Das hier beschriebene Projekt wurde aus der Taufe gehoben, um eine einfache Frage zu beantworten: Wieso hat der Buckelwal Buckel an seinen Brustflossen?
Auf unserem "Titel-Foto" ist die Brustflosse (Biologen sprechen vom Flipper) des Wals gut zu erkennen. Besonders auffällig sind die ausgeprägten Knubbel (sogen. Tuberkel) an der Vorderkante der Flosse. Diese Tuberkel finden sich ausschließlich bei Buckelwalen; sie sind, genau wie die extreme Länge dieser Flossen einzigartig und charakteristisch für diese Walart. Es liegt die Vermutung nahe, daß die Natur die Gattung megaptera nicht ohne guten Grund mit dieser Besonderheit versehen hat.
Im Gegensatz zur Schwanzfosse (Fluke) enthält die Brustflosse übrigens Knochen, genau wie ein menschlicher Arm und scheint ähnlich beweglich und flexibel zu sein.
Der Buckelwal ist trotz seiner Größe (10-15 m, 25-45 t) ein sehr wendiger und agiler Schwimmer. Ermöglicht wird dies u. a. durch die im Verhältnis zum Rest des Körpers sehr langen Brustflossen. Dank ihrer ausgefeilten hydrodynamischen Auslegung gestatten sie dem Buckelwal Manöver, zu denen andere, ähnlich große Walarten nicht in der Lage sind. Der Gedanke liegt nahe, daß die Tuberkel an den Flossen ein wesentlicher Grund für ihre strömungmechanische Qualität sind. Zudem ist der Buckelwal ein hinsichtlich Strömungsverlusten durchoptimierter Schwimmer, denn anders wären ihm lange Wanderungen durch die Weltmeere ohne Nahrungsaufnahme nicht möglich.
Advances in the understanding of heat transfer and fluid flow continue to be crucial in achieving improved performance and efficiency in a broad range of mechanical and process plants. The International Journal of Heat and Fluid Flow welcomes high-quality original contributions on experimental, computational, and physical aspects of convective heat transfer and fluid dynamics relevant to engineering or the environment, including multiphase and microscale flows.
Papers reporting the application of these disciplines to design and development, with emphasis on new technological fields, are also welcomed. Some of these new fields include microscale electronic and mechanical systems; medical and biological systems; and thermal and flow control in both the internal and external environment.
The International Journal of Multiphase Flow publishes theoretical and experimental investigations of multiphase flow which are of relevance and permanent interest.Topics appropriate to the journal include fluid mechanics and rheological studies of problems involving:
• multiphase flow and heat transfer
• cavitation phenomena
• slurries (such as ceramics, catalysts, filled polymers, etc.)
• suspensions
• particle-flow interactions
• bubble and drop dynamics
• fluidization
• porous media
The journal includes full papers, brief communications covering reports, current investigations and discussions of previous publications, and conference announcements.
The main characteristic to be aware of in these tools is that BE is primarily rule-based (using an embedded rule engine), whereas BW and iProcess are orchestration / flow engines. In BE we can use a state diagram to indicate a sequence of states which may define what process / rules apply, but this is really just another way of specifying a particular type of rules (i.e. state transition rules).
The main advantages to specifying behavior as declarative rules are:
Handling complex, event-driven behavior and choreography
Iterative development, rule-by-rule
The main advantages of flow diagrams and BPMN-type models are:
Ease of understanding (especially for simpler process routes)
Process paths are pre-determined and therefore deemed guaranteeable.
In combination these tools provide many of the IT capabilities required in an organization. For example, a business automation task uses BW to consolidate information from multiple existing sources, with human business processes for tasks such as process exceptions managed by iProcess. BE is used to consolidate (complex) events from systems to provide business information, or feed into or drive both BW and iProcess, and also monitors end-to-end system and case performance.
Activity diagrams are a loosely defined diagram technique for showing workflows of stepwise activities and actions, with support for choice, iteration and concurrency.[1] In the Unified Modeling Language, activity diagrams can be used to describe the business and operational step-by-step workflows of components in a system. An activity diagram shows the overall flow of control.
Flower Network Flow Analysis ("Flower") is a suite of applications that are designed to ease the processing and analysis of network flow information. The Flower project will incorporate many features of standard Network Behavior Analysis tools.
EDEN is the Engine for DEfinitive Notations. It is the primary software tool of the Empirical Modelling research group. We build models with it, using a variety of definitive notations that it implements.
the book I'm currently reading is titled "Flow", thanks to my new super friend Tara Brown, who somehow knew exactly where my head was at and gave it to me to read just last week. It's a really good sequel in many ways to David Allen's Getting Things Done