The main purpose of this research is to investigate the scouring effect on the west coast of Taiwan that has been caused by the natural disasters and the human activities since 17 centuries. The studies consist of the depicting of maritime topography, the data collection of sea meteorology, and the data mapping with the use of Google Earth software. The present research employed the satellite image data and the achieve maps from literature for accurately quantifying the coastal changes in south-western Taiwan. The changing process of coastal line around the south-western Taiwan including the influences of natural and artificial factors of long and short period is also investigated. The surveys has divided the coastal changes into three periods, 17th century to 1904 A.D., 1940 A.D. to 1945 A.D., and 1945 A.D. to present. In the first period, the isotope dating and historical data we used to identify the coastal line. The results of this research showed that the main element of coastal line shift in the west coast between 17th ~20th century is caused by the sink-transport of enriched river-based sources. During the second period, the data collection with the use of better precision instruments from colonial government, the sea area of Yunlin produced series of shoal from 1904 to 1945. The coast area expanded outward 26 km. On the contrary, the shoals in the sea area of Tainan were shifted inward due to lacking of sink-transport source, but the coasts remained less deposited in this period because the influence of artificial facilities construction. By artificial development, the coast was seriously corroded frequently since 1945 that leaded to the shoals reduction and disappearance. The coast was no longer to receive the sink transport source because of highly artificial coastal development, such as land reclamation, fishing port construction, and coastal protection measures to prevent from further continuously erosion around the coasts. It is necessary to emphasize that the theorem, practical and research aspect can be applied to integrate the coastal plan and development in the future. It is imperative for government to initiative on the aspects of monitoring the topography, river basin, ecology area, and sea meteorology with the use of GIS system to establish database. Moreover, the government should evaluate the feasibility of coast construction, revise the laws to protect coast and provide the guidelines on the coast plan and development in the marine environment. Finally, this research addresses the need of precautionary approach against the natural disaster.

Current high power LEDs are used popularly, energy saving can be achieved if the heat transfer performance of a high power LED is increased. Numerical analysis is carried out herein to study the parameters effect on the cooling performance for the heat sinks of the LED projector. The parameters include fin spacing, fin depth, fin thickness, base thickness and flow speed. The numerical results reveal that the parameters of the heat sinks significantly affects the average Nusselt Number. The results of this study can provide design references for LED projector.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is composed of sink and sensors. Sensors transmit data to sink through wireless network after collecting data. Because multi-hop routing and forwarding may be required on WSN, sensors closer to sink will consume more energy than other nodes due to hop-by-hop forwarding. In this Thesis, we propose pipelined forwarding for cluster-based WSN to solve these problems. First, we divide a WSN into several clusters such that the distance between sensors and sink is reduced and packet transmission delay can be decreased. However, since reducing the distance can increase the number of clusters significantly, multiple mobile sinks are embedded in the system to increase overall throughput. Second, we change the direction of pipelined forwarding to avoid from running out of energy of some sensors. We derive mathematical equations to analyze and validate the proposed scheme. From the analytical results, we prove that the proposed scheme can decrease packet transmission delay. The results also show that system throughput can be improved by increasing the length of pipeline and the number of mobile sinks. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme can increase energy throughput more efficiently than conventional non-pipelined forwarding scheme.

CPU heat sinks with high efficiency of heat transfer are greatly demanded for a personal computer with high-speed computational ability. In recent years, the manufacturing technology of CPU heat sinks has got much attention and becomes indispensable for developing the high-performance CPUs.In this study, some different design criteria for the flow guide and die are proposed during an extrusion process with complex cross-sectional shapes, such as CPU heat sinks. The plastic flow pattern of the billet inside the die cavity is analyzed by using a commercial finite element package ¡§DEFORM 3D¡¨.The extrusion load, the stress and strain distribution of die, and the curvature of the product are investigated. Taguchi method is used to find the optimum extrusion condition of the die parameters. In addition, the experiments of extrusion using Al 6061 were carried out. The plastic flow pattern of the billet within the die and the dead metal zones were observed. The experimental data were compared with the analytical values to verify the validity of the proposed analytical models.

A numerical study was carried out for enhanced heat transfer from two heated blocks in a pulsating channel flow by porous heat sink. The flow over the fluid region is governed by the Navier-Stokes equation, and the flow through the porous medium is governed by the Darcy-Brinkman-Forchheimer equation. These two flows are coupled through the interface boundary conditions at the porous/fluid and porous/solid interfaces. After a stream function-vorticity transformation, solution of the coupled governing equations for fluid/porous/solid composite system is obtained using the control-volume-based procedure and hybrid scheme. Comprehensive time-dependent flow and temperature data obtained and averaged over a cycle of pulsation in a periodic steady state. In addition, this study details the effects of variation in the governing parameters, such as inertia parameter, Dracy number, Reynolds number, Strouhal number, pulsation amplitude and geometric parameters, to illustrate important fundamental and practical results. The results show that the periodic change of shape of interblock recirculation flow caused by porous-covering blocks has significant enhanced effect on flow pattern and heat transfer characteristics. This enhanced effect is found to increase with Reynolds number, Strouhal number and pulsation amplitude but decrease with Dracy number. In comparison with the non-porous heat sink case for a steady non-pulsating flow, significant increases in the average Nusselt number are predicted and the instantaneous maximum temperatures within the heated block array are reduced. Moreover, it is shown that specific choices in certain geometric parameters, such as interblock space, can make pronounded change in the cooling of heated block.

