The quantum dynamics of a two-state system coupled to a bosonic reservoir with sub-Ohmic spectral density is investigated for strong friction. Numerically exact path integral Monte Carlo methods reveal that a changeover from coherent to incoherent relaxation does not occur for a broad class of spectral distributions. In nonequilibrium coherences associated with substantial system-reservoir enta...

A prototype distillation and storage system with recycle for producing ultrapure water was monitored for bacteriological contamination during a period of 24 months. Naturally occurring Pseudomonas aeruginosa and P. cepacia were found to grow rapidly to levels of about 10(5)/ml in water taken from the storage reservoir and also in commercially prepared distilled water. The system was found to el...

This paper presents a solution to implement neutral argon plasma (NAP) in minimally invasive medical devices (MIMD) for therapy in endoscopy. The NAP system is composed by compressed inert gas (argon), two electrodes and a high-voltage source to ionize the argon. The miniaturization of an argon reservoir is required. The finite element method simulation of a small reservoir of 304 L stainless s...

The proposed approach combines the advantages of isogeometric analysis (IGA) and scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM). The IGA is employed for idealization of the dam structure, while SBIGA is developed for modeling the semi-infinite fluid domain of reservoir and unbounded elastic half-space of the dam foundation. Water compressibility, reservoir boundary wave absorption can be taken i...

We analyze some solvable models of a quantum mechanical system in interaction with a reservoir when the initial state is not factorized. We apply Nakajima– Zwanzig’s projection method by choosing a reference state of the reservoir endowed with the mixing property. In van Hove’s limit, the dynamics is described in terms of a master equation. We observe that Markovianity becomes a valid approxima...

A direct search approach to determine optimal reservoir operating is proposed with ant colony optimization for continuous domains (ACOR). The model is applied to a system of single reservoir to determine the optimum releases during 42 years of monthly steps. A disadvantage of ant colony based methods and the ACOR in particular, refers to great amount of computer run time consumption. In this st...

In this paper a metaheuristic technique called Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is proposed to derive operating policies for a multi-purpose reservoir system. Most of the real world problems often involve non-linear optimization in their solution with high dimensionality and large number of equality and inequality constraints. Often the conventional techniques fail to yield global optimal solution...