Optical long baseline intensity interferometry: prospects for stellar physics

More than sixty years after the first intensity correlation experiments by Hanbury Brown and Twiss, there is renewed interest for intensity interferometry techniques for high angular resolution studies of celestial sources. We report on a successful attempt to measure the bunching peak in the intensity correlation function for bright stellar sources with 1 meter telescopes (I2C project). We propose further improvements of our preliminary experiments of spatial interferometry between two 1 m telescopes, and discuss the possibility to export our method to existing large arrays of telescopes.     

Optimum design height of cofferdams

The cost of Cofferdams as a function of design height is described by a basic lot size model. The cost components include construction and flooding risk cost, the former increases while the latter decreases with design height. Using an exponential function for the expected number of floods, together with Poisson assumptions, an expression is derived for the probability of no flooding. From this expression a reliability chart is constructed that can be used to estimate the flooding risk for a given design height and period. By minimizing the cost objective function, a design chart is also presented giving optimum design height in terms of parameters such as: estimated daily flooding cost, construction cost per unit height, average flood duration, mean and variance of the hydrological data. Sensitivity of the solution to errors in estimating model parameters is discussed.     

Alternative approaches for analyses of a 100,000 m<Superscript>3</Superscript> rock slide based on Barton–Bandis shear strength criterion

A data set was derived for the Åknes rock slope, Norway, with the main focus on deriving input parameters for the Barton–Bandis shear strength criterion. Back-calculations of a 100,000 m³ rock slide were performed for evaluation of the data set. The limit equilibrium analysis showed that the joint roughness coefficient (JRC) has the greatest effect on the calculated safety factor of the slide. Probabilistic computations showed that the JRC stands out as the most important contributor to the total uncertainty over the whole set of variables and that the computed failure probability of the 1960 slide was very high, which may be interpreted that the input variables and the Barton–Bandis shear strength criterion are reasonable for the slide. JRC was measured on 0.25 m scale and on 1 m scale. The results from the two scales were different.