The germination rates of four plant species (Allium schoenoprasum L., Dianthus gratianopolitanus ‘Grandiflorus’ Vill., Sedum kamtschaticum Fisch. & C.A. Mey. Spp. ellacombianum (Praeger) R.T. Clausen, and Talinum calycinum Engelm.) were compared with six fertility treatments (control, fertilizer - once a week, double fertilizer - twice a week, mycorrhizae, vermicompost, and green roof mix) that also evaluated a peat based greenhouse medium verses a lightweight aggregate medium integrated. The greenhouse medium had higher germination rates than the lightweight aggregate medium. The control, fertilizer, and double fertilizer, which were not applied until a month into the study, provided similar germination results. The seedlings obtained from the germination study were grown into 3.81cm x 7.62cm plugs, with plant height, leaf count/width, and dry weight taken three months later. The greenhouse medium treatments control, fertilizer, and double fertilizer had the most leaves, and provided the tallest and widest leaves as well as the greatest biomass. The lightweight aggregate medium control displayed the lowest growth in this study. The fertility treatment that showed the most potential was the green roof mix. This mix significantly improved plant growth in the lightweight aggregate medium, which indicates the potential to improve greenhouse medium based plug establishment on extensive green roofs with aggregates.

Honeycomb-cored sandwich structures are widely used in transport for their high strength-to-mass ratio. Their inherent high stiffness and lightweight properties make them prone to high vibration cycles which can incur deleterious damage to transport vehicles. This PhD thesis investigates the performance of a novel passive damping treatment for honeycomb-cored sandwich structures, namely the Double Shear Lap-Joint (DSLJ) damper. It consists of a passive damping construct which constrains a viscoelastic polymer in shear, thus dissipating vibrational energy. A finite element model of such DSLJ damper inserted in the void of a hexagonal honeycomb cell is proposed and compared against a simplified analytical model. The damping efficiency of the DSLJ damper in sandwich beams and plates is benchmarked against that of the Constrained Layer Damper (CLD), a commonly used passive damping treatment. The DSLJ damper is capable of achieving a higher damping for a smaller additional mass in the host structure compared to the optimised CLD solutions found in the literature. The location and orientation of DSLJ inserts in honeycomb sandwich plates are then optimised with the objective of damping the first two modes using a simple parametric approach. This method is simple and quick but is not robust enough to account for mode veering occurring during the optimisation process. A more complex and computationally demanding evolutionary algorithm is subsequently adopted to identify optimal configurations of DSLJ in honeycomb sandwich plates. Some alterations to the original algorithm are successfully implemented for this optimisation problem in an effort to increase the convergence rate of the optimisation process. The optimised designs identified are manufactured and the modal tests carried out show an acceptable correlation in the trends identified by the numerical simulations, both in terms of damping per added mass and natural frequencies.

Data security plays a central role in the design of Internet of Things (IoT). Since most of the "things" in IoT are embedded computing devices it is appropriate to talk about cryptography in embedded of systems. This kind of devices is based on microcontrollers, which have limited resources (processing power, memory, storage, and energy). Therefore, we can apply only lightweight cryptography. The goal of this work is to find the optimal cryptographic solution for IoT devices. It is expected that perception of this solution would be useful for implementation on “limited” devices. In this study, we investigate which lightweight algorithm is better to implement. Also, how we can combine two different algorithms in a hybrid scheme and modify this scheme due to data sending scenario. Compendex, Inspec, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and Springer Link databases are used to conduct a comprehensive literature review. Experimental work adopted in this study involves implementations, measurements, and observations from the results. The experimental research covers implementations of different algorithms and experimental hybrid scheme, which includes additional function. Results show the performance of the considered algorithms and proposed hybrid scheme. According to our results, security solutions for IoT have to utilize algorithms, which have good performance. The combination of symmetric and asymmetric algorithms in the hybrid scheme can be a solution, which provides the main security requirements: confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. Adaptation of this scheme to the possible IoT scenarios shows the results acceptable for implementation due to limited resources of hardware.

Architecture has a dualistic social responsibility. To provide relevant buildings with appropriate function and planning that will accommodate user needs, as well as providing habitable environments and spaces that will have positive influence on peoples daily routines. This will allow users to freely dwell within their environments and create a positive community atmosphere. It is the aim of this dissertation to investigate the social responsibility of architecture and how ordinary spaces and buildings that call for pragmatic design solutions can also enter into the realm of the metaphysical spatial experience and to find cohesion between the two. The selected project is a glasshouse complex and plant containment research facility within the Botanical gardens at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. GERMAN: Die Architektur trägt gesellschaftlich dualistische Verantwortung: es ist eine Schaffung von Gebäuden, die räumliche Bedürfnisse von Benutzern erfüllen, sowie auch einer qualitätsvollen Umgebung, die tägliche Routine von einer Gemeinde positiv beeinflussen wird. Es handelt sich um eine freundliche, gemeinde Atmosphäre zu schaffen. Dieses Projekt hat zum Ziel die Gesellschaftsverantwortung von der Architektur überprüfen. Es wird untersucht, wie vernünftige Räume, die eine Antwort für die funktionelle Bedürfnisse sind, gleichzeitig eine metaphysische Erfahrung kreieren können. Die Idee ist ein Zusammenhang zwischen diesen zwei Ansätze zu identifizieren. Das ausgewählte Projekt ist eine gegenwärtige Gewächshäuseranlage, Forschungsanstalt und botanischer Garten auf dem Gelände der Universität Pretoria, Südafrika. / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Architecture / MArch (Prof) / unrestricted

