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At least 91 records · Page 5

Elliptic Cones Alone and with Wings at Supersonic Speed

To help fill the gap in the knowledge of aerodynamics of shapes intermediate between bodies of revolution and flat triangular wings, force and moment characteristics for elliptic cones have been experimentally determined for Mach numbers of 1.97 and 2.94. Elliptic cones having cross-sectional axis ratios from 1 through 6 and with lengths and base areas equal to circular cones of fineness ratios 3.67 and 5 have been studied for angles of bank of 0 degree and 90 degrees. Elliptic and circular cones in combination with triangular wings of aspect ratios 1 and 1.5 also have been considered. The angle-of-attack range was from 0 degree to about 16 degrees, and the Reynolds number was 8 x 10(6), based on model length. In addition to the forces and moments at angle of attack, pressure distributions for elliptic cones at zero angle of attack have been determined. The results of this investigation indicate that there are distinct aerodynamic advantages to the use of elliptic cones.

Jorgensen, Leland H↗

Aerodynamic Characteristics of Towed Cones Used as Decelerators at Mach Numbers from 1.57 to 4.65

Towed and sting-supported cones were tested in the wake of various payloads at supersonic speeds to determine their drag and stability characteristics. The investigation extended over a Mach number range from 1.57 to 4.65 and included such variables as Reynolds number, cone angle, ratio of cone base diameter to payload base diameter, and trailing distance. The results of this investigation showed that the cones towed in the wake of a symmetrical payload at supersonic speeds, in general, have good drag and stability characteristics if towed in the supersonic flow region. A cone with an included angle between 80 deg and 90 deg will give maximum drag while still maintaining stability in the Mach number region of this investigation. In order to minimize wake effects, the ratio of cone base diameter to payload base diameter should be at least one and preferably around three. A trailing distance of three times the payload base diameter, in most cases, is of sufficient length to avoid low drag and instability of the decelerator.

Charczenko, Nickolai↗

Boundary Layer Transition on Slender Cones in Conventional and Low Disturbance Mach 6 Wind Tunnels

An experimental investigation was conducted on a 5-degree half-angle cone and a 5-degree half-angle flared cone in a conventional Mach 6 wind tunnel to examine the effects of facility noise on boundary layer transition. The influence of tunnel noise was inferred by comparing transition onset locations determined from the present test to that previously obtained in a Mach 6 low disturbance quiet tunnel. Together, the two sets of experiments are believed to represent the first direct comparison of transition onset between a conventional and a low disturbance wind tunnel using a common test model and transition detection technique. In the present conventional hypersonic tunnel experiment, separate measurements of heat transfer and adiabatic wall temperatures were obtained on the conical models at small angles of attack over a range of Reynolds numbers, which resulted in laminar, transitional, and turbulent flow. Smooth model turbulent heating distributions are compared to that obtained with transition forced via discrete surface roughness. The model nosetip radius was varied to examine the effects of bluntness on transition onset. Despite wall to total temperature differences between the transient heating measurements and the adiabatic wall temperature measurement, the two methods for determining sharp cone transition onset generally yielded equivalent locations. In the 'noisy' mode of the hypersonic low disturbance tunnel, transition onset occurred earlier than that measured in the conventional hypersonic tunnel, suggesting higher levels of freestream acoustic radiation relative to the conventional tunnel. At comparable freestream conditions, the transition onset Reynolds number under low disturbance conditions was a factor of 1.3 greater than that measured on flared cone in the LaRC conventional hypersonic tunnel and a factor of 1.6 greater that the flared cone run in the low disturbance tunnel run 'noisy'. Navier-Stokes mean flow computations and linear stability analysis were conducted to assess the experimental results and have indicated N factors associated with sharp flared cone transition onset to be approximately a factor of 2 lower than that inferred from the corresponding low disturbance tunnel measurements.

Horvath, Thomas J.↗

Rootless Cones on Mars: A Consequence of Lava-Ground Ice Interaction

Fields of small cratered cones on Mars are interpreted to have formed by rootless eruptions due to explosive interaction of lava with ground ice contained within the regolith beneath the flow. Melting and vaporization of the ice, and subsequent explosive expansion of the vapour, act to excavate the lava and construct a rootless cone around the explosion site. Similar features are found in Iceland, where flowing lava encountered water-saturated substrates. The martian cones have basal diameters of c. 30-1000 m and are located predominantly in the northern volcanic plains. High-resolution Mars Orbiter Camera images offer significant improvements over Viking data for interpretation of cone origins. A new model of the dynamics of cone formation indicates that very modest amounts of water ice are required to initiate and sustain the explosive interactions that produced the observed features. This is consistent with the likely low availability of water ice in the martian regolith. The scarcity of impact craters on many of the host lava flows indicates very young ages, suggesting that ground ice was present as recently as less than 10 - l00 Ma, and may persist today. Rootless cones therefore act as a spatial and temporal probe of the distribution of ground ice on Mars, which is of key significance in understanding the evolution of the martian climate. The location of water in liquid or solid form is of great importance to future robotic and human exploration strategies, and to the search for extraterrestrial life.

