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Fluid dynamic and thermodynamic behaviour of multiphase screw pumps handling gas-liquid mixtures with very high gas volume fractions
No full text"Not just supporting but leading": the involvement of the women of the South Wales coalfield in the 1984-85 Miners' Strike
Get PDFThe 1984-85 miners’ strike dramatically changed the face of the South Wales Valleys. This dissertation will show that the women’s groups that played such a crucial supportive role in it were not the homogenous entity that has often been portrayed. They shared some comparable features with similar groups in English pit villages but there were also qualitative differences between the South Wales groups and their English counterparts and between the different Welsh groups themselves. There is evidence of tensions between the Welsh groups and disputes with the communities they were trying to assist, as well as clashes with local miners’ lodges and the South Wales NUM. At the same time women’s support groups, various in structure and purpose but united in the aim of supporting the miners, challenged and shifted the balance of established gender roles
The miners’ strike evokes warm memories of communities bonding together to fight for their survival. This thesis investigates in detail the women involved in support groups to discover what impact their involvement made on their lives afterwards. Their role is contextualised by the long-standing tradition of Welsh women’s involvement in popular politics and industrial disputes; however, not all women discovered a new confidence arising from their involvement. But others did and for them this self-belief survived the strike and, in some cases, permanently altered their own lives. The activities of the women’s support groups confirmed changes in the social role of women that had been occurring since the 1960s in the coalfield communities of South Wales, and thereby contributed to a revision of the traditional notion of ‘communities’ which were changed by the very process of being defended
Modeling mixed culture fermentations; the role of different electron carriers
No full textA recently established mixed culture fermentation (MCF) model has been modified to account for the role of different electron carriers in the process. The MCF-model predicts the product spectrum as a function of the actual environmental conditions using a thermodynamic optimization criterion while satisfying a number of constrants. Other improvements made to the original model are the inclusion of formate as fermentation end-product, and gas-liquid mass transfer. The model is adequately capable of reproducing experimental results in terms of butyrate and formate versus hydrogen/carbon dioxide production. The model is not capable of predicting the production of an ethanol/acetate mixtue as measured at higher pH-values, suggesting specific biochemical control. Catabolic acetate production can potentially be explained by anabolic requirements for a specific electron donor like NADH
Underexposed: the neglected art of the cinematographer
No full textThe artistic contribution that Directors of Photography make to the films that they shoot, in narrative mainstream cinema, has been historically ignored in favour of the director-centred auteur theory. In order to address this imbalance a new approach to attributing authorship in film needs to be implemented, which acknowledges co-authorship in collaborative film-making. By taking established auteur methodologies Philip Cowan, himself a practicing Director of Photography, analyses the role of cinematographers, and proposes new ways of evaluating their work
Design and numerical simulation of the real-time particle charge and size analyser
Get PDFThe electrostatic charge and size distribution of aerosol particles play a very
important role in many industrial applications. Due to the complexity and the
probabilistic nature of the different charging mechanisms often acting simultaneously, it
is difficult to theoretically predict the charge distribution of aerosol particles or even
estimate the relative effect of the different mechanisms. Therefore, it is necessary to
measure the size and also the bipolar charge distribution on aerosol particles.
