The retail sector is a major contributor to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the UK and is one of the world’s most competitive industries. Its development in the UK has seen it expand dramatically and these changes are of particular significance in regard to retailers in traditional town and city centres. The publication of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in 2012 set out the government’s objectives for town centres. The key strategies from the paper were to promote their vitality and viability by planning for their growth and development as well as promoting and enhancing existing centres. The main focus of the policy however was to promote a ‘town centre first’ approach in regards to new retail development. Liverpool is one of many UK cities who have recently experienced a new inner-city retail development built alongside existing inner-city retail areas, in particular, through the building of Liverpool One. Opened in 2008, Liverpool One was built to not only offer a new retail experience in the city, alongside the established inner-city retail areas, but to also enhance the existing city centre retail areas through retail-led regeneration. The overall aim of this research is to examine the impacts that have arisen in regard to the opening of Liverpool One in particular, the impacts that this new retail development has had on the already established inner-city retail areas. A mixed methods approach was adopted; a questionnaire was developed to investigate existing retailers’ sales levels and vacancy rates and changes of occupation were measured using Goad maps. Semi-structured interviews were also carried out with existing inner-city shopping centre managers. The findings of the research suggest that the opening of Liverpool One impacted on existing retailers and shopping centres through a loss in annual sales, alterations in footfall patterns, fluctuations in vacancy rates, and changes in occupation of retail space. However, the scale of impact varied between retail areas within the city centre and the economic recession at the time of the study may have also been a contributing factor to these findings. This research informed the development of a set of recommendations to be used as a possible industry tool when incorporating a new regional inner-city shopping centre into an existing town or city centre.

The principles of organization theory are applied to the organization of construction projects. This is done by proposing a framework for modelling the whole process of building procurement. This consists of a framework for describing the environments within which construction projects take place. This is followed by the development of a series of hypotheses about the organizational structure of construction projects. Four case studies are undertaken, and the extent to which their organizational structure matches the model is compared to the level of success achieved by each project. To this end there is a systematic method for evaluating the success of building project organizations, because any conclusions about the adequacy of a particular organization must be related to the degree of success achieved by that organization. In order to test these hypotheses, a mapping technique is developed. The technique offered is a development of a technique known as Linear Responsibility Analysis, and is called "3R analysis" as it deals with roles, responsibilities and relationships. The analysis of the case studies shows that they tended to suffer due to inappropriate organizational structure. One of the prevailing problems of public sector organization is that organizational structures are inadequately defined, and too cumbersome to respond to environmental demands on the project. The projects tended to be organized as rigid hierarchies, particularly at decision points, when what was required was a more flexible, dynamic and responsive organization. The study concludes with a series of recommendations; including suggestions for increasing the responsiveness of construction project organizations, and reducing the lead-in times for the inception periods.

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Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T15:50:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / A tecnologia UWB (Ultra-WideBand) é uma das mais promissoras para a comunicação em redes sem fio de curto alcance. Esta afirmação é reforçada pelo fato dos sinais UWB ultrapassarem facilmente obstáculos e pelo fato da tecnologia permitir uma banda passante ultra-larga associada a um baixo consumo de energia. As interferências multi-usuário (MUI) em redes UWB são um dos principais fatores que contribuem para uma degradação rápida da qualidade da comunicação na rede. Assim sendo, a adoção de um mecanismo de mitigação de interferências multi-usuário se faz necessário. Esta dissertação propõe um método de mitigação adaptativa de MUI para redes UWB TH-PPM (Time Hopping - Pulse Position Modulation). O método proposto, chamado de MSS-UWB, se baseia nos sistemas de múltiplos códigos com o objetivo de criar vários enlaces entre um mesmo par transmissor-receptor e realizar adaptação da taxa de dados através da seleção adaptativa destes enlaces. Simulações realizadas com o auxílio do Matlab demonstraram que a utilização de múltiplas seqüências TH para a mitigação adaptativa da MUI traz benefícios com relação à utilização do canal de comunicação.

Uplift of the Al Hajar Mountains in Oman has been related to either Late Cretaceous ophiolite obduction or the Neogene Zagros collision. To test these hypotheses, the cooling of the central Al Hajar Mountains is constrained by 10 apatite (U-Th)/He (AHe), 15 fission track (AFT), and four zircon (U-Th)/He (ZHe) sample ages. These data show differential cooling between the two major structural culminations of the mountains. In the 3km high Jabal Akhdar culmination AHe single-grain ages range between 392 Ma and 101 Ma (2 sigma errors), AFT ages range from 518 Ma to 324 Ma, and ZHe single-grain ages range from 62 +/- 3Ma to 39 +/- 2 Ma. In the 2 km high Saih Hatat culmination AHe ages range from 26 +/- 4 to 12 +/- 4 Ma, AFT ages from 73 +/- 19Ma to 57 +/- 8 Ma, and ZHe single-grain ages from 81 +/- 4 Ma to 58 +/- 3 Ma. Thermal modeling demonstrates that cooling associated with uplift and erosion initiated at 40 Ma, indicating that uplift occurred 30 Myr after ophiolite obduction and at least 10 Myr before the Zagros collision. Therefore, this uplift cannot be related to either event. We propose that crustal thickening supporting the topography of the Al Hajar Mountains was caused by a slowdown of Makran subduction and that north Oman took up the residual fraction of N-S convergence between Arabia and Eurasia.

