Thesis (M.S.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. / "August, 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-84). Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2005]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm. Online version available on the World Wide Web.

<p>This dissertation describes the process of converting an application from Visual Basic to a .NET programming language. This work was carried out on behalf of The Prevas Company based in Karlstad, Sweden. Prevas provides IT solutions and industrial systems for several world leading companies such as Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens and many others. The objective behind the conversion of this application was to facilitate a more compatible and flexible option suitable for the other products using the .NET environment. In addition, Prevas felt that the Visual Basic 6 environment had grown rather old and outdated. The task was therefore to convert the source code from Visual basic 6 to .NET language and to determine the most efficient method for the conversion. The outcome of this project was to achieve a fully converted application using the .NET framework with its original functionality intact.</p>

Two liquid-solid reactions, in which the morphology of the solid changes as the reactions proceeds, were examined. One is the NA conversion in oil by decarboxylation on metal oxides and carbonates, and the other is the Kraft pulping in which lignin removal by delignification reaction. In the study of the NA conversion, CaO was chosen as the catalyst for the kinetic study from the tested catalysts based on NA conversion. Two reaction mixtures, carrier oil plus commercial naphthenic acids and heavy vacuum gas oil (HVGO) from Athabasca bitumen, were applied in the kinetic study. The influence of TAN, temperature, and catalyst loading on the NA conversion and decarboxylation were studied systematically. The results showed that the removal rate of TAN and the decarboxylation of NA were both independent of the concentration of NA over the range studied, and significantly dependent on reaction temperature. The data from analyzing the spent catalyst demonstrated that calcium naphthenate was an intermediate of the decarboxylation reaction of NA, and the decomposition of calcium naphthenate was a rate-determining step. In the study on the delignification of the Kraft pulping, a new mechanism was proposed for the heterogeneous delignification reaction during the Kraft pulping process. In particular, the chemical reaction mechanism took into account the heterogeneous nature of Kraft pulping. Lignin reacted in parallel with sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide. The mechanism consists of three key kinetic steps: (1) adsorption of hydroxide and hydrosulfide ions on lignin; (2) surface reaction on the solid surface to produce degraded lignin products; and (3) desorption of degradation products from the solid surface. The most important step for the delignification process is the surface reaction, rather than the reactions occurring in the liquid phase. A kinetic model has, thus, been developed based on the proposed mechanism. The derived kinetic model showed that the mechanism could be employed to predict the pulping behavior under a variety of conditions with good accuracy. / Chemical Engineering

Due to the increasing demand of three-dimensional (3D) graphic applications in various consumer electronics, how to develop a low-cost 3D graphic hardware accelerator suitable for the embedded systems has become an important issue. A typical 3D graphic accelerator includes a geometry sub-system and a rendering sub-system. In this thesis a highly-efficient 3D graphic rendering intellectual property (IP) based on the tiled-based approach is proposed. An entire rendering IP consists of several modules. The main contributions of this thesis focus on the development of the setup-engine, rasterization module, and the integration of the whole modules for the rendering IP. In the design of setup engine, the thesis develops a folded arithmetic unit architecture mainly consisting of one iterative divider, three multipliers and several adders, which can finish the overall computation of the setup equations within less than 50 cycles. As for the rasterization module, this thesis develops several scan-conversion algorithms including hierarchical, fast skip, and boundary-edge test methods suitable for the tiled-based rendering process. The ordinary line drawing algorithm for the scan-line boundary search or the direct in-out test approach is not efficient for tile-based approach since the shape of triangle primitives may become irregular after tiling. Our experimental results show that the boundary-edge test can lead to the most compact design since it can transform the normal in-out test circuit for single pixel to detect two end-points of the scan-line simultaneously. In addition, the rasterization module can be divided into the scan-line and the fragment generation parts which can help the optimization and speedup of the individual part to achieve the desired overall fill-rate goal. Our simulation shows the fill-rate improvement based on this approach is around 60%. Finally, this thesis integrates all the sub-modules to the entire rendering IP core. This IP has been realized by 0.18 um technology. The total gate count is 504k. It can run up to 166 Mhz, and deliver the peak fill rate of 333M pixels/sec and 1.3G texels/sec. This IP has been highly verified, and achieves more than 95% code coverage. It has also been integrated with OPENGL ES software module, Linux operation system and geometry module, and successfully prototyped on the ARM versatile platform.

This thesis aims at both developing highly nonlinear Aluminum Gallium Arsenide waveguides(AlGaAs) and demonstrating all-optical wavelength conversion via cross-phase modulation in AlGaAs waveguides at telecommunications wavelengths. This work covers waveguide design, device fabrication, device characterization and system work.

This thesis aims at both developing highly nonlinear Aluminum Gallium Arsenide waveguides(AlGaAs) and demonstrating all-optical wavelength conversion via cross-phase modulation in AlGaAs waveguides at telecommunications wavelengths. This work covers waveguide design, device fabrication, device characterization and system work.

