45,326 research outputs found
Charge control experiments on a CH-53E helicopter in a dusty environment
Charge control tests were carried out on a ground based, Marine Corps helicopter to determine if control of the electric fields acting on the engine exhaust gases could be used to reduce the electrification of the helicopter when it operated in a dusty atmosphere. The test aircraft was flown to a dusty, unpaved area and was then isolated electrically from the earth. When the helicopter engines were operated at ground idle with the rotor locked, the isolated aircraft charged positively, as had been observed previously. However, when the rotor brake was released and the turning rotor created a downdraft that raised dust clouds, the aircraft always became charged more positively, to potentials ranging form +30 to +45 kV. The dust clouds raised by the rotor downwash invariably carried negative space charges with concentrations of up to -100 nC/cu m and caused surface electric fields with strengths of up to 10 kV/m immediately down wind of the aircraft. The natural charging of the helicopter operating in these dust clouds was successfully opposed by control of the electric fields acting on the hot, electrically conductive exhaust gases. The control was achieved by placing electrostatic shield around the exhausts
Bearing-only acoustic tracking of moving speakers for robot audition
This paper focuses on speaker tracking in robot audition for human-robot interaction. Using only acoustic signals, speaker tracking in enclosed spaces is subject to missing detections and spurious clutter measurements due to speech inactivity, reverberation and interference. Furthermore, many acoustic localization approaches estimate speaker direction, hence providing bearing-only measurements without range information. This paper presents a probability hypothesis density (PHD) tracker that augments the bearing-only speaker directions of arrival with a cloud of range hypotheses at speaker initiation and propagates the random variates through time. Furthermore, due to their formulation PHD filters explicitly model, and hence provide robustness against, clutter and missing detections. The approach is verified using experimental results
Quantifying the Effect of Non-Larmor Motion of Electrons on the Pressure Tensor
In space plasma, various effects of magnetic reconnection and turbulence
cause the electron motion to significantly deviate from their Larmor orbits.
Collectively these orbits affect the electron velocity distribution function
and lead to the appearance of the "non-gyrotropic" elements in the pressure
tensor. Quantification of this effect has important applications in space and
laboratory plasma, one of which is tracing the electron diffusion region (EDR)
of magnetic reconnection in space observations. Three different measures of
agyrotropy of pressure tensor have previously been proposed, namely,
, and . The multitude of contradictory measures has
caused confusion within the community. We revisit the problem by considering
the basic properties an agyrotropy measure should have. We show that
, and are all defined based on the sum of the
principle minors (i.e. the rotation invariant ) of the pressure tensor. We
discuss in detail the problems of -based measures and explain why they may
produce ambiguous and biased results. We introduce a new measure
constructed based on the determinant of the pressure tensor (i.e. the rotation
invariant ) which does not suffer from the problems of -based
measures. We compare with other measures in 2 and 3-dimension
particle-in-cell magnetic reconnection simulations, and show that can
effectively trace the EDR of reconnection in both Harris and force-free current
sheets. On the other hand, does not show prominent peaks in
the EDR and part of the separatrix in the force-free reconnection simulations,
demonstrating that does not measure all the non-gyrotropic
effects in this case, and is not suitable for studying magnetic reconnection in
more general situations other than Harris sheet reconnection.Comment: accepted by Phys. of Plasm
Perceptual adaptation by normally hearing listeners to a simulated "hole" in hearing
