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Hydrodynamic consequences of using simpler geometric shapes to represent coral canopies are examined through a laboratory study. A canopy composed of cylinders is compared with a canopy composed of 3-D-printed, scaled down coral heads in a recirculating flume. Vertical velocity profiles are measured at four horizontal locations for each canopy type, and mean velocity and turbulence statistics are compared both within and above the canopy. A narrow, defined wake on the scale of the canopy element is present behind the cylinder canopy elements that is absent in the coral canopy. There is also a peak in shear stress at the top of the cylinder canopy, likely due to the sharp edge at the top of the cylinder. Above the canopy, however, turbulence statistics and friction velocities behave similarly for both canopy types. Therefore, the results indicate we may reasonably get coral reef drag estimates from canopies with simpler geometric surrogates, especially when the mean free-stream and within-canopy flow speeds are matched to environmental conditions.
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
A Frenchman who arrives in London, will find Philosophy, like every Thing else, very much chang’d there… In France, ’tis the Pressure of the Moon that causes the Tides; but in England ’tis the Sea that gravitates toward the Moon. Letters Concerning the English Nation [1733] Letter XIV: On Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton, Voltaire (1694–1778)
The Project Orion spacecraft is by common consent the craziest interstellar flight concept ever devised. Ironically, it was also the spacecraft design that received the widest support by scientists, the military and other branches of the US government, as well as by private industry. It was as if all of these people had collectively lost their minds. The basic idea was utterly simple and so intuitively obvious that it could be understood by a child. This was a craft whose propulsion system was built upon the Newtonian principle of action and reaction. The central notion was that of placing a bomb under a rocket and then detonating it to loft the rocket up and away – exactly the same process as putting a firecracker under a tin can and watching it blow sky high. To keep it going up, of course, a series of bombs detonated in sequence would be required. And so the Orion rocket would be propelled through space by a stream of bombs, in fact nuclear bombs, exploding one after another behind it, thereby continuously accelerating the craft. That was the project’s key concept, and as such it was simultaneously perfect and insane.
When night comes I stand on the steps and listen; the stars cluster in the garden and I stand, out in the darkness. Edith Södergran (1892–1923) “Stjärnorna [The Stars]” [1916] (tr. David Barrett)
The chapter describes three iconic interstellar travel vehicles: the Bernal sphere, the Bussard Interstellar Ramjet, and Project Daedalus. Nobody took the Bernal sphere seriously. The Bussard vehicle would not work as intended, and the Daedalus vehicle lacked a credible propulsion system. The principal difficulty with star travel is that the stars are very far away, at distances measured in light years.
In magnetized, stratified environments such as the Sun's corona and solar wind, Alfvénic fluctuations ‘reflect’ from background gradients, enabling nonlinear interactions that allow their energy to dissipate into heat. This process, termed ‘reflection-driven turbulence’, likely plays a key role in coronal heating and solar-wind acceleration, explaining a range of detailed observational correlations and constraints. Building on previous works focused on the inner heliosphere, here we study the basic physics of reflection-driven turbulence using reduced magnetohydrodynamics in an expanding box – the simplest model that can capture local turbulent plasma dynamics in the super-Alfvénic solar wind. Although idealized, our high-resolution simulations and simple theory reveal a rich phenomenology that is consistent with a diverse range of observations. Outwards-propagating fluctuations, which initially have high imbalance (high cross-helicity), decay nonlinearly to heat the plasma, becoming more balanced and magnetically dominated. Despite the high imbalance, the turbulence is strong because Elsässer collisions are suppressed by reflection, leading to ‘anomalous coherence’ between the two Elsässer fields. This coherence, together with linear effects, causes the growth of ‘anastrophy’ (squared magnetic potential) as the turbulence decays, forcing the energy to rush to larger scales and forming a ‘$1/f$-range’ energy spectrum in the process. Eventually, expansion overcomes the nonlinear and Alfvénic physics, forming isolated, magnetically dominated ‘Alfvén vortices’ with minimal nonlinear dissipation. These results can plausibly explain the observed radial and wind-speed dependence of turbulence imbalance (cross-helicity), residual energy, fluctuation amplitudes, plasma heating and fluctuation spectra, as well as making a variety of testable predictions for future observations.
