878 research outputs found
Managing innovation: a multidisciplinary scenario development approach
The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is focusing on and shifting
toward a Network Enabled Capability (NEC) approach for improved military
effect. This is being realised through the physical networking and coherent
integration of existing and future resources including sensors, effectors, support
services, and decision makers. This paper is a case study (for NEC) of how the
development and use of scenarios for demonstrating academic research can aid
and help manage innovation. It illustrates the development, use and application
of a multiple stakeholder scenario within the NECTISE research programme
that helped establish and exploit a collaborative multidisciplinary working
environment and how it helped manage innovative academic research. Our
experience suggests that this approach can support the engagement of multiple
stakeholders with differing perceptions and priorities and will provide a
scenario development strategy for improved research and innovation for many
other large systems
Demonstrating through-life and NEC requirements for defence systems
There are two major transformations currently occurring that significantly impact acquisition and
management of military systems. Network Enabled Capability (NEC) demands careful consideration of
interoperability for delivered systems; new systems must be introduced such that they are interoperable
with current systems and legacy systems must be managed (upgraded, modified etc.) such that
interoperability is maintained and, preferably, enhanced. Eventually, NEC considerations should become
‘business as usual’, but for the time being special consideration is needed. The second transformation is
the introduction of the concept of Through Life Capability Management (TLCM). Although new systems
have always been planned with consideration of their maintenance etc., TLCM has a wider scope. It
requires consideration not only of the individual systems’ life cycles, but of the management of the super
system in which new systems will operate. The whole life costs, risks, and development must be
considered by systems designers and owners.
These transformations are linked; interoperability is a key requirement of TLCM. Through a concept
mapping of TLCM, Yue & Henshaw (1) have shown that TLCM implies a need for new approaches (new
thinking) in defence systems design and acquisition. Also TLCM requires the defence supply chain
(industry) to have a changed engagement in the delivery and management of systems. This, in turn,
requires changes to the industry-customer relationship, such that new approaches to collaboration are a
vital ingredient necessary for adherence to TLCM principles.
The NECTISE (Network Enabled Capability Through Innovative Systems Engineering: www.nectise.com)
programme was a large academic-industry research programme (part sponsored by industry) to
investigate the implications for systems engineering arising from NEC and TLCM considerations. The
programme included ten UK universities, and industry technologists and systems engineers from land,
sea, air, and C4I domains.
NECTISE considered systems processes and approaches from all parts of the capability management
process (planning, design, change, and realisation in military operations). A number of new tools and
processes were developed and an important part of the programme was to demonstrate these in context
and together. This demonstration was achieved through development of a scenario that considered the
full systems acquisition and management process. By linking a set of vignettes with different timeframes it
was possible to track an exemplar system through the planning to realisation and use stages. The
scenario development drew heavily on the TTCP GUIDEx approach to defence experimentation; this
enabled effective multi-disciplinary collaboration and integration of many different research threads.
This paper will describe the scenario planning activity and outcome and illustrate the manner in which
linked research outputs were integrated into a systems engineering demonstration. The importance of
systems architecting, both to the demonstration and (more importantly) as a key underpinning skill for
TLCM and NEC will be emphasised.
