Concrete is the most common building material in the world and its use has been increasing during the last century as the need for construction projects has escalated. Traditionally, concrete uses Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) as binder, water as the activator of cement and aggregate. Finding an appropriate replacement for traditional concrete is a desirable solution to obviate the environmental problems caused by cement production. The use of fly ash as a partial replacement for Portland cement is a method to maintain the properties of concrete and reduce the need for cement. Fly ash is a by-product from coal-fired power plants and is abundantly available. The percentage of cement replacement can be varied according to application and mix design. One of the potential materials to substitute for conventional concrete is geopolymer concrete (introduced by Davidovits in 1979). Geopolymer concrete is an inorganic alumino-silicate polymer synthesized from predominantly silicon, aluminum and byproduct materials such as fly ash. Geopolymer properties have been investigated for several years and it is still a major area of interest among researchers and industry partners as it does not contain cement and uses fly ash and alkali liquids as binders to produce a paste to consolidate aggregates. Furthermore, the aggregate comprises a substantial portion of concrete. Including coarse and fine aggregates it is normally obtained from natural sources. Fine aggregate in Australia is usually mined from sand quarries. As the demand for concrete production increases, more natural sand is needed. The need for fine aggregate should be addressed in an environmentally friendly manner, considering the diminishing sources of natural sand. Red sand is a by-product generated from the manufacture of alumina from bauxite by the Bayer process. / Previous studies on properties of red sand have shown that it has the potential to be used in concrete as a fine aggregate. While the use of red sand in traditional concrete has been investigated by some researchers, no research has been reported regarding the use of this by-product in manufacturing geopolymer concrete. This research looks into the replacement of natural sand fine aggregates with red sand in geopolymer concrete. Initially, an extensive series of mixtures was prepared and tested. The objective of the research was to identify the salient parameters affecting the properties of geopolymer concrete when natural sand is replaced by red sand. At the next stage, attempts were made to enhance the mechanical and durability features of red sand geopolymer concrete. The final stage consisted of testing red sand geopolymer concrete to find out the various properties of this novel construction material.

The desire of the minerals industry to be more sustainable has led towards the increasing development of by-products. One such industry is the production of Alumina. The Alumina industry in Australia is the major producer of alumina in the western world with over 25 million tonnes of Bauxite Residue per annum. Alcoa World Alumina (Alcoa) has three refineries in Western Australia producing approximately 20,000 tonnes of Mud and a similar level of Red Sand each day. These as yet unutilised potential resources are being stockpiled, occupying a significant footprint. It is widely recognised within industry that there would be economic, environment and social benefits if a sustainable use for these materials were found. One such potential by-product is the production of coarse bauxite residue (Red Sand), neutralised and washed low in salt. The main purpose of this research was to establish a potential market for this material, through scientific evaluation of Red Sand as a replacement of natural fine aggregate (Natural Yellow Sand) in concrete mixes. For this research, the mixed stream of Bauxite Residue (fine and coarse) obtained in the Bayer process was neutralized by a process of carbonation then washed using cyclones and counter current wash towers to a value added byproduct. The coarse particles (Washed and Carbonated Sand-WCS) of the stream were separated by Wet High Intensity Magnetic Separation technique (WHIMS) so that different segments such as High Iron Sand (HIS) and Low Iron Sand (LIS) were formed. Physical, chemical and mineralogical properties of these materials have been tested and compared with that of natural sand. Several mixes of concrete were then designed using Red Sand as a fine aggregate in order to verify their effects on strength and durability indicators of concrete. / The comparative analysis between normal mix proportions and the mix proportions utilizing Red Sand was also achieved. In addition, the impact of marine environment on concrete mix design and properties of manufactured concrete were evaluated with a series of standard laboratory tests. The findings were promising in terms of both mechanical properties and durability and suggested that Red Sand, in particular Low Iron Sand is likely to be effective in place of fine aggregates and can be used within marine grade concrete with no major differences when compared to normal concrete. From the results obtained, it can be deduced that this material can be used in a wide range of concrete applications in Civil Engineering and Construction.

