503 research outputs found

    Additive Manufacturing of Liquid Rocket Engine Combustion Devices: A Summary of Process Developments and Hot-Fire Testing Results

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    Additive Manufacturing (AM) is an emerging technology with a focus on complex metallic component fabrication: Enables complex shapes and internal features that were not possibly with traditional manufacturing techniques, and significant schedule and overall lifecycle cost reductions. To date at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), combustion devices component hardware ranging in size from 100 - 35,000 lbf has been designed and manufactured using AM and many of these pieces have been hot-fire tested

    Additive Manufacturing of Liquid Rocket Engine Combustion Devices: A Summary of Process Developments and Hot-Fire Testing Results

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    Additive Manufacturing (AM) of metals is a processing technology that has significantly matured over the last decade. For liquid propellant rocket engines, the advantages of AM for replacing conventional manufacturing of complicated and expensive metallic components and assemblies are very attractive. AM can significantly reduce hardware cost, shorten fabrication schedules, increase reliability by reducing the number of joints, and improve hardware performance by allowing fabrication of designs not feasible by conventional means. The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) has been involved with various forms of metallic additive manufacturing for use in liquid rocket engine component design, development, and testing since 2010. The AM technique most often used at the NASA MSFC has been powder-bed fusion or selective laser melting (SLM), although other techniques including laser directed energy deposition (DED), arc-based deposition, and laser-wire cladding techniques have also been used to develop several components. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the various internal programs at the NASA MSFC using AM to develop combustion devices hardware. To date at the NASA MSFC, combustion devices component hardware ranging in size from 100 lbf to 35,000 lbf have been designed and manufactured using SLM and deposition-based AM processes, and many of these pieces have been hot-fire tested. Combustion devices component hardware have included thrust chamber injectors, injector components such as faceplates, regeneratively-cooled combustion chambers, regeneratively-cooled nozzles, gas generator and preburner hardware, and augmented spark igniters. Ongoing and future developments for combustion devices have also included design of components sized for boost-class engines. Several design and hot-fire test iterations have been completed on these subscale and larger scale components, and a summary of these results will be presented as well

    Corn Grain, Stover Yield and Nutrient Removal Validations at Regional Partnership Sites

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    Corn (Zea mays L.) stover has been identified as a major feedstock for cellulosic bioenergy. This report summarizes grain and stover yield as well as N, P, and K removal at several Sun Grant Regional Partnership (SGRP) sites. National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS) grain yields were used to assess the relevancy of plot-scale yields with county averages. Seasonal variation in weather patterns caused yields to differ substantially among sites and years. Nutrient removal estimates were significantly influenced by the sampling method (i.e. analysis of hand samples between physiologic maturity and grain harvest versus stover collected during the harvest operation). Based on ancillary studies that indicate corn stover should not be harvested if average grain yields are less than 175 bu ac-1 (11 Mg ha-1 ), these studies show that non-irrigated SGRP sites with the highest potential for sustainable corn stover harvest were located between -91º and -93º west longitude. The more eastern (-78º w longitude) and western (-96º w longitude) sites did not have sufficient yield for sustainable routine stover harvest, although with good management, corn could still be part of an overall landscape approach for sustainable feedstock production in those areas. For producers with consistently high yields (i.e. \u3e 200 bu ac-1 ) and where residue management may actually be a major problem (e.g. in irrigated areas), moderate stover harvest may actually decrease fuel use and save additional energy by reducing the amount of tillage needed to prepare subsequent seedbeds. Less intensive tillage could also preserve rhizosphere carbon and/or soil structure benefits often attributed to no-till systems

    Truly reconciled? A dyadic analysis of post-conflict social reintegration in Northern Uganda

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    In the aftermath of civil war or violent internal conflict, one of the key peacebuilding challenges is the reconciliation of former enemies who are members of the same small-scale societies. A failure of social reintegration may contribute to what is known as a conflict trap. To detect lingering hostile attitudes among a community’s various factions is crucial, but the approaches adopted in previous studies tend to focus on the impact of conflict on one or other aggregated indicator of social cohesion rather than on how violence-affected individuals regard and act towards their fellow community members. Here we demonstrate the value of concentrating on this latter dyadic component of social interactions and we use behavioural experiments and a social tie survey to assess, in an appropriately disaggregated manner, social cohesion in a post-conflict setting in northern Uganda. Whereas in self-reported surveys, ex-combatants appear to be well-connected, active members of their communities, the experiments unveil the continued reluctance of other community members to share or cooperate with them; fewer resources are committed to ex-combatants than to others, which is statistically significant. The dyadic nature of our analysis allows us to detect which groups are more prone to discriminate against ex-combatants, which may help facilitate targeted interventions

    Evaluation Research and Institutional Pressures: Challenges in Public-Nonprofit Contracting

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    This article examines the connection between program evaluation research and decision-making by public managers. Drawing on neo-institutional theory, a framework is presented for diagnosing the pressures and conditions that lead alternatively toward or away the rational use of evaluation research. Three cases of public-nonprofit contracting for the delivery of major programs are presented to clarify the way coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures interfere with a sound connection being made between research and implementation. The article concludes by considering how public managers can respond to the isomorphic pressures in their environment that make it hard to act on data relating to program performance.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 23. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

    The 2006 NESCent Phyloinformatics Hackathon: A Field Report

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    In December, 2006, a group of 26 software developers from some of the most widely used life science programming toolkits and phylogenetic software projects converged on Durham, North Carolina, for a Phyloinformatics Hackathon, an intense five-day collaborative software coding event sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). The goal was to help researchers to integrate multiple phylogenetic software tools into automated workflows. Participants addressed deficiencies in interoperability between programs by implementing “glue code” and improving support for phylogenetic data exchange standards (particularly NEXUS) across the toolkits. The work was guided by use-cases compiled in advance by both developers and users, and the code was documented as it was developed. The resulting software is freely available for both users and developers through incorporation into the distributions of several widely-used open-source toolkits. We explain the motivation for the hackathon, how it was organized, and discuss some of the outcomes and lessons learned. We conclude that hackathons are an effective mode of solving problems in software interoperability and usability, and are underutilized in scientific software development

