A Wells turbine blade for wave power conversion has hysteretic characteristics in a reciprocating flow. The hysteretic loop is opposite to the well-known dynamic stall of an airfoil. In this paper, the mechanism of the hysteretic behavior was elucidated by an unsteady 3-dimensional Navier-Stokes...

A Wells turbine is one of the simplest and promising self-rectifying air turbines which is basic to the needs of the near future and likely to be economically viable. With the recent development in computer hardware and software, it has now become practicable to conduct a reasonable computation...

To evaluate and prioritize energy-related projects, not only technological issues but also resource and social aspects must be included. We use an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for incorporating these two features. Technological issues are divided into three categories; resource and social...

The method of wave energy conversion utilises an oscillating water column (OWC). The OWC converts wave energy into low-pressure pneumatic energy in the form of bi-directional airflow. Wells turbine with its zero blade pitch setting has been used to convert this pneumatic power into...

We present a new two phase model of economic production processes which is a non-linear dynamical version of von Neumann's neoclassical model of production, including a market price-setting phase as well as a production phase. The rate of an economic production process is observed, for the first...

The variational principle of Glansdorff and Prigogine is formulated for stochastic processes and the relation between this method and the rate equation method is discussed in a certain frame-work of variational functions. An application is given to the Fokker-Planck equation to describe the...

We propose a concept of autonomous energy transducer at a molecular scale, where output is produced with small input energy, not very much larger than the thermal energy, without restriction of magnitude or timing of input, and without any control after the input. As an example that satisfies...

Do proteins with larger fluctuations in their functions show higher rates of their evolutions? To gain some insight on the question, we conducted an in vitro experimental evolution where a mutant of green fluorescence protein (GFP) with random sequence at its N terminus was subjected to ten...