Research on the Correlation of the Fluctuating Density Gradient of the Compressible Flows

This work is to study a roll of the fluctuating density gradient in the compressible flows for the computational fluid dynamics (CFD). A new anisotropy tensor with the fluctuating density gradient is introduced, and is used for an invariant modeling technique to model the turbulent density gradient correlation equation derived from the continuity equation. The modeling equation is decomposed into three groups: group proportional to the mean velocity, and that proportional to the mean strain rate, and that proportional to the mean density. The characteristics of the correlation in a wake are extracted from the results by the two dimensional direct simulation, and shows the strong correlation with the vorticity in the wake near the body. Thus, it can be concluded that the correlation of the density gradient is a significant parameter to describe the quick generation of the turbulent property in the compressible flows.

A Comparative Study of Turbulence Models Performance for Turbulent Flow in a Planar Asymmetric Diffuser

This paper presents a computational study of the separated flow in a planer asymmetric diffuser. The steady RANS equations for turbulent incompressible fluid flow and six turbulence closures are used in the present study. The commercial software code, FLUENT 6.3.26, was used for solving the set of governing equations using various turbulence models. Five of the used turbulence models are available directly in the code while the v2-f turbulence model was implemented via User Defined Scalars (UDS) and User Defined Functions (UDF). A series of computational analysis is performed to assess the performance of turbulence models at different grid density. The results show that the standard k-ω, SST k-ω and v2-f models clearly performed better than other models when an adverse pressure gradient was present. The RSM model shows an acceptable agreement with the velocity and turbulent kinetic energy profiles but it failed to predict the location of separation and attachment points. The standard k-ε and the low-Re k- ε delivered very poor results.

Evaluation of Radiation Synthesized β-Glucan Hydrogel Wound Dressing using Rat Models

In this study, hydrogels consisted of polyvinyl alcohol, propylene glycol and β-glucan were developed by radiation technique for wound dressing. The prepared hydrogels were characterized by examining of physical properties such as gel fraction and absorption ratio. The gel fraction and absorption ratio were dependent on the crosslinking density. On observing the wound healing of rat skin, the resulting hydrogels accelerated the wound healing comparing to cotton gauze. Therefore, the PVA/propylene glycol/β-glucan blended hydrogels can greatly accelerate the healing without causing irritation.

Thermodynamic Study of Hot Potassium Carbonate Solution Using Aspen Plus

This paper presents a study on the thermodynamics and transport properties of hot potassium carbonate aqueous system (HPC) using electrolyte non-random two liquid, (ELECNRTL) model. The operation conditions are varied to determine the system liquid phase stability range at the standard and critical conditions. A case study involving 30 wt% K2CO3, H2O standard system at pressure of 1 bar and temperature range from 280.15 to 366.15 K has been studied. The estimated solubility index, viscosity, water activity, and density which obtained from the simulation showed a good agreement with the experimental work. Furthermore, the saturation temperature of the solution has been estimated.

Effects of Geometry of Disk Openers on Seed Slot Properties

Offset Double-Disk Opener (DDO) is a popular furrow opener in conservation tillage. It has some limitations such as negative suction to penetrate in the soil, hair pinning and mixing seed and fertilizer in the slot. Because of importance of separation of seed and fertilizer in the slot, by adding two horizontal mini disks to DDO a modified opener was made (MDO) which placed the fertilizer between and under two rows of seed. To consider performance of novel opener an indoor comparison test between DDO and MDO was performed at soil bin. The experiment was conducted with three working speeds (3, 6 and 8 km h-1), two bulk densities of soil (1.1 and 1.4 Mg m-3) and two levels of residues (1 and 2 ton ha-1). The experimental design consisted in a (3×2×2) complete randomized factorial with three replicates for each test. Moisture of seed furrow, separation of seed and fertilizer, hair pinning and resultant forces acting on the openers were used as assessing indexes. There was no significant difference between soil moisture content in slots created by DDO and MDO at 0-4 cm depth, but at 4-8 cm the in the slot created by MDO moisture content was higher about 9%. Horizontal force for both openers increased with increasing speed and soil bulk density. Vertical force for DDO was negative so it needed additional weight for penetrating in the soil, but vertical force for MDO was positive and, which can solve the challenge of penetration in the soil in DDO. In soft soil with heavy residues some trash was pushed by DDO into seed furrow (hair pinning) but at MDO seed were placed at clean groove. Lateral and vertical separation of seed and fertilizer was performed effectively by MDO (4.5 and 5 cm, respectively) while DDO put seed and fertilizer close to each other. Overall, the Modified Offset Double-disks (MDO) had better performance. So by adapting this opener with no-tillage drillers it would possible to have higher yield in conservation tillage where the most appropriate opener is disk type.