    A lightweight magnetically shielded room with active shielding

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    Magnetically shielded rooms (MSRs) use multiple layers of materials such as MuMetal to screen external magnetic fields that would otherwise interfere with high precision magnetic field measurements such as magnetoencephalography (MEG). Optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) have enabled the development of wearable MEG systems which have the potential to provide a motion tolerant functional brain imaging system with high spatiotemporal resolution. Despite significant promise, OPMs impose stringent magnetic shielding requirements, operating around a zero magnetic field resonance within a dynamic range of ± 5 nT. MSRs developed for OPM-MEG must therefore effectively shield external sources and provide a low remnant magnetic field inside the enclosure. Existing MSRs optimised for OPM-MEG are expensive, heavy, and difficult to site. Electromagnetic coils are used to further cancel the remnant field inside the MSR enabling participant movements during OPM-MEG, but present coil systems are challenging to engineer and occupy space in the MSR limiting participant movements and negatively impacting patient experience. Here we present a lightweight MSR design (30% reduction in weight and 40–60% reduction in external dimensions compared to a standard OPM-optimised MSR) which takes significant steps towards addressing these barriers. We also designed a ‘window coil’ active shielding system, featuring a series of simple rectangular coils placed directly onto the walls of the MSR. By mapping the remnant magnetic field inside the MSR, and the magnetic field produced by the coils, we can identify optimal coil currents and cancel the remnant magnetic field over the central cubic metre to just |B|= 670 ± 160 pT. These advances reduce the cost, installation time and siting restrictions of MSRs which will be essential for the widespread deployment of OPM-MEG

    Enabling ambulatory movement in wearable magnetoencephalography with matrix coil active magnetic shielding

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    The ability to collect high-quality neuroimaging data during ambulatory participant movement would enable a wealth of neuroscientific paradigms. Wearable magnetoencephalography (MEG) based on optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) has the potential to allow participant movement during a scan. However, the strict zero magnetic field requirement of OPMs means that systems must be operated inside a magnetically shielded room (MSR) and also require active shielding using electromagnetic coils to cancel residual fields and field changes (due to external sources and sensor movements) that would otherwise prevent accurate neuronal source reconstructions. Existing active shielding systems only compensate fields over small, fixed regions and do not allow ambulatory movement. Here we describe the matrix coil, a new type of active shielding system for OPM-MEG which is formed from 48 square unit coils arranged on two planes which can compensate magnetic fields in regions that can be flexibly placed between the planes. Through the integration of optical tracking with OPM data acquisition, field changes induced by participant movement are cancelled with low latency (25 ms). High-quality MEG source data were collected despite the presence of large (65 cm translations and 270° rotations) ambulatory participant movements

    1960: Abilene Christian College Lectures - Full Text

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    Table of Contents: Theme Speeches: Christian Faith in the Modern World Basis of Faith - Leonard Mullens - 9 Authority in Christianity - John T. Smithson, Jr. - 27 Origin and Preservation of the Bible - Neil R. Lightfoot - 44 Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible - David H. Bobo - 62 The Unity of the Bible - Jack Meyer - 91 Faith and Reason - Joe Sanders - 115 The Reasonableness of Supernaturalism - Virgil Trout - 126 The Present Statue of the Doctrine of Organic Evolution - J.D. Thomas - 146 The Nature of Man - Roy F. Osborne, Jr. - 181 Modern Challenges to Christian Morals - Carl Spain - 199 The Christ, Whose Son is He? - Gordon Teel - 232 Special Speeches Teaching the Word of God in Korea - L. Haskell Chessfire - 255 The Influence of Christian Education - Judge Jack Pope - 276 Mission Opportunities in the Far East - Harry Robert Fox - 288 Mission Work in Austria - Robert Skelton - 303 Report from Switzerland - Heinrich Blum - 313 The Work in Nigeria - Rees Byrant - 320 The Training of Evangelists in Foreign Fields - Reiner Kallus - 331 Christian Scholarships - Everett Ferguson - 340 Evangelizing the World - A.R. Holton - 349 Panel Discussions The Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls The Scrolls and the Text of the Bible - Paul Rotenberry - 357 The Relation between the Religion of the Essenes and that of Early Christians - Jay Smith - 366 Biblical Interpretation Expediency and Pattern Authority - J.W. Roberts - 381 Examples in Pattern Authority - Thomas B. Warren - 392 Mental Health and Sin The Present State of Mental Health Knowledge - Donald R. Sime - 409 The Relationship of Mental Health Problems to Sin - Paul Easley - 421 The Teenager The Problems of Youth - Mack Wayne Craig - 432 Influences for Good - Wyatt Sawyer - 443 The Benefits of Abilene Christian College To the Church - Hulen Jackson - 451 To The Home - Robert S. Bell - 459 \u27To the Community - Louie Welch - 465 Expenses At Abilene Christian College - James C. Kerr - 469 The Graduate School at Abilene Christian College What I Am Getting Now in the ACC Graduate Program - Harold Vanderpool - 475 How the ACC Graduate Program Has Stood Up - Everett Ferguson - 481 What the ACC Graduate Program Ought To Be - Frank Pack - 486 The Importance to the Church of the ACC Graduate Program A.R. Holton - 490 Beware: Large File Size Uploaded by Jackson Hage
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