Costs of reducing water use of concentrating solar power to sustainable levels: Scenarios for North Africa

Concentrating solar power (CSP) has the potential to become a leading sustainable energy technology for the European electricity system. In order to reach a substantial share in the energy mix, European investment in CSP appears most profitable in North Africa, where solar potential is significantly higher than in southern Europe. As well as sufficient solar irradiance, however, the majority of today's CSP plants also require a considerable amount of water, primarily for cooling purposes. In this paper we examine water usage associated with CSP in North Africa, and the cost penalties associated with technologies that could reduce those needs. We inspect four representative sites to compare the ecological and economical drawbacks from conventional and alternative cooling systems, depending on the local environment, and including an outlook with climate change to the mid-century. Scaling our results up to a regional level indicates that the use of wet cooling technologies would likely be unsustainable. Dry cooling systems, as well as sourcing of alternative water supplies, would allow for sustainable operation. Their cost penalty would be minor compared to the variance in CSP costs due to different average solar irradiance values.     

Assessment of tilt capability for spaceborne global ocean colorsensors

The importance of tilt capability for Sun glint avoidance for future global ocean color missions was analyzed. The analyses focused on Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) mission, because its radiometric, orbital, and sensor characteristics are well defined. The analyses concentrated can two major questions: 1) does tilting to avoid Sun glint increase or decrease the total ocean coverage, and 2) at high latitudes far from the region of maximum Sun glint, should the sensor be tilted or untilted? For ocean coverage maximization, if the sensitivity of ocean color algorithms to Sun glint is of the same order as the error in the atmospheric correction algorithms, then a tilted sensor produces nearly 20 percent better coverage than an untilted one after 2 d in the absence of clouds, and 12 percent after 4 d including clouds. Thus, the tilt capability can improve the ocean coverage of future ocean color missions. At high latitudes differences in transmitted water-leaving radiance between tilted and untilted sensors were well within the algorithm errors. Furthermore, Sun glint radiances exceeding the algorithm errors occurred at high wind speeds as far as 70° from the solar declination, suggesting that sensors should remain in the tilted mode up to this limit     

Recovery requirements of branch prediction storage structures in the presence of mispredicted-path execution

Execution along mispredicted paths may or may not affect the accuracy of subsequent branch predictions if recovery mechanisms are not provided to undo the erroneous information that is acquired by the branch prediction storage structures. In this paper, we study four elements of the Two-Level Branch Predictor: the Branch Target Buffer (BTB), the Branch History Register (BHR), the Pattern History Tables (PHTs), and the Return Address Stack (RAS). For each we determine whether a recovery mechanism is needed, and, if so, show how to design a cost-effective one. Using five benchmarks from the SPECint92 suite, we show that there is no need to provide recovery mechanisms for the BTB and the PHTs, but that performance is degraded by an average of 30% if recovery mechanisms are not provided for the BHR and RAS.     

Herstellung von Platten aus Altpapier unter Verwendung verschiedener Bindemittel

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Introducing fluorine-18 fluoromisonidazole positron emission tomography for the localisation and quantification of pig liver hypoxia

Fluorine-18 labelled fluoromisonidazole ([18F]FMISO) has been shown to accumulate in hypoxic tissue in inverse proportion to tissue oxygenation. In order to evaluate the potential of [18F]FMISO as a possible positron emission tomography (PET) tracer for imaging of liver tissue hypoxia, we measured the [18F]FMISO uptake in 13 domestic pigs using dynamic PET scanning. Hypoxia was induced by segmental arterial hepatic occlusion. During the experimental procedure the fractional concentration of inspired oxygen (FiO2) was set to 0.67 in group A (n=6) and to 0.21 in group B (n=7) animals. Before and after arterial occlusion, the partial pressure of O2 in tissue (TPO2) and the arterial blood flow were determined in normal flow and flow-impaired liver segments. Standardised uptake values [SUV=kBq tissue (in g) / body weight (in kg) x injected dose (in kBq)] for [18F]FMISO were calculated from PET images obtained 3 hours after injection of about 10 MBq/kg body weight [18F]FMISO. Immediately before PET scanning, the mean arterial blood flow was significantly decreased in arterially occluded segments [group A: 0. 41 (0.32-0.52); group B: 0.24 (0.16-0.33) ml min-1 g-1] compared with normal flow segments [group A: 1.05 (0.76-1.46); group B: 1.14 (0.83-1.57) ml min-1 g-1; geometric mean (95% confidence limits); P<0.001 for both groups]. After PET scanning, the TPO2 of occluded segments (group A: 5.1 (4.1-6.4); group B: 3.5 (2.6-4.9) mmHg] was significantly decreased compared with normal flow segments [group A: 26.4 (21.2-33.0); group B: 18.2 (13.3-25.1) mmHg; P<0.001 for both groups]. During the 3-h PET scan, the mean [18F]FMISO SUV determined in occluded segments increased significantly to 3.84 (3.12-4.72) in group A and 5.7 (4.71-6.9) in group B, while the SUV remained unchanged in corresponding normal liver tissue [group A: 1.4 (1.14-1. 71); group B: 1.31 (1.09-1.57); P<0.001 for both groups]. Regardless of ventilation conditions, a significant inverse exponential relationship was found between the TPO2 and the [18F]FMISO SUV (r2=0. 88, P<0.001). Our results suggest that because tracer delivery to hypoxic tissues was maintained by the portal circulation, the [18F]FMISO accumulation in the liver was found to be directly related to the severity of tissue hypoxia. Thus, [18F]FMISO PET allows in vivo quantification of pig liver hypoxia using simple SUV analysis as long as tracer delivery is not critically reduced.     

