Within the United States, a growing sense of detachment exists. Conditions in both urban and suburban contexts have created a sense of social detachment where spaces do not exist which encourage social interaction. Without this social activity, neighbors become almost a disposable commodity as relationships never fully develop. This thesis will be an examination of environments which do and do not foster community relationships and an implementation of community into an urban multi-family residence. A major part of the problem is the recent move to the suburbs, but urban buildings also exhibit a lack of spaces which help encourage a community among neighbors. Suburban residents are separated by both spatial and physical boundaries. In addition to this, a social boundary is also created by a lack of interaction between the primary unit and the street as well as a reliance on the automobile which blocks any chance of spontaneous interaction. The typical urban multi-family building exists in a context that and provides some spaces which give pedestrian traffic a chance for spontaneous interaction, but provides these by accident as these spaces are usually provided only as a means to get to one's unit. To discover what community is and how it can thrive, many research methods will be used. Existing building projects which have dealt with this problem will be examined; these precedents include residential buildings such as the Bedok Court Condominium in Singapore and large scale urban areas such as New York City. Theory on community within other fields such as sociology and psychology will also be looked at to see what it is that fosters community, and what blocks it. At the end of the project, a model will be designed for an example site within a typical city of the Unites States where the majority of the area is defined by disconnected neighborhoods. The model being sought will not simply be a multi-family building with community space, but an environment where the neighborhood community can grow and thrive.

“Our structures might be machines for living in, but there was no longer much about them that was alive.” -William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle Home ownership is a significant driver within American culture. In Florida single-family homes represent one of the largest components of our built surroundings, significantly impacting the environment through material use and energy consumption. Currently, homes typically are built with little regard to the environmental context. By designing for the immediate goal of separation from the elements, they do not provide for convenient spatial expansion or adaptability, using material assemblies that do not lend themselves to be recycled, reused, or returned to the earth safely. Homes are obsolete before they have been constructed. The Florida single-family home, once closely linked to its environment both physically and experientially, has devolved into a statically defined entanglement of systems with a primary goal of separating humans from natural systems by providing a climatically fixed space with little regard to the environment. This separation has served to detach people and the buildings that they inhabit from their environmental context and responsibilities rendering the underlying physical, biological, and chemical processes of their environmental context irrelevant. By viewing the dwelling unit and its components as not within their end function but part of a greater cycle, this elevates the dwelling unit to more than inanimate machine that separates but to a symbiotic entity within a greater construction ecology. Through the analysis of historical Florida dwellings it is the intent to distill a design approach that reconnects with the environmental context through use of passive systems and experiential environmental connection. Further study is to focus on modular systems and connections within building skins and structures to develop methods that allow for the assembly, disassembly and adaption thus strengthening the construction ecology by facilitating the reuse of materials. By redefining the construction cycle and the connection to the local environment of the Florida single-family home it is the intent to establish a contemporary construction methodology that acts to not only be environmentally efficient but environmentally effective for its user and its context.

Research has been completed to determine the most effective thermal control architecture for modular satellites. This research investigated principles of modularity, modular spacecraft examples, thermal control methods, and advanced thermal control technologies. A modular spacecraft was designed as a case study to determine key influences and issues. A number of thermal control architectures were developed. Each was evaluated for compatibility with modularity principles, thermal control performance, and a realizable implementation. Thermal control performance was determined by simulating on-orbit conditions for a number of design reference missions, including traditional thermal control architecture used for comparison. An effective thermal control architecture was found that has all desired attributes. The methods of development, simulation, and evaluation are presented with results and key findings.

No description available.

Stefan Naumann Master of Architecture Mynewhome.com.au Exploring New Ways of Delivering Architecture;- Creating a Design Interface for Sustainable and Affordable Houses The aim of this research project was to explore new ways of delivering architecture and the engagement of architects in everyday, affordable, sustainable housing in Australia. This dissertation speculates on the possibility of a design system integrated with a design interface, where customers can self-configure or customise their home online with the help of embedded programs and an architect consultancy service. This can be seen as an alternative option for the homebuyer to the volume built, standard house. The design system displayed in this masters research was developed in three testing modes: speculative designs, site specific designs and user experiments. The system consists of modules and components that would have the embedded knowledge of the architect. They are intended to allow non professionals to self-arrange their homes. This was then integrated into a user interface. A construction system which allows prefabrication was then applied, but the main focus of the research was on the delivery of design and client engagement and not on the technicalities, or the realisation of a prefab system. The aim was to combine as much of the quality and advantages of a one off architecturally designed house, in particular, the consideration of user and site needs with the affordability and predictability of a completely pre-designed volume builder house. Digital design, production and marketing have the potential to make this challenge a success. This new digital way of delivering architecture could lead to houses that are more adaptable to different users and site needs than volume builder housing. The knowledge of the architect could be applied to ordinary housing, without the huge financial cost of the one off, architect designed house. The web based interface would allow customer interaction as tested in user experiments. The internet widens the possibility of the clients' involvement in the design process. These new online procurement processes are more instant and accessible and could result in an enlightened purchaser. There is the possibility to educate people, so informed decisions could be made. It could lead to houses with better orientation, engagement with new building materials, prefabrication technologies and the promotion of smaller houses resulting in more sustainable homes that are still reasonable in price. This is a very complex issue in which different experts would have to work together. However, there is a real possibility for a design interface to open up a dialogue between the architect and the general public.

