Thermal-hydraulic Fortran program for steady-state calculations of plate-type fuel research reactors

The safety assessment of research and power reactors is a continuous process covering their lifespan and requiring verified and validated codes. Power reactor codes all over the world are well established and qualified against real measuring data and qualified experimental facilities. These codes are usually sophisticated, require special skills and consume a lot of running time. On the other hand, most research reactor codes still require much more data for validation and qualification. It is, therefore, of benefit to any regulatory body to develop its own codes for the review and assessment of research reactors. The present paper introduces a simple, one-dimensional Fortran program called THDSN for steady-state thermal-hydraulic calculations of plate-type fuel research reactors. Besides calculating the fuel and coolant temperature distributions and pressure gradients in an average and hot channel, the program calculates the safety limits and margins against the critical phenomena encountered in research reactors, such as the onset of nucleate boiling, critical heat flux and flow instability. Well known thermal-hydraulic correlations for calculating the safety parameters and several formulas for the heat transfer coefficient have been used. The THDSN program was verified by comparing its results for 2 and 10 MW benchmark reactors with those published in IAEA publications and a good agreement was found. Also, the results of the program are compared with those published for other programs, such as the PARET and TERMIC

Skeletal Manifestations of Hyperparathyroidism

The presentation of hyperparathyroidism changed over the last decades which gave rise to more variable presentations than before. Hyperparathyroidism has a catabolic effect on the skeleton whether the disease is symptomatic or asymptomatic or normocalcemic. It is now understood that the effect of parathyroid hormone (PTH) on the bone is mediated by complex interaction between different bone cells and cells of the immune system especially T lymphocytes. Protecting the skeletal system against bone loss and pathological fractures is among the important treatment goals of hyperparathyroidism. To achieve this goal, more complex laboratory tests to monitor the bone turnover and imaging techniques and modalities as high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) and trabecular bone score (TBS) are employed. These imaging techniques showed the affection of microarchitecture of the cortical and the trabecular bone. For the time being, surgery and alendronate treatment are believed to reverse the catabolic effect of hyperparathyroidism on the bone. Vitamin D supplementation in case of vitamin D deficiency may also has a protective effect on the skeleton

Challenges Facing Independent Cultural Actors: The Case of Egypt

The independent art scene in Egypt flourished following the January 25 revolution in 2011. This study examines the experiences of Egyptian artists and cultural operators through a looking glass into the evolving democratization of arts towards cultural democracy from a global perspective and using the intrinsic and instrumentalist arguments regarding the value of arts. Furthermore, it employs a qualitative analysis of case studies of 18 cultural operators in Cairo and Alexandria, who work in different artistic fields ranging from visual arts to performing arts and academia. The results demonstrate that the cultural policy framework guiding the arts sector in Egypt has restricted the independent scene financially and legally by making survival of the artistic entities difficult and sustainability unrealistic. Interviews with different artists and cultural operators reveal that there is a lack of capacity building to prepare a qualified cadre of cultural leaders and managers. They also show pitfalls in arts education and a lack of artistic excellence. These pitfalls have affected accessibility of audience to arts and accessibility of emerging artists to audience and to venues. Moreover, the interviews highlight the struggle cultural operators face in maintaining a decent standard of living while working in a volatile field. Considering the aforementioned, this study indicates the negative consequences of vague cultural policies on the Egyptian independent art scene and goes further to make recommendations

Nearest Neighbor Clustering over Partitioned Data

Most clustering algorithms assume that all the relevant data are available on a single node of a computer network. In the emerging distributed and networked knowledge environments, databases relevant for computations may reside on a number of nodes connected by a communication network. These data resources cannot be moved to other network sites due to privacy, security, and size considerations. The desired global computation must be decomposed into local computations to match the distribution of data across the network. The capability to decompose computations must be general enough to handle different distributions of data and different participating nodes in each instance of the global computation. In this paper, we present a methodology and algorithm for clustering distributed data in d-dimensional space, using nearest neighbor clustering, wherein each distributed data source is represented by an agent. Each such agent has the capability to decompose global computations into local parts, for itself and for agents at other sites. The global computation is then performed by the agent either exchanging some minimal summaries with other agents or traveling to all the sites and performing local tasks that can be done at each local site. The objective is to perform global tasks with a minimum of communication or travel by participating agents across the network

A New Mechanism for Tracking a Mobile Target Using Grid Sensor Networks

Tracking moving targets is one of the important problems of wireless sensor networks. We have considered a sensor network where numerous sensor nodes are spread in a grid like manner. These sensor nodes are capable of storing data and thus act as a separate datasets. The entire network of these sensors act as a set of distributed datasets. Each of these datasets has its local temporal dataset along with spatial data and the geographical coordinates of a given object or target. In this paper an algorithm is introduced that mines global temporal patterns from these datasets and results in the discovery of linear or nonlinear trajectories of moving objects under supervision. The main objective here is to perform in-network aggregation between the data contained in the various datasets to discover global spatio-temporal patterns; the main constraint is that there should be minimal communication among the participating nodes. We present the algorithm and analyze it in terms of the communication costs