Design and performance of a moderate temperature difference Stirling engine

The present work developed a prototype Stirling engine working at the moderate temperature range. This study attempts to demonstrate the potential of the moderate temperature Stirling engine as an option for the prime movers for Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology. The heat source temperature is set to 350–500 °C to resemble the temperature available from the parabolic trough solar collector. This moderate temperature difference allows the use of low cost materials and simplified mechanical designs. With the consideration of local technological know how and manufacturing infrastructure, this development works with a low charged pressure of 7 bar and uses air as a working fluid. The Beta-type Stirling engine is designed and manufactured for the swept volume of 165 cc and the power output of 100 W. The performance of engine is evaluated at different values of charge pressures and wall temperatures at the heater section. At 500 °C and 7 bar, the engine produces the maximum power of 95.4 W at 360 rpm. The thermal efficiency is 9.35% at this maximum power condition. Results show that the moderate temperature operation offers a clear advantage in terms of the specific power over the low temperature operation. In terms of the West number, the present work demonstrated that the moderate temperature difference operations could offer the performance on par with the high temperature operations with more simple and less costly development.     

Minimizing Total Tardiness: A Case Study in an Autoparts Factory

The application of heuristic procedures for solving a real scheduling problem that arises in an autoparts factory is reported in this paper. Due to the characteristics of the environment, the measure of performance considered is the minimization of the total tardiness of the jobs. The original problem is reduced to the single machine scheduling problem, and the dispatching rules EDD (earliest due date), SPT (shortest processing time), and the PSK algorithm are used to obtain approximate solutions. Computational tests and a comparison with the usual schedule are presented.     

Design of a corrugated polarising main reflector

The realisation of a polarising main reflector for use in a W-band Cassegrain antenna system is described. The main reflector has rectangular grooves cut in its entire surface to change the polarisation from linear to circular. In addition, the use of the FD-TD (finite difference time domain) method for predicting the performance of an axisymmetric dielectric cone subreflector is shown.<>     

QoS based resource provisioning and scheduling in grids

As Grid computing has emerged as a technology for providing the computational resources to industries and scientific projects, new requirements arise. Nowadays, resource management has become an important research area in the Grid computing environment. To provision the appropriate resource to a corresponding application is a tedious task. So, it is important to check and verify the provisioning of the resource before the application’s execution. In this paper, a resource provisioning framework has been presented that offers a resource provisioning policy, which caters to provisioned resource allocation and resource scheduling. The framework has been formally specified and verified. Formal specification and verification of the framework helps in predicting possible errors before the scheduling process itself, and thus results in efficient resource provisioning and scheduling of Grid resources.     

BULLET: Particle Swarm Optimization Based Scheduling Technique for Provisioned Cloud Resources

Cloud resource scheduling requires mapping of cloud resources to cloud workloads. Scheduling results can be optimized by considering Quality of Service (QoS) parameters as inherent requirements of scheduling. In existing literature, only a few resource scheduling algorithms have considered cost and execution time constraints but efficient scheduling requires better optimization of QoS parameters. The main aim of this research paper is to present an efficient strategy for execution of workloads on cloud resources. A particle swarm optimization based resource scheduling technique has been designed named as BULLET which is used to execute workloads effectively on available resources. Performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated in cloud environment. The experimental results show that the proposed technique efficiently reduces execution cost, time and energy consumption along with other QoS parameters.     

飞行汽车--是真的吗?

审视过去已经建造和飞行过的许多飞行汽车，包括已经获得美国民用航空管理局（ＣＡＡ）认可证书的二种飞行汽车。还审检了许多发明家们的一些幻想和不切实际的许多设计方案，作者虽要求极高可靠的设计，不是鼓励并不断探索新的飞行汽车概念。     

Codon repeats in genes associated with human diseases: fewer repeats in the genes of nonhuman primates and nucleotide substitutions concentrated at the sites of reiteration

Five human diseases are due to an excessive number of CAG repeats in the coding regions of five different genes. We have analyzed the repeat regions in four of these genes from nonhuman primates, which are not known to suffer from the diseases. These primates have CAG repeats at the same sites as in human alleles, and there is similar polymorphism of repeat number, but this number is smaller than in the human genes. In some of the genes, the segment of poly(CAG) has expanded in nonhuman primates, but the process has advanced further in the human lineage than in other primate lineages, thereby predisposing to diseases of CAG reiteration. Adjacent to stretches of homogeneous present-day codon repeats, previously existing codons of the same kind have undergone nucleotide substitutions with high frequency. Where these lead to amino acid substitutions, the effect will be to reduce the length of the original homopolymeric stretch in the protein.     

The Discriminative Stimulus Effects of Cocaine in a Pavlovian Sexual Approach Paradigm in Male Japanese Quail.

Two groups of male Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) to discriminate cocaine from saline in a conditioned approach procedure maintained by sexual reinforcement. For 1 group, cocaine (10 mg/kg ip) was administered prior to a conditioned stimulus (CS) that predicted copulation; saline followed by a CS predicted no copulation. A second group underwent the opposite training regimen. Results revealed apparent between-group differences in the rates of acquisition of the discrimination; however, during extinction trials, both groups responded more under the drug condition that predicted the female than to the condition that predicted no female. The results suggested that a drug discrimination may be maintained by sexual reinforcement. The findings are discussed with regard to interactions of cocaine and sexual reward, as well as to Pavlovian conditional stimulus control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)