Liquid cooled small channel heat sinks have become a promising heat dissipation method for future high power electrical devices. Traditional mini and microchannel heat sinks consist of a single layer of low-aspect ratio rectangular channels. The alternative new heat sinks are fabricated by stacking many channels together to create multiple layer channels. These multilayer heat sinks can achieve high heat flux due to high heat transfer coefficients from small channels and large surface area from multilayer structure. In this research, multilayer copper and silicon carbide (SIC) minichannel heat sinks were tested in single-phase flow. It was shown that multilayer heat sinks have significant advantages over single-layer equivalents with reductions both in thermal resistance and pressure drop. A 3-D resistance network model for single and multilayered heat sinks was developed and validated. Parametric study and optimization on copper and SiC heat sinks with respect to channel geometries, number of layers, and heat sink conductivity were conducted by using the model.Both copper and SiC heat sinks were also tested in two-phase flow. In experiments, the multilayer copper heat sinks achieved smaller average surface temperature than their single-layer counterpart at low heat flux. However the multilayer copper heat sinks gradually lost stability at high heat flux, which lead to increased surface temperature. The redistribution of flow in different layers caused by pressure discrepancy in different layers was believed to be the cause. A three-zone model, which dividing the flow in small channels into three distinguishing parts: single-phase flow, subcooled boiling flow, and saturated boiling flow, was proposed to describe the different two-phase flow regimes. In each zone, the local heat transfer coefficient was computed by corresponding correlation. Several boiling correlations combined with the resistance network model were used to compute the heat sink surface temperature distributions, which were compared with experimental results. It was found the classical boiling correlations for macro channels are not suitable for the minichannels, frequently overestimating the boiling heat transfer coefficient. Boiling correlations for small channels are more consistent with experimental data and the predictions of Yu's correlation match the experimental results best.

This thesis is an investigation of barrenness and plant-to-plant variability (PPV) in ear development of maize (Zea mays L.). A three-year field experiment was conducted on homogenous plants with similar initial plant size, development and uniform spatial patterns in parental inbred lines CG60, CG102 and their F1 hybrid CG60 × CG102. Physiological processes underlying barrenness were dissected into plant growth through development and dry matter partitioning to the ear at canopy, subpopulation, and primarily, individual plant levels. The growth and development of the ultimately barren individuals were followed from early vegetative stage to physiological maturity (PM) using a non-destructive allometric methodology. Plant-to-plant variability in ear development, related to plant development, was measured destructively from ear initiation to 1 wk after silking and at PM. Results showed that the individual plants exhibited differential responses to their previous growth and development in the two parental inbred lines. No physiological traits in growth and development or dry matter partitioning to the ear during the critical period bracketing silking could characterize individual barren plants. The F1 hybrid was resistant to barrenness even at 160,000 plants ha-1. At 80,000 plants ha-1, the spikelet number per row (SNPR) and spikelet number per ear (SNPE) exhibited less PPV around silking than earlier stages of development. For the three genotypes, PPV in plant morphological traits and ear length was relatively constant throughout development. In addition, the period around the kernel row number (KRN) formation stage was the only time-window that the PPV in stem volume, representing PPV in above-ground plant dry matter (PDM), affected PPV in SNPR and KRN for the three genotypes, with SNPR being more affected. Although the F1 produced greater PDM at silking and 1 wk after silking, it had shorter ear length and less ear dry matter than the two parental inbred lines at the corresponding stages. When the relationships are elucidated among early ear development, plant growth, leaftip development, and dry matter partitioning to the ear, during the vegetative to silking stages and under stress conditions, then the physiological processes underlying barrenness of the tested inbred lines could be further characterized. / Syngenta, the Ontario Research Fund, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

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abstract: Durable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly anti-icing methods are desired to reduce the icing hazard in many different industrial areas including transportation systems, power plants, power transmission, as well as offshore oil and gas production. In contrast to traditional passive anti-icing surfaces, this thesis work introduces an anti-icing coating that responds to different icing conditions by releasing an antifreeze liquid. It consists of an outer porous superhydrophobic epidermis and a wick-like underlying dermis that is infused with the antifreeze liquid. This bi-layer coating prevents accumulation of frost, freezing fog, and freezing rain, while conventional anti-icing surfaces typically work only in one of these conditions. The bi-layer coating also delays condensation on the exterior surface at least ten times longer than identical system without antifreeze. It is demonstrated that the significant delay in condensation onset is due to the integral humidity sink effect posed by the hygroscopic antifreeze liquid infused in the porous structure. This effect significantly alters the water vapor concentration field at the coating surface, which delays nucleation of drops and ice. It was demonstrated that with a proper design of the environmental chamber the size of the region of inhibited condensation and condensation frosting around an isolated pore, as well as periodically spaced pores, filled by propylene glycol can be quantitatively predicted from quasi-steady state water vapor concentration field. Theoretical analysis and experiments revealed that the inhibition of nucleation is governed by only two non-dimensional geometrical parameters: the pore size relative to the unit cell size and the ratio of the unit cell size to the thickness of the boundary layer. It is demonstrated that by switching the size of the pores from millimeters to nanometers, a dramatic depression of the nucleation onset temperature, as well as significantly greater delay in nucleation onset can be achieved. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Mechanical Engineering 2017