An iterative analytical design framework for the optimal designing of an off-grid renewable energy based hybrid smart micro-grid

Creative ways of utilising renewable energy sources in electricity generation especially in remote areas and particularly in countries depending on imported energy, while increasing energy security and reducing cost of such isolated off-grid systems, is becoming an urgently needed necessity for the effective strategic planning of Energy Systems. The aim of this research project was to design and implement a new decision support framework for the optimal design of hybrid micro grids considering different types of different technologies, where the design objective is to minimize the total cost of the hybrid micro grid while at the same time satisfying the required electric demand. Results of a comprehensive literature review, of existing analytical, decision support tools and literature on HPS, has identified the gaps and the necessary conceptual parts of an analytical decision support framework. As a result this research proposes and reports an Iterative Analytical Design Framework (IADF) and its implementation for the optimal design of an Off-grid renewable energy based hybrid smart micro-grid (OGREH-SμG) with intra and inter-grid (μG2μG & μG2G) synchronization capabilities and a novel storage technique. The modelling design and simulations were based on simulations conducted using HOMER Energy and MatLab/SIMULINK, Energy Planning and Design software platforms. The design, experimental proof of concept, verification and simulation of a new storage concept incorporating Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) fuel cell is also reported. The implementation of the smart components consisting Raspberry Pi that is devised and programmed for the semi-smart energy management framework (a novel control strategy, including synchronization capabilities) of the OGREH-SμG are also detailed and reported. The hybrid μG was designed and implemented as a case study for the Bayir/Jordan area. This research has provided an alternative decision support tool to solve Renewable Energy Integration for the optimal number, type and size of components to configure the hybrid μG. In addition this research has formulated and reported a linear cost function to mathematically verify computer based simulations and fine tune the solutions in the iterative framework and concluded that such solutions converge to a correct optimal approximation when considering the properties of the problem. As a result of this investigation it has been demonstrated that, the implemented and reported OGREH-SμG design incorporates wind and sun powered generation complemented with batteries, two fuel cell units and a diesel generator is a unique approach to Utilizing indigenous renewable energy with a capability of being able to synchronize with other μ-grids is the most effective and optimal way of electrifying developing countries with fewer resources in a sustainable way, with minimum impact on the environment while also achieving reductions in GHG. The dissertation concludes with suggested extensions to this work in the future.

The role of multi-physics simulation in virtual manufacturing

Abstract not available

ENABLING HARDWARE TECHNOLOGIES FOR AUTONOMY IN TINY ROBOTS: CONTROL, INTEGRATION, ACTUATION

The last two decades have seen many exciting examples of tiny robots from a few cm3 to less than one cm3. Although individually limited, a large group of these robots has the potential to work cooperatively and accomplish complex tasks. Two examples from nature that exhibit this type of cooperation are ant and bee colonies. They have the potential to assist in applications like search and rescue, military scouting, infrastructure and equipment monitoring, nano-manufacture, and possibly medicine. Most of these applications require the high level of autonomy that has been demonstrated by large robotic platforms, such as the iRobot and Honda ASIMO. However, when robot size shrinks down, current approaches to achieve the necessary functions are no longer valid. This work focused on challenges associated with the electronics and fabrication. We addressed three major technical hurdles inherent to current approaches: 1) difficulty of compact integration; 2) need for real-time and power-efficient computations; 3) unavailability of commercial tiny actuators and motion mechanisms. The aim of this work was to provide enabling hardware technologies to achieve autonomy in tiny robots. We proposed a decentralized application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) where each component is responsible for its own operation and autonomy to the greatest extent possible. The ASIC consists of electronics modules for the fundamental functions required to fulfill the desired autonomy: actuation, control, power supply, and sensing. The actuators and mechanisms could potentially be post-fabricated on the ASIC directly. This design makes for a modular architecture. The following components were shown to work in physical implementations or simulations: 1) a tunable motion controller for ultralow frequency actuation; 2) a nonvolatile memory and programming circuit to achieve automatic and one-time programming; 3) a high-voltage circuit with the highest reported breakdown voltage in standard 0.5 μm CMOS; 4) thermal actuators fabricated using CMOS compatible process; 5) a low-power mixed-signal computational architecture for robotic dynamics simulator; 6) a frequency-boost technique to achieve low jitter in ring oscillators. These contributions will be generally enabling for other systems with strict size and power constraints such as wireless sensor nodes.

