5,337 research outputs found
Modeling and Simulation of Condensation on Plastic Condenser Cooling under Night Sky
The Kutch region of north-west India is hot and semiarid, chronically short of drinking water. Dew forms frequently in the areas near the coast, over a span of eight-month (October- May) coinciding with the entire dry part of the year. Dew water is potable and safe. Dew harvest systems - devices to condense and collect dew - have been developed which could be installed on building roofs (condenser-on-roof), open ground (condenser-on-ground) and on frames (condenser-on-frames). The key component is the condenser, made of thin plastic film insulated underneath, which cools at night by radiative exchange with cloud-free sky. Condensation occurs when the film cools to or below the dew point of the surrounding air and humidity level is high - upwards of 85%. Over the season of eight months, 15 – 20 mm of dew water can be harvested. In this region where rainfall is very erratic and in normal years only 300 mm, harvested dew water can be an appreciable supplement. It can also be a small but critical supply for plants in nurseries. Design principle of efficient dew condenser is discussed and dew water collection in some recently installed working systems reported.
Fourier Representation of Climatic Data of Kothara-Kutch
Fourier series representations of some climatic variables were developed using data from the site of an experimental greenhouse at Kothara (Kutch). Hourly data was averaged over a month to yield a profile of an average day of that month. That was put through harmonic analysis to determine Fourier coefficients . Analytical expressions would be useful to those working on modelling.
Guideline update for the performance of fusion procedures for degenerative disease of the lumbar spine. Part 15: Electrophysiological monitoring and lumbar fusion
pre-printIntraoperative monitoring (IOM) is commonly used during lumbar fusion surgery for the prevention of nerve root injury. Justification for its use stems from the belief that IOM can prevent nerve root injury during the placement of pedicle screws. A thorough literature review was conducted to determine if the use of IOM could prevent nerve root injury during the placement of instrumentation in lumbar or lumbosacral fusion. There is no evidence to date that IOM can prevent injury to the nerve roots. There is limited evidence that a threshold below 5 mA from direct stimulation of the screw can indicate a medial pedicle breach by the screw. Unfortunately, once a nerve root injury has taken place, changing the direction of the screw does not alter the outcome. The recommendations formulated in the original guideline effort are neither supported nor refuted with the evidence obtained with the current studies
Speckle Noise Reduction in Medical Ultrasound Images
Ultrasound imaging is an incontestable vital tool for diagnosis, it provides
in non-invasive manner the internal structure of the body to detect eventually
diseases or abnormalities tissues. Unfortunately, the presence of speckle noise
in these images affects edges and fine details which limit the contrast
resolution and make diagnostic more difficult. In this paper, we propose a
denoising approach which combines logarithmic transformation and a non linear
diffusion tensor. Since speckle noise is multiplicative and nonwhite process,
the logarithmic transformation is a reasonable choice to convert
signaldependent or pure multiplicative noise to an additive one. The key idea
from using diffusion tensor is to adapt the flow diffusion towards the local
orientation by applying anisotropic diffusion along the coherent structure
direction of interesting features in the image. To illustrate the effective
performance of our algorithm, we present some experimental results on
synthetically and real echographic images
On the spectral density from instantons in quenched QCD
We investigate the contribution of instantons to the eigenvalue spectrum of
the Dirac operator in quenched QCD. The instanton configurations that we use
have been derived, elsewhere, from cooled SU(3) lattice gauge fields and, for
comparison, we also analyse a random `gas' of instantons. Using a set of
simplifying approximations, we find a non-zero chiral condensate. However we
also find that the spectral density diverges for small eigenvalues, so that the
chiral condensate, at zero quark mass, diverges in quenched QCD. The degree of
divergence decreases with the instanton density, so that it is negligible for
the smallest number of cooling sweeps but becomes substantial for larger number
of cools. We show that the spectral density scales, that finite volume
corrections are small and we see evidence for the screening of topological
charges. However we also find that the spectral density and chiral condensate
vary rapidly with the number of cooling sweeps -- unlike, for example, the
topological susceptibility. Whether the problem lies with the cooling or with
the identification of the topological charges is an open question. This problem
needs to be resolved before one can determine how important is the divergence
we have found for quenched QCD.Comment: 33 pages, 16 figures (RevTex), substantial revisions; to appear in
Phys.Rev.
Topology and chiral symmetry breaking in SU(N) gauge theories
We study the low-lying eigenmodes of the lattice overlap Dirac operator for
SU(N) gauge theories with N=2,3,4 and 5 colours. We define a fermionic
topological charge from the zero-modes of this operator and show that, as N
grows, any disagreement with the topological charge obtained by cooling the
fields, becomes rapidly less likely. By examining the fields where there is a
disagreement, we are able to show that the Dirac operator does not resolve
instantons below a critical size of about rho = 2.5 a, but resolves the larger,
more physical instantons. We investigate the local chirality of the near-zero
modes and how it changes as we go to larger N. We observe that the local
chirality of these modes, which is prominent for SU(2) and SU(3), becomes
rapidly weaker for larger N and is consistent with disappearing entirely in the
limit of N -> infinity. We find that this is not due to the observed
disappearance of small instantons at larger N.Comment: 41 pages, 12 figures, RevTe
Identifying functional modules in protein–protein interaction networks: an integrated exact approach
Motivation: With the exponential growth of expression and protein–protein interaction (PPI) data, the frontier of research in systems biology shifts more and more to the integrated analysis of these large datasets. Of particular interest is the identification of functional modules in PPI networks, sharing common cellular function beyond the scope of classical pathways, by means of detecting differentially expressed regions in PPI networks. This requires on the one hand an adequate scoring of the nodes in the network to be identified and on the other hand the availability of an effective algorithm to find the maximally scoring network regions. Various heuristic approaches have been proposed in the literature
Pseudo-forces in quantum mechanics
Dynamical evolution is described as a parallel section on an infinite
dimensional Hilbert bundle over the base manifold of all frames of reference.
The parallel section is defined by an operator-valued connection whose
components are the generators of the relativity group acting on the base
manifold. In the case of Galilean transformations we show that the property
that the curvature for the fundamental connection must be zero is just the
Heisenberg equations of motion and the canonical commutation relation in
geometric language. We then consider linear and circular accelerating frames
and show that pseudo-forces must appear naturally in the Hamiltonian.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, revtex, new section added, to appear in PR
- …