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A new method to identify the optimal temperature of latent-heat thermal-energy storage systems for power generation from waste heat
The integration of thermal-energy storage (TES) within waste-heat recovery power generation systems has the potential to improve energy-efficiency in many industrial processes with variable and/or intermittent waste-heat streams. The first objective of this paper is to present a novel model of these systems that can be used at an early design stage to provide fast and accurate estimates of performance. More specifically, the method can identify the optimal temperature of latent-heat TES systems for waste-heat recovery applications based only on the known heat-source and heat-sink conditions (i.e., temperature, mass-flow rate and specificheat capacity), and can assess both single-stage and cascaded systems. The model has been validated against optimal organic Rankine cycle systems identified from a thermodynamic cycle optimisation. The second objective is to identify the characteristics of optimal systems for different heat-source profiles. The results indicate that, for a given application, there exists an optimal temperature for the latent-heat TES system that depends primarily on the relative size of the heat sink. Moreover, it is found that, for a heat engine operating with TES, the power rating ranges between 25% and 60% of the corresponding power rating for an optimal heat engine, operating without TES, that adapts instantaneously to heat-source fluctuations, whilst the total energy production is reduced by between 45% and 85% respectively. Finally, a small deviation is observed between the results obtained for the different heat sources considered, which suggests that these findings can be extrapolated to other heat sources not considered within this study
The High Energy Behavior of the Forward Scattering Parameters---An Amplitude Analysis Update
Utilizing the most recent experimental data, we reanalyze high energy \pbar p
and pp data, using the asymptotic amplitude analysis, under the assumption that
we have reached `asymptopia'. This analysis gives strong evidence for a dependence at {\em current} energies and {\em not} ,
and also demonstrates that odderons are {\em not} necessary to explain the
experimental data.Comment: 7 pages in LaTeX, 4 figures and 5 files, uuencoded in file
"sigall.uu
Baryonic Signatures in Large-Scale Structure
We investigate the consequences of a non-negligible baryon fraction for
models of structure formation in Cold Dark Matter dominated cosmologies,
emphasizing in particular the existence of oscillations in the present-day
matter power spectrum. These oscillations are the remnants of acoustic
oscillations in the photon-baryon fluid before last scattering. For acceptable
values of the cosmological and baryon densities, the oscillations modulate the
power by up to 10%, with a `period' in spatial wavenumber which is close to
Delta k approximately 0.05/ Mpc. We study the effects of nonlinear evolution on
these features, and show that they are erased for k > 0.2 h/ Mpc. At larger
scales, the features evolve as expected from second-order perturbation theory:
the visibility of the oscillations is affected only weakly by nonlinear
evolution. No realistic CDM parameter combination is able to account for the
claimed feature near k = 0.1 h/ Mpc in the APM power spectrum, or the excess
power at 100 Mpc/h wavelengths quoted by several recent surveys. Thus baryonic
oscillations are not predicted to dominate existing measurements of clustering.
We examine several effects which may mask the features which are predicted, and
conclude that future galaxy surveys may be able to detect the oscillatory
features in the power spectrum provided baryons comprise more than 15% of the
total density, but that it will be a technically challenging achievement.Comment: 16 pages, 13 Figures, to be published in MNRA
Old Galaxies at High Redshift and the Cosmological Constant
In a recent striking discovery, Dunlop {\bf \it et al} observed a galaxy at
redshift z=1.55 with an estimated age of 3.5 Gyr. This is incompatible with age
estimates for a flat matter dominated universe unless the Hubble constant is
less than . While both an open universe, and a universe
with a cosmological constant alleviate this problem, I argue here that this
result favors a non-zero cosmological constant, especially when considered in
light of other cosmological constraints. In the first place, for the favored
range of matter densities, this constraint is more stringent than the globular
cluster age constraint, which already favors a non-zero cosmological constant.
Moreover, the age-redshift relation for redshifts of order unity implies that
the ratio between the age associated with redshift 1.55 and the present age is
also generally larger for a cosmological constant dominated universe than for
an open universe. In addition, structure formation is generally suppressed in
low density cosmologies, arguing against early galaxy formation. The additional
constraints imposed by the new observation on the parameter space of vs
(where ) are derived for both
cosmologies. For a cosmological constant dominated universe this constraint is
consistent with the range allowed by other cosmological constraints, which also
favor a non-zero value.Comment: latex, 10 pages, including two embedded postscript figure
Detection of coherent beam-beam modes with digitized beam position monitor signals
A system for bunch-by-bunch detection of transverse proton and antiproton
coherent oscillations in the Fermilab Tevatron collider is described. It is
based on the signal from a single beam-position monitor located in a region of
the ring with large amplitude functions. The signal is digitized over a large
number of turns and Fourier-analyzed offline with a dedicated algorithm. To
enhance the signal, band-limited noise is applied to the beam for about 1 s.
This excitation does not adversely affect the circulating beams even at high
luminosities. The device has a response time of a few seconds, a frequency
resolution of in fractional tune, and it is sensitive to
oscillation amplitudes of 60 nm. It complements Schottky detectors as a
diagnostic tool for tunes, tune spreads, and beam-beam effects. Measurements of
coherent mode spectra are presented and compared with models of beam-beam
oscillations.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to the Proceedings of the ICFA
Mini-Workshop on Beam-beam Effects in Hadron Colliders (BB2013), Geneva,
Switzerland, 18-22 March 201
Room-temperature ballistic transport in narrow graphene strips
We investigate electron-phonon couplings, scattering rates, and mean free
paths in zigzag-edge graphene strips with widths of the order of 10 nm. Our
calculations for these graphene nanostrips show both the expected similarity
with single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and the suppression of the
electron-phonon scattering due to a Dirichlet boundary condition that prohibits
one major backscattering channel present in SWNTs. Low-energy acoustic phonon
scattering is exponentially small at room temperature due to the large phonon
wave vector required for backscattering. We find within our model that the
electron-phonon mean free path is proportional to the width of the nanostrip
and is approximately 70 m for an 11-nm-wide nanostrip.Comment: 5 pages and 5 figure
Reconstructing large-scale structure with neutral hydrogen surveys
Upcoming 21-cm intensity surveys will use the hyperfine transition in emission to map out neutral hydrogen in large volumes of the universe. Unfortunately, large spatial scales are completely contaminated with spectrally smooth astrophysical foregrounds which are orders of magnitude brighter than the signal. This contamination also leaks into smaller radial and angular modes to form a foreground wedge, further limiting the usefulness of 21-cm observations for different science cases, especially cross-correlations with tracers that have wide kernels in the radial direction. In this paper, we investigate reconstructing these modes within a forward modeling framework. Starting with an initial density field, a suitable bias parameterization and non-linear dynamics to model the observed 21-cm field, our reconstruction proceeds by {combining} the likelihood of a forward simulation to match the observations (under given modeling error and a data noise model) {with the Gaussian prior on initial conditions and maximizing the obtained posterior}. For redshifts z=2 and 4, we are able to reconstruct 21cm field with cross correlation, rc > 0.8 on all scales for both our optimistic and pessimistic assumptions about foreground contamination and for different levels of thermal noise. The performance deteriorates slightly at z=6. The large-scale line-of-sight modes are reconstructed almost perfectly. We demonstrate how our method also provides a technique for density field reconstruction for baryon acoustic oscillations, outperforming standard methods on all scales. We also describe how our reconstructed field can provide superb clustering redshift estimation at high redshifts, where it is otherwise extremely difficult to obtain dense spectroscopic samples, as well as open up a wealth of cross-correlation opportunities with projected fields (e.g. lensing) which are restricted to modes transverse to the line of sight
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