A durabilidade dos clássicos do design como instrumento de apoio ao processo de conceção de produto: 10 princípios para o projeto

A presente investigação identifica o caminho seguido no estudo que se centrou na durabilidade dos produtos como estratégia para a prevenção/redução dos impactes ambientais provocados pela excessiva produção e consumo das sociedades ocidentais. O trabalho baseou-se primeiramente na reunião de argumentos que justificassem a necessidade da investigação. A partir dos conhecimentos obtidos sobre as consequências do descarte prematuro de produtos, incluindo a produção de resíduos e utilização de recursos naturais, a investigação foi direcionada para as estratégias que motivam a redução do consumo pelo aumento da vida útil do produto. A durabilidade de alguns produtos designados de Clássicos do Design motivou o desenvolvimento da investigação. Depois de definido o universo que se enquadra nesta categoria, foi selecionada uma amostra que se considerou representativa e criou-se uma base de dados onde se sistematizou os conteúdos relevantes a conhecer. Através da análise qualitativa e quantitativa da amostra desses produtos, obteve-se uma matriz operativa composta por 10 princípios que pode ser introduzida no processo de design de novos produtos para aquisição de um tempo de vida útil inicial potencialmente maior. Os resultados da aplicação prática da estratégia desenvolvida, a tese, determinarão no futuro a conceção e produção de artefactos que se pretende apresentar à indústria nacional.

Phobos: The design and implementation of embedded software for a low cost radar warning receiver

This portfolio thesis describes work undertaken by the author under the Engineering Doctorate program of the Institute for System Level Integration. It was carried out in conjunction with the sponsor company Teledyne Defence Limited. A radar warning receiver is a device used to detect and identify the emissions of radars. They were originally developed during the Second World War and are found today on a variety of military platforms as part of the platform’s defensive systems. Teledyne Defence has designed and built components and electronic subsystems for the defence industry since the 1970s. This thesis documents part of the work carried out to create Phobos, Teledyne Defence’s first complete radar warning receiver. Phobos was designed to be the first low cost radar warning receiver. This was made possible by the reuse of existing Teledyne Defence products, commercial off the shelf hardware and advanced UK government algorithms. The challenges of this integration are described and discussed, with detail given of the software architecture and the development of the embedded application. Performance of the embedded system as a whole is described and qualified within the context of a low cost system.

Design de interfaces dinâmicos em sistemas de gestão de conteúdos

Relatório de Estágio para a obtenção do grau de Mestre na área de Educação e Comunicação Multimédia

Integrating life design counseling and psychotherapy: Possibilities and practices.

The debate on the relation between career counseling and psychotherapy revealed the close relation between psychosocial and career issues. The connection between these two approaches paves the way for the integration of career counseling into psychotherapy. One of the key challenges of integrating career counseling into psychotherapy is to avoid discontinuities and inconsistencies in the psychotherapeutic intervention. The aim of this article is, therefore, to present the Systematic Treatment Selection perspective as a framework for an effective integration of psychotherapy and career counseling. Then, Life Design Counseling is described, highlighting its possibilities to fit the psychotherapeutic approach. Finally, an illustrative case is presented and discussed.

AIR SIDE HEAT TRANSFER ENHANCEMENT IN HEAT EXCHANGERS UTILIZING INNOVATIVE DESIGNS AND THE ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TECHNIQUE

