Quantitative determination of engine water ingestion

A nonintrusive optical technique is described for determination of liquid mass flux in a droplet laden airstream. The techniques were developed for quantitative determination of engine water ingestion resulting from heavy rain or wheel spray. Independent measurements of the liquid water content (LWC) of the droplet laden airstream and of the droplet velocities were made at the stimulated nacelle inlet plane for the liquid mass flux determination. The LWC was measured by illuminating and photographing the droplets contained within a thin slice of the flow field by means of a sheet of light from a pulsed laser. A fluorescent dye introduced in the water enchanced the droplet image definition. The droplet velocities were determined from double exposed photographs of the moving droplet field. The technique was initially applied to a steady spray generated in a wind tunnel. It was found that although the spray was initially steady, the aerodynamic breakup process was inherently unsteady. This resulted in a wide variation of the instantaneous LWC of the droplet laden airstream. The standard deviation of ten separate LWC measurements was 31% of the average. However, the liquid mass flux calculated from the average LWC and droplet velocities came within 10% of the known water ingestion rate

Emissivity measurements of reflective surfaces at near-millimeter wavelengths

We have developed an instrument for directly measuring the emissivity of reflective surfaces at near-millimeter wavelengths. The thermal emission of a test sample is compared with that of a reference surface, allowing the emissivity of the sample to be determined without heating. The emissivity of the reference surface is determined by one’s heating the reference surface and measuring the increase in emission. The instrument has an absolute accuracy of Δe = 5 x 10^-4 and can reproducibly measure a difference in emissivity as small as Δe = 10^-4 between flat reflective samples. We have used the instrument to measure the emissivity of metal films evaporated on glass and carbon fiber-reinforced plastic composite surfaces. We measure an emissivity of (2.15 ± 0.4) x 10^-3 for gold evaporated on glass and (2.65 ± 0.5) x 10^-3 for aluminum evaporated on carbon fiber-reinforced plastic composite

The Volume of 2D Black Holes

It is shown that the definition for the volume of stationary black holes advocated in hep-th/0508108 readily generalizes to the case of dilaton gravity in D=2. The dilaton field is included as part of the measure. A feature observed in D=3 and 4 has been the impossibility to obtain infinite volume while retaining finite area without encountering some kind of pathology. It is demonstrated that this also holds in D=2. Consistency with spherically reduced gravity is shown. For the Witten black hole it is found that the area is proportional to the volume.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, uses iopart_mod.cl

One conjecture and two observations on de Sitter space

We propose that the state represented by the Nariai black hole inside de Sitter space is the ground state of the de Sitter gravity, while the pure de Sitter space is the maximal energy state. With this point of view, we investigate thermodynamics of de Sitter space, we find that if there is a dual field theory, this theory can not be a CFT in a fixed dimension. Near the Nariai limit, we conjecture that the dual theory is effectively an 1+1 CFT living on the radial segment connecting the cosmic horizon and the black hole horizon. If we go beyond the de Sitter limit, the "imaginary" high temperature phase can be described by a CFT with one dimension lower than the spacetime dimension. Below the de Sitter limit, we are approaching a phase similar to the Hagedorn phase in 2+1 dimensions, the latter is also a maximal energy phase if we hold the volume fixed.Comment: 12 pages, harvmac; references added; version for publication in JHE