The oxidation reaction mechanisms of water soluble textile dyes amaranth (an azo dye), brilliant blue-R (a triaryl dye) and safranine-O (an azine dye) with oxidants- hypochlorite and chlorine dioxide, were investigated. The detailed kinetics of the reactions of the three dyes was studied under excess concentrations of the oxidant and other reagents. The depletion of concentration of the chosen dye, taken at low concentration was monitored using a Hi-Tech SF-61 DX2 double mixing micro volume stopped-flow apparatus. The hypochlorite initiated oxidations were investigated as function of varying concentration of oxidant and hydrogen ion, ionic strength and temperature. For the chosen dyes and reaction conditions, the depletion of dye followed pseudo first-order kinetics and the rate constants were estimated using KinetAsystTM software. All the three reactions had first-order dependence on the oxidant concentration, and the reaction rates increased by varied extent with increase in [H+]0. The role of acid in their reaction mechanisms was established. The kinetic data was analysed to evaluate the rate constants for the competitive pathways initiated by hypochlorite ion and hypochlorous acid. The overall second-order rate coefficients for the OCl- and HOCl initiated reactions were estimated for all the three reactions. Major oxidation products for the reactions were separated and characterized by 1H NMR and 13C NMR and GC-MS techniques and the stoichiometry was established. The energy parameters inclusive of Arrhenius factor, enthalpy, entropy and energy of activations for the oxidation of three dyes both by OCl- and HOCl species were estimated. Based on the experimental findings, the probable rate laws, mechanisms and reaction schemes were described. Simulations studies were conducted to validate the proposed mechanisms using SIMKINE2 computer programme. The rate of oxidation of safranine-O is greater than that of amaranth and brilliant blue-R with OCl- / HOCl reaction. Following similar protocol, the oxidations of the chosen dyes with chlorine dioxide were investigated by monitoring the depletion kinetics of dye as function of varying concentration of ClO2 and OH- ion, ionic strength and temperature. All the three dyes, exhibited pseudo first-order kinetics and the rate constants were estimated using KinetAsystTM software. All the three reactions had first-order dependence on the oxidant concentration at pH conditions 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0 suggesting that reaction mechanism remains unaltered with pH variation. The effect of hydroxide ion on the reaction rate revealed that it acts as catalyst. All the three reactions had first-order dependence on [OH-]0, when its concentration was low; but the order with respect to [OH-] decreased as [OH-] increased stoichiometry proportion to reactants. The catalytic constant for hydroxide catalysed reaction was estimated for all the three reactions. Kinetic salt effect experiments were conducted to identify the possible reaction species involved in the reactions. The major reaction products were characterized by 1H NMR, 13C NMR and GC-MS techniques. The stoichiometry ratios were established and energy parameters were estimated. The rate laws and probable reaction mechanisms were proposed and appropriate reaction schemes for all the reactions were described. The elucidated mechanisms were confirmed by simulation studies using SIMKINE2 software. At neutral pH the rate of oxidation of amaranth is greater than safranine-O and brilliant blue-R, and brilliant blue R being the slowest. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2010.

This thesis summarises research on the improved design, integration and expansion of past cortex-like computer vision models, following biologically-inspired methodologies. By adopting early theories and algorithms as a building block, particular interest has been shown for algorithmic parameterisation, feature extraction, invariance properties and classification. Overall, the major original contributions of this thesis have been: 1. The incorporation of a salient feature-based method for semantic feature extraction and refinement in object recognition. 2. The design and integration of colour features coupled with the existing morphological-based features for efficient and improved biologically-inspired object recognition. 3. The introduction of the illumination invariance property with colour constancy methods under a biologically-inspired framework. 4. The development and investigation of rotation invariance methods to improve robustness and compensate for the lack of such a mechanism in the original models. 5. Adaptive Gabor filter design that captures texture information, enhancing the morphological description of objects in a visual scene and improving the overall classification performance. 6. Instigation of pioneering research on Spiking Neural Network classification for biologically-inspired vision. Most of the above contributions have also been presented in two journal publications and five conference papers. The system has been fully developed and tested in computers using MATLAB under a variety of image datasets either created for the purposes of this work or obtained from the public domain.

