The performance of Thin Membrane Surface (TMS) highways is largely controlled by the strength of the subgrade soil which in turn is a function of the soil suction (Fredlund and Morgenstern, 1977). Thermal conductivity suction sensors can be used to indirectly measure in situ matric suction. <p>Thirty two (32) thermal conductivity sensors were installed under Thin Membrane Surface (TMS) in two highway locations; namely, Bethune and Torquay, Saskatchewan, in September 2000. The sensors were installed beneath the pavement, shoulder and side-slope to monitor matric suction and temperature changes with time. The monitoring system at Bethune was damaged after two years of operation. The thermal conductivity sensors at Torquay all appear to have been working well and data are still being collected.<p>Other attempts had been made in the past to use thermal conductivity sensors for field suction measurement, but all were terminated within a short period of time due to limitations associated with the equipment. The long-term suction measurement at the Torquay site is unique and provides valuable field data. <p>This research project presents and interprets the long-term matric suction measurements made between the years 2000 to 2005 at the Torquay site and from 2000 to 2002 at the Bethune site. To help in the interpretation of the data, a site investigation was undertaken along with a laboratory testing program that included the measurement of Soil-Water Characteristic Curves (SWCC). As well, a limited laboratory study was undertaken on several new thermal conductivity matric suction sensors. <p>The matric suction readings in the field showed a direct relationship to rainfall and regional evaporation conditions at the test sites. At the Bethune and Torquay test sites, the changes in matric suctions appeared to be mainly due to the movement of moisture through the edge of the road. Relatively constant equilibrium suctions were encountered under the driving-lanes. Conversely, matric suctions under the side-slopes were found to vary considerably with time and depth. Matric suctions under the driving-lanes ranged from 20 to 60 kPa throughout the years. Matric suctions on the side-slopes changed from 100 to 1500 kPa over the years. <p>The greatest variation of soil suctions occurred in the month of April from location to location in the subgrade. The soil suctions became less variable in June while larger variations again occurred from July to October. <p>The matric suction measurements obtained from the thermal conductivity sensors showed a general agreement with the values estimated using the soil-water characteristic curves, SWCC, measured in the laboratory.

Choline oxidase from Arthrobacter globiformis is a flavin-dependent enzyme that catalyzes the oxidation of choline to betaine aldehyde through two sequential hydride-transfer steps. The study of this enzyme is of importance to the understanding of glycine betaine biosynthesis found in pathogenic bacterial or economic relevant crop plants as a response to temperature and salt stress in adverse environment. In this study, chemical modification of choline oxidase using two irreversible inhibitors, tetranitromethane and phenylhydrazine, was performed in order to gain insights into the active site structure of the enzyme. Choline oxidase can also be inactivated irreversibly by freezing in 20 mM sodium phosphate and 20 mM sodium pyrophosphate at pH 6 and -20 oC. The results showed that enzyme inactivation was due to a localized conformational change associated with the ionization of a group in close proximity to the flavin cofactor and led to a complete lost of catalytic activity.

In all energy systems, the parameters necessary to calculate power are the same in functionality: an effort or force needed to create a movement in an object and a flow or rate at which the object moves. Therefore, the power equation can generalized as a function of these two parameters: effort and flow, P = effort * flow. Analyzing various power transfer media this is true for at least three regimes: electrical, mechanical and hydraulic but not for magnetic. This implies that the conventional magnetic system model (the reluctance model) requires modifications in order to be consistent with other energy system models. Even further, performing a comprehensive comparison among the systems, each system's model includes an effort quantity, a flow quantity and three passive elements used to establish the amount of energy that is stored or dissipated as heat. After evaluating each one of them, it was clear that the conventional magnetic model did not follow the same pattern: the reluctance, as analogous to the electric resistance, should be a dissipative element instead it is an energy storage element. Furthermore, the two other elements are not defined. This difference has initiated a reevaluation of the conventional magnetic model. In this dissertation the fundamentals on electromagnetism and magnetic materials that supports the modifications proposed to the magnetic model are presented. Conceptual tests to a case study system were performed in order to figure out the network configuration that better represents its real behavior. Furthermore, analytical and numerical techniques were developed in MATLAB and Simulink in order to validate our model. Finally, the feasibility of a novel concept denominated magnetic transmission line was developed. This concept was introduced as an alternative to transmit power. In this case, the media of transport was a magnetic material. The richness of the power-invariant magnetic model and its similarities with the electric model enlighten us to apply concepts and calculation techniques new to the magnetic regime but common to the electric one, such as, net power, power factor, and efficiency, in order to evaluate the power transmission capabilities of a magnetic system. The fundamental contribution of this research is that it presents an alternative to model magnetic systems using a simpler, more physical approach. As the model is standard to other systems' models it allows the engineer or researcher to perform analogies among systems in order to gather insights and a clearer understanding of magnetic systems which up to now has been very complex and theoretical.

