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This article considers Louis XIV's purchase of Dunkirk from Charles II in 1662 as a case study in the interwoven histories of monarchy and empire. In France and England, proponents of absolutism sought to broaden definitions of conquest to encompass both diplomacy and commerce. It proved nearly impossible to bring the concept of buying or selling a town into congruence with grand dynastic designs. Analyzing diplomatic correspondence and royal history alongside an array of artistic representations, I contend, underscores the extent to which ideals of kingship collided with imperial and commercial concerns, as early modern states adapted to the realities of an interconnected seventeenth-century world.

Thermal management systems (TMSs) are routinely expected to mitigate transient heat loads that often exceed nominal operating conditions. Thermal energy storage (TES) devices provide the ability to improve the performance of TMSs by allowing them to temporarily store heat until there is an opportunity to reject it. To design and control TMSs with integrated TES, system level modeling and simulation tools are needed. However, latent heat TES modules, such as those that utilize phase change materials (PCMs), are difficult to simulate using variable time-step ordinary differential equation solvers due to their melting characteristics. In this paper, we validate a novel approximation of the effective specific heat for a latent heat TES module that enables the charging and discharging processes to be simulated as continuous one-phase phenomena. We incorporate the sigmoid-based effective specific heat function into a reduced-order TES model previously derived by the authors and quantify the computational improvement over established approaches for simulating melting and solidification. We validate the proposed approach against our previously published model which uses retroactive updates to simulate melting for a variety of charging and discharging load conditions in a plate-fin heat exchanger geometry using lithium nitrate trihydride as the PCM. We demonstrate improved accuracy for two-dimensional heat transfer problems with time-varying boundary conditions. Furthermore, we quantify the sensitivity of model accuracy and execution speed to these parameters.

The growth, reproduction, and senescence patterns of the epiphytic marine alga Phaeosaccion collinsii were tracked over two consecutive seasons at its type locality of Little Nahant, Nahant, MA (USA). We investigated the potential and/or combined effects of temperature and ambient nutrient supply (NO3 - and PO4 3-) on the phenology of this ephemeral species in its natural environment by collecting microscopic and macroscopic P. collinsii specimens from blades of eelgrass (Zostera marina) in a shallow coastal subtidal zone. Our results suggest that temperature is a strong driver of the alga’s in situ cycle and that the optimal temperature for P. collinsii growth and reproduction may be between 5 and 8°C, a narrower temperature threshold than previous laboratory studies on this subject have suggested. Several large winter storms also allowed us to observe the effect of physical disturbance on the integrity of the eelgrass beds and the population of microscopic and macroscopic P. collinsii. This study contributes the first in situ information on the abiotic conditions necessary for the successful growth and development of P. collinsii and a greater understanding of the life cycle of this unique golden brown alga.