There can be only one!

Today was the last day at the ARI conference, and now it is time to turn the focus on regionals.  Preview writeup.  Who is our Ramier?.

Sectionals (Sunday 1-0)

Congratulations!  UT won over Georgia, securing the second or third seed at regionals.  It was a good game that came down to the wire, but we should have ended it 10-13, similar to the Tech game we let them back in it.  We need to make it a priority at Regionals to close teams out; with our numbers we cannot afford to play long games.

It also looks like Yuk made it to regionals as well, holding the third seed in their conference.

Sectionals (Saturday 3-0)

We came in as the third seed in our pool and finished the day undefeated, playing Georgia tomorrow for the 3rd seed at regionals.

First game was against some Arts School, we beat them 13-3 or so.  Notable bits where:

• Wholesaling every other points simply because we could - this was the first tournament since ACC that we had enough players.
• Blake (freshman, kinda (very) redneck) getting beat by a girl; followed by Phil yelling on the field "Your Daddy won't have been beaten". (Previously at Freaknit he was injured, got drunk on the sideline and told us all about his Daddy.  Blake said a Freaknit "My Daddy ain't no p___y, he drinks Bud straight from the can").

Second game was against Georgia Tech, 13-11ish.   Both teams played very well, and while it got a little chippy I don't think it became un-spirted (both teams each had two questionable calls). We went down a break early, got it back, and were leading by 2-3 breaks at half.  After half we got a few more (score at one point was 6-10), then Tech rallied before we closed it out.  Notable bits where:

• Matt Radcliff shutting down Nick Lance, one of Tech's best players.  Matt put on a clinic of excellent man defense.
• I got a D by field awareness, Trey had 4 Ds in one point (I was on that point, it was long, our handlers kept on forcing shots in the wind), and Tennessee playing the best D I have seen all year (like the Wilmington game, but better).  I think Pirckle and Phil had a nice D as well, along with others that I don't remember.
• Mustache Cup.  We took those handlers for a ride.
• Winning.

Third game was against Kennesaw State, who has a giant person aptly named Tree.  This game was closer than it should have been (we ended up winning on Universe point starting on D).  Nothing really notable about this game; we didn't play like we played during the Tech game, but I don't think at any time we were scared of losing.  Maybe that confidence is what made that game so close to start with.

Side Note:

Yuk went 3-1 today, with a 7-11 loss to PSU and another win over Shippensburg.  Shame that their conference gets 5 bids for 7 teams, I would have loved in Yuk shut Shippensburg out of regionals.

Sectionals

Currently the top dog in our pool is Georgia Tech, who we play second.  I got new cleats, watched lots of Bro Tips, learned the proper technique for wearing my hat backwards, and drank a shower beer.  It's go time!

Albedo of the Earth

For my climate model I tried to make it more realistic by having the earth's albedo depend on the terrestial area.  I took an image of the earth from NASA (left) and then did some image processing on it in Matlab.

Progam Constants

These values were chosen aribtiarly (within reason)

landAlbedo = 0.15;
waterAlbedo = 0.23;
iceAlbedo = 0.6;

Read in the image

close all;
earth = imread('land_ocean_ice_2048.jpg');
imshow(earth);

Seperating into RGB Values

r = earth(:,:,1);
g = earth(:,:,2);
b = earth(:,:,3);

Extracting logical arrays for earth, water, and ice

% Water
waterThreshold = 0.999;
water = b-g-r>waterThreshold;


% Ice
iceThreshold = 180;
ice = r > iceThreshold & g > iceThreshold & b > iceThreshold+10;

Ice Area - Couldn't figure out how to apply a line border.
% Land
land = ~ice & ~water;

% Fixing up the land - adding a little bit of the area to the water
[m n] = size(land);
w2 = logical(zeros(m,n));
w2(850:890,:) = land(850:890,:);
water = water + w2;

land = ~ice & ~water;

 

Calculating the Albedo

albedo = iceAlbedo*ice+waterAlbedo*water + landAlbedo*land;
albedo = flipud(albedo);
avgAlbedo = mean(mean(albedo));
fprintf('The average albedo is %f\n',avgAlbedo);
contourf(albedo,'DisplayName','albedo')

The average albedo is 0.299076

I think that it is a neat little application of image processing.  Actually not too far off, I found a reported value for the average albedo to be 0.297 +- 0.005.