Let us optimistically assume that sooner or later a workable interstellar propulsion system will be found, and also be built and successfully tested in space. While this would be a great advance toward making interstellar travel possible, it nevertheless does not automatically follow that a voyage to the stars will in fact be attempted. There are a few other issues that must also be settled first: for example, a habitable exoplanet must be identified. It must be suitable for human colonization and ought to be a reachable distance away from Earth within a reasonable period of travel time. Second, engineers must provide a plausible space vehicle design architecture, and a spacecraft of that design must then be constructed, and tested successfully. Such a craft does not exist as yet, one among many reasons being that the specifications for it depend in turn upon the size and makeup of the likely boarding population. But both of those factors are still unknown. In addition, and perhaps most important of all, an unprecedented level of funding and resources must be allocated to the project.
The revival of the heliocentric model by Copernicus in the sixteenth century led to speculation about planets orbiting other stars. In a heliocentric model, stars must show annual parallax as the Earth moves around the Sun.
Understanding the mechanisms behind the remote triggering of landslides by seismic waves at micro-strain amplitude is essential for quantifying seismic hazards. Granular materials provide a relevant model system to investigate landslides within the unjamming transition framework, from solid to liquid states. Furthermore, recent laboratory experiments have revealed that ultrasound-induced granular avalanches can be related to a reduction in the interparticle friction through shear acoustic lubrication of the contacts. However, investigating slip at the scale of grain contacts within an optically opaque granular medium remains a challenging issue. Here, we propose an original coupling model and numerically investigate two-dimensional dense granular flows triggered by basal acoustic waves. We model the triggering dynamics at two separated time scales – one for grain motion (milliseconds) and the other for ultrasound (10 ${\rm \mu} {\rm s}$) – relying on the computation of vibrational modes with a discrete element method through the reduction of the local friction. We show that ultrasound predominantly propagates through the strong-force chains, while the ultrasound-induced decrease of interparticle friction occurs in the weak contact forces perpendicular to the strong-force chains. This interparticle friction reduction initiates local rearrangements at the grain scale that eventually lead to a continuous flow through a percolation process at the macroscopic scale – with a delay depending on the proximity to the failure. Consistent with experiments, we show that ultrasound-induced flow appears more uniform in space than pure gravity-driven flow, indicating the role of an effective temperature by ultrasonic vibration.
This study identifies two previously unrecognised screech modes in non-axisymmetric jets. Spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (SPOD) of ultra-high-speed schlieren images reveals a bi-axial flapping mode in a rectangular jet and a quasi-helical mode in an elliptical jet. To educe the complex three-dimensional structure of these new modes, SPOD is performed on datasets from different viewing perspectives, produced by rotating the nozzle with respect to the schlieren path to an azimuthal angle $\theta$. The bi-axial flapping mode is strongly antisymmetric from any perspective. However, the SPOD eigenvalue at the screech frequency ($\lambda _s$) varies with $\theta$ and the axial distance of the SPOD domain from the nozzle lip. This mode most closely resembles a flapping mode in the minor-axis plane close to the nozzle lip and a wagging mode in the major-axis plane further downstream. This transition from flapping to wagging at the same frequency correlates with the axis switching defined by the shock-cell structure in the mean flow. The quasi-helical mode in the elliptical jet is characterised by an antisymmetric structure present in the SPOD spatial modes whose eigenvalue $\lambda _s$ is insensitive to both $\theta$ and the axial domain. These findings indicate that the spatial evolution of the mean flow in non-axisymmetric jets may allow them to support a range of additional screech modes that differ significantly from those supported by the original three-dimensional shape of the jet.
Real-time systems need to be built out of tasks for which the worst-case execution time is known. To enable accurate estimates of worst-case execution time, some researchers propose to build processors that simplify that analysis. These architectures are called precision-timed machines or time-predictable architectures. However, what does this term mean? This paper explores the meaning of time predictability and how it can be quantified. We show that time predictability is hard to quantify. Rather, the worst-case performance as the combination of a processor, a compiler, and a worst-case execution time analysis tool is an important property in the context of real-time systems. Note that the actual software has implications as well on the worst-case performance. We propose to define a standard set of benchmark programs that can be used to evaluate a time-predictable processor, a compiler, and a worst-case execution time analysis tool. We define worst-case performance as the geometric mean of worst-case execution time bounds on a standard set of benchmark programs.