The Newcastle solution: A realist perspective

This intervention was a multi-component program where a number of different strategies were implemented simultaneously: • Reduced trading hours; • ‘Lockouts’; • Restrictions on the strength of alcohol after certain times; • Managerial changes to the operation of the licensed premises

Incorporating the interrelationship between primary and support processes in monitoring and optimising longwall coal mining efficiency

This thesis increased the researchers understanding of the relationship between operations and maintenance in underground longwall coal mines, using data from a Queensland underground coal mine. The thesis explores various relationships between recorded variables. Issues with human recorded data was uncovered, and results emphasised the significance of variables associated with conveyor operation to explain production.

Effects of glycerol on enzymatic hydrolysis and ethanol production using sugarcane bagasse pretreated by acidified glycerol solution

In this study, for the first time the effects of glycerol on enzymatic hydrolysis and ethanol fermentation were investigated. Enzymatic hydrolysis was inhibited slightly with 2.0 wt% glycerol, leading to reduction in glucan digestibility from 84.9% without glycerol to 82.9% (72 h). With 5.0 wt% and 10.0 wt% glycerol, glucan digestibility reduced by 4.5% and11.0%, respectively. However, glycerol appeared not detrimental to cellulase enzymes. Ethanol fermentation was not affected with glycerol up to 5.0 wt%, and was inhibited slightly with 10.0 wt% glycerol, which resulted in reduction in ethanol yield from 86.0% without glycerol to 83.7% (20 h). Based on laboratory and pilot scale enzymatic hydrolysis and ethanol production results, it was estimated that 0.142 kg ethanol could be produced from 1.0 kg dry bagasse (a glucan content of 38.0%) after pretreatment with acidified glycerol solution.

Mining topical relevant patterns for multi-document summarization

Multi-document summarization addressing the problem of information overload has been widely utilized in the various real-world applications. Most of existing approaches adopt term-based representation for documents which limit the performance of multi-document summarization systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel pattern-based topic model (PBTMSum) for the task of the multi-document summarization. PBTMSum combining pattern mining techniques with LDA topic modelling could generate discriminative and semantic rich representations for topics and documents so that the most representative and non-redundant sentences can be selected to form a succinct and informative summary. Extensive experiments are conducted on the data of document understanding conference (DUC) 2007. The results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.

A cloud-based intelligent computing system for contextual exploration on personal sleep-tracking data using association rule mining

With the development of wearable and mobile computing technology, more and more people start using sleep-tracking tools to collect personal sleep data on a daily basis aiming at understanding and improving their sleep. While sleep quality is influenced by many factors in a person’s lifestyle context, such as exercise, diet and steps walked, existing tools simply visualize sleep data per se on a dashboard rather than analyse those data in combination with contextual factors. Hence many people find it difficult to make sense of their sleep data. In this paper, we present a cloud-based intelligent computing system named SleepExplorer that incorporates sleep domain knowledge and association rule mining for automated analysis on personal sleep data in light of contextual factors. Experiments show that the same contextual factors can play a distinct role in sleep of different people, and SleepExplorer could help users discover factors that are most relevant to their personal sleep.

Organic–inorganic bismuth (III)-based material: A lead-free, air-stable and solution-processable light-absorber beyond organolead perovskites

Methylammonium bismuth (III) iodide single crystals and films have been developed and investigated. We have further presented the first demonstration of using this organic–inorganic bismuth-based material to replace lead/tin-based perovskite materials in solution-processable solar cells. The organic–inorganic bismuth-based material has advantages of non-toxicity, ambient stability, and low-temperature solution-processability, which provides a promising solution to address the toxicity and stability challenges in organolead- and organotin-based perovskite solar cells. We also demonstrated that trivalent metal cation-based organic–inorganic hybrid materials can exhibit photovoltaic effect, which may inspire more research work on developing and applying organic-inorganic hybrid materials beyond divalent metal cations (Pb (II) and Sn (II)) for solar energy applications.

