MP 2009-09

As the price of traditional fossil fuels escalates, there is increasing interest in using renewable resources, such as biomass, to meet our energy needs. Biomass resources are of particular interest to communities in interior Alaska, where they are abundant (Fresco, 2006). Biomass has the potential to partially replace heating oil, in addition to being a possible source for electric power generation (Crimp and Adamian, 2000; Nicholls and Crimp, 2002; Fresco, 2006). The communities of Tanana and Dot Lake have already installed small Garn boilers to provide space heating for homes and businesses (Alaska Energy Authority, 2009). A village-sized combined heat and power (CHP) demonstration project has been proposed in North Pole. In addition, several Fairbanks area organizations are interested in using biomass as a fuel source. For example, the Fairbanks North Star Borough is interested in using biomass to supplement coal in a proposed coal-to-liquids project, the Cold Climate Housing Research Center is planning to test a small biomass fired CHP unit, and the University of Alaska is planning an upgrade to its existing coal-fired power plant that could permit co-firing with biomass fuels. The challenge for all of these projects is in ensuring that biomass can be harvested on both an economically and ecologically sustainable basis

Mutually Dependent Heat And Mass Transfer In Laminar Duct Flow

An analysis is performed of the strongly coupled heat and mass transfer processes which result from sublimation of mass from the walls of a duct into a flowing gas, the latent heat being provided solely by convective transfer from the gas. The flow is assumed to be laminar and hydrodynamically developed. Results are given for the stream ward variations of the bulk and wall temperatures and mass fractions, of the heat and mass transfer rates, and of the local heat transfer coefficient. Representative temperature and mass fraction profiles are also presented. Entrance lengths characterizing the near approach to fully developed conditions are tabulated. Comparisons are made of the present results (based on a parabolic velocity profile) with those based on a slug flow velocity profile. A subsidiary analysis using the Lévěque model is also performed, and the results compared with those of the principal solution. Copyright © 1969 American Institute of Chemical Engineer

Stability Of Asymmetric Hydrodynamically Developing Channel Flows

Linear stability is studied for developing channel flows induced by asymmetric velocity profiles at the inlet. Neutral stability curves and axial variations of the critical Reynolds number are presented, showing greater stability for more skewed inlet profiles

Toward a History of the Democratic State

Over the past generation, the history of the state has been experiencing a much-noted renaissance, especially in France and the United States. In the United States as late as 1986, Morton Keller complained to William Leuchtenburg in the Journal of American History: “To say that ‘there is much still to be learned about the nature of the State in America’ is … a major understatement. There is close to everything to be learned about the State.” In France as late as 1990, Pierre Rosanvallon’s powerful introduction to L’État en France suggested that an ambitious history of the state could not yet be written because of the lack of works focused specifically on the state. As he put it, “L’État comme problème politique, ou comme phénomène bureaucratique, est au coeur des passions partisanes et des débats philosophiques tout en restant une sorte de non-objet historique.” As the essays in this volume attest, much has changed in the historiography of the American and French states in the intervening 25 years. The state has indeed been brought “back in” in Theda Skocpol’s influential words. In fact, the return of the state in history, theory, and the social sciences in both France and the United States has been so strong and successful, that the subject of “the state/l’État” has again itself become an intellectual crossroads—and a contested terrain—for new important debates and controversies concerning the French and American past more generally

Democratic States of Unexception: Towards a New Genealogy of the American Political

This chapter takes issue with the history and theory of exception along these three lines. The first section offers a critique of the idea of law at the heart of the theory of exception. By taking a closer look at the history and theory of law in early nineteenth-century America, it offers an alternative reading of the role of exception in Emerson’s America – a place and time in which the exception in law was anything but exceptional. The second section offers a critique of the idea of state and sovereignty at the heart of the theory of exception in the early twentieth century. In place of Schmitt’s concept of the political, it offers a reconsideration of John Dewey’s more democratic conception of “the public” and its problems, where again the exception is an unexceptional part of an everyday and agonistic democratic politics. The third section moves us further into the twentieth century, challenging the suzerainty of both liberal and neoliberal characterizations of exception and totalitarianism in that ideologically charged period. Here, Charles Merriam’s ideas about new democracy and new despotism provide an alternative reference point for thinking about the exception, its antidemocratic dangers, and its democratic possibilities. In the context of a revitalized theory of the nature of power in democratic states, the exception does not appear so exceptional. Indeed, when viewed from the perspective of democratic state history, the exception may be one of the most common ways that democratic states exercise power every day. Evaluating the state of exception from the critical perspective of the modern democratic state exposes the limits of the notions of formal law, bureaucratic statecraft, and liberal politics that so frequently preoccupy discussions of exception and emergency governance. Those rather profound limitations suggest the need for an alternative genealogy of the political. In the theories of law, state, and politics in the writings of Emerson, Dewey, and Merriam, this essay proposes a tentative new genealogy of the modern American political – where democracy is not a problem but a solution and where the exception is not exceptional but one of the most quotidian ways of exercising power in agonistic modes of self-government

Beyond Stateless Democracy

Pierre Bourdieu began his posthumously published lectures “On the State” by highlighting the three dominant traditions that have framed most thinking about the state in Western social science and modern social theory. On the one hand, he highlighted what he termed the “initial definition” of the state as a “neutral site” designed to regulate conflict and “serve the common good.” Bourdieu traced this essentially classical liberal conception of the state back to the pioneering political treatises of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.1 In direct response to this “optimistic functionalism,” Bourdieu noted the rise of a critical and more “pessimistic” alternative—something of a diametric opposite

Direct transition to high-dimensional chaos through a global bifurcation

In the present work we report on a genuine route by which a high-dimensional (with d>4) chaotic attractor is created directly, i.e., without a low-dimensional chaotic attractor as an intermediate step. The high-dimensional chaotic set is created in a heteroclinic global bifurcation that yields an infinite number of unstable tori.The mechanism is illustrated using a system constructed by coupling three Lorenz oscillators. So, the route presented here can be considered a prototype for high-dimensional chaotic behavior just as the Lorenz model is for low-dimensional chaos.Comment: 7 page