Fagents, S. A.↗

Numerical Modeling of Shatter Cones Development in Impact Craters

Shatter cones are the characteristic forms of rock fractures in impact structures. They have been used for decades as unequivocal fingerprints of meteoritic impacts on Earth. The abundant data about shapes, apical angles, sizes and distributions of shatter cones for many terrestrial impact structures should provide insights for the determination of impact conditions and characteristics of shock waves produced by high-velocity projectiles in geologic media. However, previously proposed models for the formation of shatter cones do not agree with observations. For example, the widely accepted Johnson-Talbot mechanism requires that the longitudinal stress drops to zero between the arrival of the elastic precursor and the main plastic wave. Unfortunately, observations do not support such a drop. A model has been also proposed to explain the striated features on the surface of shatter cones but can not invoked for their conical shape. The mechanism by which shatter cones form thus remains enigmatic to date. In this paper we present a new model for the formation of shatter cones. Our model has been tested by means of numerical simulations using the hydrocodes SALE 2D enhanced with the Grady-Kipp-Melosh fragmentation model.

Baratoux, D.↗

Comparison of the Atomic Oxygen Erosion Depth and Cone Height of Various Materials at Hyperthermal Energy

Atomic oxygen readily reacts with most spacecraft polymer materials exposed to the low Earth orbital (LEO) environment. If the atomic oxygen arrival comes from a fixed angle of impact, the resulting erosion will foster the development of a change in surface morphology as material thickness decreases. Hydrocarbon and halopolymer materials, as well as graphite, are easily oxidized and textured by directed atomic oxygen in LEO at energies of approx.4.5 eV. What has been curious is that the ratio of cone height to erosion depth is quite different for different materials. The formation of cones under fixed direction atomic oxygen attack may contribute to a reduction in material tensile strength in excess of that which would occur if the cone height to erosion depth ratio was very low because of greater opportunities for crack initiation. In an effort to understand how material composition affects the ratio of cone height to erosion depth, an experimental investigation was conducted on 18 different materials exposed to a hyperthermal energy directed atomic oxygen source (approx.70 eV). The materials were first salt-sprayed to provide microscopic local areas that would be protected from atomic oxygen. This allowed erosion depth measurements to be made by scanning microscopy inspection. The polymers were then exposed to atomic oxygen produced by an end Hall ion source that was operated on pure oxygen. Samples were exposed to an atomic oxygen effective fluence of 1.0x10(exp 20) atoms/sq cm based on Kapton H polyimide erosion. The average erosion depth and average cone height were determined using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM). The experimental ratio of average cone height to erosion depth is compared to polymer composition and other properties.

Waters, Deborah L.↗

Ensemble Forecasting of Coronal Mass Ejections Using the WSA-ENLIL with CONED Model

The combination of the Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA) coronal model, ENLIL heliospherical model version 2.7, and CONED Model version 1.3 (WSA-ENLIL with CONED Model) was employed to form ensemble forecasts for 15 halo coronal mass ejections (halo CMEs). The input parameter distributions were formed from 100 sets of CME cone parameters derived from the CONED Model. The CONED Model used image processing along with the bootstrap approach to automatically calculate cone parameter distributions from SOHO/LASCO imagery based on techniques described by Pulkkinen et al. (2010). The input parameter distributions were used as input to WSA-ENLIL to calculate the temporal evolution of the CMEs, which were analyzed to determine the propagation times to the L1 Lagrangian point and the maximum Kp indices due to the impact of the CMEs on the Earth's magnetosphere. The Newell et al. (2007) Kp index formula was employed to calculate the maximum Kp indices based on the predicted solar wind parameters near Earth assuming two magnetic field orientations: a completely southward magnetic field and a uniformly distributed clock-angle in the Newell et al. (2007) Kp index formula. The forecasts for 5 of the 15 events had accuracy such that the actual propagation time was within the ensemble average plus or minus one standard deviation. Using the completely southward magnetic field assumption, 10 of the 15 events contained the actual maximum Kp index within the range of the ensemble forecast, compared to 9 of the 15 events when using a uniformly distributed clock angle.

