Truncation of the Secondary Concentrator (CPC) as Means to Cost Effective Beam-Down System

2010 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Akiba Segal ◽  
Michael Epstein

A central solar plant based on beam-down optics is composed of a field of heliostats, a tower reflector (hyperboloid mirror), and a ground receiver interfaced at its aperture with one or a cluster of secondary concentrators (compound parabolic concentrator). In previous publications, a method was presented, illustrating the correlation between the tower reflector position and its size on one hand and the geometry, dimensions, and reflective area of the secondary concentrator on the other hand, both related to the heliostat field reflective area. Obviously, when one wishes to reduce the size of a tower reflector by locating it closer to the upper focal point, the image created at the lower focus will be broader, resulting in a larger secondary ground concentrator. The present paper describes a method for substantial decrease in the dimensions of the ground secondary concentrator cluster (and, implicitly, the concentrator's area) via truncation and some geometrical corrections without significant sacrifice of the optical performance. This offers a method for cost effective design of future central solar plants, utilizing the beam-down optics.

Author(s):  
Akiba Segal ◽  
Michael Epstein

A central solar plant based on beam-down optics is composed of a field of heliostats, a tower reflector (hyperboloid mirror) and a ground receiver interfaced at its aperture with one or a cluster of secondary concentrators (CPC). In previous publications a method was presented illustrating the correlation between the tower reflector position and its size on one hand and the geometry, dimensions and reflective area of the secondary concentrator on the other hand, both related to the heliostat field reflective area. Obviously, when one wishes to reduce the size of a tower reflector by locating it closer to the upper focal point, the image created at the lower focus will be broader, resulting in a larger secondary ground concentrator. The present paper describes a method for substantial decrease of the dimensions of the ground secondary concentrator cluster (and, implicitly, the concentrator’s area) via truncation and some geometrical corrections without significant sacrifice of the optical performance. This offers a method for cost effective design of future central solar plants utilizing the beam-down optics.


1974 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Klenbort ◽  
Moshe Anisfeld

The subjects were presented with active and passive sentences. For each sentence, they had to choose between two alternative implications. The pattern of choices indicates that in the passive the logical subject was interpreted by the subjects as the focal point of the information asserted by the sentence and as the carrier of overall responsibility for the sentential proposition. In contrast to the passive, there was no clear pattern of preferences for the active. The difference between the two voices was attributed to their markedness asymmetry, the passive being marked and the active unmarked. It is concluded that the active offers a neutral structure for conveying information; a structure available for use when one does not want to superimpose on the information content any stylistic or connotational implications. The passive, on the other hand, suggests special connotations in addition to the basic message.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Roger Andre Søraa ◽  
Håkon Fyhn

Sustainability has become a critical issue, calling for new conceptualizations of both problems and solutions. This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies,  explore the concept of “Crafting Sustainability”. Sustainability is a hot topic in contemporary scholarly debates, with methodological, theoretical, and conceptual contributions from a wide array of research areas, also from Science and Technology Studies. Craft on the other hand has been less of a focal point, although all humans relate to craft on some level.


1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-258
Author(s):  
J. W. Hofmeyr

A consultation amongst consultations: The historical context of the Cottesloe Church Consultation reconsidered At the time of writing it happens to be thirty years since the well known Cottesloe Church Consultation took place. On the other hand the November 1990 consultation of a wide variety of South African churches appears strongly in the focal point. In this article the socio-political, ecclesiastical and theological context of the Cottesloe Consultation is reconsidered. Finally some conclusions are drawn as regards the relevance of the Cottesloe Consultation for our times.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-329
Author(s):  
Farzana Islam ◽  
Homaira Prithul

A year-round survey on the abundance of mosquito larvae was conducted at Jagannath University - and Dhaka University - Campus from October 2018 to September 2019. A number of total 4415 mosquito larvae were collected of which 3086 were identified as Culex and 1329 were Aedes. Only 3 species belonging to 2 genera were identified in this study. At Jagannath University campus, highest number of Culex larvae was recorded in the month of August which was 167 (10.9%) and the lowest number was recorded in February which was 66 (4.3%), on the other hand, highest number of Aedes larvae was recorded in the month of July which was 137 (23.8%) and the lowest number was found in December which was 9 (1.6%). At Dhaka University campus, the highest number of Culex larvae was found in the month of April, which was 179 (11.5%) and the lowest number was found in June, which was 66 (4.3%), on the other hand, the highest number of Aedes larvae was found in the month of June which was 200 (26.5%) and lowest number was found in February which was 8 (1.06%). This study could be helpful in launching larvicidal programs in a more cost-effective way at these two urban public universities of Dhaka city. Bangladesh J. Zool. 49 (2): 321-329, 2021


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Aaron S. Gross

On the one hand, this book about Jewish traditions and food functions as the focal point for examining different forms of Judaism. On the other hand, this book is also a study of what we might call the religious dimensions of food and the case of Judaism serves as an exemplum. The introduction considers the advantages of understanding a religion through the detour of food and asks what counts as “Jewish food.” It argues that food in general provides a wieldy symbolic field that is called upon to construct sex and gender, social status, and race and to distinguish humans from other animals. Religion and food are always intermixed, and examining this intermixture in Judaism can provide some insights into a more-or-less universal human process of making meaning. Insights from Jewish scholars of food or food studies, including Warren Belasco, Noah Yuval Harari, Sidney Mintz, and Marion Nestle, are engaged.


