Pastures for the pastoral areas

The pastoral areas lie generally outside the zone where cultivated crops are grown. The rainfall is erratic and the basic pastures for sheep and cattle consist of native plants. In some favoured areas however, and in particular situations, sown pasture species are becoming increasingly important

Solution growth of Triglycine Sulfate (TGS) crystals on the International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-1)

An experiment was planned for the International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-1) to be launched around Feb. 1991. Crystals of triglycine sulfate (TGS) will be grown by low temperature solution crystal growth technique using a multiuser facility called Fluid Experiment System (FES). A special cooled sting technique of solution crystal growth will be used where heat is extracted from the seed crystal through a semi-insulating sting, thereby creating the desired supersaturation near the growing crystal. Also, a holocamera will be used to provide tomography of the three dimensional flow field and particle image displacement velocimetry to monitor the convective flows

Passive noise control strategies for jets exhausting over flat surfaces : an LES study

Unconventional aircraft propulsion configurations have to be considered in the future to address environmental issues, including air traffic noise that is know to affect communities surrounding airports. One approach involves rectangular jets in the vicinity of flat surfaces that are parallel to the jet axis in an attempt to shield the noise, but previous experimental work indicated that there is an increase in the noise generated by these configurations, mainly associated with the effect that the plate trailing edge exerts on the flow. In this work, we use large eddy simulations to investigate the potential of wall deformations at the plate trailing edge to reduce jet noise. We consider a high aspect ratio rectangular nozzle exhausting a jet over a flat surface in different configurations, and estimate the farfield noise using the Ffowcs Williams and Hawkins acoustic analogy. Because of the high aspect ratio of the rectangular nozzle, we approximate the jet as being two-dimensional, and use periodic boundary conditions in the spanwise direction. For the configurations that we considered here, the trailing edge deformations did not seem to affect the noise significantly; an overall sound pressure level in the order of 1-2 dB was observed for some selected cases

Does ecosystem sensitivity to precipitation at the site-level conform to regional-scale predictions?

Citation: Wilcox, K. R., Blair, J. M., Smith, M. D., & Knapp, A. K. (2016). Does ecosystem sensitivity to precipitation at the site-level conform to regional-scale predictions? Ecology, 97(3), 561-568. doi:10.1890/15-1437.1Central to understanding global C cycle dynamics is the functional relationship between precipitation and net primary production (NPP). At large spatial (regional) scales, the responsiveness of aboveground NPP (ANPP) to interannual variation in annual precipitation (AP; ANPP(sens)) is inversely related to site-level ANPP, coinciding with turnover of plant communities along precipitation gradients. Within ecosystems experiencing chronic alterations in water availability, plant community change will also occur with unknown consequences for ANPP(sens). To examine the role plant community shifts may play in determining alterations in site-level ANPP(sens), we experimentally increased precipitation by similar to 35% for two decades in a native Central U.S. grassland. Consistent with regional models, ANPP(sens) decreased initially as water availability and ANPP increased. However, ANPP(sens) shifted back to ambient levels when mesic species increased in abundance in the plant community. Similarly, in grassland sites with distinct mesic and xeric plant communities and corresponding 50% differences in ANPP, ANPP(sens) did not differ over almost three decades. We conclude that responses in ANPP(sens) to chronic alterations in water availability within an ecosystem may not conform to regional AP-ANPP patterns, despite expected changes in ANPP and plant communities. The result is unanticipated functional resistance to climate change at the site scale

Study of techniques and applications of satellite imagery to small scale mapping

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Perturbative and non-perturbative studies with the delta function potential

We show that the delta function potential can be exploited along with perturbation theory to yield the result of certain infinite series. The idea is that any exactly soluble potential if coupled with a delta function potential remains exactly soluble. We use the strength of the delta function as an expansion parameter and express the second-order energy shift as an infinite sum in perturbation theory. The analytical solution is used to determine the second-order energy shift and hence the sum of an infinite series. By an appropriate choice of the unperturbed system, we can show the importance of the continuum in the energy shift of bound states.Comment: 19 pages, 2 table

Evolution of turbulence and in-plane vortices in the near field flow behind multi-scale planar grids

In this experimental work, we carry out detailed two-dimensional particle image velocimetry investigations for the near field wakes behind a conventional and two multi-scale planar grids, using stitched camera fields of view. Statistical independent measurements are conducted focusing on the first few mesh distances downstream of the grid. It is found that the multiple integral length scales originated from the grids loose their importance on the turbulence development after about three mesh distances downstream, much earlier than the distance where the turbulence becomes homogeneous. The largest eddy size, represented by the integral length scales, does not show clear differences in its growth rate among the three grids after an initial development of three times the largest grid size downstream. Nevertheless, when examining individual vortex behaviours using conditional averaging and filtering processes, clear differences are found. The grids are found to have different decay rates of peak vorticity and projected vortex strengths. Despite these differences, the in-plane vorticity correlation function reveals that the mean vortex shape of all the grids shows a universal near-Gaussian pattern which does not change much as the turbulence decays

Development of a chromium-thoria alloy

Low temperature ductility and high temperature strength of pure chromium and chromium-thoria alloy prepared from vapor deposited powder

K-Band Spectroscopy of an Obscured Massive Stellar Cluster in the Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/4039) with NIRSPEC

We present infrared spectroscopy of the Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/4039) with NIRSPEC at the W. M. Keck Observatory. We imaged the star clusters in the vicinity of the southern nucleus (NGC 4039) in 0.39" seeing in K-band using NIRSPEC's slit-viewing camera. The brightest star cluster revealed in the near-IR (M_K(0) = -17.9) is insignificant optically, but coincident with the highest surface brightness peak in the mid-IR (12-18 um) ISO image presented by Mirabel et al (1998). We obtained high signal-to-noise 2.03-2.45 um spectra of the nucleus and the obscured star cluster at R = 1900. The cluster is very young (age ~ 4 Myr), massive (M ~ 16E6 M_sun), and compact (density ~ 115 M_sun pc^(-3) within a 32 pc half-light radius), assuming a Salpeter IMF (0.1-100 M_sun). Its hot stars have a radiation field characterized by T_eff ~ 39,000 K, and they ionize a compact HII region with n_e ~ 10^4 cm^(-3). The stars are deeply embedded in gas and dust (A_V = 9-10 mag), and their strong FUV field powers a clumpy photodissociation region with densities n_H > 10^5 cm^(-3) on scales of ~ 200 pc, radiating L{H_2 1-0 S(1)}= 9600 L_sun.Comment: 4 pages, 4 embedded figures, uses emulateapj.sty. To appear in ApJL. Also available at http://astro.berkeley.edu/~agilber