Properties of Al2O3 – hBN Composites

Alumina matrix composites with addition of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), acting as solid lubricant, were produced. Main purpose of solid lubricants is to dispose the necessity of using cooling lubricants in machining process. Hot pressing was used as a consolidating process for Al2O3-x%wt.hBN (x=1/ 2,5/ 5 /7,5 /10) composites. Properties of sinters such as relative density, hardness, Young-s modulus and fracture toughness were examined. Obtained samples characterize by high relative density. Hardness and fracture toughness values allow the use of alumina – hBN composites for machining steels even in hardened condition. However it was observed that high weight content of hBN can negatively influence the mechanical properties of composites.

An Erosion-based Modeling of Abrasive Waterjet Turning

In this paper, an erosion-based model for abrasive waterjet (AWJ) turning process is presented. By using modified Hashish erosion model, the volume of material removed by impacting of abrasive particles to surface of the rotating cylindrical specimen is estimated and radius reduction at each rotation is calculated. Different to previous works, the proposed model considers the continuous change in local impact angle due to change in workpiece diameter, axial traverse rate of the jet, the abrasive particle roundness and density. The accuracy of the proposed model is examined by experimental tests under various traverse rates. The final diameters estimated by the proposed model are in good accordance with experiments.

Air flow and Heat Transfer Modeling of an Axial Flux Permanent Magnet Generator

Axial Flux Permanent Magnet (AFPM) Machines require effective cooling due to their high power density. The detrimental effects of overheating such as degradation of the insulation materials, magnets demagnetization, and increase of Joule losses are well known. This paper describes the CFD simulations performed on a test rig model of an air cooled Axial Flux Permanent Magnet (AFPM) generator built at Durham University to identify the temperatures and heat transfer coefficient on the stator. The Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes and the Energy equations are solved and the flow pattern and heat transfer developing inside the machine are described. The Nusselt number on the stator surfaces has been found. The dependency of the heat transfer on the flow field is described temperature field obtained. Tests on an experimental are undergoing in order to validate the CFD results.

Density Estimation using Generalized Linear Model and a Linear Combination of Gaussians

In this paper we present a novel approach for density estimation. The proposed approach is based on using the logistic regression model to get initial density estimation for the given empirical density. The empirical data does not exactly follow the logistic regression model, so, there will be a deviation between the empirical density and the density estimated using logistic regression model. This deviation may be positive and/or negative. In this paper we use a linear combination of Gaussian (LCG) with positive and negative components as a model for this deviation. Also, we will use the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate the parameters of LCG. Experiments on real images demonstrate the accuracy of our approach.

Impact of Height of Silicon Pillar on Vertical DG-MOSFET Device

Vertical Double Gate (DG) Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MOSFET) is believed to suppress various short channel effect problems. The gate to channel coupling in vertical DG-MOSFET are doubled, thus resulting in higher current density. By having two gates, both gates are able to control the channel from both sides and possess better electrostatic control over the channel. In order to ensure that the transistor possess a superb turn-off characteristic, the subs-threshold swing (SS) must be kept at minimum value (60-90mV/dec). By utilizing SILVACO TCAD software, an n-channel vertical DG-MOSFET was successfully designed while keeping the sub-threshold swing (SS) value as minimum as possible. From the observation made, the value of sub-threshold swing (SS) was able to be varied by adjusting the height of the silicon pillar. The minimum value of sub-threshold swing (SS) was found to be 64.7mV/dec with threshold voltage (VTH) of 0.895V. The ideal height of the vertical DG-MOSFET pillar was found to be at 0.265 µm.

ABURAS Index: A Statistically Developed Index for Dengue-Transmitting Vector Population Prediction

“Dengue" is an African word meaning “bone breaking" because it causes severe joint and muscle pain that feels like bones are breaking. It is an infectious disease mainly transmitted by female mosquito, Aedes aegypti, and causes four serotypes of dengue viruses. In recent years, a dramatic increase in the dengue fever confirmed cases around the equator-s belt has been reported. Several conventional indices have been designed so far to monitor the transmitting vector populations known as House Index (HI), Container Index (CI), Breteau Index (BI). However, none of them describes the adult mosquito population size which is important to direct and guide comprehensive control strategy operations since number of infected people has a direct relationship with the vector density. Therefore, it is crucial to know the population size of the transmitting vector in order to design a suitable and effective control program. In this context, a study is carried out to report a new statistical index, ABURAS Index, using Poisson distribution based on the collection of vector population in Jeddah Governorate, Saudi Arabia.

