Compact microstrip antenna-circuit modules, which could be used as front-ends for future wireless systems applications, require electromagnetic modelling due to the close interaction of the circuit with the antenna. Spectrum crowding and EMC/EMI issues call for modelling of the radiation of such modules. Coupling through fringing fields and the nonlinearities of active devices must be addressed. In this work, the FDTD method was used because it can provide the framework for inclusion of circuit elements in a full wave calculation. A software tool was developed and validated based on this method. The modules studied were chosen due to their compactness and their merit as system components. A module with simultaneous transmit-receive operation integrating an active circulator (using amplifiers in a ring-like arrangement) and a quarter wavelength antenna was analysed. Coupling effects were identified and their impact on the radiation patterns was shown. Electronically tuneable microstrip patch antennas using varactor diodes were also studied. Tuning range and harmonic radiation were demonstrated. Single and dual device Gunn oscillator antennas were analysed and their radiation patterns were calculated for the first time. All of our results were in agreement with experimental findings.

Graphite has been used extensively in UK reactors since the 1950s. The UK nuclear decommissioning programme will result in some 90,000 tonnes of waste graphite being removed from Magnox, AGR, research reactors and plutonium production reactors. It is necessary to understand the radiological characteristics of reactor graphite as a prerequisite for decisions about its interim management as well as final disposition. There is in particular a need to improve confidence in the disposal inventory of the long-lived radionuclides carbon-14 and chlorine-36. Models have been developed to predict the distribution of principal radionuclides for Chapelcross reactor 1 and Wylfa reactor 1, and the calculated inventory compared with published experimental measurements on active samples. The models show good agreement with experimental values for carbon-14 and cobalt-60. However, for the highly mobile and volatile radionuclides chlorine-36 and tritium agreement is poor. The models provide a crude upper limit on the inventory, but certain radionuclides may be released during irradiation. For Wylfa it is predicted that all graphite waste arisings will be ILW. For Chapelcross of the order of 16% of the graphite core may be classified as LLW after the C&M period, but levels of carbon-14 rule out disposal to the LLWR facility.

Thin film ferroelectricss are widely considered for tunable microwave applications, the reduced small dimensions leading to low tuning voltages. The incipient ferroelectric strontium titanate is an ideal solution for tunable microwave devices, particularly in conjunction with high temperature superconductors. It has no spontaneous polarisation yet possesses a large permittivity at low temperatures that is sensitive to an electric field bias with relatively low loss. For such applications it is essential to use a low loss substrate such as magnesium oxide. In general, thin films have less favourable dielectric properties compared with their bulk counterparts due to differences in microstructure. strontium titanate films on MgO substrate prove difficult to grow due to the high lattice mismatch and issues connected with chemical incompatibility at the film/substrate interface. It has been shown here that it is possible to engineer the growth mode of this system, altering the strain and the defect concentration. These are both known factors influencing the dielectric properties of thin films. Reflection high energy electron diffraction (RHEED) in combination with interval pulsed laser deposition (PLD) has been used to achieve a two dimensional, layer-by-layer growth mode. Crucial to this was the deposition of a unit-cell thick titanium dioxide buffer layer on the surface, the deposition of which was also controlled by RHEED. The growth mode and microstructure of films grown using standard PLD with and without the buffer layer and films grown by interval PLD with and without the buffer layer have been compared by analysis of the RHEED data and transmission electron microscopy. This is the first time layer-by-layer growth has been achieved in this highly-mismatched epitaxial systems. The results point the way towards control of defects in oxide thin films from which microstructure-property relationships may be more clearly determined.

Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) operation is a prime candidate for training by simulation. In the present study, we investigate the simulation of ROV operation, especially related to search tasks, using low-cost Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) development tools, so-called “serious games”. In particular we investigate whether the cognitive processes of search, recall and spatial awareness of the user are the same when “technical aids”, such as metal detectors are used. The findings show that there is no significant difference in a person's ability to recall location or environmental features when performing a task in the real or virtual world. The second area of investigation focuses on comparisons between control of ROVs, in simulation and in reality. There was a clear positive significant difference in performance for those participants that had received virtual training. This validated the simulation as having the appropriate psychological fidelity required to make training effective. Finally, the impact of high fidelity simulation on the dependency of technical aids is investigated. The findings suggest a significant increase on the dependency of using additional technical aids when the simulation fidelity was increased. There is also significant evidence to show that the increased fidelity did affect the search strategy employed.