In vivo stimulation of connective tissue accumulation by the tripeptide-copper complex glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine-Cu2+ in rat experimental wounds

The tripeptide-copper complex glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine-Cu2+ (GHK-Cu) was first described as a growth factor for differentiated cells. Recent in vitro data showed that it possesses several properties of a potential activator of wound repair. We investigated the effects of GHK-Cu in vivo, using the wound chamber model described previously (Schilling, J.A., W. Joel, and M.T. Shurley, 1959. Surgery [St. Louis]. 46:702-710). Stainless steel wire mesh cylinders were implanted subcutaneously on the back of rats. The animals were divided into groups that received sequential injections into the wound chamber of either saline (control group) or various concentrations of GHK-Cu. At the end of the experiments, rats were killed, wound chambers were collected, and their content was analyzed for dry weight, total proteins, collagen, DNA, elastin, glycosaminoglycans, and specific mRNAs for collagens and TGF beta. In the GHK-Cu-injected wound chambers, a concentration-dependent increase of dry weight, DNA, total protein, collagen, and glycosaminoglycan contents was found. The stimulation of collagen synthesis was twice that of noncollagen proteins. Type I and type III collagen mRNAs were increased but not TGF beta mRNAs. An increase of the relative amount of dermatan sulfate was also found. A control tripeptide, L-glutamyl-L-histidyl-L-proline, had no significant effect. These results demonstrate that GHK-Cu is able to increase extracellular matrix accumulation in wounds in vivo.     

An experimental single-chip data flow CPU

HPSm (high-performance substrate) is a single-chip data flow CPU. It enhances throughput by using three function units to exploit parallelism, while executing RISC instructions in a data-driven manner to keep the function units busy. HPSm is data driven in the sense that instructions whose operands are not ready are not permitted to stall the machine by blocking subsequent ones. It uses branch prediction to exploit concurrency between blocks of code, and is capable of operating at a peak performance of 30 MIPS while running at only 10 MHz. It employs four on-chip smart memories to control the data-driven execution on the three function units, and to support branch prediction and exception handling. Simulations indicate that HPSm achieves significant speedup over a single-chip RISC microarchitecture implemented with the same fabrication technology and clock cycle. The HPSm chip is designed for a 1.6-μm double-metal scalable CMOS process. It contains 87279 transistors, occupies an area of 13.83 mm×13.04 mm, and is estimated to dissipate 2 W at 10 MHz     

Dynamic Predication of Indirect Jumps

Indirect jumps are used to implement increasingly-common programming language constructs such as virtual function calls, switch-case statements, jump tables, and interface calls. Unfortunately, the prediction accuracy of indirect jumps has remained low because many indirect jumps have multiple targets that are difficult to predict even with specialized hardware. This paper proposes a new way of handling hard-to-predict indirect jumps: dynamically predicating them. The compiler identifies indirect jumps that are suitable for predication along with their control-flow merge (CFM) points. The microarchitecture predicates the instructions between different targets of the jump and its CFM point if the jump turns out to be hard-to-predict at run time. We describe the new indirect jump predication architecture, provide code examples showing why it could reduce the performance impact of jumps, derive an analytical cost-benefit model for deciding which jumps and targets to predicate, and present preliminary evaluation results.