Imature Note: See the boobs in Asia?

Calculating the climate variation

for n=1:length(t);       % Need to loop through all times
    for i=1:m
        for j=1:p
            % [T t c] =  radiativeForcingModel(t,c,albedo)
            T(i,j,n) = radiativeForcingModel(c(n),c(1),albedo(i,j));
        end
    end


    % Applying the conduction conduction
    offset = 20;
    for i=1+offset:m-offset;     % Y Values
        for j=1:p;               % X values
            average = 0;
            for itter=-offset:offset;
                % Skipping the node it is on
                if (itter ==0)
                    continue;
                else
                    average = average+T(i+itter,j,n)+T(i,mod(j+itter,p)+1,n);
                end
            end
            T(i,j,n) = average/(offset*4);
        end
    end

end

Current Temperature Distribution from Model (K)

The reason why I used an average value for the temperature is that heat conduction ($$0=k\nalba ^2 T$$) requires the second spatial derivative to be zero, and this happens if the first derivative is a constant (average value) - I thought of this all by myself!  It also implies that there cannot be any local extruma, but heat conduction on a global scale is limited by time, so local extrama are allowed.  That is my offset value in the code - I use an average of the 20 nearest cells.

For the x direction I even made it wrap around to connect.  I didn't do this for the poles though, as the projection gets confusing.

My Model Prediction Change (C)

The difference in temperatures (comparing the 50 year model to the current model) is below. Compared to one done by Idaho National Lab I don't think that I am too far off.

Idaho National Lab Prediction

Helpful Errors

This is one of the most unhelpful errors I have seen:

Look Alikes

Hey look, I can throw a flick!

Actually, that's not me. It's my look alike, Richey.

I have no idea what is going on in this picture.

In any case, I am really looking forward to sectionals and regionals and beating Florida for the one bid to nationals.  It is about the ride now!

ANS Conference (Sunday)

I said y'all last night.  For shame, for shame!

A large amount of time was spent on Sunday on Fukushima.  I don't know how I feel about that - I feel that the more time the nuclear community spends on it gives the impression that the event was more serious than it is.  Kinda like how brooding on something makes it appear worse.  (Not saying that it wasn't serious and what not).

Some interesting tidbits of information:

• The terabequral exists! (A bequerel is a decay / sec, but I have never heard anybody use the 'tera' prefix in science without talking about floating point operations.
• A guide to the crisis level.  I still think this is a lot like the terror alert system.
• A short quiz on 'clean' energy from AREVA (I am think about working for them next summer between my masters and Ph.D.)  The quiz itself is kinda dumb, but the high score names are funny - they are names of reactor designs and famous reactors.

Hydrogen Production!

I pretty much stole the chart from Yildiz, Kazimi 2006.  I don't know much about the benefits of hydrogen fuel cells over better batteries, but I like the idea of developing new types of reactor.  You can read the paper for more details on each method.  I included Steam Methane reforming as an option because they did (and it is the most common commercial method), but as it uses methane and produces carbon dioxide I don't think that it will be a good hydrogen production method in the long run.  Of the reactor designs I like the LMFR (liquid metal fast reactors) the best because they close the fuel cycle and I think have the best passive safety because of their pool type design. They have been built before - The Russians use them on their Alpha Class submarines.

Pool Type Design (Pool provides a large heat sink)
The Soviets used a molten lead fuel for the Alpha Subs, while the above is Sodium

On an unrelated note, some poor bloke at Syracuse has the user ID 867-5309.  You can use it to get a copy of Office 2010. Try it - I tried it as a joke (long story) and was amazed.

ANS Conference (Saturday)

Our sectionals got cancelled this weekend so I decided to go with some friends to the American Nuclear Society student conference at Georgia Tech.  Got there late last night and then burned by hand pouring water on alka-seltzer.  (It fizzed over - don't understand why - I didn't put that much water in.  I wonder how quickly the reaction rate depends on temperature - looking into it).

