Single-stage, low-noise, advanced technology fan. Volume 4: Fan aerodynamics. Section 1: Results and analysis

Test results at design speed show fan total pressure ratio, weight flow, and adiabatic efficiency to be 2.2, 2.9, and 1.8% lower than design goal values. The hybrid acoustic inlet (which utilizes a high throat Mach number and acoustic wall treatment for noise suppression) demonstrated total pressure recoveries of 98.9% and 98.2% at takeoff and approach. Exhaust duct pressure losses differed between the hardwall duct and treated duct with splitter by about 0.6% to 2.0% in terms of fan exit average total pressure (depending on operating condition). When the measured results were used to estimate pressure losses, a cruise sfc penalty of 0.68%, due to the acoustically treated duct, was projected

Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism

This essay speaks for dirty aesthetics. Although aesthetic landscapes readily inspire environmental thinking, a case can be made for grappling with the truly local dirty matter right at hand. Dirt, soil, earth, and dust surround us at all scales: we find them on our shoes, bodies, and computer screens, in fields and forests, and floating in the air. They are the stuff of geological structures, of the rocky Earth itself, and are mobile like our bodies

Agency in the Anthropocene: Goethe, Radical Reality, and the New Materialisms

Our current era has been termed the Age of the “Anthropocene,” or the human- inflected geological era. This essay addresses the implications of human impact on the Earth as a form of “radical reality” by addressing the broad spectrum of human and non-human agency. The analysis follows a three-step process: it begins with an introduction to the new materialisms and distributed agency in contrast to Howard Tuttle’s notion of “radical reality” based on human consciousness. It then explores the agency of nature’s “vibrancy” in the debate occurring early in the Anthropocene (during Goethe’s lifetime) between “vitalism” and “mechanism.” Finally, I use this context to explore Goethe’s optics as a view that, like the new materialisms, is grounded in the interactivity of human and non-human energies. I juxtapose Tuttle’s notion of radical reality with the new materialisms via Goethe in order to explore the broader implications of human and non-human agency in the age of the Anthropocene. Goethe offers convenient access into the Anthropocene with surprisingly prescient insights into what we now see as ecological enmeshments within nature’s systems

Vegetal scale in the Anthropocene: the dark green

When exploring the problem of delineating possible “scales” useful to describe the Anthropocene’s ecological changes, I suggest plant-human relations as the basis of our models rather than solely Human impact with a capital “H” as if a stand-alone species. Instead, human beings are a species within the photosynthesis-shaped, oxygen-infused atmosphere, and countering the ongoing industrial ecocide means seeking multispecies justice. One may claim that the “vegetal” stands as the ontological antithesis of being “animal,” but that view expresses a one-dimensional disregard for the essential work and bodies of plants and their fellow photosynthesizers that produce oxygen, drive the carbon cycle, feed terrestrial life, and influence water cycles. Indeed, “animal” is an emergence from the vegetal context. But our plant stories are shifting with the anthropocenic inflection. This dark green project explores narratives, both scientific and creative, of plant-human interactions in time of planetary change; and these interactions are not always peaceful or on an easily comprehended scale. As an example, I consider the 2015 short science-fiction story from Alan Dean Foster, “That Creeping Sensation,” that portrays how plant-human relations take on frightening new forms in a climate-changed world altered by heat, carbon dioxide, and the not-always-supportive activities of plants. With all the heat and carbon dioxide, plant life explodes and produces a massive increase in oxygen. In response, insects grow enormous and specialized first-responders must battle the bugs. Foster’s texts portray scales of non-human agency larger than the human whose power encompasses, enables, and sometimes threatens human life. His “cli fi” tale of giant bugs presents human beings as inextricably enmeshed in a plant-dominated existence. To paraphrase Derrida, there is no outside the vegetal.Al explorar el problema de delinear posibles "escalas" útiles para describir los cambios ecológicos del Antropoceno, sugiero utilizar las relaciones entre plantas y humanos como base de nuestros modelos en lugar de usar únicamente el impacto Humano, con una "H" mayúscula, como si fuera una especie independiente. En cambio, los seres humanos son una especie dentro de una atmósfera imbuida de oxígeno y determinada por la fotosíntesis, y contrarrestar el ecocidio industrial en curso significa buscar una justicia multiespecies. Se podría argumentar que lo "vegetal" se erige como la antítesis ontológica de ser "animal", pero esa visión expresa un desprecio unidimensional por el trabajo esencial de las plantas y sus compañeros fotosintéticos que producen oxígeno, impulsan el ciclo del carbono, alimentan la vida terrestre e influyen en los ciclos del agua. De hecho, "animal" emerge del contexto vegetal. Pero nuestras historias de plantas están cambiando con la inflexión antropocénica. Este proyecto verde oscuro explora narrativas, tanto científicas como creativas, de interacciones planta-humano en tiempos de cambio planetario; y estas interacciones no siempre son pacíficas o en una escala fácilmente comprensible. Como ejemplo, considero la breve historia de ciencia ficción de 2015 de Alan Dean Foster, "That Creeping Sensation", que describe cómo las relaciones entre plantas y humanos adquieren nuevas formas aterradoras en un mundo con cambio climático, alterado por el calor, el dióxido de carbono y las actividades no siempre beneficiosas de las plantas. Con el calor y el dióxido de carbono, la vida vegetal se dispara y produce un aumento masivo de oxígeno. En respuesta, los insectos se vuelven enormes y los servicios de emergencia especializados deben luchar contra los insectos. Los textos de Foster retratan escalas de agencia no humana superiores a la humana cuyo poder abarca, habilita y a veces amenaza la vida humana. Su historia "cli fi" de insectos gigantes presenta a los seres humanos como inextricablemente enredados en una existencia dominada por las plantas. Parafraseando a Derrida, no hay un afuera de lo vegetal

