Spatial Decomposition of Air Pollution Concentrations Highlights Historical Causes for Current Exposure Disparities in the United States

Racial-ethnic disparities in exposure to air pollution in the United States (US) are well documented. Studies on the causes of these disparities highlight unequal systems of power and longstanding systemic racism-for example, redlining, white flight, and racial covenants-which reinforced racial segregation and wealth gaps and which concentrated polluting land uses in communities of color. Our analysis is based on empirical estimates of ambient concentrations for two important pollutants (NO2 and PM2.5). We show that spatially decomposed concentrations can be used to infer and quantify types of root causes for local- to national-scale disparities. Urban-scale segregation is important yet reflects less than half of the overall national disparities. Other historical causes of national exposure disparities include those that led current populations of Black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans to live in larger cities; those outcomes are consistent with, for example, greater economic opportunity in large cities, land-takings from non-White farmers, and racism in homesteading and between-state migration. Our results suggest that contemporary national exposure disparities in the US reflect a broad set of historical local- to national-scale mechanisms-including racist laws and actions that include, but also extend beyond, urban-scale aspects-and offer a first attempt to quantify their relative importance.

Spatial-Decomposition Analysis of Electrical Conductivity

Spatial decomposition is conducted for the electrical conductivity. The contribution per ion pair at a certain distance is identified in terms of a two-body velocity time correlation function and is integrated over the whole distance of the ion pair to provide the cross-correlation term of the conductivity. The spatial-decomposition formula is an exact expression at any concentrations of ions and incorporates physically appealing pictures in the space domain into the theory of time correlation functions. Illustrative analyses are presented for 1m NaCl aqueous solution and the [C₄ mim][NTf₂ ] ionic liquid. The contrast between the two systems is discussed for the time and spatial ranges of correlations, and it is shown that the ion-pair contribution to the conductivity for the [C₄ mim][NTf₂ ] system is not localized and extends beyond the first coordination shell of the cation-anion pair.

Simulation of Sheared Suspensions With a Parallel Implementation of QDPD

A parallel quaternion-based dissipative particle dynamics (QDPD) program has been developed in Fortran to study the flow properties of complex fluids subject to shear. The parallelization allows for simulations of greater size and complexity and is accomplished with a parallel link-cell spatial (domain) decomposition using MPI. The technique has novel features arising from the DPD formalism, the use of rigid body inclusions spread across processors, and a sheared boundary condition. A detailed discussion of our implementation is presented, along with results on two distributed memory architectures. A parallel speedup of 24.19 was obtained for a benchmark calculation on 27 processors of a distributed memory cluster.