Numerical Investigation of the Effect of Baffle Orientation on Heat Transfer and Pressure Drop in a Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger With Leakage Flows

The commercial CFD code FLUENT is used to investigate the effect of baffle orientation and of viscosity of the working fluid on the heat transfer and pressure drop in a shell-and-tube heat exchanger in the domain of turbulent flow. The shell-and-tube heat exchanger considered follows the TEMA standards and consists of 76 plane tubes with fixed outside diameter, which are arranged in a triangular pitch. Two baffle orientations as well as leakage flows are considered. In order to determine the effect of viscosity on heat transfer and pressure drop, simulations are performed for the working fluids air, water, and engine oil with Prandtl numbers in the range of 0.7 to 206. For each baffle orientation and working fluid, simulations are performed using different flow velocities at the inlet nozzle. Heat transfer and pressure drop are reported in order to describe the performance of vertically and horizontally baffled shell-and-tube heat exchangers. The heat transfer coefficient is described as modified shell-side Nusselt number, which is defined similar to the VDI method.     

Medium access control with coordinated adaptive sleeping for wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with nodes remaining largely inactive for long time, but becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in several ways: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses a few novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration. It enables low-duty-cycle operation in a multihop network. Nodes form virtual clusters based on common sleep schedules to reduce control overhead and enable traffic-adaptive wake-up. S-MAC uses in-channel signaling to avoid overhearing unnecessary traffic. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for applications that require in-network data processing. The paper presents measurement results of S-MAC performance on a sample sensor node, the UC Berkeley Mote, and reveals fundamental tradeoffs on energy, latency and throughput. Results show that S-MAC obtains significant energy savings compared with an 802.11-like MAC without sleeping.     

Thermal resistance and capacity models for borehole heat exchangers

The detailed design and energy analysis of ground source heat pump systems requires the ability to predict the short‐term behavior of borehole heat exchangers (BHE). The application of fully discretized models leads to extensive computation times and a substantial effort in terms of pre‐processing work. On the contrary, analytical models offer simple, parameter input‐based modeling and short computation times, but they usually disregard the transient effects of heat and mass transport in the borehole and hence are not suitable for the prediction of the short‐time behavior. In order to combine the advantages of both types of models, the authors developed two‐dimensional thermal resistance and capacity models for different types of BHE. These models take the capacity of the grouting material with one capacity per tube into account and, therefore, the range of validity is extended to shorter times. The correct consideration of all thermal resistances between the fluid in the pipes, the grout capacities and the borehole wall is important because of the significant influence on the validity of the models. With the developed models, the modeling work and the computation time can be significantly reduced compared with fully discretized computations while precise results are still achieved. The validation of the suggested models against fully discretized FEM models shows a very good agreement. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Study of the effect of excess carrier lifetime depth profiles and depth dependent absorption coefficients on the emitted photoluminescence spectrum of chalcopyrite thin films

The emitted photoluminescence (PL) resulting from radiative recombination in semiconductors is strongly governed by excess carrier density, which is influenced by excess carrier lifetime, absorption coefficient and according boundary conditions at front and rear contact. We have numerically solved the diffusion equation for the excess carrier density with depth dependent lifetime profiles (originating from a depth dependent defect density) and depth dependent absorption coefficient (originating from a depth dependent band‐gap) using a residual control based boundary value problem solver. The emitted PL from the absorber has been calculated on the basis of the excess carrier density with a 1D‐matrix transfer formalism including propagation, multireflection at phase boundaries and reabsorption of PL‐photons. For different lifetime or absorption depth profiles we have characterized the influence on the excess carrier depth profile as well as on the resulting spectral PL yield. Finally the calculated PL spectra were compared to the quasi‐Fermi level splitting from the excess carriers to show the influence of both depth profiles on the shape of the photoluminescence spectrum. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Structural studies of collagen-like sequential polypeptides

Sequential polyhexapeptides, synthesised by combination of sequences from collagen type Gly-X-Y (X = Ala, Pro, Ser; Y = Ala, Gly, Lys, Pro), were characterized by the temperature dependence of circular dichroism spectra. Under comparable conditions these studies revealed that alternating triplets of Gly-Pro-Pro or Gly-Pro-Ala combined with Gly-Pro-Lys or Gly-Pro-Glu exhibit collagen-like structures in aqueous solutions. In case of unstructured chains of (Gly-Pro-Ala) ≈ 12 it can be shown that N-terminal crosslinking of three chains produces a similar ordered structure.     

