Library: Engineering

Pyrene, a four-ring polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH), was identified as the chemical that requires the largest land area for soil bioremediation due to the slow rate of biodegradation at the Libby, Montana Superfund site. Prepared bed land treatment is the specific bioremediation technology that is currently employed at this site. Although bioremediation has been widely accepted for treatment of contaminated soil due to its low cost, the effective application of bioremediation is often hindered by the lack of information related to: 1) biochemical pathways, 2) enzymatic mechanisms, and 3)...

This thesis investigates the issues of implementing multi-sensor imaging system for surveillance applications. Three topics for the fusion of infrared and electro-optic images are studied, i.e. registration, fusion, and evaluation. The first topic is the image registration or alignment, which is to associate corresponding pixels in multiple images to the same physical point in the scene. A trajectory-based method for registering infrared and electro-optic video sequences is proposed in this study. The initial registration parameters are derived from matching the trajectories across the...

Data assimilation of satellite-based observations of hydrological variables with full numerical physics models can be used to downscale these observations from coarse to high resolution to improve microwave sensor-based soil moisture observations. Moreover, assimilation can also be used to predict related hydrological variables, e.g., precipitation products can be assimilated in a land information system to estimate soil moisture. High quality spatio-temporal observations of these processes are vital for a successful assimilation which in turn needs a detailed analysis and improvement. In this...

Vertical and horizontal expansion of irrigated agriculture to feed the increasing population has contributed to excessive groundwater withdrawal and affected the availability of water in terms of both quality and quantity. To sustain agricultural growth, strategic measures should be adopted to reduce water consumption while minimizing adverse effect on yield. The effect of deficit irrigation on wheat yield was studied in three consecutive years (2002-03 to 2004-05) in field and pot. Ten irrigation treatments were imposed in a randomized complete block (RCB) design covering full deficit, no def...

River stage or flow rates are required for the design and evaluation of hydraulic structures. Most river reaches are ungauged and a methodology is needed to estimate the stages, or rates of flow, at specific locations in streams where no measurements are available. Flood routing techniques are utilised to estimate the stages, or rates of flow, in order to predict flood wave propagation along river reaches. Models can be developed for gauged catchments and their parameters related to physical characteristics such as slope, reach width, reach length so that the approach can be applied to ungauge...

Expert and novice problem solving has been a subject of research for many years. Problem solving of textbook problems and case studies in various domains such as math, physics, chess, music, system design, medical diagnosis, and business sub-domains have been the norm as the subject of this type of research. Few if any research efforts have undertaken the study of real world problem solving that occurs over an extended time such as those solved by industrial engineers in a manufacturing setting. This research studies the expert and novice problem solving performance in a scaled-world simulatio...

For many applications, including power generation, aerospace and the automobile industry, high temperature wear provides serious difficulties where two or more surfaces move or slide relative to one another. In aerospace, for example, demands for more powerful, efficient engines operating at ever higher temperatures, mean that conventional lubrication is no longer sufficient to prevent direct contact between metallic sliding surfaces, accelerating wear. However, one high temperature phenomenon observed to reduce metallic contact, and thus wear and friction, is the formation of ‘glazes’,essen...

The management of hazardous and toxic waste projects in Asia (especially that related to intractable chemicals) has had a less than acceptable performance profile during the last 20 years. There have been numerous documented cases of management and systems failures in intractable chemical recovery projects, despite the establishment of global conventions designed to avoid such problems. A research programme was undertaken with the aim of producing a management model for companies to help prevent such failures in the future. The research began in the field with an exploration of management ...

This thesis (written in Spanish) presents the analysis, design and implementation of a four-quadrant power supply with high-frequency isolation, which is expected to be used to feed the low-energy correction magnet of a particle accelerator. In particle accelerator applications the magnetic field during beam acceleration may be either positive or negative, and true bipolar power converters are needed. The selected bipolar topology consists of a bidirectional three-phase to single-phase reduced matrix converter (RMC) with power factor correction and a bidirectional active rectifier. Main featur...

(Dissertation is written in Spanish.) Using PSpice of MiscroSim to simulate power converters sometimes brings awkward complications such as the simulation of real magnetic components. It deals a little bit of work to bring a good agreement between experimental and simulated results. Simulation with linear inductors or transformers does not produce good results. The reason is that real magnetic components present saturation and hysteresis, a phenomenon that characterises magnetic materials. The hysteresis or B-H loop of a magnetic component is highly dependent on frequency, waveform (not very ...