Modular risk modeling and management of water infrastructure disaster incidents

Water supply and wastewater control are critical elements of society's infrastructure. The objective of this study will be to provide a generic risk assessment tool to provide municipalities and the nation as a whole with a quantifiable assessment of their vulnerability to water infrastructure threats. The approach will prioritize countermeasures and identify where research and development is required to further minimize risk. This paper outlines the current context, primary concerns and state-of-the art in critical infrastructure risk management for the water sector and proposes a novel approach to resolve existing questions in the field. The proposed approach is based on a modular framework that derives a quantitative risk index for varied domains of interest. The approach methodology is scaleable and based on formal definitions of event probability and severity. The framework is equally applicable to natural and human-induced hazard types and can be used for analysis of compound risk events.

Improved jet noise modeling using a new time-scale.

To calculate the noise emanating from a turbulent flow using an acoustic analogy knowledge concerning the unsteady characteristics of the turbulence is required. Specifically, the form of the turbulent correlation tensor together with various time and length-scales are needed. However, if a Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stores calculation is used as the starting point then one can only obtain steady characteristics of the flow and it is necessary to model the unsteady behavior in some way. While there has been considerable attention given to the correct way to model the form of the correlation tensor less attention has been given to the underlying physics that dictate the proper choice of time-scale. In this paper the authors recognize that there are several time dependent processes occurring within a turbulent flow and propose a new way of obtaining the time-scale. Isothermal single-stream flow jets with Mach numbers 0.75 and 0.90 have been chosen for the present study. The Mani-Gliebe-Balsa-Khavaran method has been used for prediction of noise at different angles, and there is good agreement between the noise predictions and observations. Furthermore, the new time-scale has an inherent frequency dependency that arises naturally from the underlying physics, thus avoiding supplementary mathematical enhancements needed in previous modeling.

Fem modeling of periodic arrays of multi-walled carbon nanotubes

Multiwalled carbon nanotubes display dielectric properties similar to those of graphite, which can be calculated using the well known Drude-Lorentz model. However, most computational softwares lack the capacity to directly incorporate this model into the simulations. We present the finite element modeling of optical propagation through periodic arrays of multiwalled carbon nanotubes. The dielectric function of nanotubes was incorporated into the model by using polynomial curve fitting technique. The computational analysis revealed interesting metamaterial filtering effects displayed by the highly dense square lattice arrays of carbon nanotubes, having lattice constants of the order few hundred nanometers. The curve fitting results for the dielectric function can also be used for simulating other interesting optical applications based on nanotube arrays.

The Modeling of Ion Implantation in a Three-Layer Structure Using the Method of Dose Matching

The method of modeling ion implantation in a multilayer target using moments of a statistical distribution and numerical integration for dose calculation in each target layer is applied to the modelling of As⁺ in poly-Si/SiO2/Si. Good agreement with experiment is obtained. Copyright © 1985 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.