Characterizing gas film conduction for particle- particle and particle-wall collisions

Heat transfer in granular media is an important mechanism in many industrial applications. For some applications conduction is an important mode of heat transfer. Several models have been proposed to describe particle scale conduction both between particles (particle-particle) and with walls (particle-wall). Within these conduction models are several distinct modes: conduction through physical contact (macro-contact), conduction through surface roughness (micro-contacts), and conduction through the stagnant gas film surrounding each particle (particle-fluid-particle or particle- fluid-wall). While these models have been developed and verified in literature, the relationship between the conduction heat transfer coefficient and key parameters is not immediately obvious. This is especially true for gas film conduction. In this work we investigate gas film conduction for particle- particle and particle-wall collisions via DEM simulations using a well-established gas film model to determine the behavior of the heat transfer coefficient as a function of the separation distance and particle size. With a better understanding of the gas film heat transfer coefficient, we propose a simplified model that captures the same response but is easier to understand and significantly more computationally efficient

Herbicide impacts on exotic grasses and a population of the critically endangered herb "Calystegia affinis" (Convolvulaceae) on Lord Howe Island

Introduced perennial grasses are capable of altering the habitat of native species, causing reductions in population size and vigour, and potentially affecting life-history processes such as survival, pollination and seedling recruitment. We examined the utility of herbicide treatment on two exotic grasses, Pennisetum clandestinum (Kikuyu) and Stenotaphrum secundatum (Buffalo grass) to restore the habitat of Calystegia affinis, a critically endangered species endemic to Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands. Using two herbicides, Asset (designed to affect only grasses) and Glyphosate (a general herbicide), we compared effectiveness in reducing grass cover on a population of Calystegia affinis. We protected Calystegia plants from the herbicides by ensuring their leaves were covered by plastic bags during herbicide application. Both herbicides were similarly effective in reducing grass cover after four weeks and had no noticeable adverse affect on Calystegia (suggesting the plastic bag protection was effective). After 26 weeks, Glyphosate was more effective in maintaining a reduced grass cover. Plots treated with either herbicide had a greater relative increase in abundance of Calystegia stems compared to untreated controls. The Glyphosate treatment resulted in the greatest relative increase in stem abundance, but this was not significantly greater than in the Asset treatment. We consider that spraying with Glyphosate treatment, with follow-up monitoring and spot-spraying, will assist the recovery of the Calystegia affinis population. Ultimately, the maintenance of a weed-free zone at the forest edge will provide suitable habitat for additional recruitment of this and other native species

BiGlobal stability analysis in curvilinear coordinates of massively separated lifting bodies

A methodology based on spectral collocation numerical methods for global flow stability analysis of incompressible external flows is presented. A potential shortcoming of spectral methods, namely the handling of the complex geometries encountered in global stability analysis, has been dealt with successfully in past works by the development of spectral-element methods on unstructured meshes. The present contribution shows that a certain degree of regularity of the geometry may be exploited in order to build a global stability analysis approach based on a regular spectral rectangular grid in curvilinear coordinates and conformal mappings. The derivation of the stability linear operator in curvilinear coordinates is presented along with the discretisation method. Unlike common practice to the solution of the same problem, the matrix discretising the eigenvalue problem is formed and stored. Subspace iteration and massive parallelisation are used in order to recover a wide window of its leading Ritz system. The method is applied to two external flows, both of which are lifting bodies with separation occurring just downstream of the leading edge. Specifically the flow configurations are a NACA 0015 airfoil, and an ellipse of aspect ratio 8 chosen to closely approximate the geometry of the airfoil. Both flow configurations are at an angle of attack of 18, with a Reynolds number based on the chord length of 200. The results of the stability analysis for both geometries are presented and illustrate analogous features

Disruption of recruitment in two endemic palms on Lord Howe Island by invasive rats

Invasive species may have negative impacts on many narrow range endemics and species restricted to oceanic islands. Predicting recent impacts of invasive species on long-lived trees is difficult because the presence of adult plants may mask population changes. We examined the impact of introduced black rats (Rattus rattus) on two palm species restricted to cloud forests and endemic to Lord Howe Island, a small oceanic island in the southern Pacific. We combined estimates of the standing size distribution of these palms with the proximal impacts of rats on fruit survival in areas baited to control rats and in unbaited areas. The size distribution of palms with trunks was comparable across baited and unbaited sites. Small juvenile palms lacking a trunk (\50 cm tall) were abundant in baited areas, but rare in unbaited sites for Lepidorrhachis mooreana, and rare or absent in 3 out of 4 unbaited Hedyscepe canterburyana sites. All ripe fruits were lost to rats in the small fruited L. mooreana. Fruitremoval was widespread but less (20–54%) in H. canterburyana. Both palms showed evidence of a reduced capacity to maintain a juvenile bank of palms through regular recruitment as a consequence of over 90 years of rat impact. This will limit the ability of these species to take advantage of episodic canopy gaps. Baiting for rat control reduced fruit losses and resulted in the re-establishment of a juvenile palm bank. Conservation of both endemic palms necessitates control (or eradication) of rat populations on the unique cloud forest summits of the island

Wall influence on dynamics of a microbubble

The nonlinear dynamic behaviour of microscopic bubbles near a wall is investigated. The Keller-Miksis-Parlitz equation is adopted, but modified to account for the presence of the wall. This base model describes the time evolution of the bubble surface, which is assumed to remain spherical, and accounts for the effect of acoustic radiation losses owing to liquid compressibility in the momentum conservation. Two situations are considered: the base case of an isolated bubble in an unbounded medium; and a bubble near a solid wall. In the latter case, the wall influence is modeled by including a symmetrically oscillating image bubble. The bubble dynamics is traced using a numerical solution of the model equation. Subsequently, Floquet theory is used to accurately detect the bifurcation point where bubble oscillations stop following the driving ultrasound frequency and undergo period-changing bifurcations. Of particular interest is the detection of the subcritical period tripling and quadrupling transition. The parametric bifurcation maps are obtained as functions of non-dimensional parameters representing the bubble radius, the frequency and pressure amplitude of the driving ultrasound field and the distance from the wall. It is shown that the presence of the wall generally stabilises the bubble dynamics, so that much larger values of the pressure amplitude are needed to generate nonlinear responses.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figure