coronal mass↗

Bright and durable field emission source derived from refractory taylor cones

A method of producing field emitters having improved brightness and durability relying on the creation of a liquid Taylor cone from electrically conductive materials having high melting points. The method calls for melting the end of a wire substrate with a focused laser beam, while imposing a high positive potential on the material. The resulting molten Taylor cone is subsequently rapidly quenched by cessation of the laser power. Rapid quenching is facilitated in large part by radiative cooling, resulting in structures having characteristics closely matching that of the original liquid Taylor cone. Frozen Taylor cones thus obtained yield desirable tip end forms for field emission sources in electron beam applications. Regeneration of the frozen Taylor cones in-situ is readily accomplished by repeating the initial formation procedures. The high temperature liquid Taylor cones can also be employed as bright ion sources with chemical elements previously considered impractical to implement.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Techniques for optimizing nanotips derived from frozen taylor cones

Optimization techniques are disclosed for producing sharp and stable tips/nanotips relying on liquid Taylor cones created from electrically conductive materials with high melting points. A wire substrate of such a material with a preform end in the shape of a regular or concave cone, is first melted with a focused laser beam. Under the influence of a high positive potential, a Taylor cone in a liquid/molten state is formed at that end. The cone is then quenched upon cessation of the laser power, thus freezing the Taylor cone. The tip of the frozen Taylor cone is reheated by the laser to allow its precise localized melting and shaping. Tips thus obtained yield desirable end-forms suitable as electron field emission sources for a variety of applications. In-situ regeneration of the tip is readily accomplished. These tips can also be employed as regenerable bright ion sources using field ionization/desorption of introduced chemical species.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Strain engineering of Dirac cones in graphyne

6,6,12-graphyne, one of the two-dimensional carbon allotropes with the rectangular lattice structure, has two kinds of non-equivalent anisotropic Dirac cones in the first Brillouin zone. We show that Dirac cones can be tuned independently by the uniaxial compressive strain applied to graphyne, which induces n-type and p-type self-doping effect, by shifting the energy of the Dirac cones in the opposite directions. On the other hand, application of the tensile strain results into a transition from gapless to finite gap system for the monolayer. For the AB-stacked bilayer, the results predict tunability of Dirac-cones by in-plane strains as well as the strain applied perpendicular to the plane. The group velocities of the Dirac cones show enhancement in the resistance anisotropy for bilayer relative to the case of monolayer. Such tunable and direction-dependent electronic properties predicted for 6,6,12-graphyne make it to be competitive for the next-generation electronic devices at nanoscale.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

Guiding and focusing of fast electron beams produced by ultra-intense laser pulse using a double cone funnel target

A novel double cone funnel target design aiming at efficiently guiding and focusing fast electron beams produced in high intensity (>10{sup 19 }W/cm{sup 2}) laser-solid interactions is investigated via two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. The forward-going fast electron beams are shown to be directed and focused to a smaller size in comparison with the incident laser spot size. This plasma funnel attached on the cone target guides and focuses electrons in a manner akin to the control of liquid by a plastic funnel. Such device has the potential to add substantial design flexibility and prevent inefficiencies for important applications such as fast ignition. Two reasons account for the collimation of fast electron beams. First, the sheath electric fields and quasistatic magnetic fields inside the vacuum gap of the double cone provide confinement of the fast electrons in the laser-plasma interaction region. Second, the interface magnetic fields inside the beam collimator further guide and focus the fast electrons during the transport. The application of this technique to cone-guided fast ignition is considered, and it is shown that it can enhance the laser energy deposition in the compressed fuel plasma by a factor of 2 in comparison with the single cone target case.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Reionization on large scales. IV. Predictions for the 21 cm signal incorporating the light cone effect

We present predictions for the 21 cm brightness temperature power spectrum during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). We discuss the implications of the 'light cone' effect, which incorporates evolution of the neutral hydrogen fraction and 21 cm brightness temperature along the line of sight. Using a novel method calibrated against radiation-hydrodynamic simulations, we model the neutral hydrogen density field and 21 cm signal in large volumes (L = 2 Gpc h {sup –1}). The inclusion of the light cone effect leads to a relative decrease of about 50% in the 21 cm power spectrum on all scales. We also find that the effect is more prominent at the midpoint of reionization and later. The light cone effect can also introduce an anisotropy along the line of sight. By decomposing the 3D power spectrum into components perpendicular to and along the line of sight, we find that in our fiducial reionization model, there is no significant anisotropy. However, parallel modes can contribute up to 40% more power for shorter reionization scenarios. The scales on which the light cone effect is relevant are comparable to scales where one measures the baryon acoustic oscillation. We argue that due to its large comoving scale and introduction of anisotropy, the light cone effect is important when considering redshift space distortions and future application to the Alcock-Paczyński test for the determination of cosmological parameters.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Towards the clinical implementation of iterative low-dose cone-beam CT reconstruction in image-guided radiation therapy: Cone/ring artifact correction and multiple GPU implementation