10-Gb/s transmission and beyond

The authors outline obstacles encountered in the development of 10-Gb/s (STM-64, OC-192) systems. Technologies to overcome these obstacles are presented and compared, taking into account real field environments. A perspective on 40-Gb/s systems technologies is also given     

Remote detection of bottleneck links using spectral and statistical methods

Persistently saturated links are abnormal conditions that indicate bottlenecks in Internet traffic. Network operators are interested in detecting such links for troubleshooting, to improve capacity planning and traffic estimation, and to detect denial-of-service attacks. Currently bottleneck links can be detected either locally, through SNMP information, or remotely, through active probing or passive flow-based analysis. However, local SNMP information may not be available due to administrative restrictions, and existing remote approaches are not used systematically because of their network or computation overhead. This paper proposes a new approach to remotely detect the presence of bottleneck links using spectral and statistical analysis of traffic. Our approach is passive, operates on aggregate traffic without flow separation, and supports remote detection of bottlenecks, addressing some of the major limitations of existing approaches. Our technique assumes that traffic through the bottleneck is dominated by packets with a common size (typically the maximum transfer unit, for reasons discussed in Section 5.1). With this assumption, we observe that bottlenecks imprint periodicities on packet transmissions based on the packet size and link bandwidth. Such periodicities manifest themselves as strong frequencies in the spectral representation of the aggregate traffic observed at a downstream monitoring point. We propose a detection algorithm based on rigorous statistical methods to detect the presence of bottleneck links by examining strong frequencies in aggregate traffic. We use data from live Internet traces to evaluate the performance of our algorithm under various network conditions. Results show that with proper parameters our algorithm can provide excellent accuracy (up to 95%) even if the traffic through the bottleneck link accounts for less than 10% of the aggregate traffic.     

State of the Art Report on Video‐Based Graphics and Video Visualization

In recent years, a collection of new techniques which deal with video as input data, emerged in computer graphics and visualization. In this survey, we report the state of the art in video‐based graphics and video visualization. We provide a review of techniques for making photo‐realistic or artistic computer‐generated imagery from videos, as well as methods for creating summary and/or abstract visual representations to reveal important features and events in videos. We provide a new taxonomy to categorize the concepts and techniques in this newly emerged body of knowledge. To support this review, we also give a concise overview of the major advances in automated video analysis, as some techniques in this field (e.g. feature extraction, detection, tracking and so on) have been featured in video‐based modelling and rendering pipelines for graphics and visualization.     

Mo/Si multilayer-coated ruled blazed gratings for the soft-x-ray region

Two Mo/Si multilayer-coated blazed gratings have been fabricated for operation at soft-x-ray wavelengths above the Si L edge, λ ≥ 12.4 nm, at (near) normal incidence. The sawtooth profile of the grating structure was mechanically ruled into a 200-nm Au film that was deposited onto a plane glass substrate. To smooth the rough Au surface and to prevent interdiffusion of the Au film with the upper Mo/Si multilayer, a carbon film was evaporated onto the Au grating surface of one of the gratings before the deposition of the multilayer coating. We matched the multilayer grating, working on blaze in the third diffraction order, in which an absolute diffraction efficiency of 3.4% at a wavelength of 14 nm was measured, whereas only 1.1% was achieved for a similar grating (without a carbon interlayer). These efficiencies are higher than those obtained for other ruled blazed gratings reported in the literature. As a result of the multilayer and grating periodicity, the wavelength of diffraction can be tuned bya rotation of the grating, which is important for application in a soft-x-ray monochromator.