The approach taken in this demonstration of research has implications for the approaches that should be taken for defence procurement decision making in a TLCM and NEC characterised acquisition
environment. These are described and the implications of TLCM for decision making is also highlighted
Seeding the Galactic Centre gas stream: gravitational instabilities set the initial conditions for the formation of protocluster clouds
Star formation within the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) may be intimately linked to the orbital dynamics of the gas. Recent models suggest that star formation within the dust ridge molecular clouds (from G0.253+0.016 to Sgr B2) follows an evolutionary time sequence, triggered by tidal compression during their preceding pericentre passage. Given that these clouds are the most likely precursors to a generation of massive stars and extreme star clusters, this scenario would have profound implications for constraining the time-evolution of star formation. In this Letter, we search for the initial conditions of the protocluster clouds, focusing on the kinematics of gas situated upstream from pericentre. We observe a highly-regular corrugated velocity field in space, with amplitude and wavelength kms and pc, respectively. The extremes in velocity correlate with a series of massive (M) and compact ( pc), quasi-regularly spaced ( pc), molecular clouds. The corrugation wavelength and cloud separation closely agree with the predicted Toomre ( pc) and Jeans ( pc) lengths, respectively. We conclude that gravitational instabilities are driving the condensation of molecular clouds within the Galactic Centre gas stream. Furthermore, we speculate these seeds are the historical analogue of the dust-ridge molecular clouds, representing the initial conditions of star and cluster formation in the CMZ
Numerical shock propagation using geometrical shock dynamics
A simple numerical scheme for the calculation of the motion of shock waves in gases based on Whitham's theory of geometrical shock dynamics is developed. This scheme is used to study the propagation of shock waves along walls and in channels and the self-focusing of initially curved shockfronts. The numerical results are compared with exact and numerical solutions of the geometrical-shock-dynamics equations and with recent experimental investigations
Direct numerical simulation of particulate flows with an overset grid method
We evaluate an efficient overset grid method for two-dimensional and three-dimensional particulate flows for small numbers of particles at finite Reynolds number. The rigid particles are discretised using moving overset grids overlaid on a Cartesian background grid. This allows for strongly-enforced boundary conditions and local grid refinement at particle surfaces, thereby accurately capturing the viscous boundary layer at modest computational cost. The incompressible Navier–Stokes equations are solved with a fractional-step scheme which is second-order-accurate in space and time, while the fluid–solid coupling is achieved with a partitioned approach including multiple sub-iterations to increase stability for light, rigid bodies. Through a series of benchmark studies we demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of this approach compared to other boundary conformal and static grid methods in the literature. In particular, we find that fully resolving boundary layers at particle surfaces is crucial to obtain accurate solutions to many common test cases. With our approach we are able to compute accurate solutions using as little as one third the number of grid points as uniform grid computations in the literature. A detailed convergence study shows a 13-fold decrease in CPU time over a uniform grid test case whilst maintaining comparable solution accuracy.This work was supported by contracts from the U.S. Department of Energy ASCR Applied Math Program under grant AC52-07NA27344; the National Science Foundation under grant DMS-1519934; the Schlumberger Gould Research Centre under grant RG78221; the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Computational Methods for Materials Science under grant EP/L015552/1
'The Brick' is not a brick : A comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of the Central Molecular Zone cloud G0.253+0.016
© 2019 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.In this paper we provide a comprehensive description of the internal dynamics of G0.253+0.016 (a.k.a. 'the Brick'); one of the most massive and dense molecular clouds in the Galaxy to lack signatures of widespread star formation. As a potential host to a future generation of high-mass stars, understanding largely quiescent molecular clouds like G0.253+0.016 is of critical importance. In this paper, we reanalyse Atacama Large Millimeter Array cycle 0 HNCO data at 3 mm, using two new pieces of software which we make available to the community. First, scousepy, a Python implementation of the spectral line fitting algorithm scouse. Secondly, acorns (Agglomerative Clustering for ORganising Nested Structures), a hierarchical n-dimensional clustering algorithm designed for use with discrete spectroscopic data. Together, these tools provide an unbiased measurement of the line of sight velocity dispersion in this cloud, kms, which is somewhat larger than predicted by velocity dispersion-size relations for the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). The dispersion of centroid velocities in the plane of the sky are comparable, yielding . This isotropy may indicate that the line-of-sight extent of the cloud is approximately equivalent to that in the plane of the sky. Combining our kinematic decomposition with radiative transfer modelling we conclude that G0.253+0.016 is not a single, coherent, and centrally-condensed molecular cloud; 'the Brick' is not a \emph{brick}. Instead, G0.253+0.016 is a dynamically complex and hierarchically-structured molecular cloud whose morphology is consistent with the influence of the orbital dynamics and shear in the CMZ.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
