Theoretical analysis of reflected ray error from surface slope error and their application to the solar concentrated collector

Surface slope error of concentrator is one of the main factors to influence the performance of the solar concentrated collectors which cause deviation of reflected ray and reduce the intercepted radiation. This paper presents the general equation to calculate the standard deviation of reflected ray error from slope error through geometry optics, applying the equation to calculate the standard deviation of reflected ray error for 5 kinds of solar concentrated reflector, provide typical results. The results indicate that the slope error is transferred to the reflected ray in more than 2 folds when the incidence angle is more than 0. The equation for reflected ray error is generally fit for all reflection surfaces, and can also be applied to control the error in designing an abaxial optical system.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Theoretical analysis of error transfer from surface slope to refractive ray and their application to the solar concentrated collector

This paper presents the general equation to calculate the standard deviation of reflected ray error from optical error through geometry optics, applying the equation to calculate the standard deviation of reflected ray error for 8 kinds of solar concentrated reflector, provide typical results. The results indicate that the slope errors in two direction is transferred to any one direction of the focus ray when the incidence angle is more than 0 for solar trough and heliostats reflector; for point focus Fresnel lens, point focus parabolic glass mirror, line focus parabolic galss mirror, the error transferring coefficient from optical to focus ray will increase when the rim angle increase; for TIR-R concentrator, it will decrease; for glass heliostat, it relates to the incidence angle and azimuth of the reflecting point. Keywords: optic error, standard deviation, refractive ray error, concentrated solar collectorComment: 16 pages 10 figure

An Eye Tracking Study into the Effects of Graph Layout

Graphs are typically visualized as node-link diagrams. Although there is a fair amount of research focusing on crossing minimization to improve readability, little attention has been paid on how to handle crossings when they are an essential part of the final visualizations. This requires us to understand how people read graphs and how crossings affect reading performance. As an initial step to this end, a preliminary eye tracking experiment was conducted. The specific purpose of this experiment was to test the effects of crossing angles and geometric-path tendency on eye movements and performance. Sixteen subjects performed both path search and node locating tasks with six drawings. The results showed that small angles can slow down and trigger extra eye movements, causing delays for path search tasks, whereas crossings have little impact on node locating tasks. Geometric-path tendency indicates that a path between two nodes can become harder to follow when many branches of the path go toward the target node. The insights obtained are discussed with a view to further confirmation in future work

An Aggregation-Based Overall Quality Measurement for Visualization

Aesthetics are often used to evaluate the quality of graph drawings. However, the existing aesthetic criteria are useful in judging the extents to which a drawing conforms to particular drawing rules. They have limitations in evaluating overall quality. Currently the overall quality of graph drawings is mainly evaluated based on personal judgments and user studies. Personal judgments are not reliable, while user studies can be costly to run. Therefore, there is a need for a direct measure of overall quality. This measure can be used by visualization designers to quickly compare the quality of drawings at hand at the design stage and make decisions accordingly. In an attempt to meet this need, we propose a measure that measures overall quality based on aggregation of individual aesthetic criteria. We present a user study that validates this measure and demonstrates its capacity in predicting the performance of human graph comprehension. The implications of the proposed measure for future research are discussed

Error Compensated Quantized SGD and its Applications to Large-scale Distributed Optimization

Large-scale distributed optimization is of great importance in various applications. For data-parallel based distributed learning, the inter-node gradient communication often becomes the performance bottleneck. In this paper, we propose the error compensated quantized stochastic gradient descent algorithm to improve the training efficiency. Local gradients are quantized to reduce the communication overhead, and accumulated quantization error is utilized to speed up the convergence. Furthermore, we present theoretical analysis on the convergence behaviour, and demonstrate its advantage over competitors. Extensive experiments indicate that our algorithm can compress gradients by a factor of up to two magnitudes without performance degradation.Comment: Accepted by ICML 201

Prediction and optimization of the performance of parabolic solar dish concentrator with sphere receiver using analytical function

Parabolic solar dish concentrator with sphere receiver is less studied. We present an analytic function to calculate the intercept factor of the system with real sun bright distribution and Gaussian distribution, the results indicate that the intercept factor is related to the rim angle of reflector and the ratio of open angle of receiver at the top of reflector to optical error when the optical error is larger than or equal to 5 mrad, but is related to the rim angle, open angle and optical error in less than 5 mrad optical error. Furthermore we propose a quick process to optimize the system to provide the maximum solar energy to net heat efficiency for different optical error under typical condition. The results indicate that the parabolic solar dish concentrator with sphere receiver has rather high solar energy to net heat efficiency which is 20% more than solar trough and tower system including higher cosine factor and lower heat loss of the receiver.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures; Corresponding author: Weidong Huang, email: [email protected]

Metal-insulator transition in VO2_{2}: a Peierls-Mott-Hubbard mechanism

The electronic structure of VO$_2$ is studied in the frameworks of local density approximation (LDA) and LDA+$U$ to give a quantitative description of the metal-insulator (MI) transition in this system. It is found that, both structural distortion and the local Coulomb interaction, play important roles in the transition. An optical gap, comparable to the experimental value has been obtained in the monoclinic structure by using the LDA+$U$ method. Based on our results, we believe that both, the Peierls and the Mott-Hubbard mechanism, are essential for a description of the MI transition in this system.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Tuning electronic heat transport in graphene/metal heterostructures with ultralow thermal conductivity

Prior ultralow thermal conductivity materials are not suitable for thermoelectric applications due to the limited electronic transport in the materials. Here, we present a new class of ultralow thermal conductivity materials with substantial electronic heat transport. Our samples are graphene/metal heterostructures of transferred graphene and ultrathin metal films (Pd, Au and Ni) deposited by either thermal evaporation or rf magnetron sputtering. For the evaporated samples, we achieve an ultralow thermal conductivity of 0.06 W m-1 K-1, with phonons as the dominant heat carriers. The ultralow thermal conductivity is due to a huge disparity in phonon energy in graphene and metals. Interestingly, for the sputtered samples, we find that about 50 % of heat is carried by electrons, even when thermal conductivity is about 0.1 W m-1 K-1. We attribute the electronic contribution to transmission of electrons across atomic-scale pinholes in graphene. With the ultralow thermal conductivity and substantial electronic transport, the new materials could be explored for thermoelectric applications

A Force-Directed Method for Large Crossing Angle Graph Drawing

Recent empirical research has indicated that human graph reading performance improves when crossing angles increase. However, crossing angle has not been used as an aesthetic criterion for graph drawing algorithms so far. In this paper, we introduce a force-directed method that aims to construct graph drawings with large crossing angles. Experiments indicate that our method significantly increases crossing angles. Surprisingly, the experimental results further demonstrate that the resulting drawings produced by our method have fewer edge crossings, a shorter total edge length and more uniform edge lengths, compared to classical spring algorithms

A new method to calculate the Total Fertility Rate from the number of birth

The standard methods to calculate the Total Fertility Rate require the reliable age-specific fertility rate including birth data and the related age-specific women's population data. Historically, the number of births was often not counted according to the age of the mother, so it is difficult to estimate the historical total fertility rate with the standard methods. Many empirical methods have been proposed, but their application is limited to specific period and place. This paper deduces a new method for calculating the total fertility rate from the number of birth and the population of women at childbearing age, can be applied to most of cases. The relative error is usually less than 5%. It is easier to calculate TFR, and may be applied to obtain more TFRs for the history.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure