The current uses of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in wildland firefighting center around mapping, scouting, and firing operations. These operations and additional operations are often held back by lack of range and lift capacity of current UAV options. Software design tools were developed in this research to aid in designing a UAV for wildland firefighting. The tools help create a mission profile, estimate the mass of the UAV, select a motor and rotor, select a battery, and generate and analyze a finite element (FE) sector model. These tools leverage parametric analysis and studying existing hardware to create a design. The FE model is generated based on the mission profile, a motor and rotor, and battery as design parameters and a set of design variables. The tools developed for creating a mission profile, estimating mass, selecting a motor and rotor, and selecting a battery successfully aid the preliminary design of an octocopter, hexacopter, and quadcopter. The FE tool was designed around an octocopter's geometry, which leads to complications in generating FE models for a hexacopter or quadcopter. Recommendations were made for altering the FE tool to account for hexacopters and quadcopters. Other recommendations were made to support future work in creating an optimized design of a wildland firefighting UAV. / Master of Science / The use of multirotor UAVs in various industries is rapidly expanding. One industry that currently uses UAVs but is limited in their capabilities is wildland firefighting. Wildland firefighters use UAVs for scouting, mapping, and firing operations. Scouting includes finding road access to the fire, finding water sources, searching for spot fires, and many other applications. Mapping is typically done to understand the size of the fire. Firing operations are conducted to start small, controlled fires to remove fuel from the fires path. However, these operations as well as future applications of UAVs are often limited by the flight time and the lifting capabilities current UAV options offer. Tools were developed in this research to create a preliminary design of a UAV for wildland firefighting. The design parameters and variables of the UAV design are outlined throughout the tools. The tools allow for compiling mission requirements, selecting motors/rotors and a battery to use in the UAV, and a preliminary structural analysis of the UAV design. The preliminary structural analysis includes extracting stresses, strains, and displacements experienced through a simplified mission as well as the natural frequencies of the finite element sector model. The design of octocopters, hexacopters, and quadcopters were explored using the set of design tools. The tools were successfully in selecting components for each style of UAV and at the preliminary structural analysis of the octocopter design. However, the structural analysis was not able to be conducted for the hexacopter and quadcopter design due to geometric conditions in the finite element model.

Yes / In CAD, when considering the question of new designs of complex mechanical parts, such as engine pistons, a parametric representation of the design is usually defined. However, in general there is a lack of efficient tools to create and manipulate such parametrically defined shapes. In this paper, we show how the geometry of complex mechanical parts can be parameterised efficiently enabling a designer to create and manipulate such geometries within an interactive environment. For surface generation we use the PDE method which allows surfaces to be defined in terms of a relatively small number of design parameters. The PDE method effectively creates surfaces by using the information contained at the boundaries (edges) of the surface patch. An interactively defined parameterisation can then be introduced on the boundaries (which are defined by means of space curves) of the surface. Thus, we show how complex geometries of mechanical parts, such as engine pistons, can be efficiently parameterised for geometry manipulation allowing a designer to create alternative designs.

No / This paper presents a surface generation tool designed for the construction of aircraft geometry. The software generates complex geometries which can be crafted or modified by the user in real time. The surface generation is based on partial differential equations (PDEs). The PDE method can produce different configurations of aircraft shapes interactively. Each surface is generated by a number of curves representing the character lines of a given part of the aircraft shape that can be manipulated in real time. Different surfaces then blend to create the full shape of the airplane. An important function of the proposed tool is its ability to change the aircraft shape through the adjustments of parameters associated with the initial curves. The user can apply linear transformations to the curves generating the airplane through simple input from the computer keyboard and the mouse. The updated curves can then be used to generate the surface leading to different configurations of a given airplane shape. The work presents detailed descriptions on the PDE method, parametric design and manipulation of aircrafts along with graphical demonstrations of its abilities and a series of examples to illustrate the capacity of the methodology implemented.

This work addresses various applications pertaining to the design, modelling and animation of parametric surfaces using elliptic Partial Differential Equations (PDE) which are produced via the PDE method. Compared with traditional surface generation techniques, the PDE method is an effective technique that can represent complex three-dimensional (3D) geometries in terms of a relatively small set of parameters. A PDE-based surface can be produced from a set of pre-configured curves that are used as the boundary conditions to solve a number of PDE. An important advantage of using this method is that most of the information required to define a surface is contained at its boundary. Thus, complex surfaces can be computed using only a small set of design parameters. In order to exploit the advantages of this methodology various applications were developed that vary from the interactive design of aircraft configurations to the animation of facial expressions in a computer-human interaction system that utilizes an artificial intelligence (AI) bot for real time conversation. Additional applications of generating cyclic motions for PDE based human character integrated in a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) package as well as developing techniques to describe a given mesh geometry by a set of boundary conditions, required to evaluate the PDE method, are presented. Each methodology presents a novel approach for interacting with parametric surfaces obtained by the PDE method. This is due to the several advantages this surface generation technique has to offer. Additionally, each application developed in this thesis focuses on a specific target that delivers efficiently various operations in the design, modelling and animation of such surfaces. / The project files will not be available online.

