We present a method for constructing blades of hydroelectric turbines and ship propellers based on design parameters that possess a clear hydraulic meaning. The design process corresponds to the classical construction of a blade using the medial surface of the blade and profile curves attached to it. The main new contribution of the paper consists in realizing this construction using B-spline t...

The surface molecular alignment in a sandwich cell showing V-shaped switching has been investigated using a photocontrolling method. The results indicate that the molecules on the rubbed surface are aligned parallel to the rubbing direction as in an open cell with an air–liquid crystal boundary. This alignment is due to strong in-plane anchoring, due to which the small twisted state appears alo...

An attractive way to model the relation between an underspecified syntactic representation and its completions is to let the underspecified representation correspond to a logical description and the completions to the models of that description. This approach, which underlies the Description Theory of (Marcus et al. 1983) has been integrated in (VijayShanker 1992) with a pure unification approa...

Accurate solar surface irradiance data is a prerequisite for an efficient planning and operation of solar energy systems. Further, it is essential for climate monitoring and analysis. Recently, the demand on information about spectrally resolved solar surface irradiance has grown. As surface measurements are rare, satellite derived information with high accuracy might fill this gap. This paper ...

Conventional speech communication systems do not perform well in the absence of an intelligible acoustic signal. Silent Speech Interfaces enable speech communication to take place with speech-handicapped users and in noisy environments. However, since no acoustic signal is available, information on nasality may be absent, which is an important and relevant characteristic of several languages, p...

Large interactive displays are increasingly being placed in work and public settings. An assumption is that the shared surface they provide can facilitate collaboration among co-located groups. An exploratory study was carried out to investigate this claim, and, in particular, to examine the effects of the physical orientation of a display on group working. Two conditions were compared: vertica...

Potential assessment has served various objectives in the development of renewable energies. However, the prospective nature of this type of assessment sometimes makes it difficult to evaluate and compare estimation results based on different data and modeling. To facilitate this comparison, uncertainty estimates need to be systematically provided. Since potential assessment sometimes relies on...

The magnetic properties of uncoated, epitaxial Tb(0001) films on W(110) substrates are studied using electron capture spectroscopy. The topmost layer orders ferromagnetically below a surface Curie temperature Tc. = 249.96 f 0.02 K, which lies above the bulk Curie and NCI temperatures Tcb=220 K and TNb = 228 K. Near Tcs, novel critical behavior is observed, suggesting the existence of strong sur...

we adapt the level-set method to simulate epitaxial growth of thin films on a surface that consists of different reconstruction domains. Both the island boundaries and the boundaries of the reconstruction domains are described by different level-set functions. A formalism of coupled level-set functions that describe entirely different physical properties is introduced, where the velocity of eac...