This thesis investigated single-target tracking of arbitrary objects. Tracking is a difficult problem due to a variety of challenges such as significant deformations of the target, occlusions, illumination variations, background clutter and camouflage. To achieve robust tracking performance under these severe conditions, this thesis proposed firstly a novel RGB single-target tracker which models the target with multi-layered features and contextual information. The proposed algorithm was tested on two different tracking benchmarks, i.e., VTB and VOT, where it demonstrated significantly more robust performance than other state-of-the-art RGB trackers. Proposed secondly was an extension of the designed RGB tracker to handle RGB-D images using both temporal and spatial constraints to exploit depth information more robustly. For evaluation, the thesis introduced a new RGB-D benchmark dataset with per-frame annotated attributes and extensive bias analysis, on which the proposed tracker achieved the best results. Proposed thirdly was a new tracking approach to handle camouflage problems in highly cluttered scenes exploiting global dynamic constraints from the context. To evaluate the tracker, a benchmark dataset was augmented with a new set of clutter sub-attributes. Using this dataset, it was demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art single target trackers on highly cluttered scenes.

With the rapid development in communication systems recently, improvements in components of the systems such as antennas and bandpass filters are continuously required to provide improved performance. High gain, wide bandwidth, and small size are the properties of antennas which are demanded in many modern applications, and achieving these simultaneously is a challenge. This thesis presents a new design approach to address this challenge. The coupling matrix is an approach used to represent the circuits made of coupled resonators such as filters and multiplexers. The approach has been utilised here to integrate a single resonator-based antenna with an n\(^t\)\(^h\) order filter. The integrated component is capable of providing a controllable bandwidth and introduces the filtering functionality. The approach is further developed in order to integrate bandpass filters with N×N resonator-based antenna arrays. This is to increase the gain of the array as well. Six novel components have been fabricated for the purpose of validation. This thesis also looks at a 300 GHz communication system which is proposed at The University of Birmingham with the objective to build a 10 metre indoor communication link. A 300 GHz (8×8) waveguide antenna array has been designed and fabricated for the system.

This thesis investigates multi-passband and tunable microwave filters, it includes a new generalised design technique for multi-passband filters and a new coupling tuning structure for tunable waveguide filters. The synthesis technique is an analytical approach and offers very fast solutions to the design once the desired filter specifications are given. The technique calculates the coupling matrix and external Q-factors for a wide range of filter specifications. The centre frequency and bandwidth of each passband, and the number of passbands can all be arbitrarily chosen. To verity the calculations, multi-passband filters are realised by using inverter coupled resonator sections. Two X-band waveguide multi-passband filter examples are given to validate the theory. Besides the innovation in synthesis technique, new designs of fully tunable waveguide filters are also presented. These filters are based on the new coupling tuning structure and a separate frequency tuning structure offering tuning in both centre frequency and bandwidth of the filter. One tunable bandpass filter and one tunable notch filter is implemented in X-band waveguide circuit.

The research and development of wireless communication systems is often based on relatively simple models of the network topology, the radio channel and the radio propagation. This is considered to be mostly appropriate, as only under these conditions the complex technical problems in this field can be fully solved to their theoretical boundaries. However, it can also be the case that algorithms or concepts created under simplified assumptions perform in a significantly different way, when they are applied in more realistic scenarios. This Thesis presents research work which can be seen as a step towards extending the existing research on Coordinated Beamforming to a complex network scenario, i.e. to a large-scale heterogeneous multi-carrier network. For this purpose, a complex simulation framework has been developed. This is used to analyse the significant implications the conditions in a complex network can have on the achievable performance gains. In more detail, the out of cluster interference and the number of mobile stations are identified as factors which heavily influence the performance. This knowledge is then used to design a novel scheduling heuristic, designed to be able to adapt to the particular network scenarios and to estimate the extent of the achievable performance gains. Our simulation results show that the new heuristic achieves significant performance gains for a low number of mobile stations (by applying zero forcing precoding) as well as for a high number of mobile stations (by a coordinated resource assignment that intelligently pairs mobile stations when applying maximum ratio transmission). The Thesis also demonstrates that the effect of the out of cluster interference can cause the reduction of the achievable gains. Due to the knowledge of performance limiting factors, the scheduling heuristic is in addition able to realize a trade-off between complexity and performance by excluding transmission parameters from the scheduling process which are not expected to be beneficial.

