Hydraulic spool valves are found in most hydraulic circuits in which flow is to be modulated. Therefore their dynamic performance is critical to the overall performance of the circuit. Fundamental to this performance is the presence of flow reaction forces which act on the spool. These forces can result in the necessity of using two stage devices to drive the spool and in some cases have been directly linked to valve and circuit instabilities. As such, a great deal of research and design has concentrated on ways to reduce or compensate for flow forces. In one particular series of studies conducted on flow divider valves, it was established that a rim machined into the land of the spool reduced the flow dividing error by approximately 70-80%, and it was deduced that the main contribution to this error was flow forces. Direct verification of the claim regarding flow force reduction was not achieved and hence was the motivation for this particular study. <p> This thesis will consider the reaction (flow) force associated with a conventional spool land and one with a rim machined into it, and a modified form of the rimmed land referred to as a sharp edge tapered rim spool land. The rim and the sharp edge tapered rim were specially designed geometrical changes to the lands of the standard spool in order to reduce the large steady state flow forces (SSFF) inherent in the standard spool valve. In order to analyze the flow field inside the interior passages of the valve, three configurations of the spool were considered for orifice openings of 0.375, 0.5, 0.75 and 1.05 mm. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis was used to describe the fluid mechanics associated with the steady state flow forces as it provided a detailed structure of the flow through the valve, and to identify the flow mechanism whereby flow forces are reduced by the machining of a rim and tapered rim on the land of the spool. For all openings of the spool, the sharp tapered rim valve provides the largest reduction in SSFF. It was also observed that for all cases studied, the inflow SSFFs were smaller than for the outflow conditions. <p>The prediction of the steady state flow force on the rim spool was investigated in a flow divider valve configuration, and the results from the CFD analysis indicated a reduction by approximately 70%.

In this dissertation, we consider analytic and numeric approaches to the solution of probabilistic steady-state problems with specific applications in simulation and queueing theory. Our first objective on steady-state simulations is to develop new estimators for the variance parameter of a selected output process that have better performance than certain existing variance estimators in the literature. To complete our analysis of these new variance estimators, called linear combinations of overlapping variance estimators, we do the following: establish theoretical asymptotic properties of the new estimators; test the theoretical results on a battery of examples to see how the new estimators perform in practice; and use the estimators for confidence interval estimation for both the mean and the variance parameter. Our theoretical and empirical results indicate the new estimators' potential for improvements in accuracy and computational efficiency. Our second objective on steady-state simulations is to derive the expected values of various competing estimators for the variance parameter. In this research, we do the following: formulate the machinery to calculate the exact expected value of a given estimator for the variance parameter; calculate the exact expected values of various variance estimators in the literature; compute these expected values for certain stochastic processes with complicated covariance functions; and derive expressions for the mean squared error of the estimators studied herein. We find that certain standardized time series estimators outperform their competitors as the sample size becomes large. Our research on queueing theory focuses on pricing of the service provided to individual customers in a queueing system. We find sensitivity results that enable efficient computational procedures for dynamic pricing decisions for maximizing the long-run average reward in a queueing facility with the following properties: there are a fixed number of servers, each with the same constant service rate; the system has a fixed finite capacity; the price charged to a customer entering the system depends on the number of customers in the system; and the customer arrival rate depends on the current price of the service. We show that the sensitivity results considered significantly reduce the computational requirements for finding the optimal pricing policies.

The extreme operating conditions in deepwater drilling lead to serious relative problems. The knowledge of subsea temperatures is of prime interest to petroleum engineers and geo-technologists alike. Petroleum engineers are interested in subsea temperatures to better understand geo-mechanisms; such as diagenesis of sediments, formation of hydrocarbons, genesis and emplacement of magmatic formation of mineral deposits, and crustal deformations. Petroleum engineers are interested in studies of subsurface heat flows. The knowledge of subsurface temperature to properly design the drilling and completion programs and to facilitate accurate log interpretation is necessary. For petroleum engineers, this knowledge is valuable in the proper exploitation of hydrocarbon resources. This research analyzed the thermal process in drilling or completion process. The research presented two analytical methods to determine temperature profile for onshore drilling and numerical methods for offshore drilling during circulating fluid down the drillstring and for the annulus. Finite difference discretization was also introduced to predict the temperature for steady-state in conventional riser drilling and riserless drilling. This research provided a powerful tool for the thermal analysis of wellbore and rheology design of fluid with Visual Basic and Matlab simulators.

