Numerical simulation of a rotary engine primary compressor impacted by bird

In order to examine the process of a rotary engine primary compressor impacted by bird, a finite element model of a bird impacted on plate is developed with the explicit code PAM-CRASH. The smooth particles hydrodynamic (SPH) method is used to simulate the bird because of the SPH method showing no signs of instability and correctly modeling the breaking-up of the bird into particles. Good agreement between the simulation results and experimental results indicates that the numerical method of bird strike used in the present paper is reasonable. Then a rotary engine primary compressor impacted by three different configurations bird named straight-ended cylinder bird, quadrangular bird, hemispherical-ended bird are investigated using the numerical simulation method. It is found that the whole process of bird strike sustained about 3.5 ms and the bird is slashed by blade during the strike. The geometry configuration of bird affected the displacement and von Mises stress of some blades severely, just because the breaking bird’s mass is affected by the bird’s configuration. In the event of bird striking on the site of"up"some blades may develop plastic deformation and it is very adverse for the safety work of the engine.     

The Lunar Gravity Ranging System for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Mission

The Lunar Gravity Ranging System (LGRS) flying on NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission measures fluctuations in the separation between the two GRAIL orbiters with sensitivity below 0.6 microns/Hz^1/2. GRAIL adapts the mission design and instrumentation from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to a make a precise gravitational map of Earth’s Moon. Phase measurements of Ka-band carrier signals transmitted between spacecraft with line-of-sight separations between 50 km to 225 km provide the primary observable. Measurements of time offsets between the orbiters, frequency calibrations, and precise orbit determination provided by the Global Positioning System on GRACE are replaced by an S-band time-transfer cross link and Deep Space Network Doppler tracking of an X-band radioscience beacon and the spacecraft telecommunications link. Lack of an atmosphere at the Moon allows use of a single-frequency link and elimination of the accelerometer compared to the GRACE instrumentation. This paper describes the implementation, testing and performance of the instrument complement flown on the two GRAIL orbiters.     

Testing baseline stability of some neutron monitors in Europe,Africa, and Asia

For six decades, the global network of neutron monitors (NMs) has provided a continuous stream of very valuable data to the heliophysics community, leading to many insights into the myriad modes of charged particle transport in the tangled magnetic fields that permeate the 3D heliosphere. Earlier, Ahluwalia and Ygbuhay (2012) reported on the drifts in some high latitude NM counting rates in the American zone. We continue our enquiry by testing the stability of the counting rate baselines of some NMs operating in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The data from these detectors have been extremely valuable for the short-term time variation studies, but caution is advised in using the data for long-term studies from NMs with baselines that are drifting for cause(s) unknown.     

An ion analyzer for the lunar surface with E-parallel–B

We present a novel instrument concept to measure the energy and mass spectra of ions incident on the lunar surface, based on the E-parallel–B or Thomson-parabola device used extensively as a diagnostic in the plasma fusion community. The Apollo-era Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment (SIDE) was the first instrument package to perform in-situ measurements of ions incident on the lunar surface. The ions can originate from a variety of sources, including the solar wind, the Earth’s magnetotail, and photoionization of the thin lunar atmosphere. The species and energy distribution of ions arriving at the lunar surface depend in a complicated and poorly-understood fashion on the phase of the lunar day, the position of the Moon with respect to the Earth, and on the local plasma environment.     

Measurements of heat transfer and pressure in a trailing edge cavity of a turbine blade

 An experimental investigation is conducted to obtain the heat transfer and pressure drop data for an integral trailing edge cavity test section that simulates a novel turbine blade's internal cooling passage with bleed holes. Local heat transfer is measured on both the suction and pressure sides by a transient liquid crystal technique, while pressures at six positions are recorded by pressure calibrators. Moreover, flow characteristic and its effect on heat transfer are analyzed for conditions with or without bleed flow. The experimental results show that, in the cases with bleed flow, local heat transfer on the pressure side exceeds that on the suction side in the first and second channels. In the cases without bleed flow, in the first and third channels, local heat transfer on the suction side weakens whilst it increases significantly on the pressure side. For the second channel, non-bleed condition leads to a more balanced heat transfer distribution between the upstream and downstream channel. Besides, after the bleed holes are blocked, heat transfer in the first bend region on the suction side declines sharply, while the opposite phenomenon occurs for the second bend region on the pressure side. In both bleed and non-bleed cases, the total pressure of six measurement positions decreases continuously along the channel at the same Reynolds number and it promotes for higher Reynolds number. Among all the measurement points, under the same flow rate condition, the highest speed occurs at Position 5, which also shows the maximum difference between the total and static pressures. When the bleed holes are blocked, the total pressure at each measurement position appears to increase.     

Student and Teacher Attitudes towards the Role of the Mother Tongue in English Class: Report of a Questionnaire Study

This article presents the results of a questionnaire study on the role of the mother tongue in English class. The participants were 50 students and 10 teachers. The goal of the study was to investigate (1) the attitudes of both teachers and students towards the use of Chinese; (2) the actual and potential function of Chinese in English class. The results of this study indicate that Chinese was still quite extensively used in English class,that both the teachers and the students respond positively to a reaso...     

Analysis of nonstationary heating and cooling of a thermomagnetic engine gadolinium working element

The paper presents the results of calculating nonstatitionary heat exchange between a heattransfer agent (water) and a gadolinium working element of the thermomagnetic engine with the use of ANSYS 13.0 certified software. Recommendations for designing the thermomagnetic engine working elements are given based on the analysis of calculation results.     

Aircraft engine health management via stochastic modelling of flight data interrelations

A novel engine health management (EHM) scheme is introduced. It uses flight-level, instead of thermodynamic, data to cost-effectively augment the onboard EHM redundancy. For a nominal healthy aircraft, fault-sensitive interrelations among flight data are globally modelled inside a flight regime via Constant-Coefficient Pooled Nonlinear AutoRegressive with eXogenous (CCP-NARX) excitation representations. Single or sequential engine faults perturb these interrelations. Statistically evaluating the perturbation-induced effects draws reliable conclusions on the engine?s health. Validation and comparisons with Kalman filter-based alternatives are made throughout the regime under various operational conditions.     

Multi-objective Optimization Method for Automatic Drilling and Riveting Sequence Planning

 There are numerous riveting points on the large-sized aircraft panel, irregular row of riveting points on delta wing. It is es-sential to plan the riveting sequence reasonably to improve the efficiency and accuracy of automatic drilling and riveting. Therefore, this article presents a new multi-objective optimization method based on ant colony optimization (ACO). Multi-objective optimization model of automatic drilling and riveting sequence planning is built by expressing the efficiency and accuracy of riveting as functions of the points’ coordinates. In order to search the sequences efficiently and improve the quality of the sequences, a new local pheromone updating rule is applied when the ants search sequences. Pareto dominance is incorporated into the proposed ACO to find out the non-dominated sequences. This method is tested on a hyperbolicity panel model of ARJ21 and the result shows its feasibility and superiority compared with particle swarm optimization (PSO) and ge-netic algorithm (GA).