826 research outputs found
Home Truths?: Video Production and Domestic Life
Over the past decade, the video camera has become a commonplace household technology. With falling prices on compact and easy-to-use cameras, as well as mobile phones and digital still cameras with video recording capabilities, access to moving image production technology is becoming virtually universal. Home Truths? represents one of the few academic research studies exploring this everyday, popular use of video production technology, looking particularly at how families use and engage with the technology and how it fits into the routines of everyday life. The authors draw on interviews, observations, and the participants' videos themselves, seeking to paint a comprehensive picture of the role of video making in their everyday lives. While readers gain a sense of the individual characters involved in the project and the complexities and diversities of their lives, the analysis also raises a range of broader issues about the nature of learning and creativity, subjectivity and representation, and the ""domestication"" of technology—issues that are of interest to many in the fields of sociology and media/cultural studies
Dipolar ground state of planar spins on triangular lattices
An infinite triangular lattice of classical dipolar spins is usually
considered to have a ferromagnetic ground state. We examine the validity of
this statement for finite lattices and in the limit of large lattices. We find
that the ground state of rectangular arrays is strongly dependent on size and
aspect ratio. Three results emerge that are significant for understanding the
ground state properties: i) formation of domain walls is energetically favored
for aspect ratios below a critical valu e; ii) the vortex state is always
energetically favored in the thermodynamic limit of an infinite number of
spins, but nevertheless such a configuration may not be observed even in very
large lattices if the aspect ratio is large; iii) finite range approximations
to actual dipole sums may not provide the correct ground sta te configuration
because the ferromagnetic state is linearly unstable and the domain wall energy
is negative for any finite range cutoff.Comment: Several short parts have been rewritten. Accepted for publication as
a Rapid Communication in Phys. Rev.
Operability-economics trade-offs in adsorption-based CO capture process
Low-carbon dispatchable power underpins a sustainable energy system,
providing load balancing complementing wide-scale deployment of intermittent
renewable power. In this new context, fossil fuel-fired power plants must be
coupled with a post-combustion carbon capture (PCC) process capable of highly
transient operation. To tackle design and operational challenges
simultaneously, we have developed a computational framework that integrates
process design with techno-economic assessment. The backbone of this is a
high-fidelity PCC mathematical model of a pressure-vacuum swing adsorption
process. We demonstrate that the cost-optimal design has limited process
flexibility, challenging reactiveness to disturbances, such as those in the
flue gas feed conditions. The results illustrate that flexibility can be
introduced by relaxing the CO recovery constraint on the operation, albeit
at the expense of the capture efficiency of the process. We discover that
adsorption-based processes can accommodate for significant flexibility and
improved performance with respect to the operational constraints on CO
recovery and purity. The results herein demonstrate a trade-off between process
economics and process operability, which must be effectively rationalised to
integrate CO capture units in the design of low-carbon energy systems.Comment: Pre-print paper currently under review. 32 pages, 6 figures. The
first two authors contributed equally to this wor
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