Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:41:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:08:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 04672.pdf: 5899292 bytes, checksum: 2ce0b22a333f0012e1da4d7c3da1b4f7 (MD5) / Tese (Doutoramento) / IPEN/T / Escola Politecnica, Universidade de Sao Paulo - POLI/USP

Thesis (MTech(Electrical Engineering))--Cape Technikon, Cape Town,1995 / This thesis describes the research, development and design of one of the most modern generic control and automation system for mini Hydro turbines available in the world. Special emphasis is placed on the Man machine interface. A concept of total dynamic plant and data status representation was pursued. To achieve this, a large amount of graphical animation was incorporated into the design. The end product was to be the most economical and cost effective implementable design available , yet providing the most modern functions and features available in the world market. The system was developed and researched to be generic and applicable to any small Hydro plant. The design can thus be implemented on any suitable PLC and SCADA system and is not dependant on any specific manufactures hardware or software. The main emphasis is laid on functional capability of the design. Utilising this design standard would virtually cut the cost of engineering associated with the design of a Hydro control system by 90%. The design and engineering costs related to a Hydro automation project could typically exceed R 100 000 a for small Hydro plant as this scheme.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:41:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:08:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 04672.pdf: 5899292 bytes, checksum: 2ce0b22a333f0012e1da4d7c3da1b4f7 (MD5) / Tese (Doutoramento) / IPEN/T / Escola Politecnica, Universidade de Sao Paulo - POLI/USP

M.Comm. / The purpose of this study is to determine how technology may be put to use by the administrative manager with a view to providing an effective and efficient information service to the business. Literature on the duties, functions and responsibilities of the administrative manager as well as the technology available for administrative activities has been studied. For any measure of future competency, the administrative manager will need to employ technology wherever practical and possible. This could lead to a decrease in paper and the virtual office in certain types of businesses.

Magister Bibliothecologiae - MBibl / The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of information and communications technology change on the management and operations of academic libraries. How academic libraries deal with this phenomenon and strategies that could be considered to help deal with an environment where technology constantly change. This study focused on the impact of information and communications technology driven change on the academic library e.g. staff, clients, physical resources and information resources. / South Africa

A completely automated mass spectrometer system has been developed to measure the oxygen isotope ratio of carbon dioxide samples. The system has been shown to have a precision of 0.03°/oo, which is comparable to that quoted for any other system in the world. In addition, the facility is capable of analyzing over one hundred samples per day. The system uses an Interdata minicomputer as the primary controller. The minicomputer monitors the quality of analyses, on-line, and thereby insures that all DEL values are measured to at least 0.04°/oo. Host of the sophistication resides in intelligent controllers within the mass spectrometer console. This design gives a technician considerable power when operating the system in a manual mode. The intelligence of the system is contained within hardware circuits, software within the minicomputer and firmware written for a Motorola 6802 microprocessor. A major contribution of this thesis has been the design and installation of an automated mass spectrometer inlet system. A microprocessor based inlet system controller maximizes the throughput of carbon dioxide samples within the inlet system. The inlet system normally contains four different aliquots of carbon dioxide and introduces these samples to the mass spectrometer, in proper sequence, through a single mass spectrometer admittance leak. The system has been used in the analysis of 111 samples of ice taken from the Steele Glacier, Yukon Territory. The samples taken from a vertical borehole, displayed a sawtooth variation of the oxygen isotope ratio with depth. The data have been explained by a physical model described in an appendix to this thesis. If our interpretation is correct, the isotopic variations have recorded at least four surges of the Steele Glacier. / Science, Faculty of / Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