Exploring the Potential of Phase Change Memories as an Alternative to DRAM Technology

Scalability poses a severe threat to the existing DRAM technology. The capacitors that are used for storing and sensing charge in DRAM are generally not scaled beyond 42nm. This is because; the capacitors must be sufficiently large for reliable sensing and charge storage mechanism. This leaves DRAM memory scaling in jeopardy, as charge sensing and storage mechanisms become extremely difficult. In this paper we provide an overview of the potential and the possibilities of using Phase Change Memory (PCM) as an alternative for the existing DRAM technology. The main challenges that we encounter in using PCM are, the limited endurance, high access latencies, and higher dynamic energy consumption than that of the conventional DRAM. We then provide an overview of various methods, which can be employed to overcome these drawbacks. Hybrid memories involving both PCM and DRAM can be used, to achieve good tradeoffs in access latency and storage density. We conclude by presenting, the results of these methods that makes PCM a potential replacement for the current DRAM technology.

Scatterer Density in Edge and Coherence Enhancing Nonlinear Anisotropic Diffusion for Medical Ultrasound Speckle Reduction

This paper proposes new enhancement models to the methods of nonlinear anisotropic diffusion to greatly reduce speckle and preserve image features in medical ultrasound images. By incorporating local physical characteristics of the image, in this case scatterer density, in addition to the gradient, into existing tensorbased image diffusion methods, we were able to greatly improve the performance of the existing filtering methods, namely edge enhancing (EE) and coherence enhancing (CE) diffusion. The new enhancement methods were tested using various ultrasound images, including phantom and some clinical images, to determine the amount of speckle reduction, edge, and coherence enhancements. Scatterer density weighted nonlinear anisotropic diffusion (SDWNAD) for ultrasound images consistently outperformed its traditional tensor-based counterparts that use gradient only to weight the diffusivity function. SDWNAD is shown to greatly reduce speckle noise while preserving image features as edges, orientation coherence, and scatterer density. SDWNAD superior performances over nonlinear coherent diffusion (NCD), speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion (SRAD), adaptive weighted median filter (AWMF), wavelet shrinkage (WS), and wavelet shrinkage with contrast enhancement (WSCE), make these methods ideal preprocessing steps for automatic segmentation in ultrasound imaging.

Cooperative Energy Efficient Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks in Smart Grid Communications

Smart Grids employ wireless sensor networks for their control and monitoring. Sensors are characterized by limitations in the processing power, energy supply and memory spaces, which require a particular attention on the design of routing and data management algorithms. Since most routing algorithms for sensor networks, focus on finding energy efficient paths to prolong the lifetime of sensor networks, the power of sensors on efficient paths depletes quickly, and consequently sensor networks become incapable of monitoring events from some parts of their target areas. In consequence, the design of routing protocols should consider not only energy efficiency paths, but also energy efficient algorithms in general. In this paper we propose an energy efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks without the support of any location information system. The reliability and the efficiency of this protocol have been demonstrated by simulation studies where we compare them to the legacy protocols. Our simulation results show that these algorithms scale well with network size and density.

Vertical GAA Silicon Nanowire Transistor with Impact of Temperature on Device Parameters

In this paper, we present a vertical wire NMOS device fabricated using CMOS compatible processes. The impact of temperature on various device parameters is investigated in view of usual increase in surrounding temperature with device density.

A Robust Reception of IEEE 802.15.4a IR-TH UWB in Dense Multipath and Gaussian Noise

IEEE 802.15.4a impulse radio-time hopping ultra wide band (IR-TH UWB) physical layer, due to small duty cycle and very short pulse widths is robust against multipath propagation. However, scattering and reflections with the large number of obstacles in indoor channel environments, give rise to dense multipath fading. It imposes serious problem to optimum Rake receiver architectures, for which very large number of fingers are needed. Presence of strong noise also affects the reception of fine pulses having extremely low power spectral density. A robust SRake receiver for IEEE 802.15.4a IRTH UWB in dense multipath and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is proposed to efficiently recover the weak signals with much reduced complexity. It adaptively increases the signal to noise (SNR) by decreasing noise through a recursive least square (RLS) algorithm. For simulation, dense multipath environment of IEEE 802.15.4a industrial non line of sight (NLOS) is employed. The power delay profile (PDF) and the cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the respective channel environment are found. Moreover, the error performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated in comparison with conventional SRake and AWGN correlation receivers. The simulation results indicate a substantial performance improvement with very less number of Rake fingers.