This thesis presents a model of fabric bending hysteresis. The hysteresis model is designed to reproduce the fabric bending measurements taken by the Kawabata Evaluation System (KES) and the model parameters can be derived directly from these property measurements. The advantage to using this technique is that it provides the ability to simulate a continuum of property curves. Results of the model and its components are compared and constrasted with experimental results for fabrics composed of different weaves and yarn types. An attempt to incorporate the bending model as part of a fabric drape simulation is also made.

A new approach to local nonlinear image restoration is described, based on approximating functions using a regular grid of points in a many-dimensional space. Symmetry reductions and compression of the sparse grid make it feasible to work with twelve-dimensional grids as large as 22¹². Unlike polynomials and neural networks whose filtering complexity per pixel is linear in the number of filter co-efficients, grid filters have O(1) complexity per pixel. Grid filters require only a single presentation of the training samples, are numerically stable, leave unusual image features unchanged, and are a superset of order statistic filters. Results are presented for additive noise, blurring, and superresolution.

An automatic question answering system must find, within a corpus,short factual answers to questions posed in natural language. The process involves analyzing the question, retrieving information related to the question, and extracting answers from the retrieved information. This thesis presents a novel approach to answer extraction in an automated question answering (QA) system. The answer extraction approach is an extension of the MultiText QA system. This system employs a question analysis component to examine the question and to produce query terms for the retrieval component which extracts several document fragments from the corpus. The answer extraction component selects a few short answers from these fragments. This thesis describes the design and evaluation of the Redundant Inverse Term Frequency (RITF) answer extraction component. The RITF algorithm locates and evaluates words from the passages that are likely to be associated with the answer. Answers are selected by finding short fragments of text that contain the most likely words based on: the frequency of the words in the corpus, the number of fragments in which the word occurs, the rank of the passages as determined by the IR, the distance of the word from the centre of the fragment, and category information found through question analysis. RITF makes a substantial contribution in overall results, nearly doubling the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), a standard measure for evaluating QA systems.

A new approach to local nonlinear image restoration is described, based on approximating functions using a regular grid of points in a many-dimensional space. Symmetry reductions and compression of the sparse grid make it feasible to work with twelve-dimensional grids as large as 22¹². Unlike polynomials and neural networks whose filtering complexity per pixel is linear in the number of filter co-efficients, grid filters have O(1) complexity per pixel. Grid filters require only a single presentation of the training samples, are numerically stable, leave unusual image features unchanged, and are a superset of order statistic filters. Results are presented for additive noise, blurring, and superresolution.

This thesis presents a model of fabric bending hysteresis. The hysteresis model is designed to reproduce the fabric bending measurements taken by the Kawabata Evaluation System (KES) and the model parameters can be derived directly from these property measurements. The advantage to using this technique is that it provides the ability to simulate a continuum of property curves. Results of the model and its components are compared and constrasted with experimental results for fabrics composed of different weaves and yarn types. An attempt to incorporate the bending model as part of a fabric drape simulation is also made.