The history of the Viking invasions in England and what is now France in the ninth and tenth centuries is fairly well documented by medieval chroniclers. The process by which these people adopted Christianity, however, is not. The written and archaeological evidence that we can cobble together indicates that the Scandinavians who settled in England and Normandy converted very quickly. Their conversion was clearly closely associated with settlement on the land. Though Scandinavians in both countries expressed no interest in Christianity as long as they engaged in a Viking lifestyle, characterized by rootless plundering, they almost always accepted Christianity within one or two generations of becoming peasants, even when they lived in heavily Scandinavian, Norse-speaking communities. While the early history of the Vikings in Ireland was similar to that of the Vikings elsewhere, it soon took a different course. While English and French leaders were able to set aside land on which they encouraged the Scandinavians to settle, none of the many petty Irish kings had the wealth or power to do this. The Vikings in Ireland were therefore forced to maintain a lifestyle based on plunder and trade. Over time, they became concentrated into a few port towns from which they travelled inland to conduct raids and then exported what they had stolen from other parts of the Scandinavian diaspora. Having congregated at a few small sites, most prominently Dublin, they remained distinct from the rest of Ireland for centuries. The evidence suggests that they took about four generations to convert. Their conversion differed from that of Scandinavians elsewhere not only in that it was so delayed, but also in that, unlike in England and Normandy, it was not associated with the re-establishment of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. Rather, when the Scandinavians in Ireland did convert, they did so because they were evangelized by monastic communities, in particular the familia of Colum Cille, who had not fled from foundations close to the Viking ports. These communities were probably driven by political concerns to take an interest in the rising Scandinavian towns.

The history of the Viking invasions in England and what is now France in the ninth and tenth centuries is fairly well documented by medieval chroniclers. The process by which these people adopted Christianity, however, is not. The written and archaeological evidence that we can cobble together indicates that the Scandinavians who settled in England and Normandy converted very quickly. Their conversion was clearly closely associated with settlement on the land. Though Scandinavians in both countries expressed no interest in Christianity as long as they engaged in a Viking lifestyle, characterized by rootless plundering, they almost always accepted Christianity within one or two generations of becoming peasants, even when they lived in heavily Scandinavian, Norse-speaking communities. While the early history of the Vikings in Ireland was similar to that of the Vikings elsewhere, it soon took a different course. While English and French leaders were able to set aside land on which they encouraged the Scandinavians to settle, none of the many petty Irish kings had the wealth or power to do this. The Vikings in Ireland were therefore forced to maintain a lifestyle based on plunder and trade. Over time, they became concentrated into a few port towns from which they travelled inland to conduct raids and then exported what they had stolen from other parts of the Scandinavian diaspora. Having congregated at a few small sites, most prominently Dublin, they remained distinct from the rest of Ireland for centuries. The evidence suggests that they took about four generations to convert. Their conversion differed from that of Scandinavians elsewhere not only in that it was so delayed, but also in that, unlike in England and Normandy, it was not associated with the re-establishment of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. Rather, when the Scandinavians in Ireland did convert, they did so because they were evangelized by monastic communities, in particular the familia of Colum Cille, who had not fled from foundations close to the Viking ports. These communities were probably driven by political concerns to take an interest in the rising Scandinavian towns.

In order to realize the advanced graphics rendering algorithms which tends to become more complex and flexible, more and more graphics processor units (GPU) include a micro-processor-like core to support the programmable shading capability. However, since the number of cycles spent in the fragment shader in programmable GPU will vary with different applications, the hardware implementation of the remaining fixed function of the graphics rendering flow becomes not trivial because the suitable target throughput is hard to set. In addition, the data transfer between the shader processor and other hardware fixed-function modules will also represent a big overhead. Therefore, this thesis focuses on realizing the rasterization, which is a very important fixed rendering function, and proposes a pure-software solution that can be executed by the shader processor. The pure-software rasterization requires 98 cycles in setup-stage, and an average of 13 cycles per pixel in interpolation-stage. To further accelerate this rasterization, this thesis also proposes an hardware-software codesign which uses a embedded scan-conversion unit to cooperate with the shader processor. This unit costs about 8.5K gates, which occupies only 1.7% of the entire GPU, but can help reduce more than 30% cycles compared with the pure-software approach in the test-benches used in this thesis. The other contribution of this thesis is to implement the stereoscopic graphic rendering function. To provide stereoscopic effect, the graphic rendering system has to run the entire rendering flow for additional passes to generate the results from different views. However, this thesis will embed an additional code in the fragement shader to adjust the x-coordinate position generated by vertex shader to avoid the additional running pass of the vertex shader.

Tremendous interest to the study of guided waves in pipe inspection in the oil, chemical, and power generating industries has peaked during the last decade. Since the advantages are inspecting long lengths of pipe quickly and without removing insulation. Recent researches in defects inspection are determined by reflection coefficients from the cracks. However, the purpose of this thesis is to excite at a single probe position and to receive the signals of guided waves with the form of loops. For the variations of wave profiles of guided wave, this thesis aimed at the largest energy distribution of wave profiles to proceed with the researches of mode conversion phenomena caused by defects. This thesis utilizes the partial loading source, and excites the non-axisymmetric and axisymmetric guided waves individually along the carbon steel pipes with circumferential defects and without defects to contrast and analyze. According to the change of wave profiles, we can find the variables that change wave profiles for different guided waves modes include propagating distance and frequency, and these cause that the circumferential energy distribution will change. For the non-axisymmetric guided waves in this thesis are non-dispersive, and its variations of phase velocity and group velocity are small, so the variations of wave profiles are also small. Moreover we study the mode conversion phenomena caused by defects from its position which the circumferential energy is largest. It also investigates new modes from mode conversion phenomena produced by defects more completely. Finally, we can predict the types and the number of new modes from mode conversion phenomena by phase velocity dispersion curve, and compare with the experiments well.