2003 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajay Bakshi ◽  
Rana Patir ◽  
Asha Bakshi ◽  
Ajit Kumar Banerji

✓ The authors combined a monopolar electrode and a suction/irrigation channel with a 0°, 4-mm Hopkins rigid telescope into a single multifunctional unit. This three-in-one instrument is inserted through a lightweight 7.5-mm outer sheath, which is fixed separately. A fourth instrument (for example, a balloon catheter or a biopsy forceps) can be introduced and manipulated independently with the other hand. All endoscopic procedures were performed with a trephine to create a 15-mm craniotomy. After opening the dura mater, ventricles were tapped with a brain needle, which was followed by the insertion of the rigid scope for visualization. The telescope was then withdrawn momentarily; the outer sheath was introduced into the ventricle and fixed over the area of interest. The definitive procedure was then performed with ease by using the multifunctional three-inone instrument in one hand and a fourth instrument in the other hand. This novel neuroendoscopic system has been used in clinical testing at the Vidyasagar Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences since May 1998. Thus far, 83 neuroendoscopic procedures have been successfully performed with the aid of this instrumentation system, which has proven to be safe, versatile, and cost-effective, allowing a greater degree of freedom for the neurosurgeon.


2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 238-242
Author(s):  
Natasa Bogavac-Stanojevic ◽  
Zorana Jelic-Ivanovic

SummaryLaboratory testing as a part of laboratoryin vitrodiagnostic (IVD) has become required tool in clinical practice for diagnosing, monitoring and prognosis of diseases, as well as for prediction of treatment response. The number of IVD tests available in laboratory practice has increased over the past decades and is likely to further increase in the future. Consequently, there is growing concern about the overutilization of laboratory tests and rising costs for laboratory testing. It is estimated that IVD accounts for between 1.4 and 2.3% of total healthcare expenditure and less than 5% of total hospital cost (Lewin Group report). These costs are rather low when compared to pharmaceuticals and medical aids which account for 15 and 5%, respectively. On the other hand, IVD tests play an important role in clinical practice, as they influence from 60% to 70% of clinical decision-making. Unfortunately, constant increases in healthcare spending are not directly related to healthcare benefit. Since healthcare resources are limited, health payers are interested whether the benefits of IVD tests are actually worth their cost. Many articles have introduced frameworks to assess the economic value of IVD tests. The most appropriate tool for quantitative assessment of their economic value is cost-effectiveness (CEA) and cost-utility (CUA) analysis. The both analysis determine cost in terms of effectiveness or utilities (combine quantity and quality of life) of new laboratory test against its alternative. On the other hand, some investigators recommended calculation of laboratory test value as product of two ratios: Laboratory test value = (Technical accuracy/Turnaround time) × (Utility/Costs). Recently, some researches used multicriteria decision analysis which allows comparison of diagnostic strategies in terms of benefits, opportunities, costs and risks. All analyses are constructed to identify laboratory test that produce the greatest healthcare benefit with the resources available. Without solid evidence that certain laboratory tests are cost-effective, laboratory services cannot be improved. Consequently, simple policy measures such as cost cutting may be imposed upon many laboratories while patients will have limited access to laboratory service.


2022 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Shulin Zeng ◽  
Guohao Dai ◽  
Hanbo Sun ◽  
Jun Liu ◽  
Shiyao Li ◽  
...  

INFerence-as-a-Service (INFaaS) has become a primary workload in the cloud. However, existing FPGA-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) accelerators are mainly optimized for the fastest speed of a single task, while the multi-tenancy of INFaaS has not been explored yet. As the demand for INFaaS keeps growing, simply increasing the number of FPGA-based DNN accelerators is not cost-effective, while merely sharing these single-task optimized DNN accelerators in a time-division multiplexing way could lead to poor isolation and high-performance loss for INFaaS. On the other hand, current cloud-based DNN accelerators have excessive compilation overhead, especially when scaling out to multi-FPGA systems for multi-tenant sharing, leading to unacceptable compilation costs for both offline deployment and online reconfiguration. Therefore, it is far from providing efficient and flexible FPGA virtualization for public and private cloud scenarios. Aiming to solve these problems, we propose a unified virtualization framework for general-purpose deep neural networks in the cloud, enabling multi-tenant sharing for both the Convolution Neural Network (CNN), and the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) accelerators on a single FPGA. The isolation is enabled by introducing a two-level instruction dispatch module and a multi-core based hardware resources pool. Such designs provide isolated and runtime-programmable hardware resources, which further leads to performance isolation for multi-tenant sharing. On the other hand, to overcome the heavy re-compilation overheads, a tiling-based instruction frame package design and a two-stage static-dynamic compilation, are proposed. Only the lightweight runtime information is re-compiled with ∼1 ms overhead, thus guaranteeing the private cloud’s performance. Finally, the extensive experimental results show that the proposed virtualized solutions achieve up to 3.12× and 6.18× higher throughput in the private cloud compared with the static CNN and RNN baseline designs, respectively.


Author(s):  
Begoña Simal González

The article addresses the nomadic nature of Filipino American social reality and how that is conveyed through a literature imbued with a peculiarly Filipino mexilic sensibilityn. The literary texts chosen to illustrate this hypothesis are Bienvenido Santosrs What The Hell For You Left Your Heart In San Francisco (1987), as well as several short stories: N.V.M. Gonzálezrs mThe Tomato Gamen (1993), Bienvenido Santosrs mImmigration Bluesn (1979), Linda Ty-Casperrs mHills, Sky, Longingn (1990), and Jessica Hagedornrs mThe Blossoming of Bong Bongn (1990). The fiction of Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. González, and Ty-Casper, portray the nostalgia for an idealized homeland, especially through the oldtimersr and old peoplers perspective. Both Santos and González also tackle the question of green-card marriages between young Filipinas and oldtimers. On the other hand, Hagedornrs story and Santosrs novel choose a young immigrant as the focal point who does not echo the eldersr feeling of homesickness, displacement and exile.


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