Purpose: Compressed sensing (CS)-based iterative reconstruction (IR) techniques are able to reconstruct cone-beam CT (CBCT) images from undersampled noisy data, allowing for imaging dose reduction. However, there are a few practical concerns preventing the clinical implementation of these techniques. On the image quality side, data truncation along the superior–inferior direction under the cone-beam geometry produces severe cone artifacts in the reconstructed images. Ring artifacts are also seen in the half-fan scan mode. On the reconstruction efficiency side, the long computation time hinders clinical use in image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT). Methods: Image quality improvement methods are proposed to mitigate the cone and ring image artifacts in IR. The basic idea is to use weighting factors in the IR data fidelity term to improve projection data consistency with the reconstructed volume. In order to improve the computational efficiency, a multiple graphics processing units (GPUs)-based CS-IR system was developed. The parallelization scheme, detailed analyses of computation time at each step, their relationship with image resolution, and the acceleration factors were studied. The whole system was evaluated in various phantom and patient cases. Results: Ring artifacts can be mitigated by properly designing a weighting factor as a function of the spatial location on the detector. As for the cone artifact, without applying a correction method, it contaminated 13 out of 80 slices in a head-neck case (full-fan). Contamination was even more severe in a pelvis case under half-fan mode, where 36 out of 80 slices were affected, leading to poorer soft tissue delineation and reduced superior–inferior coverage. The proposed method effectively corrects those contaminated slices with mean intensity differences compared to FDK results decreasing from ∼497 and ∼293 HU to ∼39 and ∼27 HU for the full-fan and half-fan cases, respectively. In terms of efficiency boost, an overall 3.1 × speedup factor has been achieved with four GPU cards compared to a single GPU-based reconstruction. The total computation time is ∼30 s for typical clinical cases. Conclusions: The authors have developed a low-dose CBCT IR system for IGRT. By incorporating data consistency-based weighting factors in the IR model, cone/ring artifacts can be mitigated. A boost in computational efficiency is achieved by multi-GPU implementation.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Effects of Cone Penetrometer Testing on Shallow Hydrogeology at a Contaminated Site

Penetration testing is a popular and instantaneous technique for subsurface mapping, contaminant tracking, and the determination of soil characteristics. While the small footprint and reproducibility of cone penetrometer testing makes it an ideal method for in-situ subsurface investigations at contaminated sites, the effects to local shallow groundwater wells and measurable influence on monitoring networks common at contaminated sites is unknown. Physical and geochemical parameters associated with cone penetrometer testing were measured from a transect of shallow groundwater monitoring wells adjacent to penetrometer testing. For wells screened above the depth of cone refusal, the physical advancement and retraction of the cone had a significant effect ( p < 0.01) on water level for several pushes within 10 meters of a monitoring well, and a measured increase in specific conductivity. No effect on geochemistry or water level was observed in continuous monitoring data from wells screened below the depth of cone refusal, but variability in specific conductivity from these wells during penetration testing was only a fraction of the natural variation measured during precipitation events. Continuous measurements of specific conductivity and water level demonstrated that the effects of penetration testing have limited spatial and temporal distributions with a null effect post-testing.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Tables for Supersonic Flow Around Right Circular Cones at Small Angle of Attack

