Assessment of indoor HONO formation mechanisms based on in situ measurements and modeling

The photolysis of HONO has been found to be the oxidation driver through OH formation in the indoor air measurement campaign SURFin, an extensive campaign carried out in July 2012 in a classroom in Marseille. In this study, the INCA‐Indoor model is used to evaluate different HONO formation mechanisms that have been used previously in indoor air quality models. In order to avoid biases in the results due to the uncertainty in rate constants, those parameters were adjusted to fit one representative day of the SURFin campaign. Then, the mechanisms have been tested with the optimized parameters against other experiments carried out during the SURFin campaign. Based on the observations and these findings, we propose a new mechanism incorporating sorption of NO₂ onto surfaces with possible saturation of these surfaces. This mechanism is able to better reproduce the experimental profiles over a large range of conditions.     

The effect of polyvinyl alcohol addition on the physicochemical properties of ZnO synthesized by ethylene glycol-hydrothermal method

The effect of the addition of very small amount of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) on the resulting physicochemical properties of ZnO synthesized by ethylene glycol-hydrothermal method was studied. Significant change in particle size distribution and specific surface area can be observed even only 0.02% PVA (w/w) was added into the ethylene glycol (EG) solution, in which the median particle size distribution increased from 5 to 8 nm and at the same time the specific surface area is also increased to nearly 50%. Further addition of PVA resulted in the decrease of the specific surface area due to the formation of agglomeration and aggregation of particles as observed by FESEM study. This study shows that the presence of minute amount of polymer, PVA plays very crucial role in determining the resulting properties of the synthesized ZnO by EG-hydrothermal method.     

Diffusion of One‐ and Two‐Component Fluids into Polymeric Membranes

The starting point of this paper is a model of the non‐Fickian diffusion of a simple fluid into a polymeric medium that has been introduced in El Afif and Grmela (2002). The model is extended to a mixture consisting of two simple fluids and one polymeric medium. The effects of the polymeric medium on diffusion are included in the formulations through the use of relative momenta playing the role of internal variables. In ternary mixtures, new phenomena arise due to cross‐coupling effects. As a consequence, the single diffusion Deborah number in binary mixtures becomes a 2 × 2 matrix in ternary mixtures. Two specific examples for which experimental data are available are investigated in detail.     

First and second law analysis of a new power and refrigeration thermodynamic cycle using a solar heat source

The first and second laws of thermodynamics were used to analyze a novel thermodynamic cycle proposed by Goswami in 1995 that uses an ammonia–water binary mixture as the working fluid, while producing both power and refrigeration simultaneously. The thermodynamic performance of the cycle was optimized for maximum second law efficiency using a commercially available optimization program. A maximum second law efficiency of 65.8% was obtained at a heat source temperature of 420 K. An exergy analysis was performed to study losses in different components of the cycle. It is seen that the largest contribution to cycle irreversibility comes from the absorber, with the rectifier and solution heat exchanger also contributing significantly. Irreversibility generation in the boiler is high at very low heat source temperatures, but drops at higher temperatures.     

System Performance of Transmit Diversity Methods and a Two Fixed-Beam System in WCDMA

Downlink transmit diversity modes for WCDMA together with a two fixed-beam antenna array system are compared relative to the single antenna sectorized system in a radio network simulator. The transmit diversity methods investigated are: space-time transmit diversity and closed-loop mode I transmit diversity. Frequency selective (COST 259) and flat fading channels are considered and their impact to speech-only and data-only services is evaluated. A third service, which highlights the system performance of the various advanced antennas, is also investigated.The results in this investigation point out that the diversity gain in flat fading channels is substantial. In frequency-selective fading, the benefits of fixed beam systems is encouraging, whereas transmit diversity methods (especially Space-Time Transmit Diversity) is unsatisfactory.     

Investigating the current distribution of parallel-configured quantum point contacts under quantum Hall conditions

Journal of Computational Electronics - Electric-field-controlled charge transport is a crucial concept of modern computers, embodied, namely in field-effect transistors. The metallic gate voltage...     

The effect of the embedded interface dynamics on mass transport in immiscible polymer blends

Mass transport of solvents into immiscible blends may exhibit a non-Fickian behavior due to the deformation of the embedded interface that couples with diffusion. We introduce an interface area covariant tensor N as a structural state variable and derive a set of thermodynamically-consistent PDEs and ODEs transport equations for the bulk and time-dependent boundaries. The proposed model, which is a reformulation of that derived by El Afif (2008) and El Afif et al. (2003), improves both mathematically and numerically the investigation of the diffusion-interface coupling and provides reasonable predictions of the sorption-permeation one dimensional treatment affording good agreement with experimental data. The tensor N englobes, into a single morphological quantity, all information regarding diffusion-induced changes in the size and shape anisotropy of the interface area. Predicted results include concentration, components of N , residual stresses, mass-uptake, and swelling. Scaling leads to three relevant dimensionless parameters: a mixing-interface coupling constant and bulk and boundary diffusion Deborah numbers.     

A Posteriori Error Estimation for a Finite Volume Discretization on Anisotropic Meshes

A singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion problem is considered. The small diffusion coefficient generically leads to solutions with boundary layers. The problem is discretized by a vertex-centered finite volume method. The anisotropy of the solution is reflected by using anisotropic meshes which can improve the accuracy of the discretization considerably. The main focus is on a posteriori error estimation. A residual type error estimator is proposed and rigorously analysed. It is shown to be robust with respect to the small perturbation parameter. The estimator is also robust with respect to the mesh anisotropy as long as the anisotropic mesh sufficiently reflects the anisotropy of the solution (which is almost always the case for sensible discretizations). Altogether, reliable and efficient a posteriori error estimation is achieved for the finite volume method on anisotropic meshes. Numerical experiments in 2D underline the applicability of the theoretical results in adaptive computations.     

Analysis of reflectance spectra of tropical seagrass species and their value for mapping using multispectral satellite images

ABSTRACT

Mapping of the distribution of individual seagrass species is essential for any attempts to manage seagrass ecosystems. It is therefore important to understand how the spectra of different seagrass species vary, in order to establish their unique absorption features and how these can be utilised for mapping by making use of remote-sensing images. This paper presents measurements of the reflectance spectra between 400 and 900 nm for nine tropical species of seagrass. Continuum removal and multispectral resampling procedures were applied to the spectra. Dendrogram analysis was carried out to identify species clustering as the basis for a mapping scheme. Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) and Spectral Information Divergence (SID) approaches were employed for the classification of seagrass species using WorldView-2 images and measured spectra as the input endmember. Classification Tree Analysis (CTA) and an image segmentation approach using CTA (Object-Based Image Analysis – OBIA) were performed as a means of comparison. The results indicate that the absorption features and overall shape of the spectra for all seagrass species are relatively similar, and implied that the major differences are attributable to the absolute reflectance values. Consequently, SAM and SID produced results of low accuracy (<30%), whereas, CTA and OBIA delivered results exhibiting higher accuracy (60–92%). The use of a spectral-based classification algorithm was ineffective for the classification and mapping of seagrass species using multispectral images. The utilisation of absolute reflectance values was beneficial for the classification of seagrass species having similar spectral shape.