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Browsing by Author "Zhang, Lan"

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    The Design of an Urban Roadside Automatic Sprinkling System: Mitigation of PM2.5–10 in Ambient Air in Megacities
    Liu, Shiyong; Triantis, Konstantinos P.; Zhang, Lan (Hindawi, 2014-07-23)
    The objective of this research paper is to describe the system architecture for an urban roadside automatic mist-generating system. Its primary purpose is to mitigate particulate matter especially PM2.5–10. In this paper, four graphs are provided to exhibit the constituent elements of this system. This paper also discusses the functional extensions of this system for alternative uses in civil engineering which include winter road deicing and desnowing with added salt; clean-up of street dust; lowering of temperature of a “hot island” during the summer; the addition of humidity in an arid area; and the suppression of flu virus in the winter season. The structure and function of this system are comprehensively discussed in this paper. This system is compared to existing and other proposed systems in terms of control options, efficiency, and primary functional issues. The unique design of the road automatic sprinkling system renders itself a prominent option. Although there are no data available for this conceptual system, some expected qualitative and quantitative outcomes are provided and justified. The paper concludes with some potential research areas and challenges associated with this system architecture.
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    Parameter identification in linear and nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations
    Zhang, Lan (Virginia Tech, 1995)
    The research presented in this dissertation is carried out in two parts; the first, which is the main work of this dissertation, involves development of continuous differentiability of the solution with respect to the unknown parameters. For linear parabolic partial differential equations, only mild conditions are assumed on the admissible parameter space. The nonlinear partial differential equation we consider is a generalized Burgers’ equation, for which we establish the well-posedness and the smoothness properties of the solution with respect to the parameters. In the second part, we consider parameter identification problems for these two parameter dependent systems. The identification scheme which we use here is the quasilinearization method. Based on the results in the first part of this work, we obtain existence and local convergence of the algorithm. We also present some numerical examples which demonstrate the performance of the quasilinearization scheme.