We went to a few presentations, and looked at some student posters.  One presentation was really interesting - it was on a hydrogen based economy with nuclear reactors for process heat.

Tonight we are seeing what East Atlanta has to offer!

Advection Diffusion Modeling

It has been done before, but below is an advection - diffusion solver I had to write.

The movie below shows an unphysical advection case - the concentration depended on nodes where the fluid hadn't gotten to yet (can be thought of outside the light cone of the point).  I found it really interesting how the solution blew up.

More on the Above:
Advection-Diffusion is modeled by:
$$\rho\left ( \frac{\partial C}{\partial t}+v \frac{\partial C}{\partial x}  \right ) - D\frac{\partial ^2 C}{\partial x^2 } =0 $$
I originally used the following stencils for the time and first spatial derivative (advection part).
$$ \frac{\mathrm{d} }{\mathrm{d} x} f(x)\approx \frac{1}{h}\left ( f(x+h) - f(x) \right )+O(h) $$
$$ \frac{\mathrm{d} }{\mathrm{d} x} f(x)\approx \frac{1}{2h}\left ( f(x+h) - f(x-h) \right )+O(h^2) $$
Gaining the higher order in the second stencil made it depend of f(x-h), which in the case of advection was on the wrong side of the wave, and where the unphysical assumption came in.

Just a neat little example of needing to think about the physics of the problem in modeling.

Steam Generator Acoustic NDE

Some preliminary results from the steam generator acoustic non-destruction evaluation.*  In the below charts, the difference between the original pipe and that pipe with the noted defects are plotted.

Crack Defect

Hole Defect

We have proven that there is significant difference in the frequency response, and that a hole causes a noisy spectrum than a crack. The axial crack was quite long; it was a hack saw cut into the pipe, and for a real steam generator if you had a 5/64" hole in your steam generator there would be a huge problem - radioactive water would be mixing with the turbine steam.

*The idea is to detect defects in a steam generator by essential vibrating the entire structure. The principle is that if you ding a pipe with a long crack compared to one without you can hear the difference.

Silly Graphs

Now this is a silly chart:


While we are on charts:

The obvious trend is that a teams performance is strongly linked to the number of players - this, of course, is false and negative. Time to look at positive events. Coincidence that the highest RRI occurred on my birthday?

Nope, look: -there is a strong correlation between the number of birthday boys on the team and the RRI.

(Alright, I admit it, I am very frustrated with ultimate right now. I learned that our remaining captain is probably out for the series (due to being ineligible with the registrar) this afternoon.)

Freaknik and Series Update

Last weekend Agent Orange attended Freaknik; a small tournament outside of Atlanta. Notable bits are winning the tournament with11 players, having catfish for the first time, and being known as Tennessee Ultimate by an injured player, Blake, being drunk on the sideline.

Going into the series, however, Tennessee will be seeded last in our conference because Phil, our captain,  wasn't UPA certified - is wasn't his fault though.  To top it off, we will be making our nationals run with about 14 people on the team.  Turns out that some of our top seniors stopped practicing and playing because they didn't believe we will make nationals.

At least I can make regionals now.  I thought the ARI conference extended into the weekend - it doesn't so now I only have a 16 hour car trip from DC to Tallahassee.  Looking forward to being in Florida for the first time, hopefully I will find an alligator to wrassle.

Body Browser

This is really, really, really, really cool: http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com.  Cool enough to get four really's.  You can click on parts to get there name (in pin mode), or you search for items.

Two Phase Diagram - Antifreeze

Every winter we winterize the sprayers by pumping antifreeze through it. We have always used straight antifreeze (more is better philosophy) but if you look at the phase diagrams below, you see that straight antifreeze has a higher melting temperature by 22 C for ethylene glycol, and 5 C for propylene glycol, compared to the 65% or 60% ratio.

April 1st, 2011

Well, the journey ends here.  I dropped out of UTNE; April and I are eloping  - my destiny lies elsewhere.  Tonight I plan to put all of my things in storage, drive west until I find real mountains and become a mountain man.

Good Night and Good Luck!