In the United States of America after World War II, Americans from across the political spectrum adopted the technological optimism of the postwar period to resolve one of the central contradictions of industrial society—the opposition between work and freedom. Although classical American liberalism held that freedom for citizens meant owning property they worked for themselves, many Americans in the postwar period believed that work had come to mean the act of maintaining mere survival. The broad acceptance of this degraded meaning of work found expression in a word coined by managers in the immediate postwar period: “automation.” Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, the word “automation” stood for a revolutionary development, even though few could agree as to precisely what kind of technology it described. Rather than a specific technology, however, this dissertation argues that “automation” was a discourse that defined work as mere biological survival and saw the end of human labor as the the inevitable result of technological progress. In premising liberation on the end of work, those who subscribed to the automation discourse made political freedom contingent not on the distribution of power, but on escape from the limits of the human body itself. Abandoning the workplace as a site of political contest, managers in the postwar period sped up workers, broke unions, and sent jobs where non-unionized labor could be had more cheaply—all of which managers, lawmakers, and even union officials called “progress.” While existing scholarship on “automation” presumes that the word describes a clear-cut technology or industrial process, this dissertation returns the concept to its ideological roots. What most called “automation” often created more human labor or intensified labor already present—in particular in the automobile and computer industries where the word was coined. The accounts of workers in these industries show that “automation” often meant the intensification of labor. The dissertation considers how different constituencies deployed the automation discourse to advance a reformist or even radical politics that sought the abolition of work. It shows how under the sign of the automation discourse “leisure” became a synonym for liberation. It explores how “automation” and the meaning of work it conveyed influenced the development of the welfare programs of the Great Society, as well as the politics of the New Left and black liberation. The automation discourse likewise influenced the postwar conception of reproductive labor and the development of second wave feminism. The dissertation ends in the mid-1970s when a national, militant, rank-and-file workers’ movement coincided with increasing distrust of industrial society, leading unions, managers, and lawmakers—after decades of calling for the abolition of human labor—to demand the “humanization” of work.

There has been increasing interest to go back to the moon in the recent past because of various scientific and socio-economic reasons. In order to go back to the moon there is a need to study the lunar environment. Although having a permanent mission outpost on the moon is the final goal it is better to send mobile rovers to the surface of the moon first to study lunar environment before starting the human missions to moon again. With the increasing autonomous mobility of the lunar rovers some aspects become increasingly important namely localization, navigation and mapping. Although the two-dimensional localization and mapping algorithms are becoming more and more mature for indoor mobile robotics, they cannot be used, as is, for autonomous lunar rovers. The terrain on the Moon is not even and would have various kinds of obstacles for the rovers to manoeuvre and traverse. Moreover, environmental features like walls and corners are not available in the environment in which the rovers would have to navigate. In such environments it becomes important for the rover to have the ability to map its surrounding in three dimensions. Although LIDAR based systems have not been widely used on actual lunar missions for mapping yet, they have the advantage of being more accurate and long-range. The focus of this thesis would be to develop and equip a lunar rover prototype with the three-dimensional terrain mapping ability using LIDAR sensor which would help the rover to traverse its environment without collisions. A three-dimensional point cloud was used to map the environment using the Iterative Closest Point(ICP) algorithm. / <p>Validerat; 20131031 (global_studentproject_submitter)</p>

This thesis covers the implementation of visual algorithms for a robot that is to operate at a smelter furnace. The goal is for the robot to replace a human in the opening, closing and flow regulation process as danger can arise when 1300°C slag flows out of the furnace. A thermal lance is used for opening the furnace which means the robot also has to understand if the lance is burning or not. A heat camera with temperature intervals 0-660°C and 300-2000°C was used to record the furnace during these critical moments which has been used to test different vision and tracking algorithms, such as mean shift and continuously adaptive mean shift. The heat images were filtered to extract only the relevant slag flow part, which then were used to track if slag was flowing, and see how large the slag flow was. Opening of the furnace was possible to identify for both temperature intervals. For the closing of the furnace both intervals were also successful, but the lower interval used a different algorithm for this case to be successful. A relative slag flow has been identified which looks promising for further real life studies. The ignition of the lance result is inconclusive as the data recorded was not fit for analysing this case, though a few conclusions could be made indicating a thermal camera may be unfit to track the thermal lance state.