A focused electric spark is used as a non-contact acoustic source to excite stress waves in solids. The source consists of an electric spark source located at the near focus of an ellipsoidal reflector that focuses the acoustic disturbance generated by the spark source to the far focal point. Experimental studies using both contact and non-contact sensors indicate that the source has the capabi...

A ∂-analogue of differential characters for complex manifolds is introduced and studied using a new theory of homological spark complexes. Many essentially different spark complexes are shown to have isomorphic groups of spark classes. This has many consequences: It leads to an analytic representation of O-gerbes with connection, it yields a soft resolution of the sheaf O by currents on the man...

Spark timing of an Internal Combustion (IC) engine is often limited by engine knock in the advanced direction. The ability to operate the engine at its advanced (borderline knock) spark limit is the key for improving output power and fuel economy. Due to combustion cycle-to-cycle variations, IC engine combustion behaves similar to a random process and so does the engine performance criteria, su...

The spark timing plays a significant role in the combustion process and in deciding the engine parameters of SI engine. This paper aims at demonstrating the effect of advanced and retarded spark timing on the burn fraction variation versus crank angle, cumulative heat release rate versus the crank angle and the pressure variation as a function of crank angle with the help of MATLAB programs. Fo...

A ∂-analogue of differential characters for complex manifolds is introduced and studied using a new theory of homological spark complexes. Many essentially different spark complexes are shown to have isomorphic groups of spark classes. This has many consequences: It leads to an analytic representation of O ×-gerbes with connection, it yields a soft resolution of the sheaf O × by currents on the...

Calmodulin is a ubiquitous Ca2+ binding protein that binds to ryanodine rectors (RyR) and is thought to modulate its activity. Here we evaluated the effects of recombinant calmodulin on the rate of occurrence and spatial properties of Ca2+ sparks as an assay of activation in saponin-permeabilized mouse myofibers. Control myofibers exhibited a time-dependent increase and subsequent decrease in s...

A spark discharge is coupled to a laser multicharged ion source to enhance ion generation. The laser plasma triggers a spark discharge with electrodes located in front of the ablated target. For an aluminum target, the spark discharge results in significant enhancement in the generation of multicharged ions along with higher charge states than observed with the laser source alone. When a Nd:YAG...

In the electricity market, spark-spread options are increasingly used for hedging purposes and for valuing natural gas power plants. A spark-spread option gives the buyer the right but not the obligation to buy the price difference between electricity and natural gas adjusted for power plant efficiency. Pricing these options requires stochastic process models for the electricity price and the g...

In the context of deductive software verification, programs with pointers present a major challenge due to pointer aliasing. In this paper, we introduce pointers to SPARK, a well-defined subset of the Ada language, intended for formal verification of mission-critical software. Our solution is based on static alias analysis inspired by Rust's borrow-checker and affine types, and enforces the Con...