Shock-tube measurements of carbon to oxygen atom ratios for incipient soot formation with C2H2, C2H4 and C2H6 fuels

The critical atomic carbon to oxygen ratios, Phi sub C, for incipient soot formation in shock heated acetylene, ethylene, ethane/oxygen/ argon mixtures was measured over the temperature range 2000 K to 2500 K for reactant partial pressures between 0.1 and 0.4 atoms. Absorption of light from a He-Ne laser at 6328A was was used to detect soot. It was observed that the values of Phi sub C for all three fuels increased uniformly with temperature such that at the highest temperatures Phi sub C was considerably greater than unity, i.e. greater than the value of about unity at which solid carbon should have been precipitated on a thermochemical equilibrium basis. Observations were made over periods extending up to about one millisecond, which was well in excess of the time required for the major heat release of the combustion reactions. The relevance of these experimental findings to the problem of soot formation in gas turbine combustion chambers is discussed

Effects of hydrostatic pressure on the mechanical behavior of body centered cubic refractory metals and alloys Interim technical report

Effects of hydrostatic pressure on mechanical behavior of body centered cubic refractory metals and alloy

Training healthcare assistants working in adult acute inpatient wards in Psychological First Aid: An implementation and evaluation study.

WHAT IS KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT: Healthcare assistants are untrained and unregistered frontline staff but are expected to be proactive in preventing and responding to 'untoward' incidents quickly and efficiently when working within adult acute inpatient psychiatric settings. Healthcare assistants should be trained to provide enhanced care to service users residing in acute psychiatric settings. To date, a training programme in Psychological First Aid has not been expended in such a setting with nonregistered staff. WHAT THE PAPER ADDS TO EXISTING KNOWLEDGE: The study demonstrates that training healthcare assistants in Psychological First Aid is useful in improving their confidence in caring for service users, therapeutic engagement with service users and ward culture in general. WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: A training programme in Psychological First Aid for healthcare assistants to enhance ward culture can be implemented in different practice environments. Psychological First Aid is harmonious with nursing values and provides healthcare assistants with a relevant, useful and easily understood toolkit to apply in acute psychiatric settings. ABSTRACT: Introduction Healthcare assistants working within adult acute inpatient psychiatric settings are untrained and unregistered, however, they can contribute to quality service if they receive some training. Psychological First Aid training has never been expended in these settings, so this study intends to fill this gap in the existing evidence with this category of healthcare personnel. Aim The aim of this study was to introduce and evaluate first aid training for healthcare assistants. Method A pre/post design was adopted to gather data using questionnaires and interviews. The groups of participants included 16 healthcare assistants trained in Psychological First Aid, a sample of service users and four ward managers. Results Post-training, (a) healthcare assistants and service users ranked the therapeutic milieu of the ward more favourably, (b) the self-efficacy of the healthcare assistants increased, and the number of 'untoward' incidents decreased, and (c) health care assistants' confidence in their skills was high. The ward manager interviews post-training revealed four themes: (a) staff utilization of new skills and renewed enthusiasm, (b) calmer atmosphere on the ward and staff togetherness, (c) confidence and reflection on practice and (d) therapeutic engagement. Discussion Training healthcare assistants is useful in improving staff confidence, therapeutic engagement with service users and ward culture in general. Implications for practice Techniques and skills learnt are relevant and useful to healthcare assistants and provide an easily understood toolkit that is harmonious with nursing values. If executed correctly, the training can enhance practice and care outcomes and the overall service user experience

A novel time independent asynchronous communication protocol and its applications

This paper proposes a novel communications protocol called Time Independent Asynchronous (TIA) communications. This protocol constitutes a new category which has unique properties very useful in a variety of applications including embedded controller communications. The 2-wire TIA communications system proposed is implemented using software controlled IO. Analysis of this system shows that traditional Signal Transition Graphs (STGs) may fail to predict livelock and deadlock in software based systems. A modified form of STG called STG For Threads (STG-FT) is proposed to better model the behaviour of software driven systems and is shown to correctly detect livelock and deadlock that a normal STG model may miss. The performance of the new 2-wire TIA system is reported and livelock and deadlock properties found to match the STG-FT simulation. The new 2-wire TIA communication system has particular application to communications in products and industrial systems with low end microprocessors and any microprocessor that is heavily loaded with time critical applications

Can negative electricity prices encourage inefficient electrical energy storage devices?

This paper explores whether negative electricity prices can change the rationale that efficient energy storage devices are more economical for arbitrage in electricity markets. An established model algorithm to determine the maximum available arbitrage revenue and optimum schedule of electrical energy storage (EES) operation is used to simulate storage with a time-series of electricity prices which includes some negative prices. Our results suggest that at any likely frequency of negative electricity prices, inefficient EES is not encouraged, and can only be encouraged for EES devices with very low energy capacity to power ratios

Nowhere to Hide: Radio-faint AGN in the GOODS-N field. I. Initial catalogue and radio properties

(Abridged) Conventional radio surveys of deep fields ordinarily have arc-second scale resolutions often insufficient to reliably separate radio emission in distant galaxies originating from star-formation and AGN-related activity. Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) can offer a solution by identifying only the most compact radio emitting regions in galaxies at cosmological distances where the high brightness temperatures (in excess of $10^5$ K) can only be reliably attributed to AGN activity. We present the first in a series of papers exploring the faint compact radio population using a new wide-field VLBI survey of the GOODS-N field. The unparalleled sensitivity of the European VLBI Network (EVN) will probe a luminosity range rarely seen in deep wide-field VLBI observations, thus providing insights into the role of AGN to radio luminosities of the order $10^{22}~\mathrm{W\,Hz^{-1}}$ across cosmic time. The newest VLBI techniques are used to completely cover an entire 7'.5 radius area to milliarcsecond resolutions, while bright radio sources ($S > 0.1$ mJy) are targeted up to 25 arcmin from the pointing centre. Multi-source self-calibration, and a primary beam model for the EVN array are used to correct for residual phase errors and primary beam attenuation respectively. This paper presents the largest catalogue of VLBI detected sources in GOODS-N comprising of 31 compact radio sources across a redshift range of 0.11-3.44, almost three times more than previous VLBI surveys in this field. We provide a machine-readable catalogue and introduce the radio properties of the detected sources using complementary data from the e-MERLIN Galaxy Evolution survey (eMERGE).Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, accepted in A&A. Machine-readable table available upon reques