785 research outputs found
Implementing Power-to-Gas to a bitumen upgrader
Summary Hydrogen is an important commodity in the processing of intermediate bitumen products into a finished petroleum product and for upgrading bitumen into synthetic crude. With the continued extraction of bitumen-rich material from Alberta's oil sands project, there is an opportunity to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of upgrading and refining operations by using electrolytically produced hydrogen in place of hydrogen produced by steam methane reformation. Recently, a bitumen upgrading facility had been proposed for the city of Sarnia, Ontario because of its pre-existing petroleum processing infrastructure. Using the Ontario electrical system, which has a lower emissions factor than Alberta, the use of electrolytic hydrogen could result in a significant reduction of greenhouse gasses. In this paper, the objective is to determine an optimal system configuration for reducing greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining a low system cost. The analysis is performed with General Algebraic Modelling System tool, a mixed-integer linear optimization in addition to a simple model in Visual Basic. For each case, an economic and environmental analysis is performed including the use of cap-and-trade values for the price of carbon emissions, which are applied to determine the overall economic impact of the emissions reductions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Invariants of the Haldane-Shastry Chain
Using a formalism developed by Polychronakos, we explicitly construct a set
of invariants of the motion for the Haldane-Shastry chain.Comment: 11 pages, UVA-92-0
Molecular genetic contribution to the developmental course of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
Objective: The developmental trajectory of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is variable. Utilizing a longitudinally assessed sample, we investigated the contribution of susceptibility gene variants, previously implicated through pooled or meta-analyses, to the developmental course of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder over time. Methods: 151 children (aged 6â12) who met diagnostic criteria for ADHD were assessed using research diagnostic interviews during childhood and 5Â years later in adolescence. Severity was defined as total number of ADHD symptoms at baseline and reassessment. Association with variants at DRD4, DRD5, and the dopamine transporter gene, DAT was analyzed using linear regression. Results: As expected, affected individuals showed a decline in ADHD severity over time. The DRD4 48Â bp VNTR 7-repeat and DRD5 CA(n) microsatellite marker 148Â bp risk alleles were associated with persistent ADHD. Those possessing the DRD4 7 repeat risk allele showed less of a decline in severity at reassessment than those without the risk allele. Conclusions: Those carrying the DRD4 7 risk allele showed greater symptom severity at follow-up and less ADHD reduction over time. These findings support the hypothesis that some susceptibility genes for ADHD also influence its developmental course
1172-70 Tolerability, safety, and efficacy of beta-blockade in black patients with heart failure in the community setting: Insights from a large prospective beta-blocker registry
Nucleation and Growth of the Superconducting Phase in the Presence of a Current
We study the localized stationary solutions of the one-dimensional
time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equations in the presence of a current. These
threshold perturbations separate undercritical perturbations which return to
the normal phase from overcritical perturbations which lead to the
superconducting phase. Careful numerical work in the small-current limit shows
that the amplitude of these solutions is exponentially small in the current; we
provide an approximate analysis which captures this behavior. As the current is
increased toward the stall current J*, the width of these solutions diverges
resulting in widely separated normal-superconducting interfaces. We map out
numerically the dependence of J* on u (a parameter characterizing the material)
and use asymptotic analysis to derive the behaviors for large u (J* ~ u^-1/4)
and small u (J -> J_c, the critical deparing current), which agree with the
numerical work in these regimes. For currents other than J* the interface
moves, and in this case we study the interface velocity as a function of u and
J. We find that the velocities are bounded both as J -> 0 and as J -> J_c,
contrary to previous claims.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, Revte
Substantiating a political public sphere in the Scottish press : a comparative analysis
