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The 7th German-Japanese Bridge Symposium, July 30-August 1, 2007 Osaka, JAPAN (GJBS07)

Nature has an effective approach to cycling materials and energy flows to promote life. This thesis aims to expose urbanite users to nature’s way of cycling materials. The seawall is the largest public space in Vancouver at the edge of land and sea. A neighbourhood community centre along the edge called the Conservatory for Community Matters is created to nurture environmental stewardship by mimicking natural cycles in its function. By conveying architectural systems and form in a cyclical and organic approach, an architectural intervention can address the daily environmental impact of urbanites while rooting people in place and nature in the city. The community centre’s program connects the individually focused daily rituals of eating, making, and exercising to benefit the larger community where urbanites can reintegrate their organic ‘wastes’ into usable by-products. This promotes a paradigm shift transforming the apathetic consumer into an active member of the urban ecosystem.

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The effect of changing edge safety factor on the toroidal flow of the STOR-M plasma has been investigated during the application of both resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) and compact torus injection (CTI). The edge safety factor was varied by varying the plasma current while keeping the toroidal field constant. A Czyner-Turner spectrometer was used to collect the spectral data from which the velocity of specific impurity ions was diagnosed. Time resolved velocity measurements were inferred from the Doppler wavelength shift of the emission lines. Impurity emission lines at different ionization stages are located at different radial locations within the STOR-M plasma. Properties of these impurity ions are assumed to be closely related the hydrogen ion (main working gas) due to the strong interaction among the ion species. Changing the edge safety factor has a similar effect on the toroidal flow of STOR-M plasma during discharges with both RMP and CTI. A velocity shear was discovered for different impurity ions. The toroidal flow is enhanced for edge ions while a reversal of flow is observed for core ions. As the edge safety factor reduces, the emission location for the core ions is located with q=2 surface and RMP has a significant impact on their toroidal flow velocity. It was also observed that CT injection has a significant effect on the toroidal velocity of the core ions compared to that of the edge ions. In addition, high plasma current (low safety factor) induced large change in the toroidal flow velocity of the STOR-M plasma.

This thesis presents the application of topology to machining at the micro and macro levels through an experimental study, modeling and analysis. Uncoated carbide tools of four different cutting edge radii and four different feed rates are used to perform orthogonal machining on AISI 1045 steel disks. The study analyzes the cutting forces, changing grain boundary parameters, micro-hardness, temperature and correlates them to the residual stresses that hold a key to the product life. This analysis helps to understand and evaluate the aspects of grain boundary engineering that influence the fatigue life of a component. The two components of residual stresses (axial and circumferential) are measured, and are correlated with the different cutting edge radii and feed conditions. A topology-based modeling approach is applied to study and understand various outputs in the machining process. The various micro and macro topological parameters that influence the machining process are studied to develop a model to establish the effects of topological parameters in machining using Maple program.

The first-order properties like degree distribution of nodes and the clustering co-efficient have been the prime focus of research in the study of structural properties of networks. The presence of a power law in the degree distribution of nodes has been considered as an important structural characteristic of social and information networks. Higher-order structural properties such as edge embeddedness may also play a more important role in many on-line social networks but have not been studied before. In this research, we study the distribution of higher-order structural properties of a network, such as edge embeddedness, in complex network models and on-line social networks. We empirically study the embeddedness distribution of a variety of network models and theoretically prove that a recently-proposed network model, the random $k$-tree, has a power-law embedded distribution. We conduct extensive experiments on the embeddedness distribution in real-world networks and provide evidence on the correlation between embeddedeness and communication patterns among the members in an on-line social network. / Graduate

A method for designing low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for bandwidth-efficient high-order coded modulation is proposed. Code structure utilizes the multi-edge-type LDPC code ensemble to achieve an improved match between codeword bit protection ca- pabilities and modulation bit-channel capacities over existing LDPC coded modulation techniques. The multi-dimensional EXIT vector field for the specific multi-edge parame- terization is developed for the analysis and design of code ensembles. A multi-dimensional EXIT decoding convergence condition is derived to enable efficient optimization. Code design results in terms of ensemble thresholds and finite-length Monte-Carlo simulations indicate that the new technique improves on the state-of-the-art performance, with sig- nificantly lower design and implementation complexity.

A method for designing low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for bandwidth-efficient high-order coded modulation is proposed. Code structure utilizes the multi-edge-type LDPC code ensemble to achieve an improved match between codeword bit protection ca- pabilities and modulation bit-channel capacities over existing LDPC coded modulation techniques. The multi-dimensional EXIT vector field for the specific multi-edge parame- terization is developed for the analysis and design of code ensembles. A multi-dimensional EXIT decoding convergence condition is derived to enable efficient optimization. Code design results in terms of ensemble thresholds and finite-length Monte-Carlo simulations indicate that the new technique improves on the state-of-the-art performance, with sig- nificantly lower design and implementation complexity.