A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, 1990 / This work was carried out in response to the need for a simple engineering method for the thermal analysis of direct-contact air-water heat exchangers. A simple method of performance analysis is developed which is directly analogous and consistent with the fundamental approach used in conventional heat exchanger analysis and one in which the algebraic form of the overall equation and the grouping of each of the parameters are apparent. The range of conditions considered are air and water temperatures of between 0 and 50 DC and barometric pressures ranging from 80 to 120 kPa. The air conditions considered range from completely dry to completely satucated with water vapour. Both air cooling and water cooling processes are considered. [Abbreviated abstract. Open document to view full version]

In this thesis, aspects of the physics of black holes are reviewed and new results in black hole thermodynamics are presented. First, general black hole solutions of Einstein’s equations of general relativity are mentioned and a proof of conservation law of energy and momentum in general relativity is presented. Aspects of the laws of black hole mechanics and Hawking radiation are then studied. Two proposals which attempt to explain the origin of black hole entropy (the brick wall model and entanglement entropy) are then discussed. Finally, some recent work related to the possible production and detection of black holes in colliders is presented. / viii, 141 leaves ; 29 cm.

We develop the thermodynamic formalism for a large class of maps of the interval with indifferent fixed points. For such systems the formalism yields one-dimensional systems with many-body infinite range interactions for which the thermodynamics is well defined while the Gibbs states are not. (Piecewise linear systems of this kind yield the soluble, in a sense, Fisher models.) We prove that such systems exhibit phase transitions, the order of which depends on the behavior at the indifferent fixed points. We obtain the critical exponent describing the singularity of the pressure and analyse the decay of correlations of the equilibrium states at all temperatures. Our technique relies on establishing and exploiting a relationship between the transfer operators of the original map and its suitable (expanding) induced version. The technique allows one to also obtain a version of the Bowen-Ruelle formula for the Hausdorff dimension of repellers for maps with indifferent fixed points, and to generalize Fisher results to some non-soluble models. / Ph. D.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Ignition of a combustible mixture by a transient jet of hot reactive gas is important for safety of mines, pre-chamber ignition in IC engines, detonation initiation, and in novel constant-volume combustors. The present work is a numerical study of the hot-jet ignition process in a long constant-volume combustor (CVC) that represents a wave-rotor channel. The mixing of hot jet with cold mixture in the main chamber is first studied using non-reacting simulations. The stationary and traversing hot jets of combustion products from a pre-chamber is injected through a converging nozzle into the main CVC chamber containing a premixed fuel-air mixture. Combustion in a two-dimensional analogue of the CVC chamber is modeled using global reaction mechanisms, skeletal mechanisms, and detailed reaction mechanisms for four hydrocarbon fuels: methane, propane, ethylene, and hydrogen. The jet and ignition behavior are compared with high-speed video images from a prior experiment. Hybrid turbulent-kinetic schemes using some skeletal reaction mechanisms and detailed mechanisms are good predictors of the experimental data. Shock-flame interaction is seen to significantly increase the overall reaction rate due to baroclinic vorticity generation, flame area increase, stirring of non-uniform density regions, the resulting mixing, and shock compression. The less easily ignitable methane mixture is found to show higher ignition delay time compared to slower initial reaction and greater dependence on shock interaction than propane and ethylene. The confined jet is observed to behave initially as a wall jet and later as a wall-impinging jet. The jet evolution, vortex structure and mixing behavior are significantly different for traversing jets, stationary centered jets, and near-wall jets. Production of unstable intermediate species like C2H4 and CH3 appears to depend significantly on the initial jet location while relatively stable species like OH are less sensitive. Inclusion of minor radical species in the hot-jet is observed to reduce the ignition delay by 0.2 ms for methane mixture in the main chamber. Reaction pathways analysis shows that ignition delay and combustion progress process are entirely different for hybrid turbulent-kinetic scheme and kinetics-only scheme.