REFERENCE RANGE OF HEART RATE VARIABILITY AND VALIDATION IN SUBJECTS WITH ASYMPTOMATIC ELEVATED LIVER FUNCTION ENZYMES

The prevalence and severity of autonomic dysfunction appears to be related to the severity of liver disease (e. g. alcoholic cirrhosis) and is associated with an increase in mortality. This study aims to evaluate time domain parameters of heart rate variability in asymptomatic liver functions elevated healthy subjects and comparison of it with normal population reference range. The rationale of the study is that increasing severity of liver failure is associated with a reduction in total heart rate variability and regularity; therefore measurement of HRV offers a simple, noninvasive means of assessing the cardiovascular and autonomic effects of liver disease. The finding of the current study shows that Heart rate variability of Liver functions elevated subjects are found to be higher than the normal population reference range. The reason for finding of higher variability was that subjects included in this study had bradycardia. Bradycardia is known to lead to higher heart rate variability

Natural Convection Heat Transfer in Enclosures With Multiple Vertical Partitions

of air or vacuum, N 2 = n + IK is the complex refractive index of the lamina material, and 9 2 is the (complex) angle of refraction, which is related to 9 t by Snell's law: N, sin #, = N 2 sin 9 2 . Since r 2l = -r i2 , the reflectance at both interfaces is equal to p = r n rf 2 , where * denotes the complex conjugate. The internal transmittance T is related to the (complex) phase change 6 by r = exp . After carefully examining the transmittance formulae of a lamina, this work shows that the geometric-optics formula may result in a significant error for a highly absorbing medium even in the incoherent limit (when interference effects are negligible). Introduction Consider the transmission of electromagnetic radiation through a lamina with smooth and parallel surfaces. In the incoherent limit when radiation coherence length is much smaller than the thickness of the lamina, the transmittance (or reflectance) may be obtained either by tracing the multiply reflected radiant power fluxes (ray-tracing method) or by separating the power flux at each interface into an outgoing component and an incoming component (net-radiation method), viz. ( where p is the reflectance at the interface and r is the internal transmittance. This formula is also called the geometric-optics formula since it is obtained without considering interference effects. For a plane wave, p equals the square of the absolute value of the complex Fresnel reflection coefficient (i.e., the ratio of the reflected electric field to the incident electric field at the interface). The Fresnel reflection coefficient is (Heavens, 1965) r\ 2 = { cos 9 2 -N 2 cos f?i JVi cos (2) N, cos 0, -N 2 cos 6*2 , . , for s -polarization ,7V, cos 9 t + N 2 cos 9 2 where 9 l is the angle of incidence, /V, = 1 is the refractive index where d is the lamina thickness and X is the wavelength in vacuum. In the coherent limit, the transmittance of a lamina may be obtained from thin-film optics (i.e., wave optics) either by tracing the reflected and transmitted waves (Airy's method) or by separating the electric fields into a forward-propagating component (forward wave) and a backward-propagating component (backward wave), viz. (Heavens, 1965; Analysis and Discussion The power transmittance at the interface between the air (or vacuum) and the medium (lamina) is where (1 + r !2 ) is the Fresnel transmission coefficient. The power transmittance at the second interface between the medium and the air can be obtained by exchanging the subscripts 1 and 2 in Eq. (6). At normal incidence, r 12 = (1 -n -('K)/(1 If both K and Im(r 21 ) are nonzero, T 2 \ =t= 1 -p. As discussed by Journal of Heat Transfer AUGUST 1997, Vol. 119/645 Copyright © 1997 by ASME Zhang The above equation is identical to Eq. (5). However, it is not a simple replacement of (1 -p) 2 in Eq. As an example, suppose the lamina is a LaA10 3 wafer of thickness d = 100 p,m. The optical constants are calculated from the Lorentian dielectric function determined by (1) and the transmittance for a LaA10 3 lamina at wavelengths from 9 to 14 p,m at normal incidence are shown in The difference between the wave-optics formula and the incoherent formula is shown in For a highly absorbing lamina (i.e., r < § 1), multiple reflections may be neglected. The transmittance obtained from Eq. (1), when multiple reflections are negligible, is (1 -pfr. The transmittance calculated from Eq. (8) for T < 1 is where the last expression is for normal incidence only. Eq. Concluding Remarks By inspecting the energy balance at the second interface, this work reveals an implicit assumption associated with Eq. Certain important applications require the determination of transmittance below 10~4. Examples are in the characterization of attenuation filters, bandpass filters, and materials with strong absorption bands Acknowledgments This work has been supported by the University of Florida through a start-up fund and an Interdisciplinary Research Initiative award. / Vol. 119, AUGUST 1997 Transactions of the ASME A. A., 1994, "Modelling of the Reflectance of Silicon," Infrared Physics and Technology, Vol. 35, pp. 701 -708. Frenkel, A" and Zhang, Z. M" 1994, "Broadband High Optical Density Filters in the Infrared," Optics Letters, Vol. 19, pp. 1495-1497 Gentile, T. R., Frenkel, A" Migdall, A. L., and Zhang, Z. M" 1995, "Neutral Density Filter Measurements at the National Institute of Standards and Technology," Spectrophotometry, Luminescence and Colour; Science and Compliance, C. Burgess and D. G. Jones, eds., Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 129-139. Grossman, E. N" and McDonald, D. G" 1995, "Partially Coherent Transmittance of Dielectric Lamellae," Optical Engineering, Vol. 34, pp. 1289-1295. Heavens, O. S., 1965, Optical Properties of Thin Solid Films, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, chap. 4, pp. 46-95. Knittl, Z" 1976, Optical of Thin Films, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., NY, pp. 203-204. Salzberg, B., 1948, "A Note on the Significance of Power Reflection," American Journal of Physics, Vol. 16, pp. 444-446. Siegel, R" and Howell, J. R., 1992, Thermal Radiation Heat Transfer, 3rd ed" Hemisphere Publishing Corp., Washington D.C., chap. 4, p. 120, and chap. 18, pp. 928-930. Yeh, P., 1988, Optical Waves in Layered Media, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, chap. 4, pp. 83-101. Zhang, Z. M., 199