The main aim of this research project was to design, implement and simulate a
signal processing system for novel, fully functional measurement instrument capable of
simultaneously measuring in real time the bipolar charge and size distribution of medical
aerosols. The Particle Size and Charge Analyser (PSCA), investigated in this thesis, uses
Phase Doppler Anemometry (PDA) technique. The PDA system was used to track the
motion of charged particles in the presence of an electric field. By solving the equation of
particle motion in a viscous medium combined with the simultaneous measurement of its
size and velocity, the magnitude as well as the polarity of the particle charge can be
obtained. Different signal processing systems in different excitation fields have been designed and implemented. These systems include: velocity estimation system using
spectral analysis in DC excitation field, velocity estimation system based on Phase Locked
Loop (PLL) technique working in DC as well as sine-wave excitation fields, velocity
estimation system based on Quadrature Demodulation (QD) technique under sine-wave
excitation method, velocity estimation system using spectral analysis in square-wave
excitation field and phase shift estimation based on Hilbert transformation and correlation
technique in both sine-wave and square-wave excitation fields. The performances of these
systems were evaluated using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations obtained from the
synthesized Doppler burst signals generated from the mathematical models implemented
in MATLAB. The synthesized Doppler Burst Signal (DBS) was subsequently corrupted
with the added Gaussian noise. Cross validation of the results was performed using
hardware signal processing system employing Arbitrary Waveform Generator and also
NASA simulator to further confirm the validity of the estimation
Acoustic emission source location in composite aircraft structures using modal analysis
No full textThe aim of this research work was to develop an Acoustic Emission (AE) source location
method suitable for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of composite aircraft structures.
Therefore useful key signal features and sensor configurations were identified and the
proposed method was validated using both artificially generated AE as well as actual AE
resulting from damage.
Acoustic Emission is a phenomenon where waves are generated in stressed materials.
These waves travel through the material and can be detected with suitable sensors on the
surface of the structure. These stress waves are attributed to propagating damage inside the
material and can be monitored while the structure is in service. This makes AE very suitable
for SHM, in particular for aircraft structures.
In recent years composite materials such as carbon fibre reinforced epoxy (CFRP) are
increasingly being used for primary and secondary structures in aircraft. The anisotropic layup
of CFRP can lead to different failure mechanisms such as delamination, matrix cracking or
fibre breakage which affects the remaining life time of the structure to different extents. Accurate damage location is important for SHM systems to avoid further inspections and
allows for a maintenance scheme which considers the severity of the damage, due to damage
type, extent and location.
This thesis presents a novel source location method which uses a small triangular AE
sensor array. The method determines the origin of an AE wave by a combination of time of
arrival and modal analysis. The small footprint of the array allows for a fast and easy
installation in hard-to-reach areas. The possibility to locate damage outside and at a relatively
far distance from the array could potentially reduce the overall number of sensors needed to
monitor a structure.
Important wave characteristics and wave propagation in particular in CFRP were
investigated using AE simulated by an artificial source and actual damage in composite
specimens
Cluster detection and analysis with geo-spatial datasets using a hybrid statistical and neural networks hierarchical approach
Get PDFSpatial datasets contain information relating to the locations of incidents of phenomena for example, crime and disease. Areas that contain a higher than expected incidence of the phenomena, given background population and census datasets, are of particular interest. By analysing the locations of potential influence, it may be possible to establish where a cause and effect relationship is present in the observed process.
Cluster detection techniques can be applied to such datasets in order to reveal information relating to the spatial distribution of the cases. Research in these areas has mainly concentrated on either computational or statistical aspects of cluster detection. Each clustering algorithm has its own strengths and weakness. Their main weaknesses causing their unreliability can be estimating the number of clusters, testing the number of components, selecting initial seeds (centroids), running time and memory requirements. Consequently, a new cluster detection methodology has been developed in this thesis based on knowledge drawn from both statistical and computing domains. This methodology is based on a hybrid of statistical methods using properties of probability rather than distance to associate data with clusters. No previous knowledge of the dataset is required and the number of clusters is not predetermined. It performs efficiently in terms of memory requirements, running time and cluster quality. The algorithm for determining both the centre of clusters and the existence of the clusters themselves was applied and tested on simulated and real datasets. The results which were obtained from identification of hotspots were compared with results of other available algorithms such as CLAP (Cluster Location Analysis Procedure), Satscan and GAM (Geographical Analysis Machine). The outputs are very similar.
