Optimization of ice cuttings transportation by cable-suspended core auger drills

Ice cores contain an abundance of information about the Earth''s climate in the past,and recovered from shallow drilling down to 300--350 m give sufficient information for reconstructing of the last climatic chan- ges and for monitoring of pollution from human being． Cable-suspended core auger drills use an armored cable with a winch to provide power to the down-hole motor system and to retrieve the down-hole unit． Because of their lightweight,convenient transportation and installation,high penetration rates and low power consumption, core auger drills are widely used for shallow drilling in ice． Nowadays at least 14 types of auger electromechani- cal drills were designed and tested in different foreign and national glaciological laboratories． However,auger options were usually determined by experience,and the main parameters (helix angle of the fights and rotational speed) are varied in a wide range from drill to drill． If parameters of auger are not chosen properly,poorly en- gineered drills had troubles with low efficiency of cuttings transportation,jam of ice cuttings,repeated fragmen- tation,cutters icing and stop penetration,abnormal power consumption,high rotation torques,and so on． Thus,this paper presents the method of optimization of ice cuttings transportation of cable-suspended core auger drill on the base of the theory of rotary auger． As the result,the optimal helix angle was determined correspond- ing to the rotational speed from the transportation efficiency point of view．     

Satellite image retrieval using low memory locality sensitive hashing in Euclidean space

This paper presents the use of the Low Memory Locality Sensitive Hashing (LMLSH) technique operating in Euclidean space to build a data structure for the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellite imagery database. The LMLSH technique finds satellite image matches in sublinear search time. The texture feature vectors of the images are extracted using pyramid-structured wavelet transform coupled with Gaussian central moment technique. These feature vectors and families of hash functions, drawn randomly and independently from a Gaussian distribution, are used to build hash tables. Given a query, the hash tables are used to pull out the best matches to that query and this is done in a sublinear search time complexity. When tested, our algorithm has proven to be approximately twenty six times faster than the Linear Search (LS) algorithm. In addition, the LMLSH algorithm searches about two percent of the entire database randomly to find the possible matches to any given query without loss of accuracy compared to the absolute best matches returned by its LS counterpart.     

Hydrogen penetration in water through porous medium: application to a radioactive waste storage site

Hydrogen penetration in water through porous medium was analyzed in the paper. A two-phase compositional model approach was considered. The first part of the work deals with the thermodynamic analysis of the hydrogen–water system. The thermodynamic model was calibrated using the experimental data of hydrogen solubility in water. The phase densities, viscosities and phase concentrations were presented in an analytical form. Moreover, the domain of validity of analytical laws—such as Henry’s, Raoult’s and Kelvin’s laws—for the estimation of phase properties was presented for the analyzed system. The second part deals with two-phase hydrodynamic behaviors. An analytical solution for the non-compressible flow was constructed. In general case, the influence of relative permeabilities on the flow regimes was analyzed numerically. The notion pseudo-saturation was introduced to define phase appearance. Actually, mobile gas created a time displaced front relatively slower than mobile gas flow. Diffusion becomes really important for low mobile gas case as the penetration accelerates for the large range of saturation. In contrast, the mass exchange phenomena have a small influence on the flow type. Thus, the regimes of hydrogen penetration in liquid were shown really sensitive to the relative permeability form.     

The Soviet ASTRON mission: legacy

2013 marks the 30th anniversary since the launch of Soviet Spacecraft Astron that had been operated for 6 years as the largest ultraviolet telescope during its lifetime. The Astron orbital station was designed for the astrophysical observations. It was launched into orbit by Proton launch system on March 23, 1983. Astron had a 80 cm ultraviolet telescope with mass of 400 kg and a complex of X-ray spectrographs with mass of 300 kg on board as a payload. It’s high apogee orbit (with apogee 200000 km and perigee 2000 km) permitted the influences of the Earth’s umbra and radiation belts to be excluded from the measurements. The main astrophysical results are summarized in this paper.     

The condensation origin of zoned metal grains in Queen Alexandra Range 94411: Implications for the formation of the Bencubbin‐like chondrites

Abstract— Thermodynamic analysis of the compositional profiles across large chemically‐zoned Fe, Ni metal grains in the Bencubbin‐like chondrite Queen Alexandra Range (QUE) 94411 suggests that these grains formed by non‐equilibrium gas‐solid condensation under variable oxidizing conditions, isolation degree, and Cr depletion factors. The oxidizing conditions must have resulted from the complete vaporization of nebular regions with enhanced dust/gas ratios (～ 10–40 × solar). Because the origin of each of the metal grains studied requires different condensation parameters (dust/gas ratio, isolation degree, and Cr depletion factor), a high degree of heterogeneity in the formation region of the Bencubbin‐like chondrite metal is required. To preserve compositional zoning of the metal grains and prevent their melting and sulfidization, the grains must have been removed from the hot condensation region into cold regions where the accretion of the Bencubbin‐like asteroidal body took place.     