Human performance and strategies while solving an aircraft routing and sequencing problem: an experimental approach

As airport resources are stretched to meet increasing demand for services, effective use of ground infrastructure is increasingly critical for ensuring operational efficiency. Work in operations research has produced algorithms providing airport tower controllers with guidance on optimal timings and sequences for flight arrivals, departures, and ground movement. While such decision support systems have the potential to improve operational efficiency, they may also affect users’ mental workload, situation awareness, and task performance. This work sought to identify performance outcomes and strategies employed by human decision makers during an experimental airport ground movement control task with the goal of identifying opportunities for enhancing user-centered tower control decision support systems. To address this challenge, thirty novice participants solved a set of vehicle routing problems presented in the format of a game representing the airport ground movement task practiced by runway controllers. The games varied across two independent variables, network map layout (representing task complexity) and gameplay objective (representing task flexibility), and verbal protocol, visual protocol, task performance, workload, and task duration were collected as dependent variables. A logistic regression analysis revealed that gameplay objective and task duration significantly affected the likelihood of a participant identifying the optimal solution to a game, with the likelihood of an optimal solution increasing with longer task duration and in the less flexible objective condition. In addition, workload appeared unaffected by either independent variable, but verbal protocols and visual observations indicated that high-performing participants demonstrated a greater degree of planning and situation awareness. Through identifying human behavior during optimization problem solving, the work of tower control can be better understood, which, in turn, provides insights for developing decision support systems for ground movement management

Pradeep. M. Kamath A Simple Thermal Resistance Model for Open Cell Metal Foams

This paper presents a methodology for obtaining the convective heat transfer coefficient from the wall of a heated aluminium plate, placed in a vertical channel filled with open cell metal foams. For accomplishing this, a thermal resistance model from literature for metal foams is suitably modified to account for contact resistance. The contact resistance is then evaluated using the experimental results. A correlation for the estimation of the contact resistance as a function of the pertinent parameters, based on the above approach is developed. The model is first validated with experimental results in literature for the asymptotic case of negligible contact resistance. A parametric study of the effect of different foam parameters on the heat transfer is reported with and without the presence of contact resistance. The significance of the effect of contact resistance in the mixed convection and forced convection regimes is discussed. The procedure to employ the present methodology in an actual case is demonstrated and verified with additional, independent experimental data