Over the last decade, rapid development of additive manufacturing techniques has allowed the fabrication of innovative and complex designs. One field that can benefit from such technology is heat exchanger fabrication, as heat exchanger design has become more and more complex due to the demand for higher performance particularly on the air side of the heat exchanger. By employing the additive manufacturing, a heat exchanger design was successfully realized, which otherwise would have been very difficult to fabricate using conventional fabrication technologies. In this dissertation, additive manufacturing technique was implemented to fabricate an advanced design which focused on a combination of heat transfer surface and fluid distribution system. Although the application selected in this dissertation is focused on power plant dry cooling applications, the results of this study can directly and indirectly benefit other sectors as well, as the air-side is often the limiting side for in liquid or single phase cooling applications. Two heat exchanger designs were studied. One was an advanced metallic heat exchanger based on manifold-microchannel technology and the other was a polymer heat exchanger based on utilization of prime surface technology. Polymer heat exchangers offer several advantages over metals such as antifouling, anticorrosion, lightweight and often less expensive than comparable metallic heat exchangers. A numerical modeling and optimization were performed to calculate a design that yield an optimum performance. The optimization results show that significant performance enhancement is noted compared to the conventional heat exchangers like wavy fins and plain plate fins. Thereafter, both heat exchangers were scaled down and fabricated using additive manufacturing and experimentally tested. The manifold-micro channel design demonstrated that despite some fabrication inaccuracies, compared to a conventional wavy-fin surface, 15% - 50% increase in heat transfer coefficient was possible for the same pressure drop value. In addition, if the fabrication inaccuracy can be eliminated, an even larger performance enhancement is predicted. Since metal based additive manufacturing is still in the developmental stage, it is anticipated that with further refinement of the manufacturing process in future designs, the fabrication accuracy can be improved. For the polymer heat exchanger, by fabricating a very thin wall heat exchanger (150μm), the wall thermal resistance, which usually becomes the limiting side for polymer heat exchanger, was calculated to account for only up to 3% of the total thermal resistance. A comparison of air-side heat transfer coefficient of the polymer heat exchanger with some of the commercially available plain plate fin surface heat exchangers show that polymer heat exchanger performance is equal or superior to plain plate fin surfaces. This shows the promising potential for polymer heat exchangers to compete with conventional metallic heat exchangers when an additive manufacturing-enabled fabrication is utilized. Major contributions of this study are as follows: (1) For the first time demonstrated the potential of additive manufacturing in metal printing of heat exchangers that benefit from a sophisticated design to yield a performance substantially above the respective conventional systems. Such heat exchangers cannot be fabricated with the conventional fabrication techniques. (2) For the first time demonstrated the potential of additive manufacturing to produce polymer heat exchangers that by design minimize the role of thermal conductivity and deliver a thermal performance equal or better that their respective metallic heat exchangers. In addition of other advantages of polymer over metal like antifouling, anticorrosion, and lightweight. Details of the work are documented in respective chapters of this thesis.

DESIGN, MODELING, AND FABRICATION OF MICROROBOT LEGS

This dissertation presents work done in the design, modeling, and fabrication of magnetically actuated microrobot legs. Novel fabrication processes for manufacturing multi-material compliant mechanisms have been used to fabricate effective legged robots at both the meso and micro scales, where the meso scale refers to the transition between macro and micro scales. This work discusses the development of a novel mesoscale manufacturing process, Laser Cut Elastomer Refill (LaCER), for prototyping millimeter-scale multi-material compliant mechanisms with elastomer hinges. Additionally discussed is an extension of previous work on the development of a microscale manufacturing process for fabricating micrometer-sale multi-material compliant mechanisms with elastomer hinges, with the added contribution of a method for incorporating magnetic materials for mechanism actuation using externally applied fields. As both of the fabrication processes outlined make significant use of highly compliant elastomer hinges, a fast, accurate modeling method for these hinges was desired for mechanism characterization and design. An analytical model was developed for this purpose, making use of the pseudo rigid-body (PRB) model and extending its utility to hinges with significant stretch component, such as those fabricated from elastomer materials. This model includes 3 springs with stiffnesses relating to material stiffness and hinge geometry, with additional correction factors for aspects particular to common multi-material hinge geometry. This model has been verified against a finite element analysis model (FEA), which in turn was matched to experimental data on mesoscale hinges manufactured using LaCER. These modeling methods have additionally been verified against experimental data from microscale hinges manufactured using the Si/elastomer/magnetics MEMS process. The development of several mechanisms is also discussed: including a mesoscale LaCER-fabricated hexapedal millirobot capable of walking at 2.4 body lengths per second; prototyped mesoscale LaCER-fabricated underactuated legs with asymmetrical features for improved performance; 1 centimeter cubed LaCER-fabricated magnetically-actuated hexapods which use the best-performing underactuated leg design to locomote at up to 10.6 body lengths per second; five microfabricated magnetically actuated single-hinge mechanisms; a 14-hinge, 11-link microfabricated gripper mechanism; a microfabricated robot leg mechansim demonstrated clearing a step height of 100 micrometers; and a 4 mm x 4 mm x 5 mm, 25 mg microfabricated magnetically-actuated hexapod, demonstrated walking at up to 2.25 body lengths per second.