Paleomagnetic constraints on the paleogeography and oroclinal bending of the Devonian volcanic arc in Kazakhstan

Numerical modelling, incorporating coupling between surface processes and induced flow in the lower continental crust, is used to address the Quaternary evolution of the Gulf of Corinth region in central Greece. The post-Early Pleistocene marine depocentre beneath this Gulf overlies the northern margin of an older (Early Pleistocene and earlier) lacustrine basin, the Proto Gulf of Corinth Basin or PGCB. In the late Early Pleistocene, relief in this region was minimal but, subsequently, dramatic relief has developed, involving the creation of  900 m of bathymetry within the Gulf and the uplift by many hundreds of metres of the part of the PGCB, south of the modern Gulf, which forms the Gulf's main sediment supply. It is assumed that, as a result of climate change around 0.9 Ma, erosion of this sediment source region and re-deposition of this material within the Gulf began, both processes occurring at spatial average rates of  0.2 mm a^− 1. Modelling of the resulting isostatic response indicates that the local effective viscosity of the lower crust is  4 × 10¹⁹ Pa s, indicating a Moho temperature of  560 °C. It predicts that the  10 mm a^− 1 of extension across this  70 km wide model region, at an extensional strain rate of  0.15 Ma^− 1, is partitioned with  3 mm a^− 1 across the sediment source,  2 mm a^− 1 across the depocentre, and  5 mm a^− 1 across the ‘hinge zone’ in between, the latter value being an estimate of the extension rate on normal faults forming the major topographic escarpment at the southern margin of the Gulf. This modelling confirms the view, suggested previously, that coupling between this depocentre and sediment source by lower-crustal flow can explain the dramatic development in local relief since the late Early Pleistocene. The effective viscosity of the lower crust in this region is not particularly low; the strong coupling interpreted between the sediment source and depocentre results instead from their close proximity. In detail, the effective viscosity of the lower crust is expected to decrease northward across this model region, due to the northward increase in exposure of the base of the continental lithosphere to the asthenosphere; in the south the two are separated by the subducting Hellenic slab. The isostatic consequences of such a lateral variation in viscosity provide a natural explanation for why, since  0.9 Ma, the modern Gulf has developed asymmetrically over the northern part of the PGCB, leaving the rest of the PGCB to act as its sediment source.     

Metal Speciation in Water of the Flooded Mine “Arsenic” (Karelia,Russia): Equilibrium-Kinetic Modeling with a Focus on the Influence of Humic Substances

Equilibrium-kinetic modeling allows investigating metal behavior in the water–rock-organic matter system with time to evaluate anthropogenic effects on the environment. In the article, the interactions of stagnant mine drainage water of the flooded mine “Arsenic” with ore and gangue minerals were simulated using different organic matter incorporation approaches. If the model is closed to humic substances (no additional organic matter input), most fulvic acids are bound in the Fe fulvate complex. While under the removal of Fe fulvate from the model, the Cu fulvate becomes prevalent, the contribution of the fulvate complexes with Zn, Mg, and Ca also increases. This scenario simulates the organo-mineral complexes behavior well and allows identifying the sequence of metal binding to organic ligands as follows Fe?>?Cu?>?Zn?>?Mg?>?Ca. The second scenario imitates the constant input of organic matter to the model (open system regarding humic substances). The dissolved metal concentrations in the model solution are extremely high in comparison to the mine drainage water. This scenario demonstrates that excessive input of organic matter leads to the accumulation of the metals in a dissolved form and blocks the secondary mineral formation despite the faster dissolution of the primary minerals under a more acidic pH than in the first scenario. However, despite the differences between the model solution and the mine drainage water, this scenario is useful to address specific issues associated with changes in natural and anthropogenic conditions. Both scenarios show the importance of organic matter incorporation to the equilibrium-kinetic models.

     

The water cycle in the general circulation model of the martian atmosphere

Within the numerical general-circulation model of the Martian atmosphere MAOAM (Martian Atmosphere: Observation and Modeling), we have developed the water cycle block, which is an essential component of modern general circulation models of the Martian atmosphere. The MAOAM model has a spectral dynamic core and successfully predicts the temperature regime on Mars through the use of physical parameterizations typical of both terrestrial and Martian models. We have achieved stable computation for three Martian years, while maintaining a conservative advection scheme taking into account the water–ice phase transitions, water exchange between the atmosphere and surface, and corrections for the vertical velocities of ice particles due to sedimentation. The studies show a strong dependence of the amount of water that is actively involved in the water cycle on the initial data, model temperatures, and the mechanism of water exchange between the atmosphere and the surface. The general pattern and seasonal asymmetry of the water cycle depends on the size of ice particles, the albedo, and the thermal inertia of the planet’s surface. One of the modeling tasks, which results from a comparison of the model data with those of the TES experiment on board Mars Global Surveyor, is the increase in the total mass of water vapor in the model in the aphelion season and decrease in the mass of water ice clouds at the poles. The surface evaporation scheme, which takes into account the turbulent rise of water vapor, on the one hand, leads to the most complete evaporation of ice from the surface in the summer season in the northern hemisphere and, on the other hand, supersaturates the atmosphere with ice due to the vigorous evaporation, which leads to worse consistency between the amount of the precipitated atmospheric ice and the experimental data. The full evaporation of ice from the surface increases the model sensitivity to the size of the polar cap; therefore, the increase in the latter leads to better results. The use of a more accurate dust scenario changes the model temperatures, which also strongly affects the water cycle.