This thesis focus on investigations of the influence of non-metallic inclusions on corrosion in steel samples taken at different stages of the steel production when producing pipeline steels. The electrolytic extraction technique was used to extract inclusions from these steel samples and thereafter studying them using scanning electron microscopy in combination with energy dispersive microscopy. This approach enabled three-dimensional evaluations of different non-metallic inclusions present in two metal samples of low-carbon Ca-treated pipeline steels. The modification of the inclusion characteristics was investigated and compared for steel samples taken from various stages of the smelting production process. Thereafter, the corrosion resistance of these steels was discussed depending on the characteristics of non-metallic inclusions present in the steel. In addition, this study also presents a new method of soft chemical extraction for qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the initial corrosion processes of a steel matrix surrounding various non-metallic inclusions. The results showed that the initial dissolution of the steel matrix started in areas surrounding CaS inclusions or inclusion phases containing a CaS phase. Furthermore, the results showed that no dissolution of the metal matrix surrounding CaO·Al2O3 and TiN inclusions could be detected.     Key words: pipeline steels, Ca-treatment, non-metallic inclusions, electrolytic extraction, corrosion, chemical extraction. / Sammanfattning Denna avhandling fokuserar på påverkan av icke-metalliska inneslutningar på korrosion i stålprover tagna under olika delar av ståltillverkningsprocessen för tillverkning av rör. Den ektrolytiska extraktionstekniken användes för att extrahera dessa inneslutningar från stålprover och därefter undersöka dem med användande av svepelektronmikroskopi i kombination med energidispersiv spektroskopi. Detta angreppssätt möjliggjorde tredimensionella studier av olika icke-metalliska inneslutningar i två lågkolhaltiga kalciumbehandlade metallprover som används för tillverkning av rör. Modifieringen av inneslutningars karakteristik undersöktes i prover tagna från olika delar av ståltillverkningsprocessen. Därefter så undersöktes motståndet mot korrosion baserat på karakteristiken hos de icke-metalliska inneslutningar som återfanns i stålproverna. Denna studie presenterar också en ny metod baserad på en försiktig kemisk extraktion för kvalitativa såväl som kvantitativa utvärderingar av den initiala korrosionsprocessen av stålmatrisen som omger olika typer av icke-metalliska inneslutningar. Resultaten visade att den initiala upplösningen av stålmatrisen började runt CaS inneslutningar eller komplexa inneslutningar innehållande en CaS fas. Samtidigt så visade resultaten att metallmatriser som omger CaO·Al2O3 och TiN inneslutningar eller faser innehållande dessa inte löstes upp.   Nyckelord: stål för tillverkning av rör, kalciumbehandling, icke-metalliska inneslutningar, elektrolytisk extraktion, korrosion, kemisk extraktion.

The aim of the master thesis is to evaluate the European Union's position in the field of global energy policy. The thesis adopts a concept of actorness which is then applied to the case of the Nabucco pipeline project. The concept aspires to respond to an unclear status of the EU as an entity of its own kind in an international system of states. The study is based on a Brattberg's and Rhinard's approach to actorness which specifies a number of variables. Their analytical framework allows us to assess the extent of EU actorness - the ability to act as an international actor. The particular variable that this thesis focuses on is vertical consistency. Vertical consistency in the academic sphere is regarded as a significant factor of actorness. It is also often considered as an insufficient element of an integrated approach of the EU - internal unity is inevitable for more effective joint policy. Energy policy of several Member States is examined in contrast with the EU energy policy as a whole. Own analytical framework is established due to the lack of information on vertical consistency in the literature. It consists of four variables: competence of the EU in energy, financial policy, verbal and bilateral political relations of Member states with third parties. The results of the investigation...

