Design and fabrication of the Mini-Brayton Recuperator (MBR)

Development of a recuperator for a 2.0 kW closed Brayton space power system is described. The plate-fin heat exchanger is fabricated entirely from Hastelloy X and is designed for 10 years continuous operation at 1000 K (1300 F) with a Xenon-helium working fluid. Special design provisions assure uniform flow distribution, crucial for meeting 0.975 temperature effectiveness. Low-cycle fatigue, resulting from repeated startup and shutdown cycles, was identified as the most critical structural design problem. It is predicted that the unit has a minimum fatigue life of 220 cycles. This is in excess of the BIPS requirement of 100 cycles. Heat transfer performance and thermal cycle testing with air, using a prototype unit, verified that all design objectives can be met

A Correction to the Standard Galactic Reddening Map: Passive Galaxies as Standard Crayons

We present corrections to the Schlegel, Finkbeiner, Davis (SFD98) reddening maps over the Sloan Digital Sky Survey northern Galactic cap area. To find these corrections, we employ what we dub the "standard crayon" method, in which we use passively evolving galaxies as color standards by which to measure deviations from the reddening map. We select these passively evolving galaxies spectroscopically, using limits on the H alpha and O II equivalent widths to remove all star-forming galaxies from the SDSS main galaxy catalog. We find that by correcting for known reddening, redshift, color-magnitude relation, and variation of color with environmental density, we can reduce the scatter in color to below 3% in the bulk of the 151,637 galaxies we select. Using these galaxies we construct maps of the deviation from the SFD98 reddening map at 4.5 degree resolution, with 1-sigma error of ~ 1.5 millimagnitudes E(B-V). We find that the SFD98 maps are largely accurate with most of the map having deviations below 3 millimagnitudes E(B-V), though some regions do deviate from SFD98 by as much as 50%. The maximum deviation found is 45 millimagnitudes in E(B-V), and spatial structure of the deviation is strongly correlated with the observed dust temperature, such that SFD98 underpredicts reddening in regions of low dust temperature. Our maps of these deviations, as well as their errors, are made available to the scientific community as supplemental correction to SFD98 at http://www.peekandgraves2010.com.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. Accepted to the ApJ. Reddening correction maps and associated software can be found at http://www.peekandgraves2010.co

Measuring Ages and Elemental Abundances from Unresolved Stellar Populations: Fe, Mg, C, N, and Ca

We present a method for determining mean light-weighted ages and abundances of Fe, Mg, C, N, and Ca, from medium resolution spectroscopy of unresolved stellar populations. The method, pioneered by Schiavon (2007), is implemented in a publicly available code called EZ_Ages. The method and error estimation are described, and the results tested for accuracy and consistency, by application to integrated spectra of well-known Galactic globular and open clusters. Ages and abundances from integrated light analysis agree with studies of resolved stars to within +/-0.1 dex for most clusters, and to within +/-0.2 dex for nearly all cases. The results are robust to the choice of Lick indices used in the fitting to within +/-0.1 dex, except for a few systematic deviations which are clearly categorized. The realism of our error estimates is checked through comparison with detailed Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, we apply EZ_Ages to the sample of galaxies presented in Thomas et al. (2005) and compare our derived values of age, [Fe/H], and [alpha/Fe] to their analysis. We find that [alpha/Fe] is very consistent between the two analyses, that ages are consistent for old (Age > 10 Gyr) populations, but show modest systematic differences at younger ages, and that [Fe/H] is fairly consistent, with small systematic differences related to the age systematics. Overall, EZ_Ages provides accurate estimates of fundamental parameters from medium resolution spectra of unresolved stellar populations in the old and intermediate-age regime, for the first time allowing quantitative estimates of the abundances of C, N, and Ca in these unresolved systems. The EZ_Ages code can be downloaded at http://www.ucolick.org/~graves/EZ_Ages.htmlComment: Accepted to ApJ

Shuttle payload bay thermal environments: Summary and conclusion report for STS Flights 1-5

The thermal data for the payload bay of the first five shuttle flights is summarized and the engineering evaluation of that data is presented. After a general discussion on mission profiles and vehicle configurations, the thermal design and flight instrumentation systems of the payload bay are described. The thermal flight data sources and a categorization of the data are then presented. A thermal flight data summarization section provides temperature data for the five phases of a typical mission profile. These are: prelaunch, ascent, on-orbit, entry and postlanding. The thermal flight data characterization section encompasses this flight data for flight to flight variations, payload effects, temperature ranges, and other variations. Discussion of the thermal environment prediction models in use by industry and various NASA Centers, and the results predicted by these models, is followed by an evaluation of the correlation between the actual flight data and the results predicted by the models. Finally, the available thermal data are evaluated from the viewpoint of the user concerned with establishing the thermal environment in the payload bay. The data deficiencies are discussed and recommendations for their elimination are presented

Agroforestry can mitigate environmental problems in european agricultural deficit areas

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The Peak Brightness and Spatial Distribution of AGB Stars Near the Nucleus of M32

The bright stellar content near the center of the Local Group elliptical galaxy M32 is investigated with 0.12 arcsec FWHM H and K images obtained with the Gemini Mauna Kea telescope. Stars with K = 15.5, which are likely evolving near the tip of the asymptotic giant branch (AGB), are resolved to within 2 arcsec of the nucleus, and it is concluded that the peak stellar brightness near the center of M32 is similar to that in the outer regions of the galaxy. Moreover, the projected density of bright AGB stars follows the visible light profile to within 2 arcsec of the nucleus, indicating that the brightest stars are well mixed throughout the galaxy. Thus, there is no evidence for an age gradient, and the radial variations in spectroscopic indices and ultraviolet colors that have been detected previously must be due to metallicity and/or some other parameter. We suggest that either the bright AGB stars formed as part of a highly uniform and coherent galaxy-wide episode of star formation, or they originated in a separate system that merged with M32.Comment: 9 pages of text, 3 figures. ApJ (Letters) in pres

Neural NILM: Deep Neural Networks Applied to Energy Disaggregation

Energy disaggregation estimates appliance-by-appliance electricity consumption from a single meter that measures the whole home's electricity demand. Recently, deep neural networks have driven remarkable improvements in classification performance in neighbouring machine learning fields such as image classification and automatic speech recognition. In this paper, we adapt three deep neural network architectures to energy disaggregation: 1) a form of recurrent neural network called `long short-term memory' (LSTM); 2) denoising autoencoders; and 3) a network which regresses the start time, end time and average power demand of each appliance activation. We use seven metrics to test the performance of these algorithms on real aggregate power data from five appliances. Tests are performed against a house not seen during training and against houses seen during training. We find that all three neural nets achieve better F1 scores (averaged over all five appliances) than either combinatorial optimisation or factorial hidden Markov models and that our neural net algorithms generalise well to an unseen house.Comment: To appear in ACM BuildSys'15, November 4--5, 2015, Seou