Through its role in the energy and water balances at the land surface, soil moisture is a key state variable in surface hydrology and land-atmosphere interactions. Point observations of soil moisture are easy to make using established methods such as time domain reflectometry and gravimetric sampling. However, monitoring large-scale variability...
Enhanced pool boiling critical heat fluxes (CHF) at reduced wall superheat on nanostructured
substrates are reported. Nanostructured surfaces were realized using a low temperature process,
microreactor-assisted-nanomaterial-deposition. Using this technique we deposited ZnO nanostructures
on Al and Cu substrates. We observed pool boiling CHF of 82.5 W/cm2 with water as
fluid...
Engineered capillary barriers typically consist of two layers of granular materials designed so that the contrast in material hydraulic properties and sloping interface retain infiltrating water in the upper layer. We conducted two benchtop capillary barrier experiments, followed by interpretation and numerical modeling. The hydraulic parameters for two coarse materials...
There are several issues to be addressed concerning the management and effective use of information (or data), generated from nanotechnology studies in biomedical research and medicine. These data are large in volume, diverse in content, and are beset with gaps and ambiguities in the description and characterization of nanomaterials. In...
In lentic water bodies, such as lakes, the water temperature near the surface typically increases during the day, and decreases during the night as a consequence of the diurnal radiative forcing (solar and infrared radiation). These temperature variations penetrate vertically into the water, transported mainly by heat conduction enhanced by...
Hydrologic research is a very demanding application of fiber-optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS) in terms of precision, accuracy and calibration. The physics behind the most frequently used DTS instruments are considered as they apply to four calibration methods for single-ended DTS installations. The new methods presented are more accurate than...
Increase in energy demand has led towards considering lignocellulosic feedstocks as potential for ethanol production. Aim of this study was to estimate the potential of grass straws from conservation reserve program (CRP) lands as feedstocks for ethanol production. The CRP was initiated to ensure reduction in soil erosion with a...
Ecosystem services play a crucial role in sustaining human well-being and economic viability. People benefit substantially from the delivery of ecosystem services, for which substitutes usually are costly or unavailable. Climate change will substantially alter or eliminate certain ecosystem services in the future. To better understand the consequences of climate...
Cadmium sulfide (CdS) thin films are commonly used as buffer layers in thin film solar cells and can be produced by a number of solution and vacuum methods. We report the continuous solution deposition of CdS on fluorine-doped tin oxide coated glass substrates using Microreactor-Assisted Solution Deposition (MASD (TM)). A...
Ethanol from corn is produced using dry grind corn process in which simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) is one of the most critical unit operations. In this work an optimal controller based on a previously validated SSF model was developed by formulating the SSF process as a Bolza problem and...