<p>In this thesis, a concept for a modular assembly direct drive permanent magnetgenerator is presented. The maximum forces that act on the different parts of thegenerator during normal operation have been calculated and used in solid mechanicsimulations in SolidWorks. The result is a rough first draft of a generator designwhere the stator has been divided into five modules and the rotor into six modules.This division is done in order to avoid symmetries in the generator that could lead toproblems with self-oscillation.The modulization of the stator brings about certain difficulties, both for the magneticcircuit and for the winding scheme. Different solutions for optimization of themagnetic circuit are analyzed from both a physical and a construction technicalperspective. A winding scheme is produced and the winding process tested in awinding dummy produced according to the conceptual generator design.</p>

Modular exponentiation and modular multiplication are the most used operations in current cryptographic systems. Some well-known cryptographic algorithms, such as RSA, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and DSA, require modular exponentiation operations. This is performed with a series of modular multiplications to the extent of its exponent in a certain fashion depending on the exponentiation algorithm used. Cryptographic functions are very likely to be applied in current applications that perform information exchange to secure, verify, or authenticate data. Most notable is the use of such applications in Internet based information exchange. Smart cards, hand-helds, cell phones and many other small devices also need to perform information exchange and are likely to apply cryptographic functions. A hardware solution to perform a cryptographic function is generally faster and more secure than a software solution. Thus, a fast and area efficient modular exponentiation hardware solution would provide a better infrastructure for current cryptographic techniques. In certain cryptographic algorithms, very large precisions are used. Further, the precision may vary. Most of the hardware designs for modular multiplication and modular exponentiation are fixed-precision solutions. A scalable Montgomery Multiplier (MM) to perform modular multiplication has been proposed and can operate on input values of any bit-size, but the maximum bit-size should be known and is the limiting factor. The multiplier can calculate any operand size less than the maximal precision. However, this design's parameters should be optimized depending on the operand precision for which the design is used. A software application was developed in C to find the optimized design for the scalable MM module. It performs area-time trade-off for the most commonly used precisions in order to obtain a fast and area efficient solution for the common case. A modular exponentiation system is developed using this scalable multiplier design. Since the multiplier can operate on any operand size up to a certain maximum value, the exponentiation system that utilizes the multiplier will inherit the same capability. This thesis work presents the design and implementation of an exponentiation algorithm in hardware utilizing the optimized scalable Montgomery Multiplier. The design uses a parallel exponentiation algorithm to reduce the total computation time. The modular exponentiation system experimental results are analyzed and compared with software and other hardware implementations. / Graduation date: 2002

This paper presents the research and development of a 3-legged micro Parallel Kinematic Manipulator (PKM) for positioning in micro-machining and assembly operations. The structural characteristics associated with parallel manipulators are evaluated and the PKMs with translational and rotational movements are identified. Based on these identifications, a hybrid 3-UPU (Universal Joint-Prismatic Joint-Universal Joint) parallel manipulator is designed and fabricated. The principles of the operation and modeling of this micro PKM is largely similar to a normal size Stewart Platform (SP). A modular design methodology is introduced for the construction of this micro PKM. Calibration results of this hybrid 3-UPU PKM are discussed in this paper. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

No description available.

We investigate the use of self-assembly in a robotic system as a means of responding to dierent environmental contingencies. Self-assembly is the mechanism through which agents in a multi-robot system autonomously form connections with one another to create larger composite robotic entities. Initially, we consider a simple response mechanism that uses stochastic self-assembly without any explicit control over the resulting morphology | the robots self-assemble into a larger, randomly shaped composite entity if the task they encounter is beyond the physical capabilities of a single robot. We present distributed behavioural control that enables a group of robots to make this collective decision about when and if to self-assemble in the context of a hill crossing task. In a series of real-world experiments, we analyse the eect of dierent distributed timing and decision strategies on system performance. Outside of a task execution context, we present fully decentralised behavioural control capable of creating periodically repeating global morphologies. We then show how arbitrary morphologies can be generated by abstracting our behavioural control into a morphology control language and adding symbolic communication between connected agents. Finally, we integrate our earlier distributed response mechanism into the morphology control language. We run simulated and real-world experiments to demonstrate a self-assembling robotic system that can respond to varying environmental contingencies by forming dierent appropriate morphologies.