<p align="justify">In a context of restoration of historical masonry structures, it is crucial to properly estimate the residual strength and the potential structural failure modes in order to assess the safety of buildings. Due to its mesostructure and the quasi-brittle nature of its constituents, masonry presents preferential damage orientations, strongly localised failure modes and damage-induced anisotropy, which are complex to incorporate in structural computations. Furthermore, masonry structures are generally subjected to complex loading processes including both in-plane and out-of-plane loads which considerably influence the potential failure mechanisms. As a consequence, both the membrane and the flexural behaviours of masonry walls have to be taken into account for a proper estimation of the structural stability.</p> <p align="justify">Macrosopic models used in structural computations are based on phenomenological laws including a set of parameters which characterises the average behaviour of the material. These parameters need to be identified through experimental tests, which can become costly due to the complexity of the behaviour particularly when cracks appear. The existing macroscopic models are consequently restricted to particular assumptions. Other models based on a detailed mesoscopic description are used to estimate the strength of masonry and its behaviour with failure. This is motivated by the fact that the behaviour of each constituent is a priori easier to identify than the global structural response. These mesoscopic models can however rapidly become unaffordable in terms of computational cost for the case of large-scale three-dimensional structures.</p> <p align="justify">In order to keep the accuracy of the mesoscopic modelling with a more affordable computational effort for large-scale structures, a multi-scale framework using computational homogenisation is developed to extract the macroscopic constitutive material response from computations performed on a sample of the mesostructure, thereby allowing to bridge the gap between macroscopic and mesoscopic representations. Coarse graining methodologies for the failure of quasi-brittle heterogeneous materials have started to emerge for in-plane problems but remain largely unexplored for shell descriptions. The purpose of this study is to propose a new periodic homogenisation-based multi-scale approach for quasi-brittle thin shell failure.</p> <p align="justify">For the numerical treatment of damage localisation at the structural scale, an embedded strong discontinuity approach is used to represent the collective behaviour of fine-scale cracks using average cohesive zones including mixed cracking modes and presenting evolving orientation related to fine-scale damage evolutions.</p> <p align="justify">A first originality of this research work is the definition and analysis of a criterion based on the homogenisation of a fine-scale modelling to detect localisation in a shell description and determine its evolving orientation. Secondly, an enhanced continuous-discontinuous scale transition incorporating strong embedded discontinuities driven by the damaging mesostructure is proposed for the case of in-plane loaded structures. Finally, this continuous-discontinuous homogenisation scheme is extended to a shell description in order to model the localised behaviour of out-of-plane loaded structures. These multi-scale approaches for failure are applied on typical masonry wall tests and verified against three-dimensional full fine-scale computations in which all the bricks and the joints are discretised.</p>

One reason Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR) is becoming increasingly important to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the need for a smooth ‘human-like’ communication between autonomous agents and people. The selected, yet general, task motivating the work presented here is the scenario of an object configuration that has to be described by an observer on the ground using only relational object positions. The description provided should enable a second agent to create a map-like picture of the described configuration in order to recognize the configuration on a representation from the survey perspective, for instance on a geographic map or in the landscape itself while observing it from an aerial vehicle. Either agent might be an autonomous system or a person. Therefore, the particular focus of this work lies on the necessity to develop description and reconstruction methods that are cognitively easy to apply for a person. This thesis presents the representation scheme QuaDRO (Qualitative Description and Reconstruction of Object configurations). Its main contributions are a specification and qualitative classification of information available from different local viewpoints into nine qualitative equivalence classes. This classification allows the preservation of information needed for reconstruction nto a global frame of reference. The reconstruction takes place in an underlying qualitative grid with adjustable granularity. A novel approach for representing objects of eight different orientations by two different frames of reference is used. A substantial contribution to alleviate the reconstruction process is that new objects can be inserted anywhere within the reconstruction without the need for backtracking or rereconstructing. In addition, an approach to reconstruct configurations from underspecified descriptions using conceptual neighbourhood-based reasoning and coarse object relations is presented.

