9,278 research outputs found
Aerodynamics of thrust vectoring
Thrust vectoring as a means to enhance maneuverability and aerodynamic performane of a tactical aircraft is discussed. This concept usually involves the installation of a multifunction nozzle. With the nozzle, the engine thrust can be changed in direction without changing the attitude of the aircraft. Change in the direction of thrust induces a significant change in the aerodynamic forces on the aircraft. Therefore, this device can be used for lift-augmenting as well as stability and control purposes. When the thrust is deflected in the longitudinal direction, the lift force and the pitching stability can be manipulated, while the yawing stability can be controlled by directing the thrust in the lateral direction
Calculation of aerodynamic characteristics of airplane configurations at high angles of attack
Calculation of longitudinal and lateral directional aerodynamic characteristics of airplanes by the VORSTAB code is examined. The numerical predictions are based on the potential flow theory with corrections of high angle of attack phenomena; namely, vortex flow and boundary layer separation effects. To account for the vortex flow effect, vortex lift, vortex action point, augmented vortex lift and vortex breakdown effect through the method of suction analogy are included. The effect of boundary layer separation is obtained by matching the nonlinear section data with the three dimensional lift characteristics iteratively. Through correlation with results for nine fighter configurations, it is concluded that reasonably accurate prediction of longitudinal and static lateral directional aerodynamics can be obtained with the VORSTAB code up to an angle of attack at which wake interference and forebody vortex effect are not important. Possible reasons for discrepancy at higher angles of attack are discussed
Calculation of aerodynamic characteristics at high angles of attack for airplane configurations
The primary objective is to determine how an airplane configuration should be modeled to predict both longitudinal and lateral aerodynamic characteristics at high angles of attack. A generic fighter model, an F-16 and an F-18 configuration with leading edge flap deflection and an F-106B configuration were investigated. Furthermore, the F-16XL and X-29 configurations were examined. Some calculated results are given
Atomic oxygen effects on candidate coatings for long-term spacecraft in low earth orbit
Candidate atomic oxygen protective coatings for long-term low Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft were evaluated using the Los Alamos National Laboratory O-atom exposure facility. The coatings studied include Teflon, Al2O3, SiO2, and SWS-V-10, a silicon material. Preliminary results indicate that sputtered PTFE Teflon (0.1 micrometers) has a fluence lifetime of 10 to the 19th power O-atoms/cm (2), and sputtered silicon dioxide (0.1 micrometers), aluminum oxide (0.1 micrometers), and SWS-V-10, a silicone, (4 micrometers) have fluence lifetimes of 10 to the 20th power to 10 to the 21st power O-atoms/cm (2). There are large variations in fluence lifetime data for these coatings
Atomic oxygen effects on boron nitride and silicon nitride: A comparison of ground based and space flight data
The effects of atomic oxygen on boron nitride (BN) and silicon nitride (Si3N4) were evaluated in a low Earth orbit (LEO) flight experiment and in a ground based simulation facility. In both the inflight and ground based experiments, these materials were coated on thin (approx. 250A) silver films, and the electrical resistance of the silver was measured in situ to detect any penetration of atomic oxygen through the BN and Si3N4 materials. In the presence of atomic oxygen, silver oxidizes to form silver oxide, which has a much higher electrical resistance than pure silver. Permeation of atomic oxygen through BN, as indicated by an increase in the electrical resistance of the silver underneath, was observed in both the inflight and ground based experiments. In contrast, no permeation of atomic oxygen through Si3N4 was observed in either the inflight or ground based experiments. The ground based results show good qualitative correlation with the LEO flight results, indicating that ground based facilities such as the one at Los Alamos National Lab can reproduce space flight data from LEO
Efficient generation of an isolated single-cycle attosecond pulse
A new method for efficiently generating an isolated single-cycle attosecond
pulse is proposed. It is shown that the ultraviolet (UV) attosecond pulse can
be utilized as a robust tool to control the dynamics of electron wave packets
(EWPs). By adding a UV attosecond pulse to an infrared (IR) few-cycle pulse at
a proper time, only one return of the EWP to the parent ion is selected to
effectively contribute to the harmonics, then an isolated two-cycle 130-as
pulse with a bandwidth of 45 eV is obtained. After complementing the chirp, an
isolated single-cycle attosecond pulse with a duration less than 100 as seems
achievable. In addition, the contribution of the quantum trajectories can be
selected by adjusting the delay between the IR and UV fields. Using this
method, the harmonic and attosecond pulse yields are efficiently enhanced in
contrast to the scheme [G. Sansone {\it et al.}, Science {\bf314}, 443 (2006)]
using a few-cycle IR pulse in combination with the polarization gating
technique.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Normalizing Weak Boson Pair Production at the Large Hadron Collider
The production of two weak bosons at the Large Hadron Collider will be one of
the most important sources of SM backgrounds for final states with multiple
leptons. In this paper we consider several quantities that can help normalize
the production of weak boson pairs. Ratios of inclusive cross-sections for
production of two weak bosons and Drell-Yan are investigated and the
corresponding theoretical errors are evaluated. The possibility of predicting
the jet veto survival probability of VV production from Drell-Yan data is also
considered. Overall, the theoretical errors on all quantities remain less than
5-20%. The dependence of these quantities on the center of mass energy of the
proton-proton collision is also studied.Comment: 11 pages; added references, minor text revisions, version to appear
in Phys. Rev.