In this dissertation, we studied and addressed the privacy-preserving and authentication techniques for some network applications, where existing internet security solutions cannot address them straightforwardly due to different trust and attack models and possibly constrained resources. For example, in a centralized dynamic spectrum access (DSA) system, the spectrum resource licensees called incumbent users (IUs), have strong operational privacy requirements for the DSA service provider called spectrum access system (SAS), and hence SAS is required to perform spectrum computation without knowing IUs' operational information. This means SAS can at most be considered as a semi-trusted party which is honest but curious, and common anonymization and end-to-end encryption cannot address this issue, and dedicated solutions are required. Another example is that in an intra-vehicle Controller Area Network (CAN), the transmitter can only embed 64 bits of message and its authentication tag into on message frame, which makes it difficult to achieve message authentication in real-time with sufficient cryptographic strength. The focus of this dissertation is to fill the gap of existing solutions with stronger security notion and practicability. On the topic of privacy-preserving DSA systems, we firstly explored existing solutions and proposed a comparative study. We additionally proposed a new metric for evaluation and showed the advantages and disadvantages of existing solutions. We secondly studied the IU location privacy in 3.5GHz band ESC-based DSA system and proposed a novel scheme called PriDSA. PriDSA addresses malicious colluding SAS attack model through leveraging different and relatively lightweight cryptography primitive with novel design, granting stronger security notion and improved efficiency as well. We thirdly studied the operational privacy of both IU and secondary users (SUs) in a general centralized SAS based DSA system and proposed a novel framework called PeDSS. Through our novel design that integrates differential privacy with secure multi-party computation protocol, PeDSS exhibits great communication and computation overhead compared to existing solutions. On the topic of lightweight message authentication in resource-constrained networks, we firstly explored message authentication schemes with high cryptographic strength and low communication-overhead and proposed a novel scheme called CuMAC. CuMAC provides a flexible trade-off between authentication delay and cryptographic strength, through the embodiment of a novel concept that we refer to as accumulation of cryptographic strength. We secondly explored the possibility of achieving both high cryptographic strength and low authentication delay and proposed a variant of CuMAC called CuMAC/S. By employing the novel idea of message speculation, CuMAC/S achieves enables the accumulation of cryptographic strength while incurring minimal delay when the message speculation accuracy is high. / Doctor of Philosophy / The privacy-preserving and message authentication issues of some network applications are distinctive from common internet security due to different attack models and possibly constrained resources, and these security and privacy concerns cannot be addressed by applying existing internet security solutions straightforwardly. For example, in a centralized dynamic spectrum access (DSA) system, the spectrum resource licensees called incumbent users (IUs), have strong operational privacy requirements for the DSA service provider called spectrum access system (SAS), and hence SAS is required to perform spectrum computation without knowing IUs' operational information. This means SAS can at most be considered as a semi-trusted party which is honest but curious, and common anonymization and end-to-end encryption cannot address this issue, and dedicated solutions are required. Another example is that in an intra-vehicle Controller Area Network (CAN), the transmitter can only embed 64 bits of message and its authentication tag into on message frame, which makes it difficult to achieve message authentication in real-time with sufficient cryptographic strength. We addressed the privacy issue of DSA systems by proposing novel schemes incorporating efficient cryptographic primitives and various privacy-preserving techniques, achieving a greatly higher efficiency or stronger privacy-preserving level. We addressed the lightweight authentication issue of resource-constrained networks by employing the novel concept of security accumulation and message speculation, achieving high cryptographic strength, low communication overhead, and probable low latency.

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Currently, NCHRP Report 356 has published an equation to estimate the ultimate strength of the local zone in normal weight concrete. The local zone is the area of concrete directly ahead of the bearing plate. The equation can be broken into two distinct parts: unconfined bearing strength of concrete enhanced by the A/A_b ratio and the enhancement of strength due to the presence of confining. Research has shown that the strength enhancement of the A/Ab ratio and confining reinforcing is less in lightweight concrete than in normal weight concrete. To determine the strength of the local zone in lightweight concrete 30 reinforced prisms, 2 unreinforced prisms, and concrete cylinders were tested. The dimensions of the prisms were 8 in. x 8 in. x 16 in. and the cylinders were 4 in. x 8 in. cylinders. The simulated reinforcing in the prisms extended only through the top 8 in. of the prism and consisted of either ties or spirals with different spacing or pitch, respectively. To determine the effect of the A/A_b ratio for each spacing or pitch arrangement of the reinforcing, one of two different size bearing plates were used. From the testing performed in this research and other research, it is apparent that the NCHRP equation is unconservative when estimating the ultimate strength of the local zone in lightweight concrete. By modifying both parts of the NCHRP equation it is possible to conservatively predict the ultimate strength of the local zone in lightweight concrete. Also investigated in this thesis are equations to predict the splitting cylinder strength and modulus of elasticity of lightweight concrete. For a sand-lightweight concrete, as defined by ACI 318-05 Building code and Commentary, the splitting tensile strength can be accurately predicted by multiplying the square root of the compressive strength by 5.7. / Master of Science