"Ladder" structure in tonal noise generated by laminar flow around an airfoil

The presence of a “ladder” structure in the airfoil tonal noise was discovered in the 1970s, but its mechanism hitherto remains a subject of continual investigation in the research community. Based on the measured noise results and some numerical analysis presented in this letter, the variations of four types of airfoil tonal noise frequencies with the flow velocity were analyzed individually. The ladder structure is proposed to be caused by the acoustic/hydrodynamic frequency lag between the scattering of the boundary layer instability noise and the discrete noise produced by an aeroacoustic feedback loop

Poro-Serrated trailing edge devices for airfoil self-noise reduction

This paper represents the continuation of the works previously published in Chong et al. (“Self-Noise Produced by an Airfoil with Nonflat Plate Trailing-Edge Serrations,” AIAA Journal, Vol. 51, No. 11, 2013, pp. 2665–2677), who used several nonflat plate serrated trailing edges for the reduction of airfoil self-noise. The poro-serrated concept developed in the current work improves substantially the overall noise performance of the nonflat plate trailing-edge serration type. The use of porous metal, synthetic foams, or thin brush bundles to fill the gaps between adjacent members of the sawtooth can completely suppress the bluntness-induced vortex shedding tonal noise. Most important, up to 7 dB turbulent boundary layer–trailing-edge broadband noise reduction can simultaneously be achieved without compromising the aerodynamic performances in lift and drag. The poro-serrated trailing edges do not cause any noise increase throughout the frequency range investigated here. The reduction of the turbulent broadband noise is primarily caused by the serration effect, but under a condition that the sawtooth surface must be solid and nonporous. The primary role of the porous metal foams in a poro-serrated trailing edge is to suppress the vortex shedding tonal noise. However, an optimum selection of the porous material is also found to be able to further reduce the broadband noise level. The new serrated trailing-edge concept developed here has the potential to improve the industrial worthiness of the serration technology in achieving low noise radiation in fan and turbine blades.The EPSRC Doctoral Training Grants in the United Kingdo

Self-noise produced by an airfoil with nonflat plate trailing-edge serrations

This paper represents the results of an experimental study aimed at reducing the airfoil self-noise by the trailing edge serration of four different sawtooth geometries (defined in the serration angle and length). These serrations have a common feature: all of the sawtooth patterns are cut directly into the trailing edge of a realistic airfoil. This configuration offers better structural strength and integrity. For the sawtooth trailing edges investigated here, the radiation of the extraneous vortex shedding noise in a narrowband frequency due to the partial bluntness at the serration roots is unavoidable. However, this narrowband component tends to be less significant provided that the serration angle is large and the serration length is moderate. Sound power was measured, and some of the sawtooth geometries have been shown to afford significant boundary-layer instability tonal noise and moderate turbulent broadband noise reductions across a fairly large velocity range. This paper demonstrates that a nonflat plate serrated trailing edge can also be effective in the self-noise reduction. Some experimental results are also presented in order to explain the self-noise mechanisms.This work is partly supported by the Brunel Research Initiative and Enterprise fun

Some Results on the Boundary Control of Systems of Conservation Laws

This note is concerned with the study of the initial boundary value problem for systems of conservation laws from the point of view of control theory, where the initial data is fixed and the boundary data are regarded as control functions. We first consider the problem of controllability at a fixed time for genuinely nonlinear Temple class systems, and present a description of the set of attainable configurations of the corresponding solutions in terms of suitable Oleinik-type estimates. We next present a result concerning the asymptotic stabilization near a constant state for general $n\times n$ systems. Finally we show with an example that in general one cannot achieve exact controllability to a constant state in finite time.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, conferenc

Adherence to self-administered tuberculosis treatment in a high HIV-prevalence setting: a cross-sectional survey in Homa Bay, Kenya.

Good adherence to treatment is crucial to control tuberculosis (TB). Efficiency and feasibility of directly observed therapy (DOT) under routine program conditions have been questioned. As an alternative, Médecins sans Frontières introduced self-administered therapy (SAT) in several TB programs. We aimed to measure adherence to TB treatment among patients receiving TB chemotherapy with fixed dose combination (FDC) under SAT at the Homa Bay district hospital (Kenya). A second objective was to compare the adherence agreement between different assessment tools

Mycobacterium ulcerans disease: experience with primary oral medical therapy in an Australian cohort

Mycobacterium ulcerans (MU) is responsible for disfiguring skin infections which are challenging to treat. The recommended treatment for MU has continued to evolve from surgery to remove all involved tissue, to the use of effective combination oral antibiotics with surgery as required. Our study describes the oral medical treatment utilised for consecutive cases of MU infection over a 15 month period at our institution, in Victoria, Australia. Managing patients primarily with oral antibiotics results in high cure rates and excellent cosmetic outcomes. The success with medical treatment reported in this study will aid those treating cases of MU infection, and will add to the growing body of knowledge about the relative roles of antibiotics and surgery for treating this infection

Stakeholder narratives on trypanosomiasis, their effect on policy and the scope for One Health

