Tribological behaviour of polymer bearings under dry and water lubrication

This study attempts to evaluate the performance of polymer journal bearings (PET and UHMWPE) sliding against Inconel stainless steel in both dry and lubricated condition. Four types of ‘lubricant’ are included: distilled water; demineralized water; tap water and river water. The tests were carried out in a so called “Stribeck” configuration with a projected pressure of about 0.3 MPa at room temperature and sliding speed ranging from 0 to 1.07 m/s respectively. The study indicates that polymer bearings with four types of water lubricant give better tribological behaviour compared to those in dry sliding contact. Besides, with water lubrication, UHMWPE shows low friction at starting, but it does not go down much over the course of the tests. Meanwhile, although PET indicates quite higher friction at the beginning, it then shows a clearly decreasing trend

Strongly Regular Graphs Constructed from pp-ary Bent Functions

In this paper, we generalize the construction of strongly regular graphs in [Y. Tan et al., Strongly regular graphs associated with ternary bent functions, J. Combin.Theory Ser. A (2010), 117, 668-682] from ternary bent functions to $p$-ary bent functions, where $p$ is an odd prime. We obtain strongly regular graphs with three types of parameters. Using certain non-quadratic $p$-ary bent functions, our constructions can give rise to new strongly regular graphs for small parameters.Comment: to appear in Journal of Algebraic Combinatoric

Corporate tax policy, entrepreneurship and incorporation in the EU

In Europe, declining corporate tax rates have come along with rising tax-to-GDP ratios. This paper explores to what extent income shifting from the personal to the corporate tax base can explain these diverging developments. A panel of European data on firm births and legal form of business was used to analyze income shifting via increased entrepreneurship and incorporation. The results suggest that lower corporate taxes exert an ambiguous effect on entrepreneurship. The effect on incorporation is significant and large. It implies that the revenue effects of lower corporate tax rates - possibly induced by tax competition -- partly show up in lower personal tax revenues rather than lower corporate tax revenues. Simulations suggest that between 10% and 17% of corporate tax revenue can be attributed to income shifting. Income shifting is found to have raised the corporate tax-to-GDP ratio by some 0.2%-points since the early 1990s.Corporate tax, Personal tax, Entrepreneurship, Incorporation, Income shifting, de Mooij, Nicodème

Boolean function monotonicity testing requires (almost) n1/2n^{1/2} non-adaptive queries

We prove a lower bound of $\Omega(n^{1/2 - c})$, for all $c>0$, on the query complexity of (two-sided error) non-adaptive algorithms for testing whether an $n$-variable Boolean function is monotone versus constant-far from monotone. This improves a $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/5})$ lower bound for the same problem that was recently given in [CST14] and is very close to $\Omega(n^{1/2})$, which we conjecture is the optimal lower bound for this model

Radiation Transfer of Models of Massive Star Formation. I. Dependence on Basic Core Properties

Radiative transfer calculations of massive star formation are presented. These are based on the Turbulent Core Model of McKee & Tan and self-consistently included a hydrostatic core, an inside-out expansion wave, a zone of free-falling rotating collapse, wide-angle dust-free outflow cavities, an active accretion disk, and a massive protostar. For the first time for such models, an optically thick inner gas disk extends inside the dust destruction front. This is important to conserve the accretion energy naturally and for its shielding effect on the outer region of the disk and envelope. The simulation of radiation transfer is performed with the Monte Carlo code of Whitney, yielding spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for the model series, from the simplest spherical model to the fiducial one, with the above components each added step-by-step. Images are also presented in different wavebands of various telescope cameras, including Spitzer IRAC and MIPS, SOFIA FORCAST and Herschel PACS and SPIRE. The existence of the optically thick inner disk produces higher optical wavelength fluxes but reduces near- and mid-IR emission. The presence of outflow cavities, the inclination angle to the line of sight, and the thickness of the disk all affect the SEDs and images significantly. For the high mass surface density cores considered here, the mid-IR emission can be dominated by the outflow cavity walls, as has been suggested by De Buizer. The effect of varying the pressure of the environment bounding the surface of the massive core is also studied. With lower surface pressures, the core is larger, has lower extinction and accretion rates, and the observed mid-IR flux from the disk can then be relatively high even though the accretion luminosity is lower. In this case the silicate absorption feature becomes prominent, in contrast to higher density cores forming under higher pressures.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in Ap

An extension problem for the CR fractional Laplacian

We show that the conformally invariant fractional powers of the sub-Laplacian on the Heisenberg group are given in terms of the scattering operator for an extension problem to the Siegel upper halfspace. Remarkably, this extension problem is different from the one studied, among others, by Caffarelli and Silvestre.Comment: 33 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0709.1103 by other author

The determination of integral closures and geometric applications

We express explicitly the integral closures of some ring extensions; this is done for all Bring-Jerrard extensions of any degree as well as for all general extensions of degree < 6; so far such an explicit expression is known only for degree < 4 extensions. As a geometric application we present explicitly the structure sheaf of every Bring-Jerrard covering space in terms of coefficients of the equation defining the covering; in particular, we show that a degree-3 morphism f : Y --> X is quasi-etale if and only if the first Chern class of the sheaf f_*(O_Y) is trivial (details in Theorem 5.3). We also try to get a geometric Galoisness criterion for an arbitrary degree-n finite morphism; this is successfully done when n = 3 and less satifactorily done when n = 5.Comment: Advances in Mathematics, to appear (no changes, just add this info

The stellar content of the infalling molecular clump G286.21+0.17

The early evolution during massive star cluster formation is still uncertain. Observing embedded clusters at their earliest stages of formation can provide insight into the spatial and temporal distribution of the stars and thus probe different star cluster formation models. We present near-infrared imaging of an 8'*13'(5.4pc*8.7pc) region around the massive infalling clump G286.21+0.17(also known as BYF73). The stellar content across the field is determined and photometry is derived in order to { obtain} stellar parameters for the cluster members. We find evidence for some sub-structure (on scales less than a pc diameter) within the region with apparently at least three different sub-clusters associated with the molecular clump based on differences in extinction and disk fractions. At the center of the clump we identify a deeply embedded sub-cluster. Near-infrared excess is detected for 39-44% in the two sub-clusters associated with molecular material and 27% for the exposed cluster. Using the disk excess as a proxy for age this suggests the clusters are very young. The current total stellar mass is estimated to be at least 200 Msun. The molecular core hosts a rich population of pre-main sequence stars. There is evidence for multiple events of star formation both in terms of the spatial distribution within the star forming region and possibly from the disk frequency.Comment: Submitted to A