1,332 research outputs found
Performance of a micro-engineered ultrasonic particle manipulator
No full textAn ultrasonic microfluidic particle manipulator has been modeled and its experimentally measured separation performance has been compared with the modeled results for 1 µm latex particles, and yeast particles in water
Dynamics of inertial disk particles in turbulent channel flow
No full textA suspension of oblate spheroidal (disk-like) particles in turbulent channel flow has been investigated with focus on the translational and rotational particle statistics. The effects of particle aspect ratio and inertia have been explored. The disk-like particles exhibited a significant preferential orientation in the plane of the mean shear. The influence of the particle shape on the orientation and rotation diminished as translational inertia increased from Stokes number 1 to 30. Isotropization of both orientation and rotation could be observed in the core region of the channel. Keywords: oblate spheroids, preferential orientation, shape effects, inertia effects
Balancing Conflict and Cost in the Selection of Negotiation Opponents
No full textWithin the context of agent-to-agent purchase negotiations, a problem that has received little attention is that of identifying negotiation opponents in situations where the consequences of conflict and the ability to access resources dynamically vary. Such dynamism poses a number of problems that make it difficult to automate the identification of appropriate opponents. To that end, this paper describes a motivation-based opponent selection mechanism used by a buyer-agent to evaluate and select between an already identified set of seller-agents. Sellers are evaluated in terms of the amount of conflict they are expected to bring to a negotiation and the expected amount of cost a negotiation with them will entail. The mechanism allows trade-offs to be made between conflict and cost minimisation, and experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach
Inertial effects on non-spherical particle rotation on turbulent channel flow
No full textWe investigated the rotation of non-spherical particles (rod-like and disk-like) in turbulent channel flow with focus on inertial effects. A direct numerical simulation (DNS) with an Eulerian-Lagrangian approach was performed. A wide range of particle aspect ratios, λ, ranging from 0.01 to 50 were considered for Stokes numbers St equal to 1 and 30. In the particle reference frame, statistical results reveal the importance of shape effect on the particle rotation. The rods (λ > 1) are spinning (rotation about their symmetry axis) more than tumbling (rotation about other axes) whereas disks (λ < 1) behave oppositely. With increasing particle inertia, i.e. higher St, the preferential tumbling of the disks and the spinning of the rods are reduced. We ascribe these observations to the varying degree of alignment of the particle symmetry axis with the fluid vorticity vector
The conditions of formation of the sheeted dike complex at superfast spread East Pacific Rise revealed by deep ocean crust drilling at ODP Hole 1256
No full textA comparison of rosseland-mean opacities from op and opal
No full textMonochromatic opacities from the Opacity Project (OP) have been augmented by hitherto missing inner-shell contributions. OP Rosseland-mean opacities, κR, are compared with results from OPAL for the six elements H, He, C, O, S and Fe. The OPAL data are obtained from the project's website. Agreement for H is close everywhere except for the region of log(T) 6 and log(R) −1 (R=ρ/T36 where ρ is mass density in g cm3 and T6= 106×T with T in K). In that region κR(OPAL) is larger than κR(OP) by up to 13 per cent. The differences are caused by different equations of state (EOS). In the region concerned, OP has the H ground state undergoing dissolution, leading to a small H-neutral ionization fraction, while OPAL has larger values for that fraction. A similar difference occurs for He at log(R) −1 and log(T) 6.4, where OP has the He+ ground state undergoing dissolution. The OPAL website does not provide single-element Rosseland means for elements other than H and He. Comparisons between OP and OPAL are made for mixtures with X= 0.9, Z= 0.1 and Z containing pure C, O or S. There are some differences: at the lower temperatures, say log(T) ≤ 5.5, owing to differences in atomic data, with the OP R-matrix data probably being the more accurate; and at higher temperatures mainly owing to differences in level populations resulting from the use of different EOS theories. In the original OP work, R-matrix data for iron were supplemented by data obtained using the configuration-interaction (CI) code superstructure. The experiment is made of replacing much of the original iron data with new data from the CI code autostructure. Inclusion of intercombination lines gives an increase in κR of up to 18 per cent. The OPAL website does not allow for Z containing pure iron. Comparisons are made for an iron-rich mixture, X= 0.9, Z= 0.1 and Z containing C and Fe with C:Fe = 2:1 by number fraction. There are some differences between OP and OPAL for that case: the OP 'Z-bump' in κR is shifted to slightly higher temperatures, compared with OPAL. Overall, there is good agreement between OP and OPAL Rosseland-mean opacities for the six elements, but there are some differences. Recent work has shown that helioseismology measurements give a very accurate value for the depth of the solar convective zone, RCZ, and that, taking account of recent revisions in abundances, solar models give agreement with that value only if opacities at RCZ are about 20 per cent larger than OPAL values. For the six-element mix at RCZ we obtain κR(OP) to be larger than κR(OPAL) by 5 per cent
Author Correction: Rapid increase in the risk of heat-related mortality.
No full textCorrection to: Nature Communicationshttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40599-x, published online 24 August 2023 The original version of this Article omitted from the author list the 17th author, “Multi-Country Multi-City (MCC) collaborative research network”, which is the consortium providing the mortality data. A list of consortium authors and their affiliations are provided in the HTML version of this Correction. Part of the Author Contributions statement was incorrectly given and should have read ‘A.M.V.C., E.M.F., B.A., M.D.S.Z.S.C., Y.L.G., Y.G., Y.H., V.H., J.K., E.L., D.R., N.R., N.S., S.S., A.U., A.G. and the MCC were involved in resources and data curation.’ In addition, the primary affiliation ‘Climate Research Foundation (FIC), Madrid, Spain’ for Dominic Roye was missing
Monte-Carlo expectation maximization for decentralized POMDPs
No full textWe address two significant drawbacks of state-of-the-art solvers of decentralized POMDPs (DECPOMDPs): the reliance on complete knowledge of the model and limited scalability as the complexity of the domain grows. We extend a recently proposed approach for solving DEC-POMDPs via a reduction to the maximum likelihood problem, which in turn can be solved using EM. We introduce a model-free version of this approach that employs Monte-Carlo EM (MCEM). While a naïve implementation of MCEM is inadequate in multiagent settings, we introduce several improvements in sampling that produce high-quality results on a variety of DEC-POMDP benchmarks, including large problems with thousands of agents
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