This thesis is a study of the kiln drying of radiata pine with a primary focus on the change in wood colour that occurs during this process. The energy efficiency of the drying process has also been examined using computer modelling. The aim of this work was to develop guidelines for commercial wood dryers who wish to produce high quality appearance grade timber in a competitive commercial environment. The colour change in radiata pine wood during kiln drying is mainly caused by sap compounds accumulating at the wood surface and reacting to form coloured compounds. The initial research involved drying experiments designed to determine the relationship between this colour change and the kiln schedule and also measure the accumulation of colour forming compounds. The kinetics of the colour change reaction were also measured using two methods, one in-vitro and the other using small samples of wood. From these experiments a colour change equation was developed that predicts the rate of colour formation based on the drying conditions and this was incorporated into a kiln stack model along with an energy efficiency model. The combined model was used to simulate the drying process to find schedules optimised for energy use and wood quality. The model was also used to simulate the energy efficiency of different humidity control configurations for wood drying kilns. A kiln micro-sensor system was also developed for use in kiln diagnostics and control with the particular aim of identifying areas in wood drying kilns with adverse drying conditions. The recommendation to kiln operators wishing to reduce colour change is to not exceed 70? and to use lower relative humidity schedules with a wet bulb depression of 15-20?. Operating at lower humidity can increase the energy used by the kiln so it is also recommended that kiln designers incorporate heat recovery into the humidity control mechanisms of the kiln.

Colour has encountered to be a significant part in marketing, which advantageously can be used in todays competitive market. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze the colours varying associations and present ideas how colours can affect the hotel business. In coherence with the purpose we deveoled the research question, which resulted in following: How can hotels affect their servicescape and identity by the help of colour? The study has a qualitative method that began in an empirical problem that has been tested against theory, which subsequently developed the research question. This implies that our study alternated between induction and deduction. The empirical data was collected using semi-structured interviews where respondents consists of color specialists and general managers in the hotel industry. During the working process we have encountered that colour holds general, cultural and traditional associations. We also discovered that hotel company's servicescape, identity and colour are strongly related to each other. This affects, creates and conveys feelings and can be competitive advantages if the choice of colour conforms with the hotel company's identity. The final discussion presents varying colour associations and ideas how colours can affect the hotel business.

Stereopsis is the process of inferring the distance to objects from two or more images. It has applications in areas such as: novel-view rendering, motion capture, autonomous navigation, and topographical mapping from remote sensing data. Although it sounds simple, in light of the effortlessness with which we are able to perform the task with our own eyes, a number of factors that make it quite challenging become apparent once one begins delving into computational methods of solving it. For example, occlusions that block part of the scene from being seen in one of the images, and changes in the appearance of objects between the two images due to: sensor noise, view dependent effects, and/or differences in the lighting/camera conditions between the two images. Global stereopsis algorithms aim to solve this problem by making assumptions about the smoothness of the depth of surfaces in the scene, and formulating stereopsis as an optimization problem. As part of their formulation, these algorithms include a function that measures the similarity between pixels in different images to detect possible correspondences. Which of these match cost functions work better, when, and why is not well understood. Furthermore, in areas of computer vision such as segmentation, face detection, edge detection, texture analysis and classification, and optical flow, it is not uncommon to use colour spaces other than the well known RGB space to improve the accuracy of algorithms. However, the use of colour spaces other than RGB is quite rare in stereopsis research. In this dissertation we present results from two, first of their kind, large scale studies on global stereopsis algorithms. In the first we compare the relative performance of a structured set of match cost cost functions in five different global stereopsis frameworks in such a way that we are able to infer some general rules to guide the choice of which match cost functions to use in these algorithms. In the second we investigate how much accuracy can be gained by simply changing the colour representation used in the input to global stereopsis algorithms.

Protective coloration such as aposematism and crypsis occurs in many insects but only a few species alter their defensive strategy during the same instar. We hypothesize the adult shield bug Graphosoma lineatum with an alternating black and non-melanised longitudinal striation exhibit such a change in defensive coloration. In Sweden, the non-melanised stripes of the pre-hibernation G. lineatum are pale brown and cryptic but they change during hibernation to red and aposematic. We have tested the adaptive functions of coloration of the two G. lineatum forms against bird predators. In Paper I we used great tits as predators and measured detection time of the two forms against a background of dry grass and plants, simulating late-summer conditions. We found that the birds took longer time to find the pale than the red form. Thus, the pale form of G. lineatum is more cryptic in a dry environment than the red form. In Paper II and III we used naïve predators and measured attack rate/latency on red and pale adults and fifth-instar larvae (black and brown) to investigate avoidance and generalisation between the stages. In Paper II domestic chicks initially found the red form most intimidating, but both adult forms are more intimidating than the larva. Moreover, there was a broad generalisation among forms. In Paper III naïve great tits did not find the red form significantly more aversive than the pale adult. Neither the chicks nor the tits showed any difference in the speed of avoidance learning between the two adult colour forms. In Paper IV the shieldbugs themselves were the main focus as we compared activity levels in the different colour forms and found that G. lineatum alters behaviour in accordance to their protective strategy. Thus they were significantly less active during the cryptic phase. Taken together, these experiments suggest that the pale brown adult invests in a cryptic strategy at the cost of reduced protection from aposematism, whereas the red adult benefits from aposematism at the cost of reduced camouflage. / At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Accepted.

