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Notes: Flow visualization studies and laser-Doppler anemometry (LDA) measurements have been performed on the flow field generated at a sudden expansion in a cylindrical pipe during the intake stroke of a piston. The range of piston Reynolds numbers investigated, based on piston diameter and velocity, was 18–125 and covered a laminar and a transition-to-turbulence regime. A detailed study of the parameters influencing the structure of the flow, i.e., the clearance volume and the piston velocity, was carried out and is presented, and the mechanism for the creation of flow instabilities at low Reynolds numbers is outlined. One of the striking features of the flow relates to the formation of vortex structures during the intake flow. It is found that under some circumstances these structures become unstable, despite the relatively low Reynolds number of the flow.

Notes: A two-dimensional numerical study on the laminar flow past a circular cylinder rotating with a constant angular velocity was carried out. The objectives were to obtain a consistent set of data for the drag and lift coefficients for a wide range of rotation rates not available in the literature and a deeper insight into the flow field and vortex development behind the cylinder. First, a wide range of Reynolds numbers (0.01≤Re≤45) and rotation rates (0≤α≤6) were considered for the steady flow regime, where α is the circumferential velocity at the cylinder surface normalized by the free-stream velocity. Furthermore, unsteady flow calculations were carried out for one characteristic Reynolds number (Re=100) in the typical two-dimensional (2D) vortex shedding regime with α varying in the range 0≤α≤2. Additionally, the investigations were extended to very high rotation rates (α≤12) for which no data exist in the literature. The numerical investigations were based on a finite-volume flow solver enhanced by multi-grid acceleration and the local grid refinement technique to achieve efficient computations and accurate numerical results. The predictions show that the rotation of the cylinder suppresses the vortex development in both the steady and the unsteady flow regimes and significantly changes the flow field close to the cylinder. For very low Reynolds numbers, the drag force is not affected by rotation and the lift force is a linear function of α. For higher Re in the steady flow regime, the drag force decreases with increasing rotational velocities even leading to negative values. The lift force is almost a linear function of the rotational velocity and nearly independent of Re for low rotational speeds of α〈2. However, for higher α values and larger Reynolds numbers (Re〉1), a progressive increase in the lift force is observed. A very interesting phenomenon was found in the unsteady flow regime at Re=100. For low rotation rates (α≤2) the flow exhibits the behavior known from the literature, e.g., a linear increase of the mean lift coefficient with increasing α and the suppression of vortex shedding beyond a critical α value of about αL(approximate)1.8. However, for α(approximate)5, an unsteady periodic flow motion was found in the wake which is characterized by a frequency much lower than that known for normal vortex shedding. The change in the flow structure also leads to a distinct change in the mean lift coefficients which exhibits a linear relation of very high rotations rates and asymptotically converges to the values known from the potential flow theory. © 2002 American Institute of Physics.

Notes: The continuity and momentum equations do not imply a Reynolds number dependence of turbulence data when wall variables are used for normalization. However, experimental and numerical results show a Reynolds number dependence of turbulence intensity very close to the wall. The cause of this is explained. It results from the behavior of a sink term in the dissipation rate equation which shows a Reynolds number dependence in the limit of two-component two-dimensional turbulence as it exists close to walls. Away from the near-wall region the Reynolds number dependence originates from the streamwise pressure gradient which enters into the equations for the turbulent kinetic energy and turbulent dissipation rate through the gradient production processes. The low-Reynolds number effects in turbulent channel flow were investigated experimentally using the laser Doppler anemometry (LDA) measuring technique. A new method was used to eliminate the influence of the limited spatial resolution of the LDA measuring control volume. Results are presented for the limiting behavior of the turbulent intensity near the wall and its variation with the Reynolds number. The present LDA measurements confirm the trend in the data of direct numerical simulations. © 2001 American Institute of Physics.

Notes: Growth responses of wheat plants to combined treatments of four mixed function oxidase (MFO) inhibitors and chlortoluron were determined. Analysis of interactions showed that piperonyl-butoxide and especially ABT (1-aminobenzotriazole) increased the toxicity of chlortoluron. Metyrapone and 2,4-dichlorophenoxypropyne were phytotoxic and did not exert any clear interaction. ABT also increased the toxicity of isoproturon to wheat.Our results suggest that ABT Strongly inhibits the breakdown of chlortoluron and isoproturon in wheat. Since ABT is known to act as a suicide substrate for plant cytochrome P-450, wheat enzymes involved in the metabolism of these two herbicides are likely to belong to this class. It thus appears that compounds designed to inhibit plant cytochrome P-450 enzymes may interact with herbicide metabolism and are potential synergists of herbicide activity.

Notes: Notes that, in a full-scale application of the Monte Carlo method for combined heat transfer analysis, problems usually arise from the large computing requirements. Here the method to overcome this difficulty is the parallel execution of the Monte Carlo method in a distributed computing environment. Addresses the problem of determination of the temperature field formed under the assumption of radiative equilibrium in an enclosure idealizing an industrial furnace. The medium contained in this enclosure absorbs, emits and scatters anisotropically thermal radiation. Discusses two topics in detail: first, the efficiency of the parallelization of the developed code, and second, the influence of the scattering behavior of the medium. The adopted parallelization method for the first topic is the decomposition of the statistical sample and its subsequent distribution among the available processors. The measured high efficiencies showed that this method is particularly suited to the target architecture of this study, which is a dedicated network of workstations supporting the message passing paradigm. For the second topic, the results showed that taking into account the isotropic scattering, as opposed to neglecting the scattering, has a pronounced impact on the temperature distribution inside the enclosure. In contrast, the consideration of the sharply forward scattering, that is characteristic of all the real combustion particles, leaves the predicted temperature field almost undistinguishable from the absorbing/emitting case.

Notes: Thermal flow sensors with a wide dynamic range are at present not available in spite of the large demand which exists for such sensors in practical fluid flow measurements. In this paper, it is shown that the velocity range of a "time-of-flight" thermal flowmeter for slowly changing flows can be increased by using wires (or other heating/sensing elements) with large thermal inertia (time constant) and heating the sending wire with a continuous sinusoidal current, instead of discrete, very short, square-wave pulses as in the usual pulsed-wire anemometer. The device described here uses two parallel wires of 12.5µm diameter and its usable speed range is 0.05 to 25m/s. Although the present thermal flowmeter can be applied as a point measurement device, the main applications are in pipe flow, especially at very low flow rates. The high sensitivity at low flow rates makes the device especially suitable for this purpose.