To achieve thinner and longer floor slabs, rapid construction, and tight control of inservice deflections, modern concrete structures increasingly use high-strength, posttensioned prestressing steel as reinforcement. The resulting structures are called posttensioned (PT) concrete. Post-tensioned concrete slabs are widely believed to benefit from ‘inherent fire endurance.’ This belief is based largely on results from a series of standard fire tests performed on simply-supported specimens some five decades ago. Such tests are of debatable credibility; they do not capture the true structural behaviour of real buildings in real fires, nor do they reflect modern PT concrete construction materials or optimization methods. This thesis seeks to develop a more complete understanding of the structural and thermal response of modern prestressing steel and PT concrete slabs, particularly those with unbonded prestressing steel conditions, to high temperature, in an effort to steer current practice and future research towards the development of defensible, performance-based, safe fire designs. An exhaustive literature review of previous experimentation and real case studies of fire exposed PT concrete structures is presented to address whether current code guidance is adequate. Both bonded and unbonded prestressing steel configurations are considered, and research needs are identified. For unbonded prestressing steel in a localised fire, the review shows that the interaction between thermal relaxation and plastic deformation could result in tendon failure and loss of tensile reinforcement to the concrete, earlier than predicted by available design guidance. Since prestressing steel runs continuously in unbonded PT slabs, local damage to prestressing steel will affect the integrity of adjacent bays in a building. In the event that no bonded steel reinforcement is provided (as permitted by some design codes) a PT slab could lose tensile reinforcement across multiple bays; even those remote from fire. Using existing literature and design guidance, preliminary simplified modelling is presented to illustrate the stress-temperature-time interactions for stressed, unbonded prestressing steel under localised heating. This exercise showed that the observed behaviour cannot be rationally described by the existing design guidance. The high temperature mechanical properties of modern prestressing steel are subsequently considered in detail, both experimentally and analytically. Tests are presented on prestressing steel specimens under constant axial stress at high temperature using a high resolution digital image correlation (DIC) technique to accurately measure deformations. A novel, accurate analytical model of the stresstemperature- time dependent deformation of prestressing steel is developed and validated for both transient and steady-state conditions. Modern prestressing steel behaviour is then compared to its historical prestressing steel counterparts, showing significant differences at high temperature. Attention then turns to other structural actions of a real PT concrete structure (e.g. thermal bowing, restraint, concrete stiffness loss, continuity, spalling, slab splitting etc.) all of which also play inter-related roles influencing a PT slab’s response in fire. A series of three non-standard structural fire experiments on heavily instrumented, continuous, restrained PT concrete slabs under representative sustained service loads were conducted in an effort to better understand the response of PT concrete structures to localised heating. To the author’s knowledge this is the first time a continuous PT slab which includes axial, vertical and rotational restraint has been studied at high temperature, particularly under localised heating. The structural response of all three tests indicates a complex deflection trend in heating and in cooling which differs considerably from the response of a simply supported slab in a standard fire test. Deflection trends in the continuous slab tests were due to a combination of thermal expansion and plastic damage. The test data will enable future efforts to validate computational models which account for the requisite complexities. Overall, the research presented herein shows that some of the design guidance for modern PT concrete slabs is inadequate and should be updated. The high temperature deformation of prestressing steel under localised heating, as would be expected in a real fire, should be considered, since uniform heating of simplysupported elements is both unrealistic and unconservative with respect to tensile rupture of prestressing steel tendons. The most obvious impact of this finding would be to increase the minimum concrete covers required for unbonded PT construction, and to require adequate amounts of bonded steel reinforcement to allow load shedding to the bonded steel at high temperature in the event that the prestressing steel fails or is severely damaged by fire.

We present cosmological constraints from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) using a combined analysis of angular clustering of red galaxies and their cross-correlation with weak gravitational lensing of background galaxies. We use a 139 deg(2) contiguous patch of DES data from the Science Verification (SV) period of observations. Using large-scale measurements, we constrain the matter density of the Universe as Omega(m) = 0.31 +/- 0.09 and the clustering amplitude of the matter power spectrum as sigma(8) = 0.74 +/- 0.13 after marginalizing over seven nuisance parameters and three additional cosmological parameters. This translates into S-8 = sigma(8)(Omega(m)/0.3)(0.16) = 0.74 +/- 0.12 for our fiducial lens redshift bin at 0.35 < z < 0.5, while S-8 = 0.78 +/- 0.09 using two bins over the range 0.2 < z < 0.5. We study the robustness of the results under changes in the data vectors, modelling and systematics treatment, including photometric redshift and shear calibration uncertainties, and find consistency in the derived cosmological parameters. We show that our results are consistent with previous cosmological analyses from DES and other data sets and conclude with a joint analysis of DES angular clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing with Planck Cosmic Microwave Background data, baryon accoustic oscillations and Supernova Type Ia measurements.

