Due to the efficient product separation and catalyst immobilization, multi-phase catalytic systems are attractive for industrial applications. Nevertheless, it is usually difficult to decouple reaction and mass transfer kinetics such that the experimental determination of reaction kinetics is masked by mass transfer effects. A novel incremental identification methodology tailored to homogeneous...

Title of Document: SPRAY FLAME AND EXHAUST JET CHARACTERISTICS OF A PRESSURIZED SWIRL COMBUSTOR Martin Brendan Linck, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Directed By: Professor Ashwani K. Gupta Department of Mechanical Engineering This work describes an investigation of swirl-stabilized flames, created in a combustor featuring co-annular swirling airflows, under unenclosed, enclosed, and submerged condi...

Unconventional gas resources from tight sand and shale gas reservoirs have received great attention in the past decade around the world, because of their large reserves as well as technical advances in developing these resources. As a result of improved horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies, the progresses are being made towards commercial gas production from such reservoirs...

The system CuGaSe2 CuGa3Se5 in thin films has been investigated. Layer synthesis was carried out by chemical close-spaced vapour transport (CCSVT) using Cu precursors on Mo/soda-lime glass substrates. The extension of deposition times in a two-step process led to final film compositions with [Ga]/[Cu] ratios ranging from 1 to 3, allowing the study of the phase transition mentioned above. Films ...

Duty cycling improves energy efficiency but also introduces significant end-to-end delivery delay in wireless sensor networks. Several schemes have been proposed to reduce the delay, but throughput is limited by the scheduling performance. TATD-MAC introduced in this paper improves the throughput by improving the channel utilization with a traffic-adaptive time slot scheduling method. The propo...

Given a paremetric model, the task of statistical learning consists of a parameter learning part for determining unknown parameters and a model selection part for selecting an appropriate scale for a model that accommodates these parameters. Typically, the two tasks are implemented in a twophase procedure. First, a number of models of a same architecture but in different scales are enumerated, ...

A distributed Lagrangian moving-mesh finite element method is applied to problems involving changes of phase. The algorithm uses a distributed conservation principle to determine nodal mesh velocities, which are then used to move the nodes. The nodal values are obtained from an ALE (Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian) equation, which represents a generalisation of the original algorithm presented in...

A steepest edge active set algorithm is described which is suitable for solving linear programming problems where the constraint matrix is sparse and has more rows than columns. The algorithm uses a steepest edge criterion for selecting the search direction at each iteration and recurrence relations are derived which enable it to execute efficiently. The canonical form for the active set method...