3,474 research outputs found
An Evaluation of the Effect of Discharging a High Quality Effluent into a Small Ozark Mountain Stream
Recently the newly constructed Fayetteville wastewater treatment plant went on line and directed a portion of its discharge to a point in the Mud Creek drainage basin that had previously not received any effluent. Prior to the discharge, a background study had been performed to establish the water quality in the basin. The background data, when compared to the data collected by this study, allowed any alteration of the stream water quality to be evaluated. Also the modeling procedure used to set the effluent limits for the treatment plant was analyzed. All stream data were compared to the limits set forth for surface water quality by the Department of Pollution Control and Ecology. The new discharge had some effect on the receiving stream, however, the stream still meets Arkansas water quality standards for all parameters
Surrogate Accelerated Bayesian Inversion for the Determination of the Thermal Diffusivity of a Material
Determination of the thermal properties of a material is an important task in
many scientific and engineering applications. How a material behaves when
subjected to high or fluctuating temperatures can be critical to the safety and
longevity of a system's essential components. The laser flash experiment is a
well-established technique for indirectly measuring the thermal diffusivity,
and hence the thermal conductivity, of a material. In previous works,
optimization schemes have been used to find estimates of the thermal
conductivity and other quantities of interest which best fit a given model to
experimental data. Adopting a Bayesian approach allows for prior beliefs about
uncertain model inputs to be conditioned on experimental data to determine a
posterior distribution, but probing this distribution using sampling techniques
such as Markov chain Monte Carlo methods can be incredibly computationally
intensive. This difficulty is especially true for forward models consisting of
time-dependent partial differential equations. We pose the problem of
determining the thermal conductivity of a material via the laser flash
experiment as a Bayesian inverse problem in which the laser intensity is also
treated as uncertain. We introduce a parametric surrogate model that takes the
form of a stochastic Galerkin finite element approximation, also known as a
generalized polynomial chaos expansion, and show how it can be used to sample
efficiently from the approximate posterior distribution. This approach gives
access not only to the sought-after estimate of the thermal conductivity but
also important information about its relationship to the laser intensity, and
information for uncertainty quantification. We also investigate the effects of
the spatial profile of the laser on the estimated posterior distribution for
the thermal conductivity
Encapsulated formulation of the Selective Frequency Damping method
We present an alternative "encapsulated" formulation of the Selective
Frequency Damping method for finding unstable equilibria of dynamical systems,
which is particularly useful when analysing the stability of fluid flows. The
formulation makes use of splitting methods, which means that it can be wrapped
around an existing time-stepping code as a "black box". The method is first
applied to a scalar problem in order to analyse its stability and highlight the
roles of the control coefficient and the filter width in the
convergence (or not) towards the steady-state. Then the steady-state of the
incompressible flow past a two-dimensional cylinder at , obtained with
a code which implements the spectral/hp element method, is presented
Improved surface quality of anisotropically etched silicon {111} planes for mm-scale integrated optics
We have studied the surface quality of millimeter-scale optical mirrors
produced by etching CZ and FZ silicon wafers in potassium hydroxide to expose
the planes. We find that the FZ surfaces have four times lower noise
power at spatial frequencies up to . We conclude that mirrors
made using FZ wafers have higher optical quality
Ghosts That We Knew
This thesis is a collection of fictional short stories about loss and the left behind, seeking to confront grief in terms of hope, humor, and getting the oar back in the water to row on
Trade-offs between personal immunity and reproduction in the burying beetle, N. vespilloides
We know that parental investment and immune investment are costly processes, but it is unclear which trait will be prioritised when both may be required. Here we address this question using the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, carrion breeders that exhibit biparental care of young. Our results show that immunosuppression occurs during provision of parental care. We measured Phenoloxidase (PO) on Day 1-8 of the breeding bout and results show a clear decrease in PO immediately from presentation of the breeding resource onwards. Having established baseline immune investment during breeding we then manipulated immune investment at different times by applying a wounding challenge. Beetles were wounded prior to and during the parental care period and reproductive investment quantified. Different effects on reproductive output occur depending on the timing of wounding. Challenging the immune system with wounding prior to breeding does not affect reproductive output and subsequent Lifetime Reproductive Success (LRS). LRS is also unaffected by applying an immune elicitor prior to breeding, though different arms of the immune system are up/downregulated, perhaps indicating a trade-off between cellular and humoral immunity. In contrast, wounding during breeding reduces reproductive output and to the greatest extent if the challenge is applied early in the breeding bout. Despite being immunosuppressed, breeding beetles can still respond to wounding by increasing PO, albeit not to pre-breeding levels. This upregulation of PO during breeding may affect parental investment, resulting in a reduction in reproductive output. The potential role of juvenile hormone in controlling this trade-off is discussed
Deep optical imaging of the field of PC1643+4631A&B, II: Estimating the colours and redshifts of faint galaxies
In an investigation of the cause of the cosmic microwave background decrement
in the field of the z = 3.8 quasar pair PC1643+4631, we have carried out a
study to photometrically estimate the redshifts of galaxies in deep
multi-colour optical images of the field taken with the WHT. To examine the
possibility that a massive cluster of galaxies lies in the field, we have
attempted to recover simulated galaxies with intrinsic colours matching those
of the model galaxies used in the photometric redshift estimation. We find that
when such model galaxies are added to our images, there is considerable scatter
of the recovered galaxy redshifts away from the model value; this scatter is
larger than that expected from photometric errors and is the result of
confusion, simply due to ground-based seeing, between objects in the field. We
have also compared the likely efficiency of the photometric redshift technique
against the colour criteria used to select z>3 galaxies via the strong colour
signature of the Lyman-limit break. We find that these techniques may
significantly underestimate the true surface density of z>3, due to confusion
between the high-redshift galaxies and other objects near the line of sight. We
argue that the actual surface density of z=3 galaxies may be as much as 6 times
greater than that estimated by previous ground-based studies, and note that
this conclusion is consistent with the surface density of high-redshift objects
found in the HDF. Finally, we conclude that all ground-based deep field surveys
are inevitably affected by confusion, and note that reducing the effective
seeing in ground-based images will be of paramount importance in observing the
distant universe.Comment: 18 pages, 60 figures, submitted to MNRAS, 2 large figure avaliable at
ftp://ftp.mrao.cam.ac.uk:/pub/PC1643/paper2.figure50.eps and
ftp://ftp.mrao.cam.ac.uk:/pub/PC1643/paper2.figure51.ep
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