SCALE UP! is an exploration in hand-printed surface patterns in relation to scale. The aim is to make hand-printed large-scale surface patterns, by challenging the limitations of the printing screen, the fabric width and the circle as a shape; with the circle as a pattern and structure to visualise it, by colours and bleed-through. The project is based in an interest in working large-scale, in the area of screen printing. We often see printed full-width fabrics where the repeat fills the whole width. However, a possibility to take it one step further and not be limited by the width of the fabric or the size of the printing screen was seen. Why be satisfied with the size of a full-width pattern and see the printing screen as a frame to keep within? The striving to challenge the size of the printing screen and the fabric width were the basis of the project. The result is one piece ~4,2 x 4,8 m big consisting of six hand-printed cloths.

The potential of using cluster clustering for calibrating the mass-richness relation of galaxy clusters has been recognized theoretically for over a decade. Here, we demonstrate the feasibility of this technique to achieve high-precision mass calibration using redMaPPer clusters in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey North Galactic Cap. By including cross-correlations between several richness bins in our analysis, we significantly improve the statistical precision of our mass constraints. The amplitude of the mass-richness relation is constrained to 7 per cent statistical precision by our analysis. However, the error budget is systematics dominated, reaching a 19 per cent total error that is dominated by theoretical uncertainty in the bias-mass relation for dark matter haloes. We confirm the result from Miyatake et al. that the clustering amplitude of redMaPPer clusters depends on galaxy concentration as defined therein, and we provide additional evidence that this dependence cannot be sourced by mass dependences: some other effect must account for the observed variation in clustering amplitude with galaxy concentration. Assuming that the observed dependence of redMaPPer clustering on galaxy concentration is a form of assembly bias, we find that such effects introduce a systematic error on the amplitude of the mass-richness relation that is comparable to the error bar from statistical noise. The results presented here demonstrate the power of cluster clustering for mass calibration and cosmology provided the current theoretical systematics can be ameliorated.

With size down to nanoscale, nanomaterials exhibit novel properties exceeding or differing significantly from their bulk counterparts. In particular, amongst a wide range of interesting new nanostructures, tungsten based nanomaterials have demonstrated super physical, chemical, electronical and mechanical properties in a diverse range of applications which has been comprehensively reviewed. However, challenges still remain high on the effective processes to scale up the manufacturing of such nanomaterials, with desired shape, size and quality. These tungsten based nanomaterials are thus become the research subject of this project, and the study on continuous manufacturing of specifically inorganic fullerene WS2 (IF-WS2) nanoparticles, and their potential exploration as fillers to polymer matrix to fabricate nanocomposites with improved mechanical properties are the main objectives of this research. After a thorough assessment of the extremely promising potentials of tungsten based nanostructures, and review of the current bottleneck for large quantity production of IF-WS2, a generic experimental methodology and techniques used for the investigations have been described in experimental methodology part. In the following chapters, this thesis demonstrates the following research works: A novel rotary furnace for continuous scaling up manufacturing of IF-WS2 nanoparticles has been designed, constructed, tested and refined in this work. The new furnace consists of several key components: a tube furnace, self-contained rotary system, dynamic seal system, modified new tube with baffle, and a continuous gas-blow feeding system. Test results show that the rotary reactor has improved the lab scale manufacturing of IF-WS2 from sub-gram to several tens of grams per batch without agglomeration, which makes this technique a promising alternative for the replacement of the existing tall fluidised tower processing in industrial level production. As an important precursor for IF-WS2 nanomaterials production, the synthesis of WOx nanoparticles by high temperature thermal decomposition of Ammonium Paratungstate (APT) has been investigated, and the parameters have been optimised (with Ar flow at 6 L/min at 1350°C ) for achieving desired sizes. Further studies on the creation of uniform and ultra-thin WOx nanowires were carried out using solvothermal technique. The solvent concentrations, reaction time and solvent types have been systematically investigated, and the resulting WOx nanowires from tungsten chloride precursor in mixed cyclohexanol and ethanol solvent exhibited a record high specific surface area of 275 m2/g. This is fundamentally significant for their applications in sensor and electro-chromic devices. Reverse patterned growth of WOx nanorods was realised for the first time on an Au-coated W foil by a simple W-water vapour reaction. The resulting nanorods of different diameters, lengths and patterns have been created by tuning the growth parameters. Further nitriding under NH3 atmosphere at elevated temperature, converted the WOx nanorods, as a template, to WOxNy nanorods. The WOxNy nanorods have been found to inherit the patterns on the substrate and kept the size and shape of WOx nanorods. An interesting morphology revolution for the conversion of WOx to WOxNy nanorods was observed, and a mechanism has been proposed accordingly to account for the growth. This result represents a simple, innovative and efficient process for the reverse-patterned growth of new nanomaterials. Further development of the rotary furnace has led to a unique new class of core-shell composite nanoparticles, carbon (C)-coated IF-WS2 hollow nanoparticles, by continuous chemical vapour deposition (CVD) production. The composite nanoparticles exhibited a uniform and adjustable C coating, with little or no agglomeration. Importantly, the thermal stability of the core-shell C-coated IF-WS2 against oxidation in air has been improved by about 70°C, compared to the pristine IF-WS2. This new material could find applications where thermal stability is critical. Exploration of 0-4 wt% IF-WS2 as reinforcement in nylon 12 matrix nanocomposites has been carried out for the first time, using a combination of ultrasonic dispersion and magnetic stirring technique to achieve excellent IF-WS2 dispersion in the matrix. Tensile and bending test results showed moderate improvements of 27% and 28% respectively, with a 2 wt% IF-WS2 addition, but a staggering 185% and 148% improvement in toughness for the addition of 0.25 and 0.5 wt% IF-WS2 samples, against pure nylon 12, suggesting that such composites are promising candidates for structural and ballistic fibre applications.