Optimising the operational energy efficiency of an open-pit coal mine system

This thesis investigates factors that impact the energy efficiency of a mining operation. An innovative mathematical framework and solution approach are developed to model, solve and analyse an open-pit coal mine. A case study in South East Queensland is investigated to validate the approach and explore the opportunities for using it to aid long, medium and short term decision makers.

A pilot study of the Social Water Assessment Protocol in a mining region of Ghana

The Social Water Assessment Protocol (SWAP) is a tool consisting of a series of questions on fourteen themes designed to capture the social context of water around a mine site. A pilot study of the SWAP, conducted in Prestea-Huni Valley, Ghana, showed that some communities were concerned about whether the groundwater was potable. The mining company’s concern was that there was a cycle of dependency amongst communities that received treated water from the mining company. The pilot identified potential data sources and stakeholder groups for each theme, gaps in themes and suggested refinements to questions to improve the SWAP.

Water management capacity building to support rapidly developing mining economies

Many developing countries are experiencing rapid expansion in mining with associated water impacts. In most cases mining expansion is outpacing the building of national capacity to ensure that sustainable water management practices are implemented. Since 2011, Australia's International Mining for Development Centre (IM4DC) has funded capacity building in such countries including a program of water projects. Five projects in particular (principally covering experiences from Peru, Colombia, Ghana, Zambia, Indonesia, Philippines and Mongolia) have provided insight into water capacity building priorities and opportunities. This paper reviews the challenges faced by water stakeholders, and proposes the associated capacity needs. The paper uses the evidence derived from the IM4DC projects to develop a set of specific capacity-building recommendations. Recommendations include: the incorporation of mine water management in engineering and environmental undergraduate courses; secondments of staff to suitable partner organisations; training to allow site staff to effectively monitor water including community impacts; leadership training to support a water stewardship culture; training of officials to support implementation of catchment management approaches; and the empowerment of communities to recognise and negotiate solutions to mine-related risks. New initiatives to fund the transfer of multi-disciplinary knowledge from nations with well-developed water management practices are called for.

A semi-analytical solution for multilayer diffusion in a composite medium consisting of a large number of layers

Diffusion in a composite slab consisting of a large number of layers provides an ideal prototype problem for developing and analysing two-scale modelling approaches for heterogeneous media. Numerous analytical techniques have been proposed for solving the transient diffusion equation in a one-dimensional composite slab consisting of an arbitrary number of layers. Most of these approaches, however, require the solution of a complex transcendental equation arising from a matrix determinant for the eigenvalues that is difficult to solve numerically for a large number of layers. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we present a semi-analytical method based on the Laplace transform and an orthogonal eigenfunction expansion. The proposed approach uses eigenvalues local to each layer that can be obtained either explicitly, or by solving simple transcendental equations. The semi-analytical solution is applicable to both perfect and imperfect contact at the interfaces between adjacent layers and either Dirichlet, Neumann or Robin boundary conditions at the ends of the slab. The solution approach is verified for several test cases and is shown to work well for a large number of layers. The work is concluded with an application to macroscopic modelling where the solution of a fine-scale multilayered medium consisting of two hundred layers is compared against an “up-scaled” variant of the same problem involving only ten layers.

A new constraint programming approach for optimising a coal rail system

Because of the bottlenecking operations in a complex coal rail system, millions of dollars are costed by mining companies. To handle this issue, this paper investigates a real-world coal rail system and aims to optimise the coal railing operations under constraints of limited resources (e.g., limited number of locomotives and wagons). In the literature, most studies considered the train scheduling problem on a single-track railway network to be strongly NP-hard and thus developed metaheuristics as the main solution methods. In this paper, a new mathematical programming model is formulated and coded by optimization programming language based on a constraint programming (CP) approach. A new depth-first-search technique is developed and embedded inside the CP model to obtain the optimised coal railing timetable efficiently. Computational experiments demonstrate that high-quality solutions are obtainable in industry-scale applications. To provide insightful decisions, sensitivity analysis is conducted in terms of different scenarios and specific criteria. Keywords Train scheduling · Rail transportation · Coal mining · Constraint programming