Auf Wolfsspuren - unterwegs mit dem Kamerateam des WDR

Am 29.09.2008 hieß es für drei Mitglieder des NABU-Kreisverbands Höxter auf Wolfssuche gehen. Zusammen mit einem Kamerateam des WDR informierten sich Theo Elberich, Heinrich Hachmeier und Jürgen Kräutle über neueste Nachweise eines Wolfs im Reinhardswald. Treffpunkt mit dem Kamerateam war Beverungen. Dieses Kamerateam, bestehend aus Michael BLASCHKE und Ulrich HAUFE, dreht unter anderem seit 12 Jahren für die Redaktion der WDR-Lokalzeit OWL (dienstags, 19:30 Uhr) Naturfilme von vier bis sechs Minuten Länge. Von Beverungen ging es hinauf nach Langental, knapp jenseits der Landesgrenze Nordrhein-Westfalens in Hessen gelegen. Von hier hatten wir einen guten Ausblick auf den Reinhardswald. Die Kamera schwenkte über die Höhen des Waldes, um dem Fernsehzuschauer einen ersten Eindruck von dem Gebiet zu vermitteln, in das vor wenigen Monaten der Wolf zurückgekehrt ist. Leider schien an diesem Tag die Sonne nicht, so dass die Höhenzüge teilweise im Dunst verschwanden

Kinetics of silicide formation by thin films of V on Si and SiO_2 substrates

The reaction rate of vacuum‐evaporated films of V of the order of 1000 Å thick is investigated by MeV He backscattering spectrometry. On substrates of single‐crystal Si and for anneal times up to several hours in the temperature range 570–650°C, VSi_2 is formed at a linear rate in time. The activation energy of the process is 1.7±0.2 eV. The presence of oxygen in amounts of 10% can significantly decelerate the reaction. On substrates of SiO_2 in the temperature range 730–820°C and anneal times of several hours or less, V_3Si is formed at a square‐root rate in time. The activation energy of this process is 2.0±0.2 eV

A global method for coupling transport with chemistry in heterogeneous porous media

Modeling reactive transport in porous media, using a local chemical equilibrium assumption, leads to a system of advection-diffusion PDE's coupled with algebraic equations. When solving this coupled system, the algebraic equations have to be solved at each grid point for each chemical species and at each time step. This leads to a coupled non-linear system. In this paper a global solution approach that enables to keep the software codes for transport and chemistry distinct is proposed. The method applies the Newton-Krylov framework to the formulation for reactive transport used in operator splitting. The method is formulated in terms of total mobile and total fixed concentrations and uses the chemical solver as a black box, as it only requires that on be able to solve chemical equilibrium problems (and compute derivatives), without having to know the solution method. An additional advantage of the Newton-Krylov method is that the Jacobian is only needed as an operator in a Jacobian matrix times vector product. The proposed method is tested on the MoMaS reactive transport benchmark.Comment: Computational Geosciences (2009) http://www.springerlink.com/content/933p55085742m203/?p=db14bb8c399b49979ba8389a3cae1b0f&pi=1

Weak-strong uniqueness of solutions to entropy-dissipating reaction-diffusion equations

We establish a weak-strong uniqueness principle for solutions to entropy-dissipating reaction-diffusion equations: As long as a strong solution to the reaction-diffusion equation exists, any weak solution and even any renormalized solution must coincide with this strong solution. Our assumptions on the reaction rates are just the entropy condition and local Lipschitz continuity; in particular, we do not impose any growth restrictions on the reaction rates. Therefore, our result applies to any single reversible reaction with mass-action kinetics as well as to systems of reversible reactions with mass-action kinetics satisfying the detailed balance condition. Renormalized solutions are known to exist globally in time for reaction-diffusion equations with entropy-dissipating reaction rates; in contrast, the global-in-time existence of weak solutions is in general still an open problem - even for smooth data - , thereby motivating the study of renormalized solutions. The key ingredient of our result is a careful adjustment of the usual relative entropy functional, whose evolution cannot be controlled properly for weak solutions or renormalized solutions.Comment: 32 page

Comparison of numerical methods for simulating strongly non-linear and heterogeneous reactive transport problems – the MoMaS benchmark case

International audienceAlthough multicomponent reactive transport modeling is gaining wider application in various geoscience fields, it continues to present significant mathematical and computational challenges. There is a need to solve and compare the solutions to complex benchmark problems, using a variety of codes, because such intercomparisons can reveal promising numerical solution approaches and increase confidence in the application of reactive transport codes. In this contribution, the results and performance of five current reactive transport codes are compared for the 1D and 2D sub-problems of the so-called "Easy Test Case" of the MoMaS benchmark (Carrayrou et al., this issue). As a group, the codes include iterative and non-iterative operator splitting, and global implicit solution approaches. The 1D Easy Advective and 1D Easy Diffusive scenarios were solved using all codes and, in general, there was good agreement, with solution discrepancies limited to regions with rapid concentration changes. Computational demands were typically consistent with what was expected for the various solution approaches. The most important outcome of the benchmark exercise is that all codes are able to generate comparable results for problems of significant complexity and computational difficulty