Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / South Africa's health transformation blueprint is designed to replace apartheid's inequities and instill instead a new utilitarian approach by the health care sector. This study gives attention to the medical gaze and the body in hospitalisation. At macropolitical level the study focuses on the ways in which the new health policy impacted on power relations and multi-levelled subject positions of medical and nursing staff, as well as on patients in a hierarchy of spaces such as in the wards, in the institution and at a national level, in terms of policy implementation and the reconstruction of the health care services. It shows that policy and institutional discourses and arrangements were embedded in a regime of visuality which discursively homogenised people from different cultural realities. Yet, at the same time biases related to constructions of bodies in relation to class, age, gender and 'value' continued to exist. At the level of hospital protocols and structure the thesis examines the social, political and conceptual frameworks that conveyed, allowed or disallowed particular meaning to the institution. It describes the formal, dominant discourses and processes in the wards and show how these impacted on everyday interaction and relations of power, autonomy, authority, conflict and resistance. The study shows that for patients there often was a disjuncture between policy and practice, as biomedical practitioners and policy makers struggled to define the scope and implementation of health care services in response to pressures for change and concomitant fluctuation. By problematising the notion of the medical gaze and by giving attention to discourses and practices, which were not legitimated by it, the study draws attention to realities that were deemed largely irrelevant by western medical epistemology, such as subjective experiences and knowledge, which, though lacking the same legitimation as the gaze, did not disappear but only become less visible. In this way the study widens the social context in which medical practice can be perceived and understood within a transforming South African health care system.

Numerous macroscale models of arteries have been developed, comprised of populations of discrete coupled Endothelial Cells (EC) and Smooth Muscle Cells (SMC) cells, an example of which is the model of Shaikh et al. (2012), which simulates the complex biochemical processes responsible for the observed propagating waves of Ca2+ observed in experiments. In a 'homogenised' model however, the length scale of each cell is assumed infinitely small while the population of cells are assumed infinitely large, so that the microscopic spatial dynamics of individual cells are unaccounted for. We wish to show in our study, our hypothesis that the homogenised modelling approach for a particular system can be used to replicate observations of the discrete modelling approach for the same system. We may do this by deriving a homogenised model based on Goldbeter et al. (1990), the simplest possible physiological system, and comparing its results with those of the discrete Shaikh et al. (2012), which have already been validated with experimental findings. We will then analyse the mathematical dynamics of our homogenised model to gain a better understanding of how its system parameters influence the behaviour of its solutions. All our homogenised models are essentially formulated as partial differential equations (PDE), specifically they are of type reaction diffusion PDEs. Therefore before we begin developing the homogenised Goldbeter et al. (1990), we will first analyse the Brusselator PDE with the goal that it will help us to understand reaction diffusion systems better. The Brusselator is a suitable preliminary study as it shares two common properties with reaction diffusion equations: oscillatory solutions and a diffusion term.

Yes / A novel Lattice-Boltzmann model to simulate gas mixing in anaerobic digestion is developed and described. For the first time, Euler–Lagrange multiphase, non-Newtonian and turbulence modelling are applied jontly with a novel hybrid boundary condition. The model is validated in a laboratory-scale framework and flow patterns are assessed through Particle Imaging Velocimetry (PIV) and innovative Positron-Emission Particle Tracking (PEPT). The model is shown to reproduce the experimental flow patterns with fidelity in both qualitative and quantitative terms. The model opens up a new approach to computational modelling of the complex multiphase flow in anaerobic digesters and offers specific advantages, such as computational efficiency, over an analogous Euler-Lagrange finite-volume computational fluid dynamics approach. / UK EPSRC Grant (EP/R01485X/1, Computational Methods for Anaerobic Digestion Optimization, “CoMAnDO”). The numerical work was performed in the HPC Cirrus EPSRC Tier-2 National HPC Facility, Edinburgh, UK, under a UK EPSRC Tier-2 Research Allocation Panel (RAP) award.