This thesis consists of two different research problems. In the first one, the heat transfer characteristic of wavy fin assembly with dehumidification is carried out. In general, fin tube heat exchangers are employed in a wide variety of engineering applications, such as cooling coils for air conditioning, air pre-heaters in power plants and for heat dissipation from engine coolants in automobile radiators. In these heat exchangers, a heat transfer fluid such as water, oil, or refrigerant, flows through a parallel tube bank, while a second heat transfer fluid, such as air, is directed across the tubes. Since the principal resistance is much greater on the air side than on the tube side, enhanced surfaces in the form of wavy fins are used in air-cooled heat exchangers to improve the overall heat transfer performance. In heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems (HVAC), the air stream is cooled and dehumidified as it passes through the cooling coils, circulating the refrigerant. Heat and mass transfer take place when the coil surface temperature in most cooling coils is below the dew point temperature of the air being cooled. This thesis presents a simplified analysis of combined heat and mass transfer in wavy-finned cooling coils by considering condensing water film resistance for a fully wet fin in dehumidifier coil operation during air condition. The effects of variation of the cold fluid temperature (-5˚C - 5˚C), air side temperature (25˚C - 35˚C), and relative humidity (50% - 70%) on the dimensionless temperature distribution and the augmentation factor are investigated and compared with those under dry conditions. In addition, comparison of the wavy fin with straight radial or rectangular fin under the same conditions were investigated and the results show that the wavy fin has better heat dissipation because of the greater area. The results demonstrate that the overall fin efficiency is dependent on the relative humidity of the surrounding air and the total surface area of the fin. In addition, the findings of the present work are in good agreement with experimental data. The second problem investigated is the heat transfer analysis of confined liquid jet impingement on various surfaces. The objective of this computational study is to characterize the convective heat transfer of a confined liquid jet impinging on a curved surface of a solid body, while the body is being supplied with a uniform heat flux at its opposite flat surface. Both convex and concave configurations of the curved surface are investigated. The confinement plate has the same shape as the curved surface. Calculations were done for various solid materials, namely copper, aluminum, Constantan, and silicon; at two-dimensional jet. For this research, Reynolds numbers ranging from 750 to 2000 for various nozzle widths channel spacing, radii of curvature, and base thicknesses of the solid body, were used. Results are presented in terms of dimensionless solid-fluid interface temperature, heat transfer coefficient, and local and average Nusselt numbers. The increments of Reynolds numbers increase local Nusselt numbers over the entire solid-fluid interface. Decreasing the nozzle width, channel spacing, plate thickness or curved surface radius of curvature all enhanced the local Nusselt number. Results show that a convex surface is more effective compared to a flat or concave surface. Numerical simulation results are validated by comparing them with experimental data for flat and concave surfaces.

No description available.

Biochemical reactions make up most of the activity in a cell. There is inherent stochasticity in the kinetic behavior of biochemical reactions which in turn governs the fate of various cellular processes. In this work, the precision of a method for dimensionality reduction for stochastic modeling of biochemical reactions is evaluated. Further, a method of stochastic simulation of reaction kinetics is implemented in case of a specific biochemical network involved in maintenance of long-term potentiation (LTP), the basic substrate for learning and memory formation. The dimensionality reduction method diverges significantly from a full stochastic model in prediction the variance of the fluctuations. The application of the stochastic simulation method to LTP modeling was used to find qualitative dependence of stochastic fluctuations on reaction volume and model parameters. / text

A liquid-to-air membrane energy exchanger (LAMEE) is a novel flat-plate membrane-based energy exchanger where heat and moisture transfer between air and solution streams occurs through a semi-permeable membrane. The LAMEE consists of many air and solution flow channels, each separated by a membrane. A small-scale single-panel LAMEE consists of a single pair of neighboring air and solution channels. This PhD thesis focuses on developing, testing and modeling the small-scale single-panel LAMEE, and investigating the similarity between the small-scale LAMEE and a full-scale LAMEE. This PhD thesis presents a methodology to investigate similarity between small-scale and full-scale energy exchangers. A single-panel energy exchanger test (SPEET) facility is developed and built to measure the performance of the small-scale single-panel LAMEE under different test conditions. Also, the small-scale LAMEE is numerically modeled by solving coupled heat and mass transfer equations for the air, solution and membrane of the LAMEE. The effects of membrane vapor diffusion resistance and enhanced air side convective heat transfer coefficient are numerically investigated. The numerical model of the small-scale LAMEE is validated with the experimental data for summer test conditions, and effectiveness values agree within ±4% in most cases. Moreover, the effects of different heat and mass transfer directions, and salt solution types and concentrations are experimentally and numerically investigated. The results show that the LAMEE effectiveness is strongly affected by the heat and mass transfer directions but negligibly affected by salt solution type and concentration. The solution-side effectiveness for liquid-to-air membrane energy exchangers is introduced in this thesis for the first time. The results show that the solution-side effectiveness should be used to evaluate the sensible and total effectiveness of LAMEE regenerators. Finally, the similarity between the small-scale and full-scale LAMEEs is investigated experimentally and numerically. The results show that the small-scale LAMEE effectiveness results can be used to predict the performance of a full-scale LAMEE within ±2% to ±4% in most cases.