Evaluating the Response of Rainfed-Chickpea to Population Density in Iran, Using Simulation

The response of growth and yield of rainfed-chickpea to population density should be evaluated based on long-term experiments to include the climate variability. This is achievable just by simulation. In this simulation study, this evaluation was done by running the CYRUS model for long-term daily weather data of five locations in Iran. The tested population densities were 7 to 59 (with interval of 2) stands per square meter. Various functions, including quadratic, segmented, beta, broken linear, and dent-like functions, were tested. Considering root mean square of deviations and linear regression statistics [intercept (a), slope (b), and correlation coefficient (r)] for predicted versus observed variables, the quadratic and broken linear functions appeared to be appropriate for describing the changes in biomass and grain yield, and in harvest index, respectively. Results indicated that in all locations, grain yield tends to show increasing trend with crowding the population, but subsequently decreases. This was also true for biomass in five locations. The harvest index appeared to have plateau state across low population densities, but decreasing trend with more increasing density. The turning point (optimum population density) for grain yield was 30.68 stands per square meter in Isfahan, 30.54 in Shiraz, 31.47 in Kermanshah, 34.85 in Tabriz, and 32.00 in Mashhad. The optimum population density for biomass ranged from 24.6 (in Tabriz) to 35.3 stands per square meter (Mashhad). For harvest index it varied between 35.87 and 40.12 stands per square meter.

The Euler Equations of Steady Flow in Terms of New Dependent and Independent Variables

In this paper we study the transformation of Euler equations  1 , u u u Pf t (ρ ∂) + ⋅∇ = − ∇ + ∂ G G G G ∇⋅ = u 0, G where (ux, t) G G is the velocity of a fluid, P(x, t) G is the pressure of a fluid andρ (x, t) G is density. First of all, we rewrite the Euler equations in terms of new unknown functions. Then, we introduce new independent variables and transform it to a new curvilinear coordinate system. We obtain the Euler equations in the new dependent and independent variables. The governing equations into two subsystems, one is hyperbolic and another is elliptic.

FEM Simulation of HE Blast-Fragmentation Warhead and the Calculation of Lethal Range

This paper presents the simulation of fragmentation warhead using a hydrocode, Autodyn. The goal of this research is to determine the lethal range of such a warhead. This study investigates the lethal range of warheads with and without steel balls as preformed fragments. The results from the FE simulation, i.e. initial velocities and ejected spray angles of fragments, are further processed using an analytical approach so as to determine a fragment hit density and probability of kill of a modelled warhead. In order to simulate a plenty of preformed fragments inside a warhead, the model requires expensive computation resources. Therefore, this study attempts to model the problem in an alternative approach by considering an equivalent mass of preformed fragments to the mass of warhead casing. This approach yields approximately 7% and 20% difference of fragment velocities from the analytical results for one and two layers of preformed fragments, respectively. The lethal ranges of the simulated warheads are 42.6 m and 56.5 m for warheads with one and two layers of preformed fragments, respectively, compared to 13.85 m for a warhead without preformed fragment. These lethal ranges are based on the requirement of fragment hit density. The lethal ranges which are based on the probability of kill are 27.5 m, 61 m and 70 m for warheads with no preformed fragment, one and two layers of preformed fragments, respectively.

Noise Performance of Millimeter-wave Silicon Based Mixed Tunneling Avalanche Transit Time(MITATT) Diode

A generalized method for small-signal simulation of avalanche noise in Mixed Tunneling Avalanche Transit Time (MITATT) device is presented in this paper where the effect of series resistance is taken into account. The method is applied to a millimeter-wave Double Drift Region (DDR) MITATT device based on Silicon to obtain noise spectral density and noise measure as a function of frequency for different values of series resistance. It is found that noise measure of the device at the operating frequency (122 GHz) with input power density of 1010 Watt/m2 is about 35 dB for hypothetical parasitic series resistance of zero ohm (estimated junction temperature = 500 K). Results show that the noise measure increases as the value of parasitic resistance increases.