Tangible mobile app store design for China's new generation migrant worker

China has the largest numbers of Internet users and mobile phone subscribers in the world, as well as the most extensive peacetime internal migration on the planet. Mobile phone uses play a very important role in migrant responses to alienation and discrimination. There are 150 million to 200 million migrant workers in China, 60% of them are the second-generation migrant workers. They support the nation’s manufacturing and industry. The majority of these individuals is poor and is from rural areas of the country. These young people are currently ignored by mainstream mobile device manufacturers, even though this constituency will be a growing consumptive segment in the future. Thus, my research will target the new-generation migrant workers in China, and concentrates on their mobile lives to best develop a tangible mobile devices application store that will improve their mobile experiences.

Manufacturing conditioned roughness and wear of biomedical oxide ceramics for all-ceramic knee implants

Background: Ceramic materials are used in a growing proportion of hip joint prostheses due to their wear resistance and biocompatibility properties. However, ceramics have not been applied successfully in total knee joint endoprostheses to date. One reason for this is that with strict surface quality requirements, there are significant challenges with regard to machining. High-toughness bioceramics can only be machined by grinding and polishing processes. The aim of this study was to develop an automated process chain for the manufacturing of an all-ceramic knee implant. Methods: A five-axis machining process was developed for all-ceramic implant components. These components were used in an investigation of the influence of surface conformity on wear behavior under simplified knee joint motion. Results: The implant components showed considerably reduced wear compared to conventional material combinations. Contact area resulting from a variety of component surface shapes, with a variety of levels of surface conformity, greatly influenced wear rate. Conclusions: It is possible to realize an all-ceramic knee endoprosthesis device, with a precise and affordable manufacturing process. The shape accuracy of the component surfaces, as specified by the design and achieved during the manufacturing process, has a substantial influence on the wear behavior of the prosthesis. This result, if corroborated by results with a greater sample size, is likely to influence the design parameters of such devices.

EMMA 2--a MAGE-compliant system for the collaborative analysis and integration of microarray data

Background: Understanding transcriptional regulation by genome-wide microarray studies can contribute to unravel complex relationships between genes. Attempts to standardize the annotation of microarray data include the Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) recommendations, the MAGE-ML format for data interchange, and the use of controlled vocabularies or ontologies. The existing software systems for microarray data analysis implement the mentioned standards only partially and are often hard to use and extend. Integration of genomic annotation data and other sources of external knowledge using open standards is therefore a key requirement for future integrated analysis systems. Results: The EMMA 2 software has been designed to resolve shortcomings with respect to full MAGE-ML and ontology support and makes use of modern data integration techniques. We present a software system that features comprehensive data analysis functions for spotted arrays, and for the most common synthesized oligo arrays such as Agilent, Affymetrix and NimbleGen. The system is based on the full MAGE object model. Analysis functionality is based on R and Bioconductor packages and can make use of a compute cluster for distributed services. Conclusion: Our model-driven approach for automatically implementing a full MAGE object model provides high flexibility and compatibility. Data integration via SOAP-based web-services is advantageous in a distributed client-server environment as the collaborative analysis of microarray data is gaining more and more relevance in international research consortia. The adequacy of the EMMA 2 software design and implementation has been proven by its application in many distributed functional genomics projects. Its scalability makes the current architecture suited for extensions towards future transcriptomics methods based on high-throughput sequencing approaches which have much higher computational requirements than microarrays.