Increasingly complex dynamics in the software operations pose formidable software evolution challenges to the software industry. Examples of these dynamics include the globalization of software markets, the massive increase of interconnected devices worldwide with the internet of things, and the digital transformation to large-scale cyber-physical systems. To tackle these challenges, researchers and practitioners have developed impressive bodies of knowledge, including adaptive and autonomic systems, run-time models, continuous software engineering, and the practice of combining software development and operations (i.e., DevOps). Despite the tremendous strides the software engineering community has made toward managing highly dynamic systems, software-intensive industries face major challenges to match the ever-increasing pace. To cope with this rapid rate at which operational contexts for software systems change, organizations are required to automate and expedite software evolution on both the development and operations sides. The aim of our research is to develop continuous and autonomic methods, infrastructures, and tools to realize software evolution holistically. In this dissertation, we shift the prevalent autonomic computing paradigm and provide new perspectives and foci on integrating autonomic computing techniques into continuous software engineering practices, such as DevOps. Our methods and approaches are based on online experimentation and evolutionary optimization. Experimentation allows autonomic managers to make in- formed data-driven and explainable decisions and present evidence to stakeholders. As a result, autonomic managers contribute to the continuous and holistic evolution of design, configuration and deployment artifacts, providing guarantees on the validity, quality and effectiveness of enacted changes. Ultimately, our approach turns autonomic managers into online stakeholders whose contributions are subject to quality control. Our contributions are threefold. We focus on effecting long-lasting software changes through self-management, self-improvement, and self-regulation. First, we propose a framework for continuous software evolution pipelines for bridging offline and online evolution processes. Our framework’s infrastructure captures run-time changes and turns them into configuration and deployment code updates. Our functional validation on cloud infrastructure management demonstrates its feasibility and soundness. It effectively contributes to eliminate technical debt from the Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) life cycle, allowing development teams to embrace the benefits of IAC without sacrificing existing automation. Second, we provide a comprehensive implementation for the continuous IAC evolution pipeline. Third, we design a feedback loop to conduct experimentation-driven continuous exploration of design, configuration and deployment alternatives. Our experimental validation demonstrates its capacity to enrich the software architecture with additional components, and to optimize the computing cluster’s configuration, both aiming to reduce service latency. Our feedback loop frees DevOps engineers from incremental improvements, and allows them to focus on long-term mission-critical software evolution changes. Fourth, we define a reference architecture to support short-lived and long-lasting evolution actions at run-time. Our architecture incorporates short-term and long-term evolution as alternating autonomic operational modes. This approach keeps internal models relevant over prolonged system operation, thus reducing the need for additional maintenance. We demonstrate the usefulness of our research in case studies that guide the designs of cloud management systems and a Colombian city transportation system with historical data. In summary, this dissertation presents a new approach on how to manage software continuity and continuous software improvement effectively. Our methods, infrastructures, and tools constitute a new platform for short-term and long-term continuous integration and software evolution strategies and processes for large-scale intelligent cyber-physical systems. This research is a significant contribution to the long-standing challenges of easing continuous integration and evolution tasks across the development-time and run-time boundary. Thus, we expand the vision of autonomic computing to support software engineering processes from development to production and back. This dissertation constitutes a new holistic approach to the challenges of continuous integration and evolution that strengthens the causalities in current processes and practices, especially from execution back to planning, design, and development. / Graduate

In 2016, An estimated 15,000 people representing 400 Indigenous Nations and non-indigenous allies gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in solidarity against the Dakota Access Pipeline to protect Mni Sose, the Missouri River. They became known as the Water Protectors. This dissertation analyzes the response in environmental philosophy journals to the #noDAPL protest at Standing Rock. Even though the Stand at Standing Rock became one of the most important and monumental environmental protests of the last decade, neither Standing Rock nor the Water Protectors appear in environmental philosophy journals at all--not once. Why? I suggest a possible answer by exploring the Stand of the Water Protectors as a moment in a much longer continuous history of resistance to settler colonialism. Settler colonialism attempts to facilitate the erasure of Indigenous populations by colonial ones, in order to gain access to territory—to land. The omission of Standing Rock from environmental philosophy journals represents the ease with which environmental philosophy can become complicit in the project of settler colonial erasure and replacement through absence. Drawing on Indigenous land-based philosophies of kinship, Latin American decolonial philosophy, settler colonial theory, and frameworks of Indigenous environmental justice, I show how the geo-politics of colonialism have come to produce environmental injustice and planetary ruin. I work to break the silence on Standing Rock in environmental philosophy and allow the Water Protectors example to guide the project toward an environmental philosophy which centers colonialism and Indigenous resurgence as core concerns.

