The ECOS 2009 World Energy Panel: An introduction to the Panel and to the present (2009) situation in sustainable energy development

This paper introduces the ECOS 2009 conference World Energy Panel, and presents the opening talk that briefly surveys the present (2009) situation in sustainable energy development. Recent (2008) estimates and forecasts of the oil, gas, coal resources and their reserve/production ratio, nuclear and renewable energy potential, and energy uses are surveyed. A brief discussion of the status, sustainability (economic, environmental and social impact), and prospects of fossil, nuclear and renewable energy use, and of power generation (including hydrogen, fuel cells, micro-power systems, and the futuristic concept of generating power in space for terrestrial use), is presented. Comments about energy use in general, with more detailed focus on insufficiently considered areas of transportation and buildings are brought up. Ways to resolve the problem of the availability, cost, and sustainability of energy resources alongside the rapidly rising demand are discussed. The author’s view of the promising energy R&D areas, their potential, foreseen improvements and their time scale, and last year’s trends in government funding are presented.     

Energy,exergy, and Second Law performance criteria

Performance criteria, such as efficiencies and coefficients of performance, for energy systems, are commonly used but often without sufficient understanding and consistence. The situation becomes particularly incoherent when simultaneous energy interactions of different types, such as work, heating and cooling, take place with a system. Also, the distinction between exergy and Second Law efficiencies is not clearly recognized by many. It is attempted here to clarify the definitions and use of energy and exergy based performance criteria, and of the Second Law efficiency, with an aim at the advancement of international standardization of these important concepts.     

Detection measures in real-life criminal guilty knowledge tests.

Provides a 1st attempt to compare the validity of the respiration line length (RLL) and skin resistance response (SRR) amplitude in real-life criminal guilty knowledge tests (GKTs). GKT records of 40 innocent and 40 guilty Ss, for whom actual truth was established by confession, were assessed for their accuracy. When a predefined decision rule was used and inconclusive decisions were excluded, 97.4% of the innocent Ss and 53.3% of the guilty Ss were correctly classified with the SRR measure. For the RLL measure, the respective results were 97.2% and 53.1%. The combination of both measures improved detection of guilty Ss to 75.8% and decreased detection of innocent Ss to 94.1%. The combined measure seems to be a more useful means of identifying guilty suspects than each physiological measure alone. The results elaborate and extend those obtained in a previous field study (E. Elaad, 1990). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Magnetic bucket for rotating unmagnetized plasma

A new experiment is described which generates flow in unmagnetized plasma. Confinement is provided by a cage of permanent magnets, arranged to form an axisymmetric, high-order, multipolar magnetic field. This field configuration-sometimes called a "magnetic bucket"-has a vanishingly small field in the core of the experiment. Toroidal rotation is driven by J × B forces applied in the magnetized edge. The cross-field current that is required for this forcing flows from anodes to thermionic cathodes, which are inserted between the magnet rings. The rotation at the edge reaches 3 km/s and is viscously coupled to the unmagnetized core plasma. We describe the conditions necessary for rotation, as well as a 0-dimensional power balance used to understand plasma confinement in the experiment.     

Sparse weighted voting classifier selection and its linear programming relaxations

We consider the problem of minimizing the number of misclassifications of a weighted voting classifier, plus a penalty proportional to the number of nonzero weights. We first prove that its optimum is at least as hard to approximate as the minimum disagreement halfspace problem for a wide range of penalty parameter values. After formulating the problem as a mixed integer program (MIP), we show that common “soft margin” linear programming (LP) formulations for constructing weighted voting classsifiers are equivalent to an LP relaxation of our formulation. We show that this relaxation is very weak, with a potentially exponential integrality gap. However, we also show that augmenting the relaxation with certain valid inequalities tightens it considerably, yielding a linear upper bound on the gap for all values of the penalty parameter that exceed a reasonable threshold. Unlike earlier techniques proposed for similar problems (Bradley and Mangasarian (1998) [4], Weston et al. (2003) [14]), our approach provides bounds on the optimal solution value.     

Observations on Vertical Variability in Groundwater Quality: Implications for Aquifer Management

This work demonstrates significant vertical variability in the chemical composition of groundwater (Cl⁻ from 150 to 550 mg/L, NO₃^-{\rm{NO}}_{3}^{-} from 3 to 70 mg/L, trichloroethene from 350 to 55,000 μg/L and Cr_Total from 3 to 2,900 μg/L) along a 130 m thick vertical section passing through two subaquifers of the Costal Plain aquifer of Israel. Water samples were obtained by multilevel sampler under natural gradient flow conditions from a monitoring well which penetrates the entire aquifer. The vertical chemical variability detected at a single point in time in this well was found to be similar to the range of concentrations detected for Cl⁻ in pumping wells located over an area of about 1,000 km² in the same aquifer. Similarly, vertical variations in NO₃^-{\rm{NO}}_{3}^{-} concentration in the single monitoring well represent more than 50% of the total variation in nitrate levels in pumping wells sampled across the entire aquifer. These results graphically illustrate that data from pumping wells, which extract unknown mixtures of groundwater from different depths, cannot provide adequate information about groundwater quality for management purposes.     

Instrumentation principles for performance measurement of solar heating systems

An instrumentation design and implementation plan for monitoring the performance of solar heating systems and of their components is described. Specifically the selection of the data acquisition system and of the sensors, the procurement process and installation and calibration principles are discussed in detail. As a practical example, the cost and choice of measurement methods and instruments used in the University of Pennsylvania SolaRow house is presented.     

Unitary and non-unitary manipulations of qubit-bath entanglement: non-Markov qubit cooling

Initialization of quantum logic operations makes it imperative to cool down the information-carrying qubits as much and as fast as possible, so as to purify their state, or at least their ensemble average. Yet, the limit on the speed of existing cooling schemes is either the duration of the qubit equilibration with its bath or the decay time of an auxiliary state to one of the qubit states. Here we show that highly-frequent phase-shifts or measurements of the state of thermalized qubits can be designed to affect the qubit-bath entanglement so that the qubits undergo cooling, well before they re-equilibrate with the bath and without resorting to auxiliary states. These processes can be used in principally novel, advantageous, cooling schemes to assist quantum logic operations.     

Hydrogenation of brown coal. 1. The effects of additional quantities of the inorganic constituents

The effect of adding additional amounts of the inorganic constituents normally found in a Morwell coal on the hydrogenation reactions of the coal has been studied. Of the principal inorganic constituents, only iron has a major effect on conversion yields. Addition of iron as haematite led to an increase in coal conversion similar to that obtained by addition of a crushed cobalt molybdate catalyst. Generally, little inorganic matter, even in the case of iron, entered the chloroform-soluble fraction. The variation of conversion yield with the particle size of the coal was examined and found to be small.