Simulations of cochlear implants have demonstrated that the deleterious effects of a frequency misalignment between analysis bands and characteristic frequencies at basally shifted simulated electrode locations are significantly reduced with training. However, a distortion of frequency-to-place mapping may also arise due to a region of dysfunctional neurons that creates a "hole" in the tonotopic representation. This study simulated a 10 mm hole in the mid-frequency region. Noise-band processors were created with six output bands (three apical and three basal to the hole). The spectral information that would have been represented in the hole was either dropped or reassigned to bands on either side. Such reassignment preserves information but warps the place code, which may in itself impair performance. Normally hearing subjects received three hours of training in two reassignment conditions. Speech recognition improved considerably with training. Scores were much lower in a baseline (untrained) condition where information from the hole region was dropped. A second group of subjects trained in this dropped condition did show some improvement; however, scores after training were significantly lower than in the reassignment conditions. These results are consistent with the view that speech processors should present the most informative frequency range irrespective of frequency misalignment. 0 2006 Acoustical Society of America
Aircraft measurements of electrified clouds at Kennedy Space Center
The space-vehicle launch commit criteria for weather and atmospheric electrical conditions in us at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Kennedy Space Center (KSC) have been made restrictive because of the past difficulties that have arisen when space vehicles have triggered lightning discharge after their launch during cloudy weather. With the present ground-base instrumentation and our limited knowledge of cloud electrification process over this region of Florida, it has not been possible to provide a quantitative index of safe launching conditions. During the fall of 1988, a Schweizer 845 airplane equipped to measure electric field and other meteorological parameters flew over KSC in a program to study clouds defined in the existing launch restriction criteria. All aspects of this program are addressed including planning, method, and results. A case study on the November 4, 1988 flight is also presented
15 GHz Monitoring of the Gravitational Lens MG 0414+0534
We report the results of monitoring the four images of the gravitational lens MG 0414+0534 at 15 GHz. In 35 VLA maps spanning 180 days, we measure root-mean-square variations in the image light curves of ~3.5% mostly due to variations in the flux density calibration. The flux ratios, which are independent of flux density calibration variations, show root-mean-square variability of 1-3%. Extensive simulations of the data analysis process show that the observed variations in the flux ratios are likely to be due entirely to errors in the deconvolution process. It is possible that some of the observed variation is due to the source; however, the signal-to-noise ratio is too small to make a time delay determination using a data set of this size
Geometric Phases and Mielnik's Evolution Loops
The cyclic evolutions and associated geometric phases induced by
time-independent Hamiltonians are studied for the case when the evolution
operator becomes the identity (those processes are called {\it evolution
loops}). We make a detailed treatment of systems having equally-spaced energy
levels. Special emphasis is made on the potentials which have the same spectrum
as the harmonic oscillator potential (the generalized oscillator potentials)
and on their recently found coherent states.Comment: 11 pages, harvmac, 2 figures available upon request; CINVESTAV-FIS
GFMR 11/9
Clustering of the Diffuse Infrared Light from the COBE DIRBE maps. III. Power spectrum analysis and excess isotropic component of fluctuations
The cosmic infrared background (CIB) radiation is the cosmic repository for
energy release throughout the history of the universe. Using the all-sky data
from the COBE DIRBE instrument at wavelengths 1.25 - 100 mic we attempt to
measure the CIB fluctuations. In the near-IR, foreground emission is dominated
by small scale structure due to stars in the Galaxy. There we find a strong
correlation between the amplitude of the fluctuations and Galactic latitude
after removing bright foreground stars. Using data outside the Galactic plane
() and away from the center () we extrapolate
the amplitude of the fluctuations to cosec. We find a positive intercept
of nW/m2/sr at 1.25, 2.2,3.5 and 4.9 mic
respectively, where the errors are the range of 92% confidence limits. For
color subtracted maps between band 1 and 2 we find the isotropic part of the
fluctuations at nW/m2/sr. Based on detailed numerical and
analytic models, this residual is not likely to originate from the Galaxy, our
clipping algorithm, or instrumental noise. We demonstrate that the residuals
from the fit used in the extrapolation are distributed isotropically and
suggest that this extra variance may result from structure in the CIB. For
2\deg< \theta < 15^\deg, a power-spectrum analysis yields firm upper limits
of (\theta/5^\deg) \times\delta F_{\rm rms} (\theta) < 6, 2.5, 0.8, 0.5
nW/m2/sr at 1.25, 2.2, 3.5 and 4.9 mic respectively. From 10-100 mic, the upper
limits <1 nW/m2/sr.Comment: Ap.J., in press. 69 pages including 24 fig
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