Nature and the Dark Pastoral in Goethe\u27s \u3cem\u3eWerther\u3c/em\u3e

Celebrating the natural harmony of the stream, grasses, and the beautiful wellspring where the peasant girls come to fetch water in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Goethe’s eponymous hero embraces pastoral nature with a passion. He partakes in a traditional pastoral setting of rustic, idyllic landscapes rife with “simple” peasant folk, happy children, and agricultural pursuits far from the complexities of urban or courtly life—at least in the first part of the novel. This idealized pastoral framework with its peaceful green hills and valleys appears isolated from—or, more precisely, abstracted from—the urban sites where the authors of such poems and tales inevitably write and where, apparently, corrupted wealthy sophisticates rage political and economic battles. Yet according to ecocritic Terry Gifford, the pastoral trope is actually not so one-sided and simplistic; this literary form encompasses complex, often ironic tensions, including the primary oppositions between the (gritty) urban and the (garden-like) rural, between the always already lost “Golden Age” and a messier present time, between myth and history, and between an overtly artificial “utopia” and concrete “realism,” as well as the intentional acknowledgment that the green vision is hyperbolic yet precisely therefore able to provide a social critique through artifice. Even the pastoral’s common insistence on avoiding all mention of politics can function as a form of critique, with its utopian, conflict-free zone inevitably suggesting the opposite, much in the way that a utopia can describe a “no-place” that critiques what actually is. The pastoral tensions in these polarities resonate all the more powerfully because they cannot be bridged; their mythic nostalgia can reveal stark contrasts in social, political, chronological, and, most significantly for ecocriticism, ecological terms

Threatening Animals?

Threatening predators and pernicious beasts continue to play significant roles in the human imaginary even as human threats to other species increase exponentially in the age of Anthropocene. While posthumanist animal studies and material ecocriticism sync human and other animals within the biosphere’s living interactions, our shared material reciprocity is currently skewing ever more towards the human threat to other species – and so to ourselves as co-dependents. This essay explores the meaning of “threatening” and “threatened”. Five German texts presenting human-animal interactions in the Anthropocene’s span by Goethe, Kafka, Stifter, Duve, and Trojanow unsettle expectations of threats. In Goethe’s “Novella”, an escaped lion and tiger enter German forests and are subdued, whereas Stifter’s “Brigitta” depicts a pastoral peace threatened by wolves. Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” re-shapes David Abram’s idea of “becoming animal”, and Karen Duve’s “Rain Novel” and Ilija Trojanow’s “Melting Ice”, recent climate change novels, juxtapose the human threat to the world’s climate with the onslaught of endless slugs and a biting penguin. Finally, the resurgence of wild boars in Berlin’s urban space in the past few years renegotiates human, nonhuman, and posthuman boundaries in an urban ecology