Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Sunil K. Agrawal, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. Includes bibliographical references.

The amount of data that people and companies store has grown exponentially over the last few years. Storing this information alone is not enough, because in order to make it useful we need to be able to efficiently search inside it. Furthermore, it is highly valuable to keep the historic data of each document stored, allowing to not only access and search inside the newest version, but also over the whole history of the documents. Grammar-based compression has proven to be very effective for repetitive data, which is the case for versioned documents. In this thesis we present several results on representing textual information and searching in it. In particular, we present text indexes for grammar-based compressed text that support searching for a pattern and extracting substrings of the input text. These are the first general indexes for grammar-based compressed text that support searching in sublinear time. In order to build our indexes, we present new results on representing binary relations in a space-efficient manner, and construction algorithms that use little space to achieve their goal. These two results have a wide range of applications. In particular, the representations for binary relations can be used as a building block for several structures in computer science, such as graphs, inverted indexes, etc. Finally, we present a new index, that uses on grammar-based compression, to solve the document listing problem. This problem deals with representing a collection of texts and searching for the documents that contain a given pattern. In spite of being similar to the classical text indexing problem, this problem has proven to be a challenge when we do not want to pay time proportional to the number of occurrences, but time proportional to the size of the result. Our proposal is designed particularly for versioned text, allowing the storage of a collection of documents with all their historic versions in little space. This is currently the smallest structure for such a purpose in practice.

Firms in many sectors have achieved significant economies by taking advantages of opportunities made possible by innovation in trucking logistics. Transportation usually represents the single most important component in trucking logistics costs for most firms. Transportation costs are particularly important to the corrugated container industry. Averaging an estimated 12 to 20% of total costs, transportation costs are a vital factor in the geographical scope of the markets producer can serve in addition to affecting the prices of production inputs and outputs. A natural question for the corrugated container industry is how improvements in the trucking logistics impacts a firms overall operating rate. The literature contains very little information on the relative costs and benefits of alternative logistic operations, including outsourcing, long term contracts, and private carrier. This research seeks to identify practices in trucking logistics that box plants might utilize to obtain materials and disburse products more economically.

A study of pool boiling of a dielectric liquid (PF 5060) from single-layered enhanced structures was conducted. The parameters investigated were the heat flux, the width of the microchannels and the microchannel pitch. The boiling performance of the enhanced structures increases with increase in channel width and decrease in channel pitch. Simple single line curve fits are provided as a practical way of predicting the data over the entire nucleate boiling regime. The influence of confinement on the thermal performance of the enhanced structures was also assessed. The main parameter investigated was the top space (0 mm { 13 mm). High-speed visualization was used as a tool . For the total confinement ( = 0 mm), the heat transfer performance of the enhanced structures was found to depend weakly on the channel width. For >0 mm, the enhancement observed for plain surfaces in the low heat fluxes regime is not present for the present enhanced structure. The maximum heat flux for a prescribed 85 oC surface temperature limit increased with the increase of the top spacing, similar to the plain surfaces case. Two characteristic regimes of pool boiling have been identified and described: isolated flattened bubbles regime and coalesced bubbles regime. A semi-analytical predictive model applicable to pool boiling under confinement is developed. The model requires a limited number of empirical constants and is capable of predicting the experimental heat flux within 30%.

The photovoltaic energy conversion system (PV cells or solar cells) has been researched over the last few decades, and new technologies have been proposed. At the same time, the synthesis of nano-scale materials has been investigated intensively from the 1990s. These new types of materials encourage the development of new PV technologies with extensive research. Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) can be a part of these efforts. Since first presented in 1991, DSSCs have become the center of attention due to their great advantages to the traditional silicon solar cells. However, it remains a challenge to develop better performing DSSCs since the efficiency of DSSCs is still much lower than that of high performance solar cells. To meet this challenge, the different types of TiO2 nanostructures in DSSCs have been studied. This thesis presents the synthesis of TiO2 hetero-structures. These structures can achieve two important factors in DSSCs. One is the electron pathway for high electron transport rate, and the other is the large surface area for the dye absorption. TiO2 hetero-structures were successfully synthesized by using a simple thermal annealing method. The synthesis method required neither a high reaction temperature nor complicated reaction processes and produced dense TiO2 nanowires and incorporating TiO2 nanoparticles with relatively short reaction time. The key parameters of growing 1-D TiO2 nanostructures were the Cu eutectic catalyst, the reaction temperatures, and the annealing time. The repetition time and the reaction temperatures were important factors for incorporating TiO2 nanoparticles. The structure and composition of as-grown samples were analyzed using an x-ray diffractometer, a scanning electron microscope, a field emission scanning electron microscope, a transmission electron microscope and an ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy. The results showed they were crystalline structures in rutile phase of TiO2. From this research, we can utilize hetero-structures as an electrode of DSSCs. We also expect that our simple and effective synthesis method can be used for growing other kinds of metal oxide nanostructures, especially for those melting temperature are high.

Thèse de doctorat : Mécanique. Biomécanique : Paris 12 : 2003. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre.

Thèse de doctorat : Géologie structurale tectonique : Strasbourg 1 : 2007. Doctor of Philosophy : Earth sciences : Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic : 2007. / Thèse soutenue en co-tutelle. Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. p. 61- 69.

Thèse de doctorat : Informatique : Evry-Val d'Essonne : 2009. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2002. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains x, 103 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1987.