Single-element coaxial injector for rocket fuel

Improved injector for oxygen difluoride and diborane has better mixing characteristics and is able to project fuel onto the wall of the combustion chamber for better cooling. It produces an essentially conical, diverging, continuous sheet of propellant mixture formed by similarly shaped and continuously impinging sheets of fuel and oxidant

Coolidge solar powered irrigation pumping project

A 150 kW solar thermal electric power plant which includes over 2100 square meters of parabolic trough type collectors and an organic Rankine cycle turbine engine was constructed on an irrigated farm. The plant is interconnected with the electrical utility grid. Operation is providing an evaluation of equipment performance and operating and maintenance requirements as well as the desirability of an on farm location

The LISA Time-Delay Interferometry Zero-Signal Solution. I: Geometrical Properties

Time-Delay Interferometry (TDI) is the data processing technique needed for generating interferometric combinations of data measured by the multiple Doppler readouts available onboard the three LISA spacecraft. Within the space of all possible interferometric combinations TDI can generate, we have derived a specific combination that has zero-response to the gravitational wave signal, and called it the {\it Zero-Signal Solution} (ZSS). This is a two-parameter family of linear combinations of the generators of the TDI space, and its response to a gravitational wave becomes null when these two parameters coincide with the values of the angles of the source location in the sky. Remarkably, the ZSS does not rely on any assumptions about the gravitational waveform, and in fact it works for waveforms of any kind. Our approach is analogous to the data analysis method introduced by G\"ursel & Tinto in the context of networks of Earth-based, wide-band, interferometric gravitational wave detectors observing in coincidence a gravitational wave burst. The ZSS should be regarded as an application of the G\"ursel & Tinto method to the LISA data.Comment: 29 pages, 17 Figure

Science Icebreaker Activities: An Example from Gravitational Wave Astronomy

At the beginning of a class or meeting an icebreaker activity is often used to help loosen the group and get everyone talking. Our motivation is to develop activities that serve the purpose of an icebreaker, but are designed to enhance and supplement a science-oriented agenda. The subject of this article is an icebreaker activity related to gravitational wave astronomy. We first describe the unique gravitational wave signals from three distinct sources: monochromatic binaries, merging compact objects, and extreme mass ratio encounters. These signals form the basis of the activity where participants work to match an ideal gravitational wave signal with noisy detector output for each type of source.Comment: Accepted to The Physics Teacher. Original manuscript divided into two papers at the request of the referee. For a related paper on gravitational wave observatories see physics/050920

Hopf Algebras of Heap Ordered Trees and Permutations

It is known that there is a Hopf algebra structure on the vector space with basis all heap-ordered trees. We give a new bialgebra structure on the space with basis all permutations and show that there is a direct bialgebra isomorphism between the Hopf algebra of heap-ordered trees and the bialgebra of permutations.Comment: 10 pages LaTeX, minor revisio

Revealing black holes with Gaia

We estimate the population of black holes with luminous stellar companions (BH-LCs) in the Milky Way (MW) observable by Gaia. We evolve a realistic distribution of BH-LC progenitors from zero-age to the current epoch taking into account relevant physics, including binary stellar evolution, BH-formation physics, and star formation rate, to estimate the BH-LC population in the MW today. We predict that Gaia will discover between 3800 and 12,000 BH-LCs by the end of its 5 yr mission, depending on BH natal kick strength and observability constraints. We find that the overall yield, and distributions of eccentricities and masses of observed BH-LCs can provide important constraints on the strength of BH natal kicks. Gaia-detected BH-LCs are expected to have very different orbital properties compared to those detectable via radio, X-ray, or gravitational wave observations.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters; 8 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; Comments welcom