Pharmaceutical tablets have been the most dominant form for drug delivery and they need to be strong enough to withstand external stresses due to packaging and loading conditions before use. The strength of the produced tablets, which is characterised by their compressibility and compactibility, is usually deter-mined through a physical prototype. This process is sometimes quite expensive and time consuming. Therefore, simulating this process before hand can over-come this problem. A technique for shape modelling of pharmaceutical tablets based on the use of Partial Differential Equations is presented in this thesis. The volume and the sur-face area of the generated parametric tablet in various shapes have been es-timated numerically. This work also presents an extended formulation of the PDE method to a higher dimensional space by increasing the number of pa-rameters responsible for describing the surface in order to generate a solid tab-let. The shape and size of the generated solid tablets can be changed by ex-ploiting the analytic expressions relating the coefficients associated with the PDE method. The solution of the axisymmetric boundary value problem for a finite cylinder subject to a uniform axial load has been utilised in order to model a displace-ment component of a compressed PDE-based representation of a flat-faced round tablet. The simulation results, which are analysed using the Heckel model, show that the developed model is capable of predicting the compressibility of pharmaceutical powders since it fits the experimental data accurately. The opti-mal design of pharmaceutical tablets with particular volume and maximum strength has been obtained using an automatic design optimisation which is performed by combining the PDE method and a standard method for numerical optimisation.

<p> This thesis describes the analytical study of the stability of the structural system under circulatory loading and/or parametric excitation. The model is a double pendulum, composed of two rigid weightless bars of equal length and two concentrated masses at the ends of each bar, on an oscillating base. The vertical oscillation of the base produces parametric excitation to the system. A circulatory force is applied at the free end. At the joints the restoring moments are produced by spring and damping. The damping coefficients are taken as positive, and the gravitational effects are included. </p> <p> The combined effect of the circulatory loading and parametric excitation on stability of the system is investigated. The problem is so formulated that the stability of the system is represented by coupled Mathieu equations. The effect of damping on the boundary of stability is also determined. </p> / Thesis / Master of Engineering (ME)

<p> Steady state heat and mass balancing around an ethylene/ethane distillation unit at Polymer Corporation, Sarnia is studied using the CHESS simulation executive system.</p> <p> The unit involves a single column with reboiler heat provided by recompression of the overhead vapor stream.</p> <p> A new column model is developed, based on the approximate pseudo-binary method of Hengstebeck, and is shown to give good results with marked savings in computation time over the conventional tray to tray methods. Models for vapor compression and heat exchange are also presented.</p> <p> The system model is fitted to plant data and a routine developed to obtain satisfactory system convergence.</p> <p> A parametric study is carried out in which column pressure and distillate product enthalpy are varied to demonstrate significant improvements in plant operation.</p> <p> An evaluation of the CHESS simulation system is presented.</p> / Thesis / Master of Engineering (MEngr)

<p dir="ltr">Invasive species wreak havoc on global ecosystems, with negative ecological and economic consequences. Human activities, primarily stemming from globalization, trade, and increased travel, have played a significant role in accelerating species invasions. To manage and possibly mitigate these challenges, humans can harness data analysis to predict and control species invasions. Addressing this issue requires an understanding of the spatiotemporal dynamics of invasions. This research developed an innovative visualization tool designed to illustrate complex spatiotemporal data pertaining to species invasion routes. By analyzing pest invasion records spanning from 1905 to 2020, the tool presents the invasion trajectories of four non-native species in the eastern United States. Implementing spatial tools such as road networks and terrain, the visualization clarifies the spatiotemporal progression of these invasions, allowing users to intuitively determine invasion epicenters, and identify propagation pathways. Additional features enable the examination of correlations between highway systems, terrain, and invasion dynamics. Following a comprehensive training and exploration phase with domain experts, the efficacy of the tool was proven. The findings underline the proposed solution’s potential to enhance users’ comprehension of invasion dynamics, highlight intrusion centers, and indicate the influence of external factors on species expansion. This study not only validates the visualization tool’s capability but also serves as a foundation for future spatiotemporal research endeavors.</p>

Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) is a nonlinear optical process in which an incident field known as the pump interacts with a nonlinear crystal to produce two output fields known as signal and idler. Due to the conservation of energy and momentum, these output fields are entangled in the temporal and spatial degrees of freedom. The gain, which represents the strength of the interaction, increases in direct proportion to the strength of the pump field. In the low-gain regime, the generated field is an entangled two-photon state. This regime continues to be routinely employed in fundamental quantum optics experiments and quantum technologies. In the high-gain regime, the generated field is a multiphoton entangled state known as a bright squeezed vacuum. The goal of this thesis is to theoretically and experimentally characterize the spatial correlations present in high-gain SPDC. In order to characterize the spatial correlations between the generated fields, we utilize the Schmidt decomposition formalism. In this study, we examine the evolution of the Schmidt modes and spectrum with increasing pump amplitude. Our work shows that the Schmidt modes expand marginally in size, and the Schmidt spectrum narrows with respect to increasing gain. The narrowing of the Schmidt spectrum, as quantified by a decrease in the Schmidt number, indicates a gradual decrease in spatial entanglement.

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