Particulate filled polymer composites are gaining growing acceptance in the commodity industry because the properties can be adjusted according to the industry's requirements. As particulate filler, fly ash is ready to compete with other particular fillers in polymer composites industries. Although fly ash is a cheap material but the fact that fly ash is grey-black in colour, limits the application of fly ash only to product where colour is not important. As such, a method was needed to be developed to increase the whiteness of fly ash without reducing the advantages of it as a cheap material. In this research, twelve commercially provided fly ash samples from Australian thermal power stations were investigated with respect to composition. Seven of them were thermally modified and further investigated and characterized with respect to colour, size, size distribution, and density. Of these seven fly ashes a particular grade was modified to a whiteness of 93.3 in L*a*b* scale (using barium sulfate as standard), without changing other inherent properties such as particle size and density. By comparison L*a*b* value for Omy carb 20, based on calcium carbonate is 96.9. The whiteness of fly ash was increased using a one stage thermal method ensuring the related cost of production would be not a major hurdle. The next aspect of the thesis involved incorporating as-received and heat treated fly ash samples in isotactic polypropylene up to 80 parts of fly ash per hundred resins (phr), demonstrating that fly ash content in polypropylene composites can be quite high with properly maintained combination of mechanical properties -- in particular up to 200 % improvement in Young's modulus and 63 % gain in notched impact properties, as explained in the thesis. Whilst the Young's modulus properties of the fly ash PP composites match very well with Kerner model, they lie in between the Rule of Mixture series and parallel. The tensile strength properties obtained in this research are at least 25 % higher than those predicted by Nielsen, Landon and Nicolais; whereas the strain to failure values are between 25 - 50 % higher than those predicted by Nielsen, and Smith. Whilst tensile strength of the fly ash filled polypropylene composites were less than the original polypropylene samples, as normally reported in the literature, in this thesis surface modification of fly ash particles by using 10% vinyl triethoxy silane (VTES) coupling agent gave a nominal increase in tensile strength especially at higher fly ash content. The final aspect involved study of oxidation behavior of fly ash filled polypropylene composites. Fillers, including fly ash can shorten the life time of polymers from both chemical as well as physical factors. As-received fly ash contains iron based impurities which may catalyze the anti oxidant in polypropylene, therefore reducing the service life time of the polymer. In this work, thermal treatment studies showed that the iron in fly ash can be changed to a chemically inert material so the effective service life of the polymer will only be influenced by physical factors. Therefore thermal treatment of fly ash not only increases the whiteness but also it reduces the risk of the filler on the life time of the polymer, and hence the composites.