Minority groups experience disproportionately worse health outcomes. An identified solution is to increase the number of minorities providing healthcare in their own communities. Primary care complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) providers are a potential resource. Many investigators have demonstrated the efficacy of science-based pipeline programs for increasing the roles of students in allopathic health professions. Whether these programs influence matriculation of minorities into a CAM university is unknown. The main purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of a pre-college science academy at a CAM university and determine whether the experience increased interest in and motivation for CAM careers. It was also important to learn more about what factors may facilitate or impede minority student matriculation in a CAM university. In this phenomenological study, a mixed purposeful sampling strategy was used to select 9 students who had participated in a science academy at a CAM university. Individual in depth, semi-structured, interviews were conducted and analyzed using a process of inductive analysis. The results indicated that barriers to college matriculation included cost and the complexity of the process. The desire to elevate status steers some minorities who use CAM modalities as their indigenous health practice, towards high prestige allopathic careers. Participation in the science academy increased interest in and utility of CAM, but did not change preconceived career choices. These results contribute to the existing literature and can enrich social change initiatives by increasing the number of minorities providing healthcare in their own communities, and further understanding of the factors that influence underrepresented minority career choices.

Export of heat treated steel goods has an important impact on the Swedish economy which brings performance demands and expectations on production to keep a competitive market position. Sustainability and efficiency are two important aspects in meeting these demands. This thesis studies how a data driven approach can be used to increase efficiency in manufacturing of rods produced for the mining industry.  The purpose of this thesis is to use a machine learning model suitable for classifying quality results for heat treated steel rods. This is done by comparing nine algorithms with the objective to tune and deploy the model best fitted while gaining insights in variables that have an impact on the quality output.  This thesis outset is a heat treatment process at Epirocs facility in Fagersta. Interviews are conducted to gain domain knowledge about important features and an AI pipeline is implemented to demonstrate its suitability for predicting quality given production and weather data in the form of time series and product-unique data points.  The result of the study shows that the machine learning algorithm random forest is indicated as most suitable among the analyzed. The study also shows that an AI pipeline with streaming data can be designed and efficiently implemented for quality improvement. Through this work, the authors have proved that machine learning can be used to improve the heat treatment process of rods, but the model still has room for improvement in feature selection and availability of larger and more detailed data at the facility.

A compound-heterozygous variant occurs when a child inherits a variant from each parent, with these variants occurring at a different position within the same gene and on opposite homologous chromosomes. These inherited variants may result in two nonfunctional versions of the same gene. Compound-heterozygous variants cannot be identified unless a patients' DNA sequence data is phased. Phasing is a computationally demanding process that requires the use of multiple software tools in order to determine which nucleotide was inherited from which parent. First, in Chapter 1, we review the literature to better understand what research has been conducted on the role of compound-heterozygous variants in pediatric cancers and what methods are being used to identify them. In Chapter 2, we develop a pipeline to make it easier for us and other researchers to phase and identify compound-heterozygous variants using VCF files from trios or individuals. We then use this pipeline in Chapter 3 to survey the prevalence of compound-heterozygous variants across 7 pediatric disease types. We show the importance of identifying compound heterozygous and what information would be missed if this variant type was not included in study design. In Chapter 4, we develop a software tool to phase trio data using a combination of Mendelian inheritance logic and an existing phasing software program. We show that our software tool increases the total number of variants that can be phased. Finally, in Chapter 5, we use phased data of three nuclear families, each family having one child with pediatric cancer, to evaluate the potential to use inherited genomic variants to inform diagnostic decisions. The work contained within this dissertation shows the importance of not overlooking compound-heterozygous variants when trying to identify potentially causal genes in pediatric disease. In addition, this work provides software tools that are openly available for other researchers to use; these tools make it easier to phase patient DNA sequence data and to identify compound-heterozygous variants.