Establishing continental sovereignty in Africa: risk and opportunity in financial integration - lessons for Africa from a legal perspective

This thesis identifies and defines the new African sovereignty. It establishes a modern sovereignty in Africa hatched from the changing nature of sovereignty in which countries come together at various levels or grades of partial surrender of national sovereignty in order to work closer together for their mutual advantage and benefit. To this end, the narrative zooms in on the central issues within the realms of money matters whereby a new model of monetary sovereignty and monetary solutions is designed in an attempt to ease the recurring tensions and challenges of modern national sovereignty in the continent of Africa. As such, this discussion will offer a historical journey through the constitution of sovereignty, to the birth of the nation state and international public law. It develops the theory of the changing nature of sovereignty within the modern state and opens new lines of inquiry for Africa. In this regard, it draws from juxtaposing and mixing elements of regional and global financial integration as well as retaining national financial sovereignty features to form this new design which I dub continental sovereignty. At its core, the thesis will deal with the legal aspects that stem from the co-mingling of legal systems of nation states and communities at the regional and global levels within the context of financial integration. The argument is that the rule of law remains sacrosanct in monetary management. Effective financial integration is the result of properly structured and managed legal frameworks with robust laws and institutions whether at a national, regional or global level. However, the thesis reveals that in order to avoid undermining the progress of Africa’s financial integration project, any solution for Africa must be immersed within a broader global solution where development issues are addressed and resolved and Africa can form a more central part in all relevant international discussion fora. The work will expound these issues by applying them within a regional and global context, with the state of affairs in Africa forming the nucleus. This application consequently presents the six key themes of the thesis which will be considered therein. They are: a.) regional advantage: which exploits the possibilities of deeper and further financial integration between smaller communal arrangements; b.) regional risk and exposure: the extent to which this deeper form of financial integration can spiral out of control if effected too quickly and too ambitiously; c.) global advantage: which considers the merits of global financial integration and the influence exerted by financial laws on the global financial architecture; d.) global risk and exposure: which considers the challenges of global financial integration especially within the background of the Global Financial Crisis 2007-2008; e.) African challenge: which considers the extent to which this analysis impacts the African economic and financial integration agenda; and f.) development challenge: which examines the extent to which global development issues impact the African solution (continental sovereignty) and the need for any solution for the continent to be roped into a broader global solution within which Africa can form an important part. Even though the thesis requests an optimistic undertone on the progress made so far, it unearths the African problem of multiple national sovereignty and multiple overlapping regional sovereignty constituted as the ‘spaghetti bowl’ dilemma. As such, the unique contribution to knowledge on financial integration in Africa can be echoed in these words: Africa‘s financial integration agenda has had little success in authenticating a systematic and dependable legal framework for monetary management. Efforts made have been incomplete, substandard, and not carefully followed through particularly reflected in the impuissant nature of the judicial enforcement mechanisms. Thus, the thesis argues that, any meaningful answer to the problems dogging the continent is inter alia deeply entrenched within a new form of cooperative monetary sovereignty. In other words, the thesis does not prescribe the creation of new laws; rather it advocates the effective enforcement of existing laws.

