GIS integration model for geothermal exploration and well siting

The work involved in identifying geothermal fields can be simplified by means of a Geographical Information System (GIS), a decision-making tool used to determine the spatial association between exploration and environmental thematic maps. This methodology has been applied to part of the Sabalan geothermal field in northwestern Iran, and to the siting of exploration wells. The datasets used in the analyses consist of geological, geochemical and geophysical information. Boolean and Index Overlay knowledge-driven models were developed for site selection; the findings from these two models correlated well with the exploration data modeling. The results of the Index Overlay model were combined with those of an environmental suitability analysis for final selection of well sites. The results of exploration and environmental data modeling were combined to select and prioritize the sites of three exploratory wells in the study area.     

A new benchmark reference solution for double-diffusive convection in a heterogeneous porous medium

ABSTRACT

A new benchmark with a high accurate solution is proposed for the verification of numerical codes dealing with double-diffusive convection in a heterogeneous porous medium. The new benchmark is inspired by the popular problem of square porous cavity by assuming a stratified porous medium. A high accurate steady state solution is developed using the Fourier–Galerkin method. To this aim, the unknowns are expanded in double infinite Fourier series. The accuracy of the developed solution is assessed in terms of the truncation orders of the Fourier series. Comparison against finite element solutions highlights the worthiness of the proposed benchmark for numerical code validation.     

Stability limits and NO emissions of premixed swirl ammonia-air flames enriched with hydrogen or methane at elevated pressures

This study reports measurements of stability limits and exhaust NO mole fractions of technically-premixed swirl ammonia-air flames enriched with either methane or hydrogen. Experiments were conducted at different pressures from atmospheric to 5 bar, representative of commercial micro gas turbines. The full range of ammonia fractions in the fuel blend, x_NH3, was considered, from 0 (pure methane or hydrogen) to 1 (pure ammonia), covering very lean (φ = 0.25) to rich (φ = 1.60) equivalence ratios. Results show that increasing pressure widens the range of stable equivalence ratios for pure ammonia-air flames. Regardless of pressure, there is a critical ammonia fraction above which the range of stable equivalence ratios suddenly widens. This is because flashback does not occur anymore when the equivalence ratio is progressively increased towards stoichiometric and rich blowout occurs instead. This critical ammonia fraction increases with pressure and is larger for ammonia-hydrogen than for ammonia-methane. Provided that enough hydrogen is blended with ammonia (x_NH3 < 0.9), flames with very lean equivalence ratios (φ < 0.7) can be stabilized and these yield competitively low NO emissions (<200 ppm), regardless of pressure. For this reason, very lean swirl ammonia-hydrogen-air flames are promising candidates for micro gas turbines. However, N₂O emissions have the potential to be unacceptably large for these operating conditions if heat loss is too large or residence time is too short. As a consequence, the post flame region must be considered carefully. Due to the lower reactivity of methane compared to that of hydrogen, very lean swirl ammonia-methane-air flames could not be stabilized and good NO performance is limited to rich equivalence ratios for ammonia-methane fuel blends. The equivalence ratio above which good NO performance depends on pressure and bulk velocity.     

Relationship between J-integral and averaged strain-energy density for U-notches in the case of large control volume under Mode I loading

The main purpose of this technical note is to present a relationship between J-integral and averaged strain-energy density () in U-notches under Mode I loading for brittle or quasi-brittle materials. In this work, control volume includes the rectilinear edge of the notch in addition to semi-circular arc of the notch root. A dimensionless function (f) between J and has been presented in this paper. Finite element analysis has been used for verification. It is found that this relationship is identical for tension or bending loading.     

On the Achievable Rates of Multiband Ultra-Wideband Systems

In this work we study the achievable rates of memoryless signaling strategies adapted to ultra-wideband (UWB) multipath fading channels. We focus on strategies that do not have explicit knowledge of the instentaneous channel realization, but may have knowledge of the channel statistics. We evaluate the average mutual information of the general binary flash-signaling rates as a function of channel statistics and derive random coding bounds for m-ary PPM using different noncoherent receivers as well as an imperfect coherent receiver. Then we extend the results to multiband m-PPM signaling and show that for data rates on the order of 400 Mbits/s, at 4 m distance between the transmitter and the receiver, can be achieved using simple noncoherent receivers.     

Ultrasound spatiotemporal despeckling via Kronecker wavelet-Fisz thresholding

We propose a novel framework for despeckling ultrasound image sequences while respecting the structural details. More precisely, we use thresholding in an adapted wavelet domain that jointly takes into account for the non-Gaussian statistics of the noise and the differences in spatial and temporal regularities. The spatiotemporal wavelet is obtained via the Kronecker product of two sparsifying wavelet bases acting, respectively, on the spatial and temporal domains. Besides enabling a structured sparse representation of the time–space plan, it also makes it possible to perform a variance stabilization routine on the spatial domain through a Fisz transformation. The proposed method enjoys adaptability, easy tuning and theoretical guaranties. We propose the corresponding algorithm together with results that demonstrate the benefits of the proposed spatiotemporal approach over the successive spatial treatment. Finally, we describe a data-driven extension of the proposed method that is based on temporal pre-filtering.     

Enhanced Configurable DCT Cordic Loeffler Architectures for Optimal Power-PSNR Trade-Off

The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is one of the most widely used techniques of transforms in digital signal processing. It is the main algorithm in image and video coding systems. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which generates enhanced Cordic based Loeffler DCT architectures for angle’s precision degrees ranging from 10^?1 to 10^?7. High level PSNR, area and power estimators have been proposed to make a trade-off between consumption and image quality. An optimal architecture has been retained for its low complexity, low power and high PSNR. The complexity of this architecture is the lowest among the conventional DCT architectures even the BinDCT which is a reference in terms of reduced complexity. The selected architecture has also the closest PSNR to the reference Loeffler-DCT architecture without a substancial loss of power.