On the physical mechanisms governing the cloud lifecycle in the Central Molecular Zone of the Milky Way
We apply an analytic theory for environmentally-dependent molecular cloud lifetimes to the Central Molecular Zone of the Milky Way. Within this theory, the cloud lifetime in the Galactic centre is obtained by combining the time-scales for gravitational instability, galactic shear, epicyclic perturbations and cloud-cloud collisions. We find that at galactocentric radii ∼45-120 pc, corresponding to the location of the ‘100-pc stream’, cloud evolution is primarily dominated by gravitational collapse, with median cloud lifetimes between 1.4 and 3.9 Myr. At all other galactocentric radii, galactic shear dominates the cloud lifecycle, and we predict that molecular clouds are dispersed on time-scales between 3 and 9 Myr, without a significant degree of star formation. Along the outer edge of the 100-pc stream, between radii of 100 and 120 pc, the time-scales for epicyclic perturbations and gravitational free-fall are similar. This similarity of time-scales lends support to the hypothesis that, depending on the orbital geometry and timing of the orbital phase, cloud collapse and star formation in the 100-pc stream may be triggered by a tidal compression at pericentre. Based on the derived time-scales, this should happen in approximately 20 per cent of all accretion events onto the 100-pc stream
An Optical Readout TPC (O-TPC) for Studies in Nuclear Astrophysics With Gamma-Ray Beams at HIgS
We report on the construction, tests, calibrations and commissioning of an
Optical Readout Time Projection Chamber (O-TPC) detector operating with a
CO2(80%) + N2(20%) gas mixture at 100 and 150 Torr. It was designed to measure
the cross sections of several key nuclear reactions involved in stellar
evolution. In particular, a study of the rate of formation of oxygen and carbon
during the process of helium burning will be performed by exposing the chamber
gas to intense nearly mono-energetic gamma-ray beams at the High Intensity
Gamma Source (HIgS) facility. The O-TPC has a sensitive target-drift volume of
30x30x21 cm^3. Ionization electrons drift towards a double parallel grid
avalanche multiplier, yielding charge multiplication and light emission.
Avalanche induced photons from N2 emission are collected, intensified and
recorded with a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) camera, providing two-dimensional
track images. The event's time projection (third coordinate) and the deposited
energy are recorded by photomultipliers and by the TPC charge-signal,
respectively. A dedicated VME-based data acquisition system and associated data
analysis tools were developed to record and analyze these data. The O-TPC has
been tested and calibrated with 3.183 MeV alpha-particles emitted by a 148Gd
source placed within its volume with a measured energy resolution of 3.0%.
Tracks of alpha and 12C particles from the dissociation of 16O and of three
alpha-particles from the dissociation of 12C have been measured during initial
in-beam test experiments performed at the HIgS facility at Duke University. The
full detection system and its performance are described and the results of the
preliminary in-beam test experiments are reported.Comment: Supported by the Richard F. Goodman Yale-Weizmann Exchange Program,
ACWIS, NY, and USDOE grant Numbers: DE-FG02-94ER40870 and DE-FG02-97ER4103
PHANGS CO kinematics: disk orientations and rotation curves at 150 pc resolution
We present kinematic orientations and high resolution (150 pc) rotation
curves for 67 main sequence star-forming galaxies surveyed in CO (2-1) emission
by PHANGS-ALMA. Our measurements are based on the application of a new fitting
method tailored to CO velocity fields. Our approach identifies an optimal
global orientation as a way to reduce the impact of non-axisymmetric (bar and
spiral) features and the uneven spatial sampling characteristic of CO emission
in the inner regions of nearby galaxies. The method performs especially well
when applied to the large number of independent lines-of-sight contained in the
PHANGS CO velocity fields mapped at 1'' resolution. The high resolution
rotation curves fitted to these data are sensitive probes of mass distribution
in the inner regions of these galaxies. We use the inner slope as well as the
amplitude of our fitted rotation curves to demonstrate that CO is a reliable
global dynamical mass tracer. From the consistency between photometric
orientations from the literature and kinematic orientations determined with our
method, we infer that the shapes of stellar disks in the mass range of log()=9.0-10.9 probed by our sample are very close to circular
and have uniform thickness.Comment: 19 figures, 36 pages, accepted for publication in ApJ. Table of
PHANGS rotation curves available from http://phangs.org/dat
- …