Large-scale networks are becoming more prevalent, with applications in healthcare systems, financial networks, social networks, and traffic systems. The detection of normal and abnormal behaviors (signals) in these systems presents a challenging problem. State-of-the-art approaches such as principal component analysis and graph signal processing address this problem using signal projections onto a space determined by an eigendecomposition or singular value decomposition. When a graph is directed, however, applying methods based on the graph Laplacian or singular value decomposition causes information from unidirectional edges to be lost. Here we present a novel formulation and graph signal processing framework that addresses this issue and that is well suited for application to extremely large, directed, sparse networks. In this thesis, we develop and demonstrate a graph Fourier transform for which the spectral components are the Jordan subspaces of the adjacency matrix. In addition to admitting a generalized Parseval’s identity, this transform yields graph equivalence classes that can simplify the computation of the graph Fourier transform over certain networks. Exploration of these equivalence classes provides the intuition for an inexact graph Fourier transform method that dramatically reduces computation time over real-world networks with nontrivial Jordan subspaces. We apply our inexact method to four years of New York City taxi trajectories (61 GB after preprocessing) over the NYC road network (6,400 nodes, 14,000 directed edges). We discuss optimization strategies that reduce the computation time of taxi trajectories from raw data by orders of magnitude: from 3,000 days to less than one day. Our method yields a fine-grained analysis that pinpoints the same locations as the original method while reducing computation time and decreasing energy dispersal among spectral components. This capability to rapidly reduce raw traffic data to meaningful features has important ramifications for city planning and emergency vehicle routing.

We detect the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect with a statistical significance of 4.2 sigma by combining a cluster catalogue derived from the first year data of the Dark Energy Survey with cosmic microwave background temperature maps from the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Survey. This measurement is performed with a differential statistic that isolates the pairwise kSZ signal, providing the first detection of the large-scale, pairwise motion of clusters using redshifts derived from photometric data. By fitting the pairwise kSZ signal to a theoretical template, we measure the average central optical depth of the cluster sample, (tau) over bar (e) = (3.75 +/- 0.89) x 10(-3). We compare the extracted signal to realistic simulations and find good agreement with respect to the signal to noise, the constraint on (tau) over bar (e), and the corresponding gas fraction. High-precision measurements of the pairwise kSZ signal with future data will be able to place constraints on the baryonic physics of galaxy clusters, and could be used to probe gravity on scales greater than or similar to 100 Mpc.

In cosmological N-body simulations, the representation of dark matter as discrete 'macroparticles' suppresses the growth of structure, such that simulations no longer reproduce linear theory on small scales near k(Nyquist). Marcos et al. demonstrate that this is due to sparse sampling of modes near k(Nyquist) and that the often-assumed continuum growing modes are not proper growing modes of the particle system. We develop initial conditions (ICs) that respect the particle linear theory growing modes and then rescale the mode amplitudes to account for growth suppression. These ICs also allow us to take advantage of our very accurate N-body code ABACUS to implement second-order Lagrangian perturbation theory (2LPT) in configuration space. The combination of 2LPT and rescaling improves the accuracy of the late-time power spectra, halo mass functions, and halo clustering. In particular, we achieve 1 per cent accuracy in the power spectrum down to k(Nyquist), versus k(Nyquist)/4 without rescaling or k(Nyquist)/13 without 2LPT, relative to an oversampled reference simulation. We anticipate that our 2LPT will be useful for large simulations where fast Fourier transforms are expensive and that rescaling will be useful for suites of medium-resolution simulations used in cosmic emulators and galaxy survey mock catalogues. Code to generate ICs is available at https://github.com/lgarrison/zeldovich-PLT.

