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This thesis describes an ion irradiation study of ordered Cu<sub>3M/sub>Au. Argon, Copper and Krypton ions of 50 and 100keV were implanted to nominal doses of 10¹¹ ions cm^-2 both at room temperature and at liquid helium temperature. The damage induced at low temperature was observed in-situ and after subsequent warming to room temperature. The collapse of collision cascades to vacancy dislocation loops was observed to occur with moderately high probability under all irradiation conditions at low temperature, with no subsequent increase in the number of loops on warming. Comparison of the collapsed fraction of cascades at low temperature with that produced by room temperature irradiation revealed that the collapse process is more efficient in the latter case. An increase in collapse probability with ion mass was also observed, although no dependence on ion energy was found over the range investigated. Quantitative analysis of the disordered zones which result in ordered Cu₃Au at individual cascade sites revealed that cascades which had collapsed to loops generally produced larger disordered zones. Additionally, increases in disordered zone size with ion mass, ion energy and irradiation temperature were identified. The observation that disordered zone sizes exceed the theoretically predicted cascade dimensions for the case of the highest energy density in this study (50keV Kr) is interpreted as evidence for leakage of energy from the cascade region to the surrounding lattice. A model is proposed which attributes the observed cascade collapse behaviour to vacancy migration during the cooling of the cascade region being systematically directed toward its centre, and accounts for the observed disordered zones in terms of extensive atomic rearrangement during the cooling. The major factors identified as controlling this vacancy and atomic motion are the initial spatial distribution of energy and vacancies within the region, and the rate at which the region cools.

A review of Shakedown and Ratchetting concepts and their extensions is presented in an attempt to recount all the aspects of the problems considered in this research programme. The concept of Stress Concentration Factor was the first to be further investigated, by analysing two representative types of structures operating under severe stress concentration, namely; two-bar structures and cylindrical vessels with variable thickness subjected to cyclic mechanical loads. The material behaviour considered are: elastic-perfectly plastic and isotropic hardening. Such an analytical investigation allowed the assessment of the influence of the Stress Concentration Factor below and above the limit of reversed plasticity. The primary aim of this research was to develop simplified techniques capable of solving thermal loading problems in the presence of steady mechanical loads. A simplified technique was then developed to analyse a tube subjected to a complex thermal loading simulating the fluctuation of level of sodium in Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors (LMFBR). The technique was also able to include a second important aspect of shakedown problems which is cases of multiple mechanical loads. The construction of bi-dimensional Bree type diagrams, from tri-dimensional ones obtained for such cases, allowed an easy assessment of the modes of deformation of the structure. The effects of the temperature on the yield stress were explored. A third aspect of thermal cyclic problems investigated was the experimental verification of the reliability of the extended Upper Bound Theorem proposed in Chapter 2. This was achieved by experimental tests on portal frames at 400°C. Contours representing states of constant of deformation were obtained from the experimental measurements. A fourth aspect of the problem was the development of theoretical technique to estimate the transient plastic deformation in excess of the shakedown limit which allowed the construction of theoretical contours directly comparable with the experimental ones. The fifth and major contribution of this thesis was the development of a general technique for the analysis of axi-symmetric shells based in a displacement formulation for the Finite Element Method. Limit analysis and shakedown problems were reduced to minimization problems by developing a technique to obtain consistent relationship between the displacement field and the plastic strain field. Such a technique, based upon a Galerkin type of approach, consist of minimizing the difference between the two representations of the strain within the element; in terms of nodal displacement and in terms of plastic multipliers. The problem was then solved by Linear Programming. Finally, the conclusions and proposal for future work are presented.

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The development of computer based tools, to assist process plant operators in their task of fault/alarm diagnosis, has received much attention over the last twenty five years. More recently, with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, the research activity in this subject area has heightened. As a result, there are a great variety of fault diagnosis methodologies, using many different approaches to represent the fault propagation behaviour of process plant. These range in complexity from steady state quantitative models to more abstract definitions of the relationships between process alarms. Unfortunately, very few of the techniques have been tried and tested on process plant and even fewer have been judged to be commercial successes. One of the outstanding problems still remains the time and effort required to understand and model the fault propagation behaviour of each considered process. This thesis describes the development of an experimental knowledge based system (KBS) to diagnose process plant faults, as indicated by process variable alarms. In an attempt to minimise the modelling effort, the KBS has been designed to infer diagnoses using a fault tree representation of the process behaviour, generated using an existing fault tree synthesis package (FAULTFINDER). The process is described to FAULTFINDER as a configuration of unit models, derived from a standard model library or by tailoring existing models. The resultant alarm diagnosis methodology appears to work well for hard (non-rectifying) faults, but is likely to be less robust when attempting to diagnose intermittent faults and transient behaviour. The synthesised fault trees were found to contain the bulk of the information required for the diagnostic task, however, this needed to be augmented with extra information in certain circumstances.