Architectural-Physical Co-Design of 3D CPUs with Micro-Fluidic Cooling

The performance, energy efficiency and cost improvements due to traditional technology scaling have begun to slow down and present diminishing returns. Underlying reasons for this trend include fundamental physical limits of transistor scaling, the growing significance of quantum effects as transistors shrink, and a growing mismatch between transistors and interconnects regarding size, speed and power. Continued Moore's Law scaling will not come from technology scaling alone, and must involve improvements to design tools and development of new disruptive technologies such as 3D integration. 3D integration presents potential improvements to interconnect power and delay by translating the routing problem into a third dimension, and facilitates transistor density scaling independent of technology node. Furthermore, 3D IC technology opens up a new architectural design space of heterogeneously-integrated high-bandwidth CPUs. Vertical integration promises to provide the CPU architectures of the future by integrating high performance processors with on-chip high-bandwidth memory systems and highly connected network-on-chip structures. Such techniques can overcome the well-known CPU performance bottlenecks referred to as memory and communication wall. However the promising improvements to performance and energy efficiency offered by 3D CPUs does not come without cost, both in the financial investments to develop the technology, and the increased complexity of design. Two main limitations to 3D IC technology have been heat removal and TSV reliability. Transistor stacking creates increases in power density, current density and thermal resistance in air cooled packages. Furthermore the technology introduces vertical through silicon vias (TSVs) that create new points of failure in the chip and require development of new BEOL technologies. Although these issues can be controlled to some extent using thermal-reliability aware physical and architectural 3D design techniques, high performance embedded cooling schemes, such as micro-fluidic (MF) cooling, are fundamentally necessary to unlock the true potential of 3D ICs. A new paradigm is being put forth which integrates the computational, electrical, physical, thermal and reliability views of a system. The unification of these diverse aspects of integrated circuits is called Co-Design. Independent design and optimization of each aspect leads to sub-optimal designs due to a lack of understanding of cross-domain interactions and their impacts on the feasibility region of the architectural design space. Co-Design enables optimization across layers with a multi-domain view and thus unlocks new high-performance and energy efficient configurations. Although the co-design paradigm is becoming increasingly necessary in all fields of IC design, it is even more critical in 3D ICs where, as we show, the inter-layer coupling and higher degree of connectivity between components exacerbates the interdependence between architectural parameters, physical design parameters and the multitude of metrics of interest to the designer (i.e. power, performance, temperature and reliability). In this dissertation we present a framework for multi-domain co-simulation and co-optimization of 3D CPU architectures with both air and MF cooling solutions. Finally we propose an approach for design space exploration and modeling within the new Co-Design paradigm, and discuss the possible avenues for improvement of this work in the future.

Physical Design Methodologies for Low Power and Reliable 3D ICs

As the semiconductor industry struggles to maintain its momentum down the path following the Moore's Law, three dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC) technology has emerged as a promising solution to achieve higher integration density, better performance, and lower power consumption. However, despite its significant improvement in electrical performance, 3D IC presents several serious physical design challenges. In this dissertation, we investigate physical design methodologies for 3D ICs with primary focus on two areas: low power 3D clock tree design, and reliability degradation modeling and management. Clock trees are essential parts for digital system which dissipate a large amount of power due to high capacitive loads. The majority of existing 3D clock tree designs focus on minimizing the total wire length, which produces sub-optimal results for power optimization. In this dissertation, we formulate a 3D clock tree design flow which directly optimizes for clock power. Besides, we also investigate the design methodology for clock gating a 3D clock tree, which uses shutdown gates to selectively turn off unnecessary clock activities. Different from the common assumption in 2D ICs that shutdown gates are cheap thus can be applied at every clock node, shutdown gates in 3D ICs introduce additional control TSVs, which compete with clock TSVs for placement resources. We explore the design methodologies to produce the optimal allocation and placement for clock and control TSVs so that the clock power is minimized. We show that the proposed synthesis flow saves significant clock power while accounting for available TSV placement area. Vertical integration also brings new reliability challenges including TSV's electromigration (EM) and several other reliability loss mechanisms caused by TSV-induced stress. These reliability loss models involve complex inter-dependencies between electrical and thermal conditions, which have not been investigated in the past. In this dissertation we set up an electrical/thermal/reliability co-simulation framework to capture the transient of reliability loss in 3D ICs. We further derive and validate an analytical reliability objective function that can be integrated into the 3D placement design flow. The reliability aware placement scheme enables co-design and co-optimization of both the electrical and reliability property, thus improves both the circuit's performance and its lifetime. Our electrical/reliability co-design scheme avoids unnecessary design cycles or application of ad-hoc fixes that lead to sub-optimal performance. Vertical integration also enables stacking DRAM on top of CPU, providing high bandwidth and short latency. However, non-uniform voltage fluctuation and local thermal hotspot in CPU layers are coupled into DRAM layers, causing a non-uniform bit-cell leakage (thereby bit flip) distribution. We propose a performance-power-resilience simulation framework to capture DRAM soft error in 3D multi-core CPU systems. In addition, a dynamic resilience management (DRM) scheme is investigated, which adaptively tunes CPU's operating points to adjust DRAM's voltage noise and thermal condition during runtime. The DRM uses dynamic frequency scaling to achieve a resilience borrow-in strategy, which effectively enhances DRAM's resilience without sacrificing performance. The proposed physical design methodologies should act as important building blocks for 3D ICs and push 3D ICs toward mainstream acceptance in the near future.