Cosmic voids are usually identified in spectroscopic galaxy surveys, where 3D information about the large-scale structure of the Universe is available. Although an increasing amount of photometric data is being produced, its potential for void studies is limited since photometric redshifts induce line-of-sight position errors of >= 50 Mpc h(-1)which can render many voids undetectable. We present a new void finder designed for photometric surveys, validate it using simulations, and apply it to the high-quality photo-z redMaGiC galaxy sample of the DES Science Verification data. The algorithm works by projecting galaxies into 2D slices and finding voids in the smoothed 2D galaxy density field of the slice. Fixing the line-of-sight size of the slices to be at least twice the photo-z scatter, the number of voids found in simulated spectroscopic and photometric galaxy catalogues is within 20 per cent for all transverse void sizes, and indistinguishable for the largest voids (R-v >= 70 Mpc h(-1)). The positions, radii, and projected galaxy profiles of photometric voids also accurately match the spectroscopic void sample. Applying the algorithm to the DES-SV data in the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.8, we identify 87 voids with comoving radii spanning the range 18-120 Mpc h(-1), and carry out a stacked weak lensing measurement. With a significance of 4.4 sigma, the lensing measurement confirms that the voids are truly underdense in the matter field and hence not a product of Poisson noise, tracer density effects or systematics in the data. It also demonstrates, for the first time in real data, the viability of void lensing studies in photometric surveys.

Gravitational lensing studies the distortions of a distant galaxy’s observed size, shape or flux due to the tidal bending of photons by matter between the source and observer. Such distortions can be used to infer knowledge on the mass distribution of the intervening matter, such as the dark matter halos in which clusters of individual galaxies may reside, or on cosmology through the statistics of the matter density of large scale structure and geometrical factors. In particular, gravitational lensing has the advantage that it is insensitive to the nature of the lensing matter. However, contamination of the signal by correlations between galaxy shape or size and local environment complicate a lensing analysis. Further, measurement of traditional lensing estimators is made more difficult by limitations on observations, in the form of atmospheric distortions or optical limits of the telescope itself. As a result, there has been a large effort within the lensing community to develop methods to either reduce or remove these contaminants, motivated largely by stringent science requirements for current and forthcoming surveys such as CFHTLenS, DES, LSST, HSC, Euclid and others. With the wealth of data from these wide-field surveys, it is more important than ever to understand the full range of independent probes of cosmology at our disposal. In particular, it is desirable to understand how each probe may be used, individually and in conjunction, to maximise the information of a lensing analysis and minimise or mitigate the systematics of each. With this in mind, I investigate the use of galaxy clustering measurements using photometric redshift information, including a contribution from flux magnification, as a probe of cosmology. I present cosmological forecasts when clustering data alone are used, and when clustering is combined with a cosmic shear analysis. I consider two types of clustering analysis: firstly, clustering with only redshift auto-correlations in tomographic redshift bins; secondly, clustering using all available redshift bin correlations. Finally, I consider how inferred cosmological parameters may be biased using each analysis when flux magnification is neglected. Results are presented for a Stage–III ground-based survey, and a Stage–IV space-based survey modelled with photometric redshift errors, and values for the slope of the luminosity function inferred from CFHTLenS catalogues. I find that combining clustering information with shear gives significant improvement on cosmological parameter constraints, with the largest improvement found when all redshift bins are included in the analysis. The addition of galaxy-galaxy lensing gives further improvement, with a full combined analysis improving constraints on dark energy parameters by a factor of > 3. The presence of flux magnification in a clustering analysis does not significantly affect the precision of cosmological constraints when combined with cosmic shear and galaxy-galaxy lensing. However if magnification is neglected, inferred cosmological parameter values are biased, with biases in some cosmological parameters found to be larger than statistical errors. We find that a combination of clustering, cosmic shear and galaxy-galaxy lensing can provide a significant reduction in statistical errors from each analysis individually, however care must be taken to measure and model flux magnification. Finally, I consider how measurements of galaxy size and flux may be used to constrain the dark matter profile of a foreground lens, such as galaxy- or galaxy-cluster-dark matter halos. I present a method of constructing probability distributions for halo profile free parameters using Bayes’ Theorem, provided the intrinsic size-magnitude distribution may be measured from data. I investigate the use of this method on mock clusters, with an aim of investigating the precision and accuracy of returned parameter constraints under certain conditions. As part of this analysis, I quantify the size and significance of inaccuracies in the dark matter reconstruction as a result of limitations in the data from which the sample and size-magnitude distribution is obtained. This method is applied to public data from the Space Telescope A901/902 Galaxy Evolution Survey (STAGES), and results are presented for the four STAGES clusters using measurements of source galaxy size and magnitude, and a combination of both. I find consistent results with existing shear measurements using measurements of galaxy magnitudes, but interesting inconsistent results when galaxy size measurements are used. The simplifying assumptions and limitations of the analysis are discussed, and extensions to the method presented.