This thesis describes a new approach to the study of high-redshift star-formation and its environments that can be applied to large high-redshift surveys. Instead of relying on spectroscopy or narrow-band photometry to study galaxy line emission in detail, the properties of large emission line galaxy (ELG)populations are estimated from broadband photometry by measuring colour-residuals against colours drawn from a set of line-free stochastic burst models-based on (Bruzual & Charlot, 2003). Simulated star-formation histories drawn from semi-analytic and adaptive-mesh-refinement codes were converted into mock galaxy colours, but neither could-span the range of observed galaxy colours at high redshift. Instead, an existing set of exponentially declining star-formation models with stochastic bursts was used, because it closely spanned the range in observed galaxy colours in the bandsthat were line-free at each redshift. Small colour offsets were measured between the models and the observations, corresponding to the equivalent widths (EWs)of Hα, [OIII] and [OII]. In this way, I measure the rest-frame Equivalent Widths of the Hα, [OIII]and [OII] emission lines as they are redshifted through all filters from CANDELS(near-continuous U to 4.5μm coverage) for a large sample of galaxies from z=0.1up to z=5. This approach relies solely on the line-free models, a set of existing reliable photometric redshifts, and a colour cut (B−K < 2 or equivalent) to select only the dust-free young objects (the majority of identified emission-line galaxies). Once correctly identified, I apply this method to the CANDELS-UDS photometry to characterise the properties of Emission-Line Galaxies (ELGs) through these lines. I find that in this sample the Hα and [OIII] ELG fraction with EW > 150Årises from < 5% at z < 1 up to 40% at z > 2. The co-moving ELG density rises from 5 to 30 ×10 −4 /Mpc −3 at z=2.3. The evolution of median Hα EW with redshift is consistent with results from HiZELS and 3D-HST yielding median EW ∼ M 0.25 (1+z) 1.75 up to z=2.3, from which it departs to values of 450Å atz=4.3. [OIII] remains weaker than Hα for z < 3 and matches its values above that redshift. [OIII] also displays a larger fraction of extreme EWs than Hα. [OII], while correctly identified, never becomes as extreme as the other two lines lines, even when corrected for the evolving continuum. This is evidence of an increasing [OIII]/[OII] ratio with increasing z through-out this sample. While these results agree with spectroscopic and narrow-band surveys, the use of the deeper broadband filter coverage enables a systematic measurement of the increasingly prevalent high EWs ( > 500Å) in galaxies at every redshift spanning the 10 8 to 10 10.5 M range. Subsequently, this method was applied to all the other CANDELS fields (GOODS-South and North, COSMOS and EGS) and further corroborates these results. These results further show that EW dependence on mass is steeper for [OIII] than for Hα. Line EWs are then converted into luminosities for the three lines and fitting formulas are obtained, displaying L Hα ∼(1+z) 3.2 M 0.45−0.6log(1+z), with similar results for the other lines. L Hα is converted into star-formation rate and specific star-formation rate (sSFR). sSFR at low-z aligns approximately with the main sequence (with a steeper dependence in mass), but at high-redshift sSFR remains above the main sequence by a factor of 2 and rising towards medians SFR=100/Gyr around log(M/M )=9, showing a departure of the main sequence of star formation at lower masses log(M/M ) < 9.5. The SFRD of ELGs is 1% at low redshift, but rises to 30% at z=4.5. The L [OIII] /L Hα ratio is used to estimate L [OIII] /L Hβ and the ionization parameter q, for which the median atz > 0.5 stays approximately constant at 10 8 cm/s, and increases with mass. Using the L [OIII] /L [OII] ratio and q, median metallicity is shown to be sub-solar, and can be tentatively estimated for z > 0.5 to be Z/Z ∼0.3. The errors are large, but this could also mean a large range in metallicity from Z to 0.1Z . L [OIII] /L [OII] rises with sSFR as shown in the literature. This method shows great potential to survey emission-line-derived physical quantities for large galaxy populations with a low computational footprint, which could be particularly useful for pixel-by-pixel EW imaging. It is also flexibile, which allows it to be applied to any future deep multi-broadband fields.

In nature, both fundamental and sophisticated ecological functionality alike are driven by the display or, conversely, the concealment of colour and visual contrast. Through scientific investigation, the evolutionary genius manifested in numerous light manipulating biological systems has provided many blueprints for innovative photonic devices and other smart materials. The development of innovative bioinspired materials that harness the optical properties exhibited by chiral structures, such as those found in certain Scarabaeidae, offer widespread potential. In this thesis, the species-specific circularly polarised optical behaviour corresponding to a variety of Scarabaeidae beetles is investigated. The helicoidal morphology giving rise to circularly polarised photonic properties is first described for several beetles displaying a narrowband colour appearance. A structural analysis of the native surface structures encountered in these species is presented alongside a discussion of their role in defining the species' optical characteristics. Experimental measurements of the circularly polarised scattering behaviour are presented and discussed with respect to the electron microscopy and surface morphology measurements comprising the structural analysis. Following this, the origins of the subtle differences in the metallic colour appearance of several broadband coleopteran structures are deciphered. The broadband response of these species is attributed to chirped configurations of the helicoidal lamellar structure, elucidated using electron microscopy. Results of this structural analysis are applied to theoretical simulations of the structures' electromagnetic response and consolidate experimental measurements of the circularly polarised reflectance. Rigorous experimental measurement demonstrated that the circularly polarised spectral response is relatively robust to small structural defects or `biological noise'. Building from this, the intraspecific colour variation displayed in the species Chrysina aurigans is a useful lens through which the nuances of the chirped multilayer structure are further examined. As a result, this work provides detailed insights into the fine-tuning of chirped biological photonic systems. Likewise, the topic of biological wave retarders is afforded significant attention, primarily with reference to the biological half-wave plate encountered in the cuticle structure of Chrysina resplendens. A rigorous analysis of the photonic system in C. resplendens is presented, leading to novel conclusions describing this system's opto-structural relationship. Additionally, this thesis reports, for the first time, the presence of a biological wave retarder in the cuticle structure of Chrysina cupreomarginata.

Giving textiles form is a project in textile design exploring how textiles can create self-supporting three-dimensional forms with after finishing techniques. The project focuses on the textile to be self-supporting, by working against and challenging the properties of a textile fabric. The motive for the project is to widen the definition of what a textile can do. The methods of origami and traditional Japanese wood joinery are used to find a functioning and durable construction, as well as manipulating the textiles with colour and after finishing techniques. The result of this work is three coloured textile forms that are three-dimensional and self-supporting, the use of colour strengthens the depth and adds a spatial dimension. This work contributes to broaden the field of textile design by expanding the use of textile.