Focusing on community colleges in distressed rural areas of the United States, the Ford Foundation’s Rural Community College Initiative (RCCI) aims to help targeted community colleges expand their capacity to increase access to postsecondary education and to foster regional economic development. RCCI is geared to specific geographic regions where communities face out-migration and stagnant or d...

This paper presents a new predictive second order sliding controller (PSSC) formulation for setpoint tracking of constrained linear systems. The PSSC scheme is developed by combining the concepts of model predictive control (MPC) and second order discrete sliding mode control. In order to guarantee the feasibility of the PSSC during setpoint changes, a virtual reference variable is added to the...

in this paper, a numerical study is performed to provide the combustion and emission characteristics resulting from fuel-reactivity controlled compression ignition (rcci) combustion mode in a heavy-duty, single-cylinder diesel engine with gasoline and diesel fuels. in rcci strategy in-cylinder fuel blending is used to develop fuel reactivity gradients in the combustion chamber that result in a ...

In this paper, a numerical study is performed to provide the combustion and emission characteristics resulting from fuel-reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) combustion mode in a heavy-duty, single-cylinder diesel engine with gasoline and diesel fuels. In RCCI strategy in-cylinder fuel blending is used to develop fuel reactivity gradients in the combustion chamber that result in a ...

An experimental study has been conducted to provide insight into heat transfer to the piston of a light-duty single-cylinder research engine under Conventional Diesel (CDC), Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI), and Reactivity Controlled Compression Ignition (RCCI) combustion regimes. Two fast-response surface thermocouples embedded in the piston top measured transient temperature. A ...

In an era when global biodiversity is increasingly impacted by rapidly changing climate, efforts to conserve global biodiversity may be compromised if we do not consider the uneven distribution of climate-induced threats. Here, via a novel application of an aggregate Regional Climate Change Index (RCCI) that combines changes in mean annual temperature and precipitation with changes in their int...

Abstract This paper focuses on the stochastically exponential synchronization problem for one class of neural networks with time-varying delays (TDs) and Markov jump parameters (MJPs). To derive a tighter bound reciprocally convex quadratic terms, we provide an improved combination inequality (RCCI), which includes some existing ones as its particular cases. We construct eligible stochastic Lya...