Access to Internet is the key to facilitate the economic growth and development of the rural communities and to bridge the digital-divide between the urban and rural population. The traditional broadband access technologies are not always suitable for the rural areas due to their difficult topography and sparsely populated communities. Specialized relay stations can be deployed to extend the coverage of a wireless rural network but they come with an inherited increase in the infrastructural cost. An alternative is to utilize the in-range users as relays to enhance the coverage range of the wireless rural network. In this thesis, the in-range ordinary users termed as primary users (PUs) are used to act as relays for the out-of-range users called the secondary users (SUs). Two relay selection solutions, the Fair Battery Power Consumption (FBPC) algorithm and the Credit based Fair Relay Selection (CF-RS) protocol have been proposed with the aim of providing fair chance to every PU to assist the SUs, thus resulting in fair utilization of battery power of all relays along with the coverage extension. The FBPC algorithm uses the concept of proportional fairness as the relay selection criterion. However, if only proportionally fair consumption of battery power is taken as the relay selection parameter, the FBPC algorithm may result in selecting relays with poor channel conditions. The rural network may also consist of selfish PUs which need to be incentivized to use their resources for the SUs. The CF-RS protocol is developed which takes into account both the achievable data rate and consumption of battery power for selection of a relay. The CF-RS protocol is formulated using Stackelberg game which employs a credit-based incentive mechanism to motivate the self-interested PUs to help the SUs by providing instantaneous as well as long term benefit to the PUs. A basic network model consisting of PUs and SUs has been simulated and the performance of the FBPC algorithm and the CF-RS protocol have been evaluated in terms of data rate and utility achievable at the SUs, dissipation of battery power of the PUs and Jain's fairness index to determine fairness in utilization of battery power. The results obtained show that the FBPC algorithm achieves approximately 100% fairness for utilization of battery power of relays but compromises the data rate attainable by the SUs. Thus the FBPC algorithm shall be viewed as a trade-off between the fair battery power dissipation of relays and the data rate achievable by the SUs. Whereas, the CF-RS protocol provides 55% better utility and longer service time to the SUs without harming the attainable data rate and achieves 80% fairness. When the CF-RS protocol is used for relay selection, it is advantageous even for the self-interested users to participate in the relaying process to earn some benefit to utilize it when needed to buy assistance from other users.

The light sensors market is growing, driven largely by increased use of proximity detection and ambient light sensing (ALS) in consumer electronics. There is high demand for reduced cost and physical size of light sensors, however the spectral filter technology used on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chips has not advanced significantly. Plasmonic filters have been proposed as a superior alternative offering reduced cost and thickness, among other advantages. In this work plasmonic filters are investigated in the near infrared (NIR) range for proximity sensing applications, and the visible range for ALS applications using CMOS compatible materials and fabrication processes. The plasmonic filters are thin metallic films nanostructured with an array of subwavelength holes that facilitate coupling with surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) and localised surface plasmons (LSP). They exhibit extraordinary optical transmission with peak transmission wavelengths controlled by the geometry and size of the hole array. Filters were designed on glass substrate by electromagnetic simulations using a finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, created using micro and nano-fabrication techniques, and then measured by microspectrophotometry to evaluate their spectral response. Following characterisation, the NIR filter was fabricated directly onto a CMOS chip and the spectral response was assessed by chip measurement for a proof-of-concept demonstration of an integrated device. The NIR plasmonic filter exhibited poor suitability on CMOS due to high order plasmonic resonances in the visible range that were enhanced by Fabry-Pérot resonances supported by the CMOS stack. The most common plasmonic filter, a circular-shaped hole nanostructure, is sensitive to angle of incidence (AOI) making it unsuitable for ALS applications. Preliminary designs for plasmonic ALS filters with low sensitivity to AOI were demonstrated, by characterisation on glass, using a cross-shaped hole nanostructure. Design dimensions that produced this quality were decreased array period and decreased ratio of the cross arm-length to arm-width, due to increased separation between the SPP and LSP resonances generated by the plasmonic hole array filter.