Recently an effective usage of the chip area plays an essential role for System-on-Chip (SOC) designs. Nowadays on-chip memories take up more than 50%of the total die-area and are responsible for more than 40% of the total energy consumption. Cache memory alone occupies 30% of the on-chip area in the latest microprocessors. This thesis project “System Level Exploration of RRAM for SRAM Replacement” describes a Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) based memory organizationfor the Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) processors. Thebenefit of the RRAM based memory organization, compared to the conventional Static-Random Access Memory (SRAM) based memory organization, is higher interms of energy and area requirement. Due to the ever-growing problems faced by conventional memories with Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS), emerging memory technologies gained more importance. RRAM is typically seen as a possible candidate to replace Non-volatilememory (NVM) as Flash approaches its scaling limits. The replacement of SRAMin the lowest layers of the memory hierarchies in embedded systems with RRAMis very attractive research topic; RRAM technology offers reduced energy and arearequirements, but it has limitations with regards to endurance and write latency. By reason of the technological limitations and restrictions to solve RRAM write related issues, it becomes beneficial to explore memory access schemes that tolerate the longer write times. Therefore, since RRAM write time cannot be reduced realistically speaking we have to derive instruction memory and data memory access schemes that tolerate the longer write times. We present an instruction memory access scheme to compromise with these problems. In addition to modified instruction memory architecture, we investigate the effect of the longer write times to the data memory. Experimental results provided show that the proposed architectural modifications can reduce read energy consumption by a significant frame without any performance penalty.

How much groundwater flows to boreal streams depends on the relative contributions from each landscape unit (forested uplands, lakes, and peatlands) within a catchment along with its hydrogeologic setting. Although there is an understanding of the hydrologic processes that regulate groundwater outputs from individual landscape units to their underlying aquifers (both coarse- and fine-textured) in the boreal forest, less understood is how the topography, typology, and topology (i.e. hydrologic connectivity) of the landscape units regulates groundwater flow to streams. Improved understanding of groundwater-stream interactions in the Boreal Plain of Alberta and Saskatchewan is critical as this region is undergoing substantial environmental change from land cover disturbances for energy and forestry industries and climate change. This thesis determines groundwater-stream interactions during the autumn low-flow period in a 97 km2 glacial outwash sub-catchment of White Gull Creek Research Basin, Boreal Ecosystem Research and Modelling Site, Saskatchewan. The catchment (Pine Fen Creek) is comprised of a large (30 km2) valley-bottom peatland, two lakes, and jack pine (Pinus banksiana) uplands. The pine uplands are important areas of annual groundwater recharge for the catchment. Vertical hydraulic gradients (VHGs) show frequent flow reversals between the lakes and sand aquifer, and spatially diverse VHGs between the peatland and sand aquifer. Groundwater flow nets and lateral hydraulic gradients indicate the stream receives groundwater along its length. Isotopic samples of end members corroborate the hydrometric data. Catchment streamflow response during the 2011 low flow period was not simply the addition of net groundwater inputs from each landscape unit. Instead, the large size, valley-bottom position, and short water ‘memory’ of the peatland were the critical factors in regulation of catchment streamflow during low flow periods. Peatland hydrologic function alternated between a source and sink of runoff (surface and subsurface) to the stream, dependent on the position of the water table; a value of 0.15 m below peat surface was the critical functional tipping point. Given the high percentage of peatlands (21%) within the Boreal Plain, incorporating their runoff threshold is required in parameterizing runoff generation in hydrological models, and thus predicting impacts of peatland degradation and forest clearing on streamflow.

Water plays a critical role in the function and structure of biological systems. Current techniques to study biologically relevant events that span many length and time scales are limited by the prohibitive computational cost of including accurate effects from the aqueous environment. The aim of this work is to expand the reach of current molecular dynamics techniques by reducing the computational cost for achieving an accurate description of water and its effects on biomolecular systems. This work builds from the assumption that the “local” effect of water (e.g. the local orientational preferences and hydrogen bonding) can be effectively modelled considering only the atomistic detail in a very limited region. A recent adaptive resolution simulation technique (AdResS) has been developed to practically apply this idea; in this work it will be extended to systems of simple hydrophobic solutes to determine a characteristic length for which thermodynamic, structural, and dynamic properties are preserved near the solute. This characteristic length can then be used for simulation of biomolecular systems, specifically those involving protein dynamics in water. Before this can be done, current coarse grain models must be adapted to couple with a coarse grain model of water. This thesis is organized in to five chapters. The first will give an overview of water, and the current methodologies used to simulate water in biological systems. The second chapter will describe the AdResS technique and its application to simple test systems. The third chapter will show that this method can be used to accurately describe hydrophobic solutes in water. The fourth chapter describes the use of coarse grain models as a starting point for targeted search with all-atom models. The final chapter will describe attempts to couple a coarse grain model of a protein with a single-site model for water, and it’s implications for future multi-resolution studies.

