Offshore Wind Energy: Simulating Local Offshore Wind Turbine

Dominion Virginia Energy is looking at the possible creation of an offshore wind plant as a renewable source of electricity to be located off the coast of Virginia Beach. This thesis reports on a computer simulation based on local wind conditions and possible single wind turbine installation. The National Buoy Data Center keeps records of the local wind conditions gathered in real time and available to the public. These data give a general overview of the wind conditions in Virginia Beach which is used to simulate atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) flow conditions and is subsequently used as input data for different test cases for wind turbine simulations. The program used to simulate the turbine is Simulator fOr Wind Farm Applications (SOWFA) developed by NREL. SOWFA is based on the open source CFD code OpenFoam. With current studies and data from other wind plants, certain expectations and predictions can be made for local power generation. Local wind used in a general turbine energy output equation shows that most turbine energy is generated between 11 m/s and 12 m/s over the span of a year. The simulations created with a speed slightly over the rated speed of 11.4 m/s produced the turbines max power output of the expected 5 MW. Combining the knowledge of local data producing the majority of power at its rated speed and simulations producing 5 MW of power at this speed help confirm the importance of creating an offshore turbine

Memory Effects in the Standard Model for Glasses

The standard model of glasses is an ensemble of two-level systems interacting with a thermal bath. The general origin of memory effects in this model is a quasi-stationary but non-equilibrium state of a single two-level system, which is realized due to a finite-rate cooling and very slow thermally activated relaxation. We show that single particle memory effects, such as negativity of the specific heat under reheating, vanish for a sufficiently disordered ensemble. In contrast, a disordered ensemble displays a collective memory effect [similar to that described by Kovacs for glassy polymers], where non-equilibrium features of the ensemble are monitored via a macroscopic observable. An experimental realization of the effect can be used to further assess the consistency of the model.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Absorption and Emission in the non-Poisson case

This letter adresses the challenging problems posed to the Kubo-Anderson (KA) theory by the discovery of intermittent resonant fluorescence with a non-exponential distribution of waiting times. We show how to extend the KA theory from aged to aging systems, aging for a very extended time period or even forever, being a crucial consequence of non-Poisson statistics.Comment: 4 pages 3 figures. accepted for publication on Physical Review Letter

Interviewing Hugo Hamilton

This interview took place at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, on 19th August 2013. Hamilton discussed the relationship between language and identity and reflected upon the art of writing in his novel The SpeckledPeople which is part of the curriculum of the undergraduate course of Linguistic and Literary Studies in English.Keywords: Hugo Hamilton; The Speckcled People; language; identity; nation

Extent of Student-College Matching for Students Enrolled in Special Education Services

This study investigates the prevalence of postsecondary student-college match for students enrolled in special education services at the secondary education level by using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002. This study examines alternative student-college match scenarios – including undermatch, match, and overmatch – and addresses the gap in research specific to college match and students in special education. Findings indicate that students who enrolled in special education services in high school undermatched to schools they had the potential of enrolling in. Moreover, undermatching for this student group increased if students were Black, Hispanic, or of low socioeconomic status

Brownian motion of a charged particle driven internally by correlated noise

We give an exact solution to the generalized Langevin equation of motion of a charged Brownian particle in a uniform magnetic field that is driven internally by an exponentially-correlated stochastic force. A strong dissipation regime is described in which the ensemble-averaged fluctuations of the velocity exhibit transient oscillations that arise from memory effects. Also, we calculate generalized diffusion coefficients describing the transport of these particles and briefly discuss how they are affected by the magnetic field strength and correlation time. Our asymptotic results are extended to the general case of internal driving by correlated Gaussian stochastic forces with finite autocorrelation times.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures with subfigures, RevTeX, v2: revise