One of the key competences for Europe in the 21st Century is the technological competence understood as an instrument for development, aimed at encouraging society to use and like science. This competence can only be fully achieved by using practical experiments, which present use cases in a realistic, creative, and revolutionary way. This paper presents our work on the development of practical experiments in the context of several pre-university levels, from pre-school to elementary school, aimed at enhancing the appeal of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) among students.

In order to have better insight into the physics of the urban wind turbines, a graphical user interface (GUI) that employs Open FOAM flow solver has been developed for industrial applications by Uppsala University with Spanish engineering company SOLUTE via EU framework as part of the WINDUR framework 7 project. Urban wind resource assessment for small scale wind applications present several challenges and complexities for that are different from large-scale wind power generation. Urban boundary layer relevant in this regime of flows have different horizontal profiles impacted by the buildings, low speed wind regimes, separation and different turbulence characteristics. This software addresses the project set-up and scientific visualization of the results for right investment decision needs. Preliminary numerical results will be presented for a test site in Huesca, Spain where a measurement campaign is undertaken to validate the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results.

We propose a linear regression method for estimating Weibull parameters from life tests. The method uses stochastic models of the unreliability at each failure instant. As a result, a heteroscedastic regression problem arises that is solved by weighted least squares minimization. The main feature of our method is an innovative s-normalization of the failure data models, to obtain analytic expressions of centers and weights for the regression. The method has been Monte Carlo contrasted with Benard's approximation, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation; and it has the highest global scores for its robustness, and performance.

For earthquake simulations to play an important role in the reduction of seismic risk, they must be capable of high resolution and high fidelity. We have developed algorithms and tools for earthquake simulation based on multiresolution hexahedral meshes. We have used this capability to carry out 1 Hz simulations of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in the LA Basin using 100 million grid points. Our wave propagation solver sustains 1.21 teraflop/s for 4 hours on 3000 AlphaServer processors at 80% parallel efficiency. Because of uncertainties in characterizing earthquake source and basin material properties, a critical remaining challenge is to invert for source and material parameter fields for complex 3D basins from records of past earthquakes. Towards this end, we present results for material and source inversion of high-resolution models of basins undergoing antiplane motion using parallel scalable inversion algorithms that overcome many of the difficulties particular to inverse heterogeneous wave propagation problems.