Terraced areas have existed in Italy since ancient times, and they continue to be characteristic elements of the cultural identity of the country. The progressive abandonment of rural areas and farmland that began in the 1960s has led to the disintegration and disappearance of many terraces, representing one of the problems connected with the deterioration of the historic Tuscan agricultural la...

A simple mathematical model of an indirect-fired strip annealing furnace for real-time control and optimization purposes is developed. The considered furnace is part of a hot-dip galvanizing line and is used for continuous heat treatment of steel strips. The heat that is released during the combustion process inside the radiant tubes is calculated by means of steady-state mass and enthalpy bala...

In our installation at AB Sandvik Materials Technology, we have shown that by using a nondestructive UWB Radar technique it is possible to visualize in real-time the ongoing process inside the furnace behind a 0.5 m thick ceramic wall. Since the operating temperature inside the furnace is 1200 C, there is today no other known method capable of visualizing the process for the operator of the fu...

A mathematical heat transfer model for the prediction of transient heating of the slab in a direct-fired walking beam type reheating furnace has been developed by considering the nongray thermal radiation with given furnace environments. The furnace is modeled as radiating nongray medium with carbon dioxide and water with five-zoned gas temperature and the furnace wall is considered as a consta...

In this work, the effects of scale on thermal behavior of the slab in a walking-beam type reheating furnace is studied by considering scale formation and growth in a furnace environment. Also, mathematical heat transfer model to predict the thermal radiation in a complex shaped reheating furnace with slab and skid buttons is developed with combined nongray WSGGM and blocked-off solution procedu...

Ultra-thin lubricant films are essential in the design of nanoscale systems and devices as surface effects become increasingly important on the nanoscale. We have used molecular dynamics simulations to quantify terraced spreading of perfluoropolyether lubricant on a flat substrate as a function of polymer chain length, lubricant thickness, and functional end groups of the lubricant and the subs...

Human land use legacies have significant and long lasting impacts across landscapes. However, investigating the impacts of ancient land use legacies (>400 years) remains problematic due to the difficulty in detecting ancient land uses, especially those beneath dense canopies. The city of Caracol, one of the most important Maya archaeological sites in Belize, was abandoned after the collapse of ...

A circular crater, about 4 kilometers in diameter and located at 24.2 degrees N, 26.4 degrees E, was discovered in Landsat images among the linear dunes of the Great Sand Sea, Egypt. The crater has a sharp and crenulated rim crest, a terraced wall, a discontinuous inner structure (approximately 1.6 kilometers in diameter), and a few rim blocks. Its morphological and morphometric characteristics...

In order to discuss the matrix modifier effect of palladium, iron, and a mixture of palladium and iron for the determination of cadmium in graphite-furnace atomic absorption spectrometry (GF-AAS), we measured the absorption profiles of a cadmium line at various compositions of these elements. Variations in the gas temperature were also estimated with the progress of atomization, by using a two-...