An automatic question answering system must find, within a corpus,short factual answers to questions posed in natural language. The process involves analyzing the question, retrieving information related to the question, and extracting answers from the retrieved information. This thesis presents a novel approach to answer extraction in an automated question answering (QA) system. The answer extraction approach is an extension of the MultiText QA system. This system employs a question analysis component to examine the question and to produce query terms for the retrieval component which extracts several document fragments from the corpus. The answer extraction component selects a few short answers from these fragments. This thesis describes the design and evaluation of the Redundant Inverse Term Frequency (RITF) answer extraction component. The RITF algorithm locates and evaluates words from the passages that are likely to be associated with the answer. Answers are selected by finding short fragments of text that contain the most likely words based on: the frequency of the words in the corpus, the number of fragments in which the word occurs, the rank of the passages as determined by the IR, the distance of the word from the centre of the fragment, and category information found through question analysis. RITF makes a substantial contribution in overall results, nearly doubling the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), a standard measure for evaluating QA systems.

Many engineering applications make use of fiber assemblies under compression. Unfortunately, this compression behavior is difficult to predict, due to nonlinear compliance, hysteresis, and anelasticity. The main objective of this research is to develop an algorithm which is capable of incorporating the microscale features of the fiber network into macroscopic scale applications, particularly the modeling of contact mechanics in multibody systems. In micromechanical approaches, the response of a fiber assembly to an external force is related to the response of basic fiber units as well as the interactions between these units, i.e. the mechanical properties of the constituent fibers and the architecture of the assembly will both have a significant influence on the overall response of the assembly to compressive load schemes. Probabilistic and statistical principles are used to construct the structure of the uniformly-distributed random network. Different micromechanical approaches in modeling felt, as a nonwoven fiber assembly with unique mechanical properties, are explored to gain insight into the key mechanisms that influence its compressive response. Based on the deformation processes and techniques in estimating the number of fiber contacts, three micromechanical models are introduced: (1) constitutive equations for micromechanics of three-dimensional fiberwebs under small strains, in which elongation of the fibers is the key deformation mechanism, adapted for large deformation ranges; (2) micromechanical model based on the rate theory of granular media, in which bending and torsion of fibers are the predominant elemental deformations used to calculate compliances of a particular contact; and (3) a mechanistic model developed using the general deformation theory of the fiber networks with fiber bending at the micro level and a binomial distribution of fiber contacts. A well-established mechanistic model, based on fiber-to-fiber friction at the micro level, is presented for predicting the hysteresis in compression behavior of wool fiberwebs. A novel algorithm is introduced to incorporate a hysteretic micromechanical model - a combination of the mechanistic model with microstructural fiber bending, which uses a binomial distribution of the number of fiber-to-fiber contacts, and the friction-based hysteresis idea - into the contact mechanics of multibody simulations with felt-lined interacting bodies. Considering the realistic case in which a portion of fibers slides, the fiber network can be treated as two subnetworks: one from the fibers with non-sliding contact points, responsible for the elastic response of the network, and the other consisting of fibers that slide, generating irreversible hysteresis phenomenon in the fiberweb compression. A parameter identification is performed to minimize the error between the micromechanical model and the elastic part of the loading-unloading experimental data for felt, then contribution of friction was added to the obtained mechanistic compression-recovery curves. The theoretical framework for constructing a mechanistic multibody dynamic model of a vertical piano action is developed, and its general validity is established using a prototype model. Dynamic equations of motion are derived symbolically for the piano action using a graph-theoretic formulation. The model fidelity is increased by including hammer-string interaction, backcheck wire and hammer shank flexibility, a sophisticated key pivot model, nonlinear models of bridle strap and butt spring, and a novel mathematical contact model. The developed nonlinear hysteretic micromechanical model is used for the hammer-string interaction to affirm the reliability and applicability of the model in general multibody dynamic simulations. In addition, dynamic modeling of a flexible hub-beam system with an eccentric tip mass including nonlinear hysteretic contact is studied. The model represents the mechanical finger of an actuator for a piano key. Achieving a desired finger-key contact force profile that replicates that of a real pianist's finger requires dynamic and vibration analysis of the actuator device. The governing differential equations for the dynamic behavior of the system are derived using Euler-Bernoulli beam theory along with Lagrange's method. To discretize the distributed parameter flexible beam in the model, the finite element method is utilized. Excessive vibration due to the arm flexibility and also the rigid-body oscillations of the arm, especially during the period of key-felt contact, is eliminated utilizing a simple grounded rotational dashpot and a grounded rotational dashpot with a one-sided relation. The effect on vibration behavior attributed to these additional components is demonstrated using the simulated model.