Background This paper explores the framings of trypanosomiasis, a widespread and potentially fatal zoonotic disease transmitted by tsetse flies (Glossina species) affecting both humans and livestock. This is a country case study focusing on the political economy of knowledge in Zambia. It is a pertinent time to examine this issue as human population growth and other factors have led to migration into tsetse-inhabited areas with little historical influence from livestock. Disease transmission in new human-wildlife interfaces such as these is a greater risk, and opinions on the best way to manage this are deeply divided. Methods A qualitative case study method was used to examine the narratives on trypanosomiasis in the Zambian policy context through a series of key informant interviews. Interviewees included key actors from international organisations, research organisations and local activists from a variety of perspectives acknowledging the need to explore the relationships between the human, animal and environmental sectors. Principal Findings Diverse framings are held by key actors looking from, variously, the perspectives of wildlife and environmental protection, agricultural development, poverty alleviation, and veterinary and public health. From these viewpoints, four narratives about trypanosomiasis policy were identified, focused around four different beliefs: that trypanosomiasis is protecting the environment, is causing poverty, is not a major problem, and finally, that it is a Zambian rather than international issue to contend with. Within these narratives there are also conflicting views on the best control methods to use and different reasoning behind the pathways of response. These are based on apparently incompatible priorities of people, land, animals, the economy and the environment. The extent to which a One Health approach has been embraced and the potential usefulness of this as a way of reconciling the aims of these framings and narratives is considered throughout the paper. Conclusions/Significance While there has historically been a lack of One Health working in this context, the complex, interacting factors that impact the disease show the need for cross-sector, interdisciplinary decision making to stop rival narratives leading to competing actions. Additional recommendations include implementing: surveillance to assess under-reporting of disease and consequential under-estimation of disease risk; evidence-based decision making; increased and structurally managed funding across countries; and focus on interactions between disease drivers, disease incidence at the community level, and poverty and equity impacts

Bats Use Magnetite to Detect the Earth's Magnetic Field

While the role of magnetic cues for compass orientation has been confirmed in numerous animals, the mechanism of detection is still debated. Two hypotheses have been proposed, one based on a light dependent mechanism, apparently used by birds and another based on a “compass organelle” containing the iron oxide particles magnetite (Fe3O4). Bats have recently been shown to use magnetic cues for compass orientation but the method by which they detect the Earth's magnetic field remains unknown. Here we use the classic “Kalmijn-Blakemore” pulse re-magnetization experiment, whereby the polarity of cellular magnetite is reversed. The results demonstrate that the big brown bat Eptesicus fuscus uses single domain magnetite to detect the Earths magnetic field and the response indicates a polarity based receptor. Polarity detection is a prerequisite for the use of magnetite as a compass and suggests that big brown bats use magnetite to detect the magnetic field as a compass. Our results indicate the possibility that sensory cells in bats contain freely rotating magnetite particles, which appears not to be the case in birds. It is crucial that the ultrastructure of the magnetite containing magnetoreceptors is described for our understanding of magnetoreception in animals

An extensible framework for multicore response time analysis

In this paper, we introduce a multicore response time analysis (MRTA) framework, which decouples response time analysis from a reliance on context independent WCET values. Instead, the analysis formulates response times directly from the demands placed on different hardware resources. The MRTA framework is extensible to different multicore architectures, with a variety of arbitration policies for the common interconnects, and different types and arrangements of local memory. We instantiate the framework for single level local data and instruction memories (cache or scratchpads), for a variety of memory bus arbitration policies, including: Round-Robin, FIFO, Fixed-Priority, Processor-Priority, and TDMA, and account for DRAM refreshes. The MRTA framework provides a general approach to timing verification for multicore systems that is parametric in the hardware configuration and so can be used at the architectural design stage to compare the guaranteed levels of real-time performance that can be obtained with different hardware configurations. We use the framework in this way to evaluate the performance of multicore systems with a variety of different architectural components and policies. These results are then used to compose a predictable architecture, which is compared against a reference architecture designed for good average-case behaviour. This comparison shows that the predictable architecture has substantially better guaranteed real-time performance, with the precision of the analysis verified using cycle-accurate simulation

Measurement of the inclusive and dijet cross-sections of b-jets in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

The inclusive and dijet production cross-sections have been measured for jets containing b-hadrons (b-jets) in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s) = 7 TeV, using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The measurements use data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 34 pb^-1. The b-jets are identified using either a lifetime-based method, where secondary decay vertices of b-hadrons in jets are reconstructed using information from the tracking detectors, or a muon-based method where the presence of a muon is used to identify semileptonic decays of b-hadrons inside jets. The inclusive b-jet cross-section is measured as a function of transverse momentum in the range 20 < pT < 400 GeV and rapidity in the range |y| < 2.1. The bbbar-dijet cross-section is measured as a function of the dijet invariant mass in the range 110 < m_jj < 760 GeV, the azimuthal angle difference between the two jets and the angular variable chi in two dijet mass regions. The results are compared with next-to-leading-order QCD predictions. Good agreement is observed between the measured cross-sections and the predictions obtained using POWHEG + Pythia. MC@NLO + Herwig shows good agreement with the measured bbbar-dijet cross-section. However, it does not reproduce the measured inclusive cross-section well, particularly for central b-jets with large transverse momenta.Comment: 10 pages plus author list (21 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version published in European Physical Journal