Mathematical modelling and optimisation of the formulation and manufacture of aggregate food products

In this PhD study, mathematical modelling and optimisation of granola production has been carried out. Granola is an aggregated food product used in breakfast cereals and cereal bars. It is a baked crispy food product typically incorporating oats, other cereals and nuts bound together with a binder, such as honey, water and oil, to form a structured unit aggregate. In this work, the design and operation of two parallel processes to produce aggregate granola products were incorporated: i) a high shear mixing granulation stage (in a designated granulator) followed by drying/toasting in an oven. ii) a continuous fluidised bed followed by drying/toasting in an oven. In addition, the particle breakage of granola during pneumatic conveying produced by both a high shear granulator (HSG) and fluidised bed granulator (FBG) process were examined. Products were pneumatically conveyed in a purpose built conveying rig designed to mimic product conveying and packaging. Three different conveying rig configurations were employed; a straight pipe, a rig consisting two 45° bends and one with 90° bend. It was observed that the least amount of breakage occurred in the straight pipe while the most breakage occurred at 90° bend pipe. Moreover, lower levels of breakage were observed in two 45° bend pipe than the 90° bend vi pipe configuration. In general, increasing the impact angle increases the degree of breakage. Additionally for the granules produced in the HSG, those produced at 300 rpm have the lowest breakage rates while the granules produced at 150 rpm have the highest breakage rates. This effect clearly the importance of shear history (during granule production) on breakage rates during subsequent processing. In terms of the FBG there was no single operating parameter that was deemed to have a significant effect on breakage during subsequent conveying. A population balance model was developed to analyse the particle breakage occurring during pneumatic conveying. The population balance equations that govern this breakage process are solved using discretization. The Markov chain method was used for the solution of PBEs for this process. This study found that increasing the air velocity (by increasing the air pressure to the rig), results in increased breakage among granola aggregates. Furthermore, the analysis carried out in this work provides that a greater degree of breakage of granola aggregates occur in line with an increase in bend angle.

Representations of Catholicism in selected works by Colm Tóibín

The aim of this thesis is to provide an original and extensive study of Colm Tóibín as the “secular revisionist who acknowledges Catholicism as an enduring element of Irish society” (Ryan, Ireland and Scotland 251). Tóibín is uniquely placed to interpret many aspects of Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century and I will argue that intertwined with his revisionism of Irish history is a reimagining of Ireland and Catholicism in fictive terms. An extensive amount of material from Tóibín’s time as a journalist and travel writer will feature in my research because it validates my argument concerning his prolonged engagement with Catholicism. Similarly, a broad range of Tóibín’s prose will be studied because it affords opportunities for an exploration of a literary Catholic oeuvre in his fiction. Therefore, I am emphasizing that a crucial linkage of Catholicism is identifiable throughout Tóibín’s diverse canon of work. However, I will argue that divergences of attitude and mode can be found in how Tóibín depicts Catholicism in his journalism and fiction. My argument identifies Tóibín’s recurrent journalistic questioning of the Church’s teaching and leadership but I classify a benignity towards Catholicism in his travel writing and fiction. Overall, Tóibín’s fiction merits significant status in this thesis because of the representations of Catholicism in the work of a writer who has been short-listed three times for The Booker Prize.

Locating the transnational: representations and aesthetics of the city in contemporary European cinemas

This thesis focuses on two Western European cinematic cities, and two unique periods of their respective nations’ histories, in a bid to “locate” the transnational within a contemporary European milieu. I argue that my geo-cinematic case studies are emblematic of broader questions of the problematics of national identity in contemporary Europe in the face of cross-national flows yet, as a result of their representations as cities both “anchored” and “in flux”, they reject a European postnational identity. Through its engagement with cinematic Rome as the “Eternal City” of Europe and cinematic Dublin as the “newly Europeanised” city, my thesis traces how representations and aesthetics of the urban spaces of these two cities correspond with the tensions at the heart of the respective eras in question. Via the figures that inhabit it, navigate it and search for it, the city is utilised to highlight fixity and mobility, centrality and dislocation, in explicit and implicit ways, amid the rapidly changing landscape of its national terrain. It is through my analyses of the filmed places and sociopolitical, socioeconomic and sociocultural spaces of these capital cities under the rubric of the transnational that this research demonstrates the “pluralities” of the construct in its cinematic manifestations. It is also my aim to evaluate the concept of cinematic transnationalism when identifying and accounting for representations of a specific national, historical timeframe, when the momentousness of the changes that occur is not bound by the national, but rather is reflective of the influence of both domestic and external forces. To this end, my thesis draws attention to instances in which the nation is shown to persist and resist dilution, arguing that it is only against the backdrop and continuity of the nation (in its evershifting guises) that the transnational can be conceived in representative and aesthetic terms.