The solution of supersonic flow fields by the method of characteristics requires that starting conditions be known. Ferri, in reference 1, developed a method-of-characteristics solution for axially symmetric bodies of revolution at small angles of attack. With computing machinery that is now available, this has become a feasible method for computing the aerodynamic characteristics of bodies near zero angle of attack. For sharp-nosed bodies of revolution, the required starting line may be obtained by computing the flow field about a cone at a small angle of attack. This calculation is readily performed using Stone's theory in reference 2. Some solutions of this theory are available in reference 3. However, the manner in which these results are presented, namely in a wind-fixed coordinate system, makes their use somewhat cumbersome. Additionally, as pointed out in reference 4, the flow component perpendicular to the meridian planes was computed incorrectly. The results contained herein have been computed in the same basic manner as those of reference 3 with the correct velocity normal to the meridian planes. Also, all results have been transferred into the body-fixed coordinate system. Therefore, the values tabulated herein may be used, in conjunction with the respective zero-angle-of-attack results of reference 5, as starting conditions for the method-of-characteristics solution of the flow field about axially symmetric bodies of revolution at small angles of attack. As in the zero-angle-of-attack case (ref. 5) the present results have been computed using the ideal gas value of 1.4 for the ratio of the specific heats of air. Solutions are given for cone angles from 2.5 deg to 30 deg in increments of 2.5 deg. For each cone angle, results were computed for a constant series of free-stream Mach numbers from 1.5 to 20. In addition, a solution was computed which yielded the minimum free-stream Mach number for a completely supersonic conical flow field. For cone angles of 27.5 deg and 30 deg, this minimum free-stream Mach number was above 1.5. Consequently, solutions at this Mach number were not computed for these two cone angles.

SUPERSONIC FLOW↗

Boundary-Layer-Transition and Heat-Transfer Measurements from Flight Tests of Blunt and Sharp 50 Degree Cones at Mach Numbers from 1.7 to 4.7

Boundary-layer-transition and heat-transfer measurements were obtained from flight tests of blunt and sharp cones having apex angles of 50 deg. The test Mach number range was from 1.7 to 4.7, corresponding to free-stream Reynolds numbers, based on cone base diameter, of 18. 3 x 10(exp 6) and 32.1 x 10(exp 6), respectively. Transition on both models occurred at a local Reynolds number of 1 x 10(exp 6) to 2 X 10(exp 6) based on distance from the stagnation point. Transition Reynolds numbers based on momentum thickness were between 320 and 380 for the blunt cone. The model surface roughness was 25 rms microinches or greater. Turbulent heat transfer to the conical surface of the blunt cone at a Mach number of 4 was 30 percent less than that to the surface of the sharp cone. Available theories predicted heat-transfer coefficients reasonably well for the fully laminar or turbulent flow conditions.

BLUNT BODY↗

Direct observation of the dead-cone effect in quantum chromodynamics

In particle collider experiments, elementary particle interactions with large momentum transfer produce quarks and gluons (known as partons) whose evolution is governed by the strong force, as described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). These partons subsequently emit further partons in a process that can be described as a parton shower, which culminates in the formation of detectable hadrons. Studying the pattern of the parton shower is one of the key experimental tools for testing QCD. This pattern is expected to depend on the mass of the initiating parton, through a phenomenon known as the dead-cone effect, which predicts a suppression of the gluon spectrum emitted by a heavy quark of mass m Q and energy E, within a cone of angular size m Q /E around the emitter. Previously, a direct observation of the dead-cone effect in QCD had not been possible, owing to the challenge of reconstructing the cascading quarks and gluons from the experimentally accessible hadrons. We report the direct observation of the QCD dead cone by using new iterative declustering techniques to reconstruct the parton shower of charm quarks. This result confirms a fundamental feature of QCD. Furthermore, the measurement of a dead-cone angle constitutes a direct experimental observation of the non-zero mass of the charm quark, which is a fundamental constant in the standard model of particle physics.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Insights into pathological mechanisms and interventions revealed by analyzing a mathematical model for cone metabolism

This work analyzes a mathematical model for the metabolic dynamics of a cone photoreceptor, which is the first model to account for energy generation from fatty acids oxidation of shed photoreceptor outer segments (POS). Multiple parameter bifurcation analysis shows that joint variations in external glucose, the efficiency of glucose transporter 1 (GLUT1), lipid utilization for POS renewal, and oxidation of fatty acids affect the cone’s metabolic vitality and its capability to adapt under glucose-deficient conditions. The analysis further reveals that when glucose is scarce, cone viability cannot be sustained by only fueling energy production in the mitochondria, but it also requires supporting anabolic processes to create lipids necessary for cell maintenance and repair. In silico experiments are used to investigate how the duration of glucose deprivation impacts the cell without and with a potential GLUT1 or oxidation of fatty acids intervention as well as a dual intervention. The results show that for prolonged duration of glucose deprivation, the cone metabolic system does not recover with higher oxidation of fatty acids and requires greater effectiveness of GLUT1 to recover. Finally, time-varying global sensitivity analysis (GSA) is applied to assess the sensitivity of the model outputs of interest to changes and uncertainty in the parameters at specific times. The results reveal a critical temporal window where there would be more flexibility for interventions to rescue a cone cell from the detrimental consequences of glucose shortage.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