Application-specific optimization of embedded systems becomes inevitable to satisfy the market demand for designers to meet tighter constraints on cost, performance and power. On the other hand, the flexibility of a system is also important to accommodate the short time-to-market requirements for embedded systems. To compromise these incompatible demands, coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA) has emerged as a suitable solution. A typical CGRA requires many processing elements (PEs) and a configuration cache for reconfiguration of its PE array. However, such a structure consumes significant area and power. Therefore, designing cost-effective CGRA has been a serious concern for reliability of CGRA-based embedded systems. As an effort to provide such cost-effective design, the first half of this work focuses on reducing power in the configuration cache. For power saving in the configuration cache, a low power reconfiguration technique is presented based on reusable context pipelining achieved by merging the concept of context reuse into context pipelining. In addition, we propose dynamic context compression capable of supporting only required bits of the context words set to enable and the redundant bits set to disable. Finally, we provide dynamic context management capable of reducing reduce power consumption in configuration cache by controlling a read/write operation of the redundant context words In the second part of this dissertation, we focus on designing a cost-effective PE array to reduce area and power. For area and power saving in a PE array, we devise a costeffective array fabric addresses novel rearrangement of processing elements and their interconnection designs to reduce area and power consumption. In addition, hierarchical reconfigurable computing arrays are proposed consisting of two reconfigurable computing blocks with two types of communication structure together. The two computing blocks have shared critical resources and such a sharing structure provides efficient communication interface between them with reducing overall area. Based on the proposed design approaches, a CGRA combining the multiple design schemes is shown to verify the synergy effect of the integrated approach. Experimental results show that the integrated approach reduces area by 23.07% and power by up to 72% when compared with the conventional CGRA.

Polymer nanocomposites refer to a broad range of composite materials with polymer acting as the matrix and any material which has at least one dimension in the order of 1 ~ 100 nanometer acting as the filler. Due to unprecedented improvement observed in properties of the nanocomposites, research interest in this area has grown exponentially in recent years. In designing better nano-composites for advanced technological applications some of the major challenges are: understanding the structure-property relationships, interaction and integrity of the two components at the interface, the role of nanofillers in enhancing the properties of the resulting material. In our work, we have utilized first principle calculations, atomistic simulations, coarse-grained modeling and constitutive equations to develop structureproperty relationships for an amorphous aromatic piezoelectric polyimide substituted with nitrile dipole, carbon nanotubes and resulting nanocomposites. We have studied in detail structure-property relationships for carbon nanotubes and (? ?CN)APB/ODPA polyimide. We have developed chemically sound coarse-grained model based on atomic level simulations of the piezoelectric polyimide to address the larger length and time scale phenomena. The challenge of coarse grain model for these polymers is to reproduce electrical properties in addition to the structure and energetics; our model is the first to successfully achieve this goal. We have compared and analyzed atomistic scale simulation results on the nanocomposite with those predicted from micromechanics analysis. Notably, we have investigated the time dependent response of these highly complex polymers, to our best knowledge this is the first of its kind. In particular we have studied the thermal, mechanical and dielectric properties of the polyimide, nanotube and their nanocomposites through multi-scale modeling technique. We expect the results obtained and understanding gained through modeling and simulations may be used in guiding development of new nanocomposites for various advanced future applications. In conclusion we have developed a computational paradigm to rationally develop next generation nano-materials.

Though the Aerospace industry is moving towards small satellites and smaller sensor technologies, sensors used for close-proximity operations are generally cost (and often size and power) prohibitive for University-class satellites. Given the need for low-cost, low-mass solutions for close-proximity relative navigation sensors, this research analyzed the expected errors due to near-field effects using a coarse sun sensor as part of a 6-degree-of-freedom (6-dof) solution. To characterize these near-field effects, a test bed (Characterization Test Apparatus or CTA) was proposed, its design presented, and the design stage uncertainty analysis of the CTA performed. A candidate coarse sun sensor (NorthStarTM) was chosen for testing, and a mathematical model of the sensor’s functionality was derived. Using a Gaussian Least Squares Differential Correction (GLSDC) algorithm, the model parameters were estimated and a comparison between simulated NorthStarTM measurements and model estimates was performed. Results indicate the CTA is capable of resolving the near-field errors. Additionally, this research found no apparent show stoppers for using coarse sun sensors for 6-dof solutions.