Green roofs are increasingly being employed as a sustainability feature of buildings. The sustainability approach in building designs requires reducing energy consumption and adopting low carbon energy sources without compromising the increasing expectations of comfort and health levels. Given the wide range of building designs, climates and green roof types, it is desirable to evaluate at the design stage the energy saving impact and other potential benefits from the application of green roofs. Currently, the abilities of building simulation programs to simulate the influences of green roofs are limited. For example, they have limitations in representing dynamic inter-layer interactions and moisture infiltration mechanisms. This research aims to develop a new model for the simulation of green roofs based on the control volume approach and to integrate the model within a whole building energy simulation program. The green roof elements consist of special layers such as plants and soil for which the control volume approach is capable of capturing their special characteristics with regards to the thermal and moisture exchanges. The model has been integrated within the ESP-r whole building energy simulation program. Within the ESP-r, the new green roof model alters the boundary condition of a roof surface on which green roof is constructed. The model development is carried out by a series of steps which include a careful selection of governing equations that describe the thermal and moisture balances in various layers of green roof, the numerical implementation for a simultaneous solution of the governing equations for the whole green roof, algorithm and code development and finally developing the interface with ESP-r. After successful integration, the model results were validated on an experimental test cell, which consists of an approximately 2 m2 planted medium on an insulated box with facilities for thermal, moisture and drainage measurements. The results for the thermal validation were promising with the significant boundary temperature values within a root mean square deviation (RMSD) in the vicinity of 0.5 K, whereas the moisture validation results are found to depend on initial conditions, the lower layers showing an RMSD of approximately 0.05 m3/m3 and the top layer nearly 0.12 [m3/m3]. The model is also able to predict the slowing down of water run-off. A methodology for collecting soil and plant properties which are required to be used along with the program has also been described. Based on the current state of the model and also considering the new developments in green roofs, some suggestions are proposed at the end of the thesis as a continuation of this research.

Building construction industry has significant impact on sustainability. The construction, operation and maintenance of buildings account for approximately 50% of global energy usage and anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In recent years, the embodied energy and carbon are identified increasingly important in terms of sustainability throughout building life cycle. Incorporation of sustainable development in building structural design becomes undoubtedly crucial. The effective building design requires smart and holistic tools that can process multi-objective and inter-connected domain knowledge to provide genuine sustainable buildings. With the advancement of information and communication technologies, various methods and techniques have been applied to accomplish the multiple objectives of sustainable development in building design. One of the most successful approaches is building information modelling (BIM), which requires further enhancement of interoperability. The emergence of Semantic Web technology provides more opportunity to improve the information modelling, knowledge management and system integration. The research presented in this thesis investigates how ontology and Semantic Web rules can be used in a knowledge-based holistic system, in order to integrate information about structural design and sustainability, and facilitate decision-making in design process by recommending appropriate solutions for different use cases. A research prototype namely OntoSCS incorporating OWL ontology and SWRL rules has been developed and tested in typical structural design cases. The holistic approach considers five inter-connected dimensions of sustainability, including structural feasibility, embodied energy and carbon, cost, durability and safety. In addition, the selection of structural material supplier and criteria in sustainability assessment are taken into account as well. This research concludes that the Semantic Web technology can be applied to structural design at early stage to provide multi-criteria optimised solution. The methodology and framework employed in this study can be further adapted as a generic multi-criteria and holistic decision support system for other domains in construction sector.

The integration of low-temperature thermochronometers, including apatite and zircon (U-Th)/He (AHe, ZHe) and apatite fission-track (AFT) methods, allows for a quantification of the thermal history experienced by rocks as they heat and cool through upper crustal temperature regimes (<200°C). Whereas these methods are practical in geologic terranes that have undergone rapid cooling, application to strata with protracted cooling histories is complicated by the enhanced role of grain-specific parameters (volume, chemistry, radiation damage) on the kinetics of helium diffusion and fission track annealing. The effects of these variables are most prevalent in sedimentary samples, where natural variance in detrital accessory mineral populations results in a broad range of diffusion kinetics and great dispersion in corresponding cooling dates. This thesis integrates contemporary thermochronometer diffusion and annealing kinetics to investigate the burial and exhumation history of two natural laboratories. In the Mackenzie Mountains and Plain of the Northwest Territories, long-term radiation damage accumulation in zircon from Neoproterozoic siliciclastic units produces ZHe dates that track Albian to Paleocene burial and exhumation in front of the foreland-propagating fold-thrust belt. For the Phanerozoic stratigraphic section, AFT annealing kinetics are calculated from Devonian and Cretaceous samples, and are incorporated into multi-kinetic AFT modeling. These kinetics also constrain AHe date-radiation damage trends, and when combined allow for an estimation on the magnitude of eroded sediment across regional pre-Albian and post-Paleocene unconformities. Finally, conodont (U-Th)/He data from Anticosti Island, Québec in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence are compared with ZHe, AHe and AFT data to test their utility as a thermochronometer for carbonate basin analysis. These data evince a Mesozoic thermal history previously unattributed to the region. Ultimately, this thesis provides a novel assessment on the ways in which thermochronometer date dispersion can be quantified to assess the thermal evolution of sedimentary basins from burial through to inversion.

First-order viscous relativistic hydrodynamics has long been thought to be unsta- ble and acausal. This is not true; it is only with certain definitions of the hydrody- namic variables that the equations of motion display these properties. It is possible to define the hydrodynamic variables such that a fluid is both stable and causal at first order. This thesis does so for both uncharged and charged fluids, mostly for fluids at rest. Work has also been done in limited cases on fluids in motion. A class of stable and causal theories is identified via constraints on transport coefficients derived from linearized perturbations of the equilibrium state. Causality conditions are also derived for the full non-linear hydrodynamic equations. / Graduate

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