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GIS presented in this thesis encompasses the SCS algorithm, statistics and neural networks for developing a hybrid predictive crime model, mapping, visualizing crime data and the corresponding population in the study region, visualizing the location of obtained clusters and burglary incidence concentration ‘hotspots’ which was specified by clustering algorithm SCS. Naturally the quality of results is subject to the accuracy of the used data. GIS is used in this thesis for developing a methodology for modelling data containing multiple functions. The census data used throughout this construction provided a useful source of geo-demographic information. The obtained datasets were used for predictive crime modelling.
This thesis has benefited from several existing methodologies to develop a hybrid modelling approach. The methodology was applied to real data on burglary incidence distribution in the study region. Relevant principles of statistics, Geographical Information System, Neural Networks and SCS algorithm were utilized for the analysis of observed data. Regression analysis was used for building a predictive crime model and combined with Neural Networks with the aim of developing a new hierarchical neural Network approaches to generate a more reliable prediction. The promising results were compared with the non-hierarchical neural Network back-propagation network and multiple regression analysis. The average percentage accuracy achieved by the new methodology at testing stage increase 13% compared with the non-hierarchical BP performance. In general the analysis reveals a number of predictors that increase the risk of burglary in the study region. Specifically living in a household in which there is ‘one person’, ‘lone parent’, household where occupations are in elementary or intermediate and unemployed. For the influence of Household space, the results indicate that the risk of burglary rate increases within the household living in shared houses
Wenglish, the dialect of the south Wales valleys, as a medium for narrative and performance
Get PDFThis study examines the characteristics of a range of narrative and performance
texts featuring Wenglish, the dialect of the South Wales Valleys, in terms of their
linguistic and thematic content and their relation to the community.
Part One comprises an introduction to Wenglish and an overview of research on
English in South Wales and approaches to language in use. In Part Two the results
of textual and discourse analysis of twenty-five texts (nine literary and seven formal
performance excerpts and nine personal narratives) are presented. In Part Three
insights arising from analysis are applied in three pieces of new creative work in
dialect. A reference list of texts containing Wenglish is appended.
Cultural outputs mirror and express the community which produces them and thus
the formal and informal literary output of the South Wales Valleys both reflects and
expresses some of the shared characteristics, values, beliefs and preoccupations of
those communities. Analysis revealed recurrent thematic clusters (e.g. community,
personal identity, world of work, sport) across the range of texts, suggesting the
centrality of these themes and a close link between the texts and the community.
From analysis of linguistic content, a ‘Wenglish index’ was calculated for each text.
The literary texts generally had lower indices than the formal performance texts. The
personal narratives, though informal, all had lower indices than the formal
performance material, suggesting that in this latter category, dialect features are
consciously exaggerated.
Discourse analytical methods generated rich interpretive material at the level of
individual texts. Insights from analysis proved useful at the initial and editing phases
of new creative work. The possible practical application of Wenglish material in
community and interpretive projects is also discussed
Experiencing civil society: the reality of civil society in post-devolution Wales
Get PDFDiscussions about civil society have traditionally been concerned with its relationship to the state and the market. The last decade, however, has seen the concept being increasingly used by those involved in public policy formation, both on the right and left of the political spectrum. Linked to ideas concerning social capital', 'trust' and 'partnership' civil society has moved to centre stage in both academic and political debate.
Despite a considerable body of social science literature about Wales, especially with
regard to economic aspects and the political culture leading up to devolution, there are gaps in our knowledge regarding the organisation of 'social' Wales; the institutions, networks and relationships that comprise civil society. There is little published data on the form and impact o f civil society in Wales and yet assumptions about the nature, size and type of civil society abound. Essentially, this thesis provides a critical analysis o f some o f the main ideas and clichéd views that have come to be associated with civil society. The work provides a unique insight into how and why people form civil associations and traces the impact of these organisations on the local community.
Additionally it investigates the impact of devolution and the involvement of civil
society with the policy-making machinery of state. In this way, the study fills some of
the gaps in our knowledge about civil society in Wales