No description available.

Diesel, one of the main petroleum products, is widely used in industry and transportation. Only high quality diesel product can survive in the more and more competitive market. The optimization methodology for diesel production and management is critical to refineries' profitability. LP/MIP models have been applied in diesel blending planning and scheduling in the last decades. With the benefits of reducing the model scale and computing efforts, LP/MIP models lead to operation results with inaccurate property estimation and profit loss due to the accuracy loss in the linearisation of blending models. To improve model accuracy, more accurate property prediction models for diesel blending should be incorporated into the refinery planning and schedule methods to improve decision making procedure in the case of scheduling for diesel blending, where academic effort is almost absent. A model for planning of refinery diesel streams is developed to optimise the diesel production of a refinery. Nonlinear blending models are applied to calculate blending properties more precisely than conventional linear models. Due to the large number of equations and variables, it may be generated to an infeasible solution if the given initial points are not good enough. To avoid this situation, a solution algorithm is proposed. Based on the NLP planning model, a model for scheduling diesel blending is developed. In order to improve the model accuracy, nonlinear blending correlations are used, which lead to a complicated MINLP problem that cannot be solved by existing MINLP solver directly. A robust solution algorithm is proposed in this thesis to help optimizing the MINLP problem. A case study of diesel production blending scheduling is introduced to illustrate how to model a diesel blending scheduling problem and the efficient and reliability of the solution algorithm. Besides, the proposed MINLP model and the solution algorithm can be extensively applied to other processes in a refinery, such as gasoline blending. Once gasoline blending models are taken into account, the model can be modified to optimize the gasoline blending scheduling problem.

Frequency domain photon migration consists of launching an intensitymodulated near-infrared light into the powder medium and measuring the amplitude, mean-intensity, and phase shift of detected intensity modulated light for extracting both the isotropic scattering and absorption coefficients of the powder bed. The dependence of absorption coefficient upon the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) concentration of powder blend enables FDPM to monitor blending homogeneity. The volume sampled by FDPM in powder blend was investigated through a designed heterogeneity experiments. A model which describes the visitation probability of a local region by migrating photons was developed to theoretically determine the sampled volume of FDPM in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. The applicability of FDPM in monitoring blending homogeneity was directly verified by measuring the API contents in a series of industrial samples, which were retrieved from various locations at various times in an actual pharmaceutical blending process. The FDPM measurement results were consistent with the traditional analysis using high performance liquid chromatography. The homogeneity evolution revealed through FDPM agreed with the well-established first order model of blending. A simulation method was developed which consisted of (i) dynamic simulation for generating the powder structure; (ii) the completely-randommixture model for predicting the spatial distribution of API particles within the powder bed; and (iii) Monte Carlo simulation for tracking photon trajectories within the powder bed. The simulation of photon migration in powder blend revealed that while both the isotropic scattering and absorption coefficients increased with the solid-volume fraction, the ratio of absorption coefficient to the isotropic scattering coefficient is (i) independent of the solid-volume fraction; (ii) linearly dependent upon the API concentration; and (iii) appropriate for monitoring the powder blending homogeneity under simultaneous variations of solid-volume fraction and API content. Finally, a rigorous two-speed diffusion equation for describing photon migration in powders was derived from the two-group radiative transfer equations and the analytical expression of the isotropic scattering coefficient was provided. The theoretical results agreed well with the experimental measurements in resin powder media and resin suspensions.

No description available.

Designing a school for children with Autism was a very enriching experience for me. Being a kid in a school is already a very challenging experience but for an autistic kid it can be very overwhelming. Our building codes does not even include someone on the Autism spectrum and hence it is our responsibly as an architect to help create architecture which does not ignore kids with any kind of disability as they have been ignored enough by our society. I wanted to create a safe haven for autistic kids where they could develop their potential to the maximum. The vision for the project was to create an environment that both shelters and challenges these children. Shelter being at the heart of human need for safety and challenge being key to a child's development. This thesis explores how there could be various degrees of blending experienced in an educational institution with relation to its surrounding environment. This connection with nature and its surroundings could be an important source of inspiration that promotes well-being, health, and emotional comfort for the children. / Master of Architecture / This thesis explores how there could be various degrees of blending experienced in an educational institution with relation to its surrounding environment. This connection with nature and its surroundings could be an important source of inspiration that promotes well-being, health, and emotional comfort for the children.

Impellers are important components in the field of precision machine, energy technology, and aerospace industries. Due to their complex geometries and higher degrees of interference, to produce a impeller with high precision dimension is a challenging technology. In this study, flank milling is used to machine blade surfaces of impeller instead of point cutting. Flank milling can provide a surface better than point cutting without addition processes. When blades of an impeller are designed by ruled surfaces, the impeller can be machined by flank cutting technology. Based on the type of a five-axis CNC machine, the objective of this project is aimed to develop the technology of five-axis machining for impellers. The involved techniques are : the identification of undercutting in flank cutting for ruled surfaces, five-axis tool paths generation, coordinate transformations for five-axis machining, and determination of cutting parameters. In addition, a practical application example is provided to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the developed procedure.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.