Education and Skill Development through the Reconfiguration of Discarded Hardware: Turning Base Metal into intellectual Capital

This paper examines an intervention in Europe which enables untypical individuals to acquire skills and competences in order to enter IT related employment. To do this they need to acquire a threshold level of intellectual capital so that they are considered sufficiently competent to gain employment. This can therefore provide the industry with a solid foundation of the necessary support staff, capable of providing services to the local community supporting such educational initiatives. This initiative can then release the more conventionally educated to work at the cutting edge of industry. As a driver for wealth generation in India, the IT industry is remarkable. It demands a wide spectrum of intellectual capital. As diffusion of IT technology is predicted to pervade throughout the subcontinent, the demand for all levels of competence would seem to be buoyant. The training environment covered in this case study complements the traditional educational system and could furnish alternative career opportunities to certain sections of the community. This paper takes a strategic view throughout. The fallacy of composition has to be taken seriously. What is true for a part is not true of the whole. To place this in the context of this paper; whilst a workshop to help unemployed people build computers in Sheffield may work, it is not necessarily appropriate to draw the conclusions that it will be effective when implemented over the whole of the Indian Subcontinent

Parallizable manifolds and the fundamental group

ntroduction. Low-dimensional topology is dominated by the fundamental group. However, since every finitely presented group is the fundamental group of some closed 4-manifold, it is often stated that the effective influence of π1 ends in dimension three. This is not quite true, however, and there are some interesting border disputes. In this paper, we show that, by imposing the extra condition of parallelizability on the tangent bundle, the dominion of π1 is extended by an extra dimension

Evaluation of shear mounted elastomeric damper

Viton-70 elastomeric shear mounted damper was built and tested on a T-55 power turbine spool in the rotor's high speed balancing rig. This application of a shear mounted elastomeric damper demonstrated for the first time, the feasibility of using elastomers as the primary rotor damping source in production turbine engine hardware. The shear damper design was selected because it was compatible with actual gas turbine engine radial space constraints, could accommodate both the radial and axial thrust loads present in gas turbine engines, and was capable of controlled axial preload. The shear damper was interchangeable with the production T-55 power turbine roller bearing support so that a direct comparison between the shear damper and the production support structure could be made. Test results show that the Viton-70 elastomer damper operated successfully and provided excellent control of both synchronous and nonsynchronous vibrations through all phases of testing up to the maximum rotor speed of 16,000 rpm. Excellent correlation between the predicted and experienced critical speeds, mode shapes and log decrements for the power turbine rotor and elastomer damper assembly was also achieved

Introduction: Religious plurality, interreligious pluralism, and spatialities of religious difference

The introduction to this special section foregrounds the key distinction between ‘religious plurality’ and ‘interreligious pluralism’. Building from the example of a recent controversy over an exhibition on shared religious sites in Thessaloniki, Greece, we analyze the ways in which advocates and adversaries of pluralism alternately place minority religions at the center or attempt to relegate them to the margins of visual, spatial, and political fields. To establish the conceptual scaffolding that supports this special section, we engage the complex relations that govern the operations of state and civil society, sacrality and secularity, as well as spectacular acts of disavowal that simultaneously coincide with everyday multiplicities in the shared use of space. We conclude with brief summaries of the four articles that site religious plurality and interreligious pluralism in the diverse contexts of Brazil, Russia, Sri Lanka, and the Balkans

An Intrinsic Approach to Forces in Magnetoelectric Media

This paper offers a conceptually straightforward method for the calculation of stresses in polarisable media based on the notion of a drive form and its property of being closed in spacetimes with symmetry. After an outline of the notation required to exploit the powerful exterior calculus of differential forms, a discussion of the relation between Killing isometries and conservation laws for smooth and distributional drive forms is given. Instantaneous forces on isolated spacetime domains and regions with interfaces are defined, based on manifestly covariant equations of motion. The remaining sections apply these notions to media that sustain electromagnetic stresses, with emphasis on homogeneous magnetoelectric material. An explicit calculation of the average pressure exerted by a monochromatic wave normally incident on a homogeneous, magnetoelectric slab in vacuo is presented and the concluding section summarizes how this pressure depends on the parameters in the magnetoelectric tensors for the medium.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Il Nuovo Cimento B, proceedings of GCM8, Catania (Oct 2008) - References added, minor corrections mad

The foaming of lavas

Foaming is of great practical and theoretical significance for volcanic processes on the earth, the moon, and perhaps the meteorite parent bodies. The theory of foams agrees with steelmaking experience to indicate that their presence depends on the existence of solutes in the lavas which reduce the surface tension, and are not saturated. These solutes concentrate at the surface, and are called surfactants. The surfactant responsible for the formation of volcanic ash was not identified; it appears to be related to the oxygen partial pressure above the lava. This fact may explain why lunar and meteoritic melts are not observed to foam. Experimental studies are needed to clarify the process

Internal rotor friction instability

The analytical developments and experimental investigations performed in assessing the effect of internal friction on rotor systems dynamic performance are documented. Analytical component models for axial splines, Curvic splines, and interference fit joints commonly found in modern high speed turbomachinery were developed. Rotor systems operating above a bending critical speed were shown to exhibit unstable subsynchronous vibrations at the first natural frequency. The effect of speed, bearing stiffness, joint stiffness, external damping, torque, and coefficient of friction, was evaluated. Testing included material coefficient of friction evaluations, component joint quantity and form of damping determinations, and rotordynamic stability assessments. Under conditions similar to those in the SSME turbopumps, material interfaces experienced a coefficient of friction of approx. 0.2 for lubricated and 0.8 for unlubricated conditions. The damping observed in the component joints displayed nearly linear behavior with increasing amplitude. Thus, the measured damping, as a function of amplitude, is not represented by either linear or Coulomb friction damper models. Rotordynamic testing of an axial spline joint under 5000 in.-lb of static torque, demonstrated the presence of an extremely severe instability when the rotor was operated above its first flexible natural frequency. The presence of this instability was predicted by nonlinear rotordynamic time-transient analysis using the nonlinear component model developed under this program. Corresponding rotordynamic testing of a shaft with an interference fit joint demonstrated the presence of subsynchronous vibrations at the first natural frequency. While subsynchronous vibrations were observed, they were bounded and significantly lower in amplitude than the synchronous vibrations

High Speed Balancing Applied to the T700 Engine

The work performed under Contracts NAS3-23929 and NAS3-24633 is presented. MTI evaluated the feasibility of high-speed balancing for both the T700 power turbine rotor and the compressor rotor. Modifications were designed for the existing Corpus Christi Army Depot (CCAD) T53/T55 high-speed balancing system for balancing T700 power turbine rotors. Tests conducted under these contracts included a high-speed balancing evaluation for T700 power turbines in the Army/NASA drivetrain facility at MTI. The high-speed balancing tests demonstrated the reduction of vibration amplitudes at operating speed for both low-speed balanced and non-low-speed balanced T700 power turbines. In addition, vibration data from acceptance tests of T53, T55, and T700 engines were analyzed and a vibration diagnostic procedure developed