This article uses content analysis to characterize the performance of the media in a national public sphere, by setting apart those qualities that typify internal press coverage of a political event. The article looks at the coverage of the 1999 devolved Scottish election from the day before the election until the day after. It uses a word count to measure the election material in Scottish newspapers the Herald, the Press and Journal and the Scotsman, and United Kingdom newspapers the Guardian, the Independent and The Times, and categorizes that material according to discourse type, day and page selection. The article finds a number of qualities that typify the Scottish sample in particular, and might be broadly indicative of a political public sphere in action. Firstly, and not unexpectedly, it finds that the Scottish newspapers carry significantly more election coverage. Just as tellingly, though, the article finds that the Scottish papers offer a greater proportion of advice and background information, in the form of opinion columns and feature articles. It also finds that the Scottish papers place a greater concentration of both informative and evaluative material in the period before the vote, consistent with their making a contribution to informed political action. Lastly, the article finds that the Scottish sample situates coverage nearer the front of the paper and places a greater proportion on recto pages. The article therefore argues that the Scottish papers display features that distinguish them from the UK papers, and are broadly consistent with their forming part of a deliberative public sphere, and suggests that these qualities might be explored as a means of judging future media performance
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Using the Skewness of the CMB Temperature Distribution
We present a detection of the unnormalized skewness induced by the
thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect in filtered Atacama Cosmology Telescope
(ACT) 148 GHz cosmic microwave background temperature maps. Contamination due
to infrared and radio sources is minimized by template subtraction of resolved
sources and by constructing a mask using outlying values in the 218 GHz
(tSZ-null) ACT maps. We measure = -31 +- 6 \mu K^3 (measurement error
only) or +- 14 \mu K^3 (including cosmic variance error) in the filtered ACT
data, a 5-sigma detection. We show that the skewness is a sensitive probe of
sigma_8, and use analytic calculations and tSZ simulations to obtain
cosmological constraints from this measurement. From this signal alone we infer
a value of sigma_8= 0.79 +0.03 -0.03 (68 % C.L.) +0.06 -0.06 (95 % C.L.). Our
results demonstrate that measurements of non-Gaussianity can be a useful method
for characterizing the tSZ effect and extracting the underlying cosmological
information.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Replaced with version accepted by Phys. Rev. D,
with improvements to the likelihood function and the IR source treatment;
only minor changes in the result
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Selected Galaxy Clusters at 148 GHz from Three Seasons of Data
[Abridged] We present a catalog of 68 galaxy clusters, of which 19 are new
discoveries, detected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZ) at 148 GHz in the
Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) survey of 504 square degrees on the celestial
equator. A subsample of 48 clusters within the 270 square degree region
overlapping SDSS Stripe 82 is estimated to be 90% complete for M_500c > 4.5e14
Msun and 0.15 < z < 0.8. While matched filters are used to detect the clusters,
the sample is studied further through a "Profile Based Amplitude Analysis"
using a single filter at a fixed \theta_500 = 5.9' angular scale. This new
approach takes advantage of the "Universal Pressure Profile" (UPP) to fix the
relationship between the cluster characteristic size (R_500) and the integrated
Compton parameter (Y_500). The UPP scalings are found to be nearly identical to
an adiabatic model, while a model incorporating non-thermal pressure better
matches dynamical mass measurements and masses from the South Pole Telescope. A
high signal to noise ratio subsample of 15 ACT clusters is used to obtain
cosmological constraints. We first confirm that constraints from SZ data are
limited by uncertainty in the scaling relation parameters rather than sample
size or measurement uncertainty. We next add in seven clusters from the ACT
Southern survey, including their dynamical mass measurements based on galaxy
velocity dispersions. In combination with WMAP7 these data simultaneously
constrain the scaling relation and cosmological parameters, yielding \sigma_8 =
0.829 \pm 0.024 and \Omega_m = 0.292 \pm 0.025. The results include
marginalization over a 15% bias in dynamical mass relative to the true halo
mass. In an extension to LCDM that incorporates non-zero neutrino mass density,
we combine our data with WMAP7+BAO+Hubble constant measurements to constrain
\Sigma m_\nu < 0.29 eV (95% C. L.).Comment: 32 pages, 21 figures To appear in J. Cosmology and Astroparticle
Physic
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