Investigation of the influence of a step change in surface roughness on turbulent heat transfer

The use is studied of smooth heat flux gages on the otherwise very rough SSME fuel pump turbine blades. To gain insights into behavior of such installations, fluid mechanics and heat transfer data were collected and are reported for a turbulent boundary layer over a surface with a step change from a rough surface to a smooth surface. The first 0.9 m length of the flat plate test surface was roughened with 1.27 mm hemispheres in a staggered, uniform array spaced 2 base diameters apart. The remaining 1.5 m length was smooth. The effect of the alignment of the smooth surface with respect to the rough surface was also studied by conducting experiments with the smooth surface aligned with the bases or alternatively with the crests of the roughness elements. Stanton number distributions, skin friction distributions, and boundary layer profiles of temperature and velocity are reported and are compared to previous data for both all rough and all smooth wall cases. The experiments show that the step change from rough to smooth has a dramatic effect on the convective heat transfer. It is concluded that use of smooth heat flux gages on otherwise rough surfaces could cause large errors

Economic Analysis of Water Conservation Policies in the Texas Panhandle

Due to declining water availability from the Ogallala Aquifer, management policy alternatives for extending the life of the aquifer to sustain rural economies in the Texas Panhandle are evaluated. The study concludes that water conservation policies for the region significantly impact crop mix, resource usage, and net present value of farm profits over a sixty-year planning horizon.Ogallala Aquifer, Groundwater Conservation, Water Management Policy, Texas Panhandle, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

FMRI Clustering and False Positive Rates

Recently, Eklund et al. (2016) analyzed clustering methods in standard FMRI packages: AFNI (which we maintain), FSL, and SPM [1]. They claimed: 1) false positive rates (FPRs) in traditional approaches are greatly inflated, questioning the validity of "countless published fMRI studies"; 2) nonparametric methods produce valid, but slightly conservative, FPRs; 3) a common flawed assumption is that the spatial autocorrelation function (ACF) of FMRI noise is Gaussian-shaped; and 4) a 15-year-old bug in AFNI's 3dClustSim significantly contributed to producing "particularly high" FPRs compared to other software. We repeated simulations from [1] (Beijing-Zang data [2], see [3]), and comment on each point briefly.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure. A Letter accepted in PNA