A comparison of ground-based and space flight data: Atomic oxygen reactions with boron nitride and silicon nitride
The effects of atomic oxygen on boron nitride (BN) and silicon nitride (Si3N4) have been studied in low Earth orbit (LEO) flight experiments and in a ground-based simulation facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Both the in-flight and ground-based experiments employed the materials coated over thin (approx 250 Angstrom) silver films whose electrical resistance was measured in situ to detect penetration of atomic oxygen through the BN and Si3N4 materials. In the presence of atomic oxygen, silver oxidizes to form silver oxide, which has a much higher electrical resistance than pure silver. Permeation of atomic oxygen through BN, as indicated by an increase in the electrical resistance of the silver underneath, was observed in both the in-flight and ground-based experiments. In contrast, no permeation of atomic oxygen through Si3N4 was observed in either the in-flight or ground-based experiments. The ground-based results show good qualitative correlation with the LEO flight results, thus validating the simulation fidelity of the ground-based facility in terms of reproducing LEO flight results
Hydrophobic Interactions and Dewetting between Plates with Hydrophobic and Hydrophilic Domains
We study by molecular dynamics simulations the wetting/dewetting transition
and the dependence of the free energy on distance between plates that contain
both hydrophobic and hydrophilic particles. We show that dewetting and strength
of hydrophobic interaction is very sensitive to the distribution of hydrophobic
and hydrophilic domains. In particular, we find that plates characterized by a
large domain of hydrophobic sites induce a dewetting transition and an
attractive solvent-induced interaction. On the other hand, a homogeneous
distribution of the hydrophobic and hydrophilic particles on the plates
prevents the dewetting transition and produces a repulsive solvent-induced
interaction. We also present results for a kind of Janus interface in which one
plate consists of hydrophobic particles and the other of hydrophilic particles
showing that the inter-plate gap remains wet until steric constraints at small
separations eject the water molecules. Our results indicate that the Cassie
equation, for the contact angle of a heterogeneous plate, can not be used to
predict the critical distance of dewetting. These results indicate that
hydrophobic interactions between nanoscale surfaces with strong large
length-scale hydrophobicity can be highly cooperative and thus they argue
against additivity of the hydrophobic interactions between different surface
domains in these cases. These findings are pertinent to certain protein-protein
interactions where additivity is commonly assumed.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figure
Predicting Future Instance Segmentation by Forecasting Convolutional Features
Anticipating future events is an important prerequisite towards intelligent
behavior. Video forecasting has been studied as a proxy task towards this goal.
Recent work has shown that to predict semantic segmentation of future frames,
forecasting at the semantic level is more effective than forecasting RGB frames
and then segmenting these. In this paper we consider the more challenging
problem of future instance segmentation, which additionally segments out
individual objects. To deal with a varying number of output labels per image,
we develop a predictive model in the space of fixed-sized convolutional
features of the Mask R-CNN instance segmentation model. We apply the "detection
head'" of Mask R-CNN on the predicted features to produce the instance
segmentation of future frames. Experiments show that this approach
significantly improves over strong baselines based on optical flow and
repurposed instance segmentation architectures
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