Fuel properties and emissions of soybean oil esters as diesel fuel

The effects of using blends of methyl and isopropyl esters of soybean oil with No. 2 diesel fuel were studied at several steady-state operating conditions in a four-cylinder turbocharged diesel engine. Fuel blends that contained 20, 50, and 70% methyl soyate and 20 and 50% isopropyl soyate were tested. Fuel properties, such as cetane number, also were investigated. Both methyl and isopropyl esters provided significant reductions in particulate emissions compared with No. 2 diesel fuel. A blend of 50% methyl ester and 50% No. 2 diesel fuel provided a reduction of 37% in the carbon portion of the particulates and 25% in the total particulates. The 50% blend of isopropyl ester and 50% No. 2 diesel fuel gave a 55% reduction in carbon and a 28% reduction in total particulate emissions. Emissions of carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons also were reduced significantly. Oxides of nitrogen increased by 12%.     

Case-Based Learning: Predictive Features in Indexing

Interest in psychological experimentation from the Artificial Intelligence community often takes the form of rigorous post-hoc evaluation of completed computer models. Through an example of our own collaborative research, we advocate a different view of how psychology and AI may be mutually relevant, and propose an integrated approach to the study of learning in humans and machines. We begin with the problem of learning appropriate indices for storing and retrieving information from memory. From a planning task perspective, the most useful indices may be those that predict potential problems and access relevant plans in memory, improving the planner's ability to predict and avoid planning failures. This predictive features hypothesis is then supported as a psychological claim, with results showing that such features offer an advantage in terms of the selectivity of reminding because they more distinctively characterize planning situations where differing plans are appropriate.We present a specific case-based model of plan execution, RUNNER, along with its indices for recognizing when to select particular plans—appropriateness conditions—and how these predictive indices serve to enhance learning. We then discuss how this predictive features claim as implemented in the RUNNER model is then tested in a second set of psychological studies. The results show that learning appropriateness conditions results in greater success in recognizing when a past plan is in fact relevant in current processing, and produces more reliable recall of the related information. This form of collaboration has resulted in a unique integration of computational and empirical efforts to create a model of case-based learning.     

The Stanford Hydra CMP

The Hydra chip multiprocessor (CMP) integrates four MIPS-based processors and their primary caches on a single chip together with a shared secondary cache. A standard CMP offers implementation and performance advantages compared to wide-issue superscalar designs. However, it must be programmed with a more complicated parallel programming model to obtain maximum performance. To simplify parallel programming, the Hydra CMP supports thread-level speculation and memory renaming, a paradigm that allows performance similar to a uniprocessor of comparable die area on integer programs. This article motivates the design of a CMP, describes the architecture of the Hydra design with a focus on its speculative thread support, and describes our prototype implementation. Chip multiprocessors offer an economical, scalable architecture for future microprocessors. Thread-level speculation support allows them to speed up past software     

Determination of ethylene oxide content inn-Alcohol ethoxylates by proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy

Proton Fourier transform nuclear magnetic resonance spectral data were collected onn-alcohol ethoxylates and used to calculate the percent ethylene oxide (EO) content of then-alcohol ethoxylate without an internal or external standard. The accuracy and precision of the method were determined from ten repetitive analyses of hexaethylene glycol monon-dodecyl ether. The standard deviation was 0.23 wt% EO with a relative standard deviation of 0.40%. The method had a relative error of +0.55% and an absolute error of +0.32% EO. This paper was presented at the 20th ISF World Congress/83rd AOCS Annual Meeting and Exposition in Toronto, Canada, May 10–14, 1992.     

Neutral shift [five years of continuous operation with adjustable frequency drives]

The combined efforts of the AFD supplier and end-user have resulted in an extremely reliable electrical adjustable speed drive system. Almost three years into the run of the first unit, all parties are confident of the ability to meet the five-year run target that was identified at the outset. The redundancy of the power cells in this particular design, together with the neutral shift control has practically eliminated the power components as a source of operational failure. Future development efforts will include applying redundancy and fault tolerance to the drive control processor to further enhance system reliability.     

Preferred Orientations in Iodide Titanium

The wire textures for cold rolled and recrystallized iodide titanium and the sheet textures for this material produced by cold and hot rolling, and recrystallization at a series of temperatures were determined. The effect of the α → β transformation on the sheet texture was noted.     

Ansel Adams and Fiat Lux

Abstract

In 1963, Clark Kerr, then President of the University of California, approached Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall to participate in the centennial celebrations (in 1968) of the founding of the University. Adams's photographic work on the nme campuses in the years following resulted in the production of six thousand negatives, from which six hundred and five were produced as fine prints (placed in the University Archives at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley) and many others reproduced in the book, Fiat Lux (1968), with text by Nancy Newhall. In 1990, an exhibition consisting of one hundred of those photographs (to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the University of California at Irvine) toured the campuses of the University between January 1991 and May 1992, accompanied by the exhibition catalogue, Ansel Adams: Fiat Lux.     

An investigation of the performance portability of OpenCL

This paper reports on the development of an MPI/OpenCL implementation of LU, an application-level benchmark from the NAS Parallel Benchmark Suite. An account of the design decisions addressed during the development of this code is presented, demonstrating the importance of memory arrangement and work-item/work-group distribution strategies when applications are deployed on different device types. The resulting platform-agnostic, single source application is benchmarked on a number of different architectures, and is shown to be 1.3–1.5× slower than native FORTRAN 77 or CUDA implementations on a single node and 1.3–3.1× slower on multiple nodes. We also explore the potential performance gains of OpenCL’s device fissioning capability, demonstrating up to a 3× speed-up over our original OpenCL implementation.