Cornell University Unit Name

Events, courses, reports, miscellany...

This page contains events of interest, as well as miscellaneous data, programs and reports written by Michel Louge.

As an example of application of granular materials, here is a movie showing an innovative process for producing ultra high strength concrete pipes.

Bill Nye's '77 Solar Noon Indicator over Rhodes Hall

Bill Nye "the Science Guy", Mechanical Engineering class of 1977, dedicated a unique clock that he donated to Cornell for the facade of Rhodes Hall at a ceremony on August 27, 2011. Beside simply telling the time of day, this clock illustrates the difference between legal and solar time by letting light illuminate a disk at the precise time when the sun culminates overhead. In memory of his parents, Bill Nye personally designed the clock and its light guide. See Bill Nye's lecture here.

In 2009-2011, Michel Louge led the group of students (Avraham Aisenberg, Erin Boschert, JB Rajsky, Steven Shine and Ian Werris) who designed the microcontroller that lets light through the Electric Time monumental clock. The microcontroller calibrates time with a GPS and opens a Solatube dimmer letting sky light shine at Solar Noon, per calculations in this worksheet.

Tamara Linsdtrom of YNN Ithaca/Cortland produced this piece on Bill Nye's creative project (August 24, 2011). Alyson Martin filed this report for the Ithaca Journal of August 24. Daniel Aloi wrote this article for the Cornell Chronicle. Channel 9 News in Syracuse posted this piece on its website. Byron Kittle, of the Cornell Daily Sun wrote this article on Bill's dedication. Joe Wilenski of the Cornell Chronicle reported dedication day in this pictorial article and posted a video of Bill Nye's visit.

   

   

      

    

         

From left to right and top to bottom: Bill Nye '77 "the Science Guy" personally directs tests of the Solatube system above the roof of Rhodes Hall on March 27, 2008. The Solar Noon controller team works with Bill on October 19, 2009, and later enjoys Chef Harold Evans' table at North Star.  Electric Time and Cornell Facilities raise the clock on August 3, 2011. The Solar Noon indicator is fully-operational on August 18, 2011.  Note the contrast between the indicator with closed dimmer valve (left) and open valve (right). JB Rajsky poses on the roof and near the clock. Michel Louge shows the Solatube Fresnel lens that collects ambient light for the clock face. He poses in front of the clock on August 19, 2011 at Solar Noon. Bottom: Bill Nye'77 shares details of his parents' WWII history in front of the display case in the Rhodes Hall lobby.

Solar energy

This workbook uses solar ephemeris to calculate the fraction of radiation collected by PV solar panels at a fixed orientation in 2014. For subsequent years, follow instructions therein after downloading the new ephemeris from http://navastro.com/downloads/catalogue.php, or look for updates on this page.

Combustion engines

This zipped document contains several Matlab and other files to implement simple models for Otto and Diesel engines. This worksheet contains a fit of the properties of water. Michel Louge currently serves as advisor to the Cornell Baja SAE team.

Dynamics of student-designed machines in MAE2250 "Mechanical Synthesis" at Cornell: Wind-pump and air cart


This file outlines the dynamics of wind pumps designed by sophomores in MAE 2250, see movie. This Matlab program implements the corresponding ODEs. These Matlab, PowerPoint and Excel files describe the dynamics of an aircart, see movie.


Position papers and presentations


This short paper on "The surprising relevance of a continuum description to granular clusters" in press for the "Focus on Fluids" section of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics discusses the significance of the article of Mitrano, P. P., Zenk, J., Benyahia, S., Galvin, J., Dahl, S. & Hrenya, C., Kinetic theory predictions of clustering instabilities in granular flows: beyond the small Knudsen regime. J. Fluid Mech. 738 (2014), R2. The abstract of this short review follows:

M.Y. Louge: The surprising relevance of a continuum description to granular clusters


Nature shuns homogeneity. In turbulent clouds, industrial reactors and geophysical flows, discrete particles arrange in clusters, posing difficult challenges to theory. A persistent question is whether clusters can be modeled with continuum equations. Recent evidence indicates that suitable equations can predict the formation of clusters in granular flows, despite violating the simplifying assumptions upon which they are based.





This 2003 position paper summarizes research challenges for gas-solid suspensions. It was written for a workshop organized by the US DOE at the University of Illinois in May 2002.

Requests for information were written for NASA in 2007 and 2008. This 2009 position paper to the decadal survey articulates the need for granular research for space exploration.


Michel Louge chaired the working group that submitted this report to the NSF under the auspices of the International Fine Particle Research Institute.

Link to Michel Louge's presentation to Cornell's Environmental Law Society Workshops Program entitled "Are Technological Solutions an Excuse for Inaction?" on September 30, 2010.


Patents


US patents 5459406 and 5546006 are licensed to Capacitec, Inc. Their practical use is to measure the density, velocity or other physical parameters affecting dielectric suspension properties (e.g., humidity) of granular suspensions. Their principal advantage is to possess a small measurement volume of know extent, and to be deployable through conductive walls held at the ground voltage. Applications have included catalytic cracking, lost-foam casting, stratigraphy of the snow pack, sand dunes, snow avalanches, etc.

Chemical kinetics

Michel Louge's PhD thesis "Shock Tube Study of Cyanide Species Kinetics and Spectrocopy" contains information on kinetics and spectroscopy of species involved in the fuel-nitrogen mechanism of nitric oxide formation. It also provides fortran source codes for the spectrocopy of CN and NCO molecules.


The shock tube of the High Temperature Gasdynamics Laboratory, picture taken circa 1981.


This zipped file contains FORTRAN source codes for calculating chemical kinetic mechanisms. Compile intp.f to create interactively subroutines containing the mechanism with rate constants contained in the file DABA.LIB. (This file should probably be updated with more recent rate constants...). Then, run the program kin.f with its subroutine created by intp.f.  Examples for CO and OH mechanisms are provided in two separate folders.

Louge, M.Y. and Hanson, R.K.:  “Shock Tube Study of NCO Kinetics,” Twentieth Symp. (Int.) on Combustion, The Combustion Institute (1984) pp. 665-672.

Louge, M.Y. and Hanson, R.K.:  “High Temperature Kinetics of NCO,” Combustion and Flame 58, 291 (1984).

Louge, M., Hanson, R., Rea, E., and Booman, R.:  “Quantitative High Temperature Absorption Spectroscopy of NCO at 305 and 440 nm,” J. Quant. Spectr. Radiat. Transfer 32, 353 (1984).

Louge, M.Y. and Hanson, R.K.:  “Shock Tube Study of Cyanogen Oxidation Kinetics,” Int. J. Chem. Kinet. 16, 231 (1984).

Roth, P., Louge, M.Y. and Hanson, R.K.:  “O- and N-Atom Measurements in High Temperature C2N2 + O Kinetics,” Combustion and Flame 64, 167 (1986).

Louge, M.Y. and Hanson, R.K.:  “Shock Tube Study of the High Temperature Absorption Spectroscopy of CH at 431 nm,” Shock Waves & Shock Tubes, Stan-ford Press, (1986) pp. 827-33.

Software bugs

This worksheet documents a bug in Excel involving order of operations.