Structural hierarchy of rock masses and the mechanisms of its formation

The formation mechanisms for the structural hierarchy in geological media are discussed. It is shown that the formation of such a hierarchy is caused by certain external and internal circumstances. The first ones consist in the fact that, because of external actions, the Earth’s poles continuously execute the translational and rotational motions responsible for a regular structure of rock fracture and for the appearance of the scale factor √2. The second ones consist in the fact that, under the action of many random factors and because of external actions, during the formation of geological media there appear dissipative structures and, hence, some self-similar fractal structures are formed.     

Reply to Nathan: How to reconstruct the causal argument

Nicholas Nathan tries to resist the current version of the causal argument for sense-data in two ways. First he suggests that, on what he considers to be the correct re-construction of the argument, it equivocates on the sense of proximate cause. Second he defends a form of disjunctivism, by claiming that there might be an extra mechanism involved in producing veridical hallucination, that is not present in perception. I argue that Nathan’s reconstruction of the argument is not the appropriate one, and that, properly interpreted, the argument does not equivocate on proximate cause. Furthermore, I claim that his postulation of a modified mechanism for hallucinations is implausibly ad hoc.     

Extension of a combined analytical/numerical initial value problem solver for unsteady periodic flow

Here we describe analytical and numerical modifications that extend the Differential Reduced Ejector/ mixer Analysis (DREA), a combined analytical/numerical, multiple species ejector/mixing code developed for preliminary design applications, to apply to periodic unsteady flow. An unsteady periodic flow modelling capability opens a range of pertinent simulation problems including pulse detonation engines (PDE), internal combustion engine ICE applications, mixing enhancement and more fundamental fluid dynamic unsteadiness, e.g. fan instability/vortex shedding problems. Although mapping between steady and periodic forms for a scalar equation is a classical problem in applied mathematics, we will show that extension to systems of equations and, moreover, problems with complex initial conditions are more challenging. Additionally, the inherent large gradient initial condition singularities that are characteristic of mixing flows and that have greatly influenced the DREA code formulation, place considerable limitations on the use of numerical solution methods. Fortunately, using the combined analytical–numerical form of the DREA formulation, a successful formulation is developed and described. Comparison of this method with experimental measurements for jet flows with excitation shows reasonable agreement with the simulation. Other flow fields are presented to demonstrate the capabilities of the model. As such, we demonstrate that unsteady periodic effects can be included within the simple, efficient, coarse grid DREA implementation that has been the original intent of the DREA development effort, namely, to provide a viable tool where more complex and expensive models are inappropriate. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.