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Preparation of high quality personnel to provide educational services to students with disabilities living in rural areas is, at best, challenging. Findings from a comprehensive study concerning the status of the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in rural settings and the issues such implementation presents to teacher education programs in these areas are discussed. Members of the American Council on Rural Special Education (ACRES) participated in the study. Results indicated that strategies for enhancing personnel preparation, recruitment, and retention of individuals to institutions of higher education and K-12 schools in rural settings include distance learning, on-site professional development opportunities, salary incentives/increments, and benefits. Linking evaluation data to the general education curriculum and determining how the student's disabilities affect his/her progress in general education are issues for practitioners implementing IDEA in rural settings. Recommendations are provided for enhancing personnel preparation and service delivery based on the results.

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In the present paper a computational analysis of a confined premixed turbulent methane/air jet flame is presented. In this scope, chemistry is reduced by the use of the Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) method [1, 2], and the fluid flow is modeled in a RANS context. In the FGM technique the reaction progress of the flame is generally described by a few control variables, for which a transport equation is solved during runtime. The flamelet system is computed in a pre-processing stage, and a manifold with all the information about combustion is stored in a tabulated form. In the present implementation the reaction evolution is described by the reaction progress variable, the heat loss is described by the enthalpy and the turbulence effect on the reaction is represented by the progress variable variance. The turbulence-chemistry interaction is considered through the use of a presumed pdf approach. A generic lab scale burner for high-velocity preheated jets is used for validation [3, 4]. It consists of a rectangular confinement, and an off-center positioning of the jet nozzle enables flame stabilization by recirculation of hot combustion products. The inlet speed is appropriately high, in order to be close to the blow out limit. Flame structures were visualized by OH* chemiluminescence imaging and planar laser-induced fluorescence of the OH radical. Laser Raman scattering was used to determine concentrations of the major species and the temperature. Velocity fields were measured with particle image velocimetry. The important effect of conductive heat loss to the walls is included in the FGM chemistry reduction method in a RANS context, in order to predict the evolution and description of a turbulent jet flame in high Reynolds number flow conditions. Comparisons of various mean fields (velocities, temperatures) with RANS results are shown. The use of FGM as a combustion model shows that combustion features at gas turbine conditions can be satisfactorily reproduced with a reasonable computational effort.

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With the increasing demand for electric power, the development of new power generation technologies is gaining increased attention. The supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO2) cycle is one such technology, which has relatively high efficiency, compactness, and potentially could provide complete carbon capture. The S-CO2 cycle technology is adaptable for almost all of the existing heat sources such as solar, geothermal, fossil, nuclear power plants, and waste heat recovery systems. However, it is known that optimal combinations of operating conditions, equipment, working fluid, and cycle layout determine the maximum achievable efficiency of a cycle. Within an S-CO2 cycle, the compression device is of critical importance as it is operating near the critical point of CO2. However, near the critical point, the thermo-physical properties of CO2 are highly sensitive to changes of pressure and temperature. Therefore, the conditions of CO2 at the compressor inlet are critical in the design of such cycles. Also, the impurity species diluted within the S-CO2 will cause deviation from an ideal S-CO2 cycle as these impurities will change the thermodynamic properties of the working fluid. Accordingly, the current work examines the effects of different impurity compositions, considering binary mixtures of CO2 and He, CO, O2, N2, H2, CH4, or H2S on various S-CO2 cycle components. The second part of the study focuses on the calculation of the basic cycles and component efficiencies. The results of this study will provide guidance and define the optimal composition of mixtures for compressors and coolers.