Most of the municipalities in Czech republic have old or even disfunctional sewage systems for built up communal areas. General combined sewage systems built earlier are being today replaced by solutions separating rain waters and sewage waters. Municipality Vír has currently only few sewage branches that consequently flow into Svratka river. Aim of this Diploma Thesis is to propose 3 solutions for sewage produced in communal areas of Vír municipality and its consequent disposal in sewage treatment plant. Each of three solutions feature combined gravity-driven and pressure systems of sewage lines as well as water treatment in proposed MTB as well as household and container WTP. Each of three variant is economically weighed with proposed budget.

No description available.

[pt] A termografia infravermelha tem sido usada como uma técnica de avaliação não destrutiva para detectar falhas nos componentes estruturais, desempenhando um papel importante nos programas de inspeção de fabricação, inspeção em serviço e manutenção. Um programa de investigação foi lançado com o objetivo de apresentar combinações de métodos analíticos, experimentais e numéricos para prever e monitorar o início da fadiga e a progressão dos danos à fadiga em equipamentos como vasos de pressão, tanques, tubulações e dutos com mossas ou anomalias complexas. O monitoramento do início e propagação da fadiga nas amostras reais utilizou técnicas de inspeção por infravermelho não destrutivo. Análise termoelástica de tensão (TSA), correlação tridimensional de imagem digital (3D-DIC) e strain gages de fibra óptica Bragg (FBSG) foram utilizados para determinar deformações em locais de fadiga em pontos críticos. Os campos de deformação determinados a partir das medições experimentais e do método de elementos finitos (MEF) foram combinados com a equação de vida-de-fadiga de Coffin-Manson e a regra de dano por fadiga de Miner para prever a vida de fadiga (N). Os resultados das amostras tubulares testadas de 3 m de comprimento contendo mossas de formato complexo foram relatados e analisados completamente. Este trabalho confirmou que os métodos infravermelhos de avaliação rápida de fadiga são ferramentas práticas e eficientes que podem fornecer resultados confiáveis, não destrutivos e rápidos acerca do comportamento à fadiga dos materiais. Uma boa concordância entre as estimativas de vida em fadiga e a vida real de mossas com geometria complexas em dutos só pode ser atingida se medições precisas ou determinações numéricas das deformações circunferenciais que atuam nos pontos de interesse forem acopladas a curvas de fadiga deformação-vida adequadas. Acoplando uma técnica experimental para determinar com precisão a geometria das mossas com uma técnica de análise numérica de deformações fará com que sejam obtidas boas estimativas de deformação das posições críticas que serão combinadas com as curvas de fadiga baseadas na relação deformação-vida. As presentes conclusões podem ser aplicadas a outras estruturas que podem apresentar mossas, como tanques e vasos de pressão. / [en] Infrared thermography has been used as a nondestructive evaluation (NDE) technique to detect flaws in structural components, playing an important role in manufacturing inspection, in-service inspection and maintenance programs. An investigation program was launched with the objective of presenting combinations of analytical, experimental and numerical methods to predict and monitor fatigue initiation and fatigue damage progression in equipment such as pressure vessels, tanks, piping and pipelines with dents or complex-shaped anomalies. The monitoring of fatigue initiation and propagation in the actual specimens used nondestructive inspection techniques such as thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA), three-dimensional digital image correlation (3D-DIC) and fiber optic Bragg strain gages (FBSG) to determine strains at fatigue hot spots locations. Strain fields determined from the experimental measurements and from the finite element method (FEM) were combined with the fatigue Coffin-Manson strain-life equation and the Miner s fatigue damage rule to predict fatigue life (N). Results from tested 3m long tubular (with nominal dimensions: 324mm external diameter and 6.35mm wall thickness) specimens containing complex-shaped dents were reported and fully analyzed. This work confirmed that infrared rapid fatigue assessment methods are practical and efficient tools that can provide a reliable, non-destructive and faster results about the fatigue behavior of materials. Good agreement among fatigue life estimations and actual fatigue lives of complex dent shapes in pipeline specimens can only be achieved if accurate measurements or numerical eterminations of the circumferential strains actuating at the dent hot-spots were coupled with suitable fatigue strain-life curves. Coupling an experimental technique for accurately determining dent shapes to a numerical strain analysis technique will lead to good hot-spot strain estimations to be combined with the strain-life fatigue curves. The present conclusions can be applied to other structures that may present dents such as tanks and pressure vessels.