This thesis focus on memory-aware algorithms tailored for hierarchical memory architectures, found for instance within multicore processors. We first study the matrix product on multicore architectures. We model such a processor, and derive lower bounds on the communication volume. We introduce three ad hoc algorithms, and experimentally assess their performance.We then target a more complex operation: the QR factorization of tall matrices. We revisit existing algorithms to better exploit the parallelism of multicore processors. We thus study the critical paths of many algorithms, prove some of them to be asymptotically optimal, and assess their performance.In the next study, we focus on scheduling streaming applications onto a heterogeneous multicore platform, the QS 22. We introduce a model of the platform and use steady-state scheduling techniques so as to maximize the throughput. We present a mixed integer programming approach that computes an optimal solution, and propose simpler heuristics. We then focus on minimizing the amount of required memory for tree-shaped workflows, and target a classical two-level memory system. I/O represent transfers from a memory to the other. We propose a new exact algorithm, and show that there exist trees where postorder traversals are arbitrarily bad. We then study the problem of minimizing the I/O volume for a given memory, show that it is NP-hard, and provide a set of heuristics.Finally, we compare archival policies for BLUE WATERS. We introduce two archival policies and adapt the well known RAIT strategy. We provide a model of the tape storage platform, and use it to assess the performance of the three policies through simulation.

It has been conventional to simplify the thermo-mechanical modeling of solder joints by omitting the primary (transient) contributions to total creep deformation, assuming that secondary (steady-state) creep strain is dominant and primary creep is negligible. The error associated with this assumption has been difficult to assess because it depends on the properties of the solder joint and the temperature-time profile. This research examines the relative contributions of primary and secondary creep in Sn3.8Ag0.7Cu solder using the constant load creep and stress relaxation measurements for bulk tensile specimens and the finite element analysis of a chip resistor (trilayer) solder joint structure that was thermally cycled under multiple temperature ranges and ramp rates. It was found that neglect of primary creep can result in errors in the predicted stress and strain of the solder joint. In turn, these discrepancies can lead to errors in the estimation of the solder thermal fatigue life due to the changing proportion of primary creep strain to total inelastic strain under different thermal profiles. The constant-load creep and stress relaxation data for Sn3.8Ag0.7Cu span a range of strain rates 10(-8) 1/s < strain rate < 10(-4) 1/s, and temperatures 25°C, 75°C and 100°C. Creep and stress relaxation measurements show that transient creep caused faster strain rates during stress relaxation for a given stress compared to the corresponding minimum creep rate from constant-load creep tests. The extent of strain hardening during primary creep was a function of temperature and strain rate. A constitutive creep model was presented for Sn3.8Ag0.7Cu that incorporates both transient and steady-state creep to provide agreement for both creep and stress relaxation data with a single set of eight coefficients. The model utilizes both temperature compensated time and strain rate to normalize minimum strain rate and saturated transient creep strain, thereby establishing equivalence between decreased temperature and increased strain rate. The apparent activation energy of steady-state creep was indicative of both dislocation core and bulk lattice diffusion was the most sensitive model parameter. A saturation threshold was defined that distinguishes whether primary or secondary creep is dominant under either static or variable loading.

It has been conventional to simplify the thermo-mechanical modeling of solder joints by omitting the primary (transient) contributions to total creep deformation, assuming that secondary (steady-state) creep strain is dominant and primary creep is negligible. The error associated with this assumption has been difficult to assess because it depends on the properties of the solder joint and the temperature-time profile. This research examines the relative contributions of primary and secondary creep in Sn3.8Ag0.7Cu solder using the constant load creep and stress relaxation measurements for bulk tensile specimens and the finite element analysis of a chip resistor (trilayer) solder joint structure that was thermally cycled under multiple temperature ranges and ramp rates. It was found that neglect of primary creep can result in errors in the predicted stress and strain of the solder joint. In turn, these discrepancies can lead to errors in the estimation of the solder thermal fatigue life due to the changing proportion of primary creep strain to total inelastic strain under different thermal profiles. The constant-load creep and stress relaxation data for Sn3.8Ag0.7Cu span a range of strain rates 10(-8) 1/s < strain rate < 10(-4) 1/s, and temperatures 25°C, 75°C and 100°C. Creep and stress relaxation measurements show that transient creep caused faster strain rates during stress relaxation for a given stress compared to the corresponding minimum creep rate from constant-load creep tests. The extent of strain hardening during primary creep was a function of temperature and strain rate. A constitutive creep model was presented for Sn3.8Ag0.7Cu that incorporates both transient and steady-state creep to provide agreement for both creep and stress relaxation data with a single set of eight coefficients. The model utilizes both temperature compensated time and strain rate to normalize minimum strain rate and saturated transient creep strain, thereby establishing equivalence between decreased temperature and increased strain rate. The apparent activation energy of steady-state creep was indicative of both dislocation core and bulk lattice diffusion was the most sensitive model parameter. A saturation threshold was defined that distinguishes whether primary or secondary creep is dominant under either static or variable loading.