Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 215-220).

Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: volume integral equations; patch antenna; reonators; MoM. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-106).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Syracuse University, 2007. / "Publication number: AAT 3295512."

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Auburn University. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-71).

Thesis (M.A.S.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland. / Typescript. Bibliography: leaves 75-79. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xiv, 130 p.; also includes graphics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-130). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

This study focuses on the development of a stochastic simulation methodology to study the effects of cure kinetics uncertainty, in plane fibre misalignment and boundary conditions uncertainty on the cure process of composite materials. Differential Scanning Calorimetry was used to characterise cure kinetics variability of a commercial epoxy resin used in aerospace applications. It was found that cure kinetics uncertainty is associated with variations in the initial degree of cure, activation energy and reaction order. Image analysis was employed to characterise in plane fibre misalignment in a carbon fibre ±45º non-crimp fabric. The experimental results showed that variability in tow orientation was significant with a standard deviation of about 1.2º. A set of experiments using an infusion set-up was carried out to quantify boundary conditions uncertainty related to tool temperature, ambient temperature and surface heat transfer coefficient using thermocouples (tool/ambient temperature) and heat flux sensors (surface heat transfer coefficient). It was concluded that boundary conditions uncertainty can show considerable short term and long term variability. Conventional Monte Carlo and Probabilistic Collocation Method were integrated with a thermo-mechanical cure simulation model in order to investigate the effect of cure kinetics, fibre misalignment and boundary conditions variability on process outcome. The cure model was developed and implemented using a finite element model incorporating appropriate material sub-models of cure kinetics, specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity, moduli, thermal expansion and cure shrinkage. The effect of cure kinetics uncertainty on the temperature overshoot of a thick carbon fibre epoxy flat panel was investigated using the two stochastic simulation schemes. The stochastic simulation results showed that variability in cure kinetics can introduce a significant scatter in temperature overshoot, presenting a coefficient of variation of about 30%. Furthermore, it was shown that the collocation method can offer an efficient solution with significantly lower computational cost compared to Monte Carlo at comparable accuracy. Stochastic simulation of the cure of an angle shaped carbon fibre-epoxy component within the Monte Carlo scheme showed that fibre misalignment can cause considerable variability in the process outcome. The coefficient of variation of maximum residual stress can reach up to approximately 2% (standard deviation of 1 MPa) whilst qualitative and quantitative variations in final distortion of the cured part occur with the standard deviation in twist and corner angle reaching values of 0.4 º and 0.05º respectively. Simulation of the cure of a thin carbon fibre-epoxy panel within the Monte Carlo scheme indicated that surface heat transfer and tool temperature variability dominate variability in cure time, resulting in a coefficient of variation of about 22%. In addition to Monte Carlo, the effect of surface heat transfer coefficient and tool temperature variations on cure time was addressed using the collocation method. It was found that probabilistic collocation is capable of capturing variability propagation with good accuracy while offering tremendous benefits in terms of computational costs.

Modeling of patch antennas and resonators on arbitrary dielectric substrates using surface RWG and volume edge based basis functions and the Method of Moments is implemented. The performance of the solver is studied for different mesh configurations. The results obtained are tested by comparison with experiments and Ansoft HFSS v9 simulator. The latter uses a large number of finite elements (up to 200K) and adaptive mesh refinement, thus providing the reliable data for comparison. The error in the resonant frequency is estimated for canonical resonator structures at different values of the relative dielectric constant ƒÕr, which ranges from 1 to 200. The reported results show a near perfect agreement in the estimation of resonant frequency for all the metal-dielectric resonators. Behavior of the antenna input impedance is tested, close to the first resonant frequency for the patch antenna. The error in the resonant frequency is estimated for different structures at different values of the relative dielectric constant ƒÕr, which ranges from 1 to 10. A larger error is observed in the calculation of the resonant frequency of the patch antenna. Moreover, this error increases with increase in the dielectric constant of the substrate. Further scope for improvement lies in the investigation of this effect.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-135).

This thesis concentrates on the algorithmic aspects of Method of Moments (MoM) and Locally Corrected Nyström (LCN) numerical methods in electromagnetics. The data dependency in each step of the algorithm is analyzed to implement a parallel version that can harness the powerful processing power of a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU). The GPGPU programming model provided by NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) is described to learn the software tools at hand enabling us to implement C code on the GPGPU. Various optimizations such as the partial update at every iteration, inter-block synchronization and using shared memory enable us to achieve an overall speedup of approximately 10. The study also brings out the strengths and weaknesses in implementing different methods such as Crout's LU decomposition and triangular matrix inversion on a GPGPU architecture. The results suggest future directions of study in different algorithms and their effectiveness on a parallel processor environment. The performance data collected show how different features of the GPGPU architecture can be enhanced to yield higher speedup.