1,483 research outputs found
An Investigation into Power from Pitch-Surge Point-Absorber Wave Energy Converters.
There is a worldwide opportunity for clean renewable power. The results from the UK Government's "Marine Energy Challenge" showed that marine energy has the potential to become competitive with other forms of energy. The key to success in this lies in a low lifetime-cost of power as delivered to the user. Pitch-surge point-absorber WECs have the potential to do this with average annual powers of around 2 MW in North Atlantic conditions from relatively small devices that would be economically competitive with other technologies and would be relatively easy to install and maintain. The paper examines the factors governing the performance of such devices and outlines their underlying theory Preliminary laboratory test results from a 1/100 scale pilot design are presented. It is hoped that more extensive development work will follow these promising early results. Engineering designs for devices based on these findings are outlined
Spectroscopic measurements of temperature and plasma impurity concentration during magnetic reconnection at the Swarthmore Spheromak Experiment
Electron temperature measurements during counterhelicity spheromak merging studies at the Swarthmore Spheromak Experiment (SSX) [M. R. Brown, Phys. Plasmas 6, 1717 (1999)] are presented. VUV monochromator measurements of impurity emission lines are compared with model spectra produced by the non-LTE excitation kinematics code PRISMSPECT [J. J. MacFarlane et al., in Proceedings of the Third Conference on Inertial Fusion Science and Applications (2004)] to yield the electron temperature in the plasma with 1 µs time resolution. Average T_e is seen to increase from 12 to 19 eV during spheromak merging. Average C III ion temperature, measured with a new ion Doppler spectrometer (IDS) [C. D. Cothran et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. 77, 063504 (2006)], likewise rises during spheromak merging, peaking at ~22 eV, but a similar increase in T_i is seen during single spheromak discharges with no merging. The VUV emission line measurements are also used to constrain the concentrations of various impurities in the SSX plasma, which are dominated by carbon, but include some oxygen and nitrogen. A burst of soft x-ray emission is seen during reconnection with a new four-channel detector (SXR). There is evidence for spectral changes in the soft x-ray emission as reconnection progresses, although our single-temperature equilibrium spectral models are not able to provide adequate fits to all the SXR data
Reliability of P mode event classification using contemporaneous BiSON and GOLF observations
We carried out a comparison of the signals seen in contemporaneous BiSON and
GOLF data sets. Both instruments perform Doppler shift velocity measurements in
integrated sunlight, although BiSON perform measurements from the two wings of
potassium absorption line and GOLF from one wing of the NaD1 line.
Discrepancies between the two datasets have been observed. We show,in fact,
that the relative power depends on the wing in which GOLF data observes. During
the blue wing period, the relative power is much higher than in BiSON datasets,
while a good agreement has been observed during the red period.Comment: 7 pages, HELAS II: Helioseismology, Asteroseismology, and MHD
Connections, conference proceedin
Tests of the asymptotic large frequency separation of acoustic oscillations in solar-type and red giant stars
Asteroseismology, i.e. the study of the internal structures of stars via
their global oscillations, is a valuable tool to obtain stellar parameters such
as mass, radius, surface gravity and mean density. These parameters can be
obtained using certain scaling relations which are based on an asymptotic
approximation. Usually the observed oscillation parameters are assumed to
follow these scaling relations. Recently, it has been questioned whether this
is a valid approach, i.e., whether the order of the observed oscillation modes
are high enough to be approximated with an asymptotic theory. In this work we
use stellar models to investigate whether the differences between observable
oscillation parameters and their asymptotic estimates are indeed significant.
We compute the asymptotic values directly from the stellar models and derive
the observable values from adiabatic pulsation calculations of the same models.
We find that the extent to which the atmosphere is included in the models is a
key parameter. Considering a larger extension of the atmosphere beyond the
photosphere reduces the difference between the asymptotic and observable values
of the large frequency separation. Therefore, we conclude that the currently
suggested discrepancies in the scaling relations might have been overestimated.
Hence, based on the results presented here we believe that the suggestions of
Mosser et al. (2013) should not be followed without careful consideration.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication by MNRAS as a
Letter to the Edito
Earth Occultation Imaging of the Low Energy Gamma-Ray Sky with GBM
The Earth Occultation Technique (EOT) has been applied to Fermi's Gamma-ray
Burst Monitor (GBM) to perform all-sky monitoring for a predetermined catalog
of hard X-ray/soft gamma-ray sources. In order to search for sources not in the
catalog, thus completing the catalog and reducing a source of systematic error
in EOT, an imaging method has been developed -- Imaging with a Differential
filter using the Earth Occultation Method (IDEOM). IDEOM is a tomographic
imaging method that takes advantage of the orbital precession of the Fermi
satellite. Using IDEOM, all-sky reconstructions have been generated for ~sim 4
years of GBM data in the 12-50 keV, 50-100 keV and 100-300 keV energy bands in
search of sources otherwise unmodeled by the GBM occultation analysis. IDEOM
analysis resulted in the detection of 57 sources in the 12-50 keV energy band,
23 sources in the 50-100 keV energy band, and 7 sources in the 100-300 keV
energy band. Seventeen sources were not present in the original GBM-EOT catalog
and have now been added. We also present the first joined averaged spectra for
four persistent sources detected by GBM using EOT and by the Large Area
Telescope (LAT) on Fermi: NGC 1275, 3C 273, Cen A, and the Crab
Neutrino fluxes from CNO cycle in the Sun in the non stationary case with mixing
The computational analyses is presented of the non stationary case with
mixing of the solar model when the neutrino flux from the decay of
is higher than a standard solar model predictsComment: 6 pages, 3figure
Defendants with intellectual disability and autism spectrum conditions the perspective of clinicians working across three jurisdictions
The treatment of vulnerable defendants by criminal justice systems or correctional systems varies within and between countries. The purpose of this paper is to examine three legal jurisdictions – New South Wales in Australia; Norway; England and Wales – to understand the extent of variation in practice within the court systems for defendants with intellectual disabilities (ID) and/or autism spectrum conditions (ASC). Two of the jurisdictions had a process for screening in place, either in police custody or at court, but this was not universally implemented across each jurisdiction. All three jurisdictions had a process for
supporting vulnerable defendants through the legal system. Across the three jurisdictions, there was variation in disposal options from a mandatory care setting to hospital treatment to a custodial sentence for serious offences. This variation requires further international exploration to ensure the rights of defendants with ID or ASC are understood and safeguarde
Evidence of Counter-Streaming Ions near the Inner Pole of the HERMeS Hall Thruster
NASA is continuing the development of a 12.5-kW Hall thruster system to support a phased exploration concept to expand human presence to cis-lunar space and eventually to Mars. The development team is transitioning knowledge gained from the testing of the government-built Technology Development Unit (TDU) to the contractor-built Engineering Test Unit (ETU). A new laser-induced fluorescence diagnostic was developed to obtain data for validating the Hall thruster models and for comparing the behavior of the ETU and TDU. Analysis of TDU LIF data obtained during initial deployment of the diagnostics revealed evidence of two streams of ions moving in opposite directions near the inner front pole. These two streams of ions were found to intersect the downstream surface of the front pole at large oblique angles. This data points to a possible explanation for why the erosion rate of polished pole covers were observed to decrease over the course of several hundred hours of thruster operation
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