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Solidification during horizontal continuous casting of low carbon steel billets with cyclic withdrawal was simulated and the wavy profile of the solidifying shell characteristic of this process was reproduced. Effects of rate of withdrawal cycle, superheat and casting speed were determined. In order to carry out this simulation in a personal computer, efficient numerical techniques had to be developed for mesh refinement by coordinate transformation, interfaces with temperature discontinuities and re-entrant corners. A flexible means of mesh generation involving polynomials was also developed. From the transient heat transfer model finite difference equations peculiar to each gridpoint in the solution field were derived and solved by the Alternating Direction Implicit (ADI) method. Graphics software were developed to view the results with 3-D as well as contour plots. The heat transfer model was verified with published results of vertical continuous casting of Mg alloys and steel. Due to its ability to deal with interfaces, unlike previous work, the present model could solve temperature at both casting and mold simultaneously. A model for the shell growth, rupture and healing at the break-ring of horizontal continuous casting molds was incorporated into the heat transfer model. An interesting result of this simulation was the presence of transient hot spots in the hot face of the mold. Elimination of such hot spots should aid shell strength and hence the casting rate. A semi-quantitative dependence of the depth of the primary witness mark on cycle rate was also established.

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Over the past 10 years, multiple executable modelling formalisms for molecular biology have been developed in order to address the growing need for a system-level understanding of complex biological phenomena. An important class of these formalisms are biology-inspired process algebras, which offer-among other desirable properties - an almost complete separation of model specification (syntax) from model dynamics (semantics). In this thesis, the similarity between this separation and the genotype-phenotype duality in evolutionary biology is exploited to develop a process-algebraic approach to the study of evolution of biochemical systems. The main technical contribution of this thesis is the continuous π-calculus (cπ), a novel process algebra based on the classical π-calculus of Milner et. al. Its two defining characteristics are: continuous, compositional, computationally inexpensive semantics, and a exible interaction structure of processes (molecules). Both these features are conductive to evolutionary analysis of biochemical systems by, respectively, enabling many variants of a given model to be evaluated, and facilitating in silico evolution of new functional connections. A further major contribution is a collection of variation operators, syntactic model transformation schemes corresponding to common evolutionary events. When applied to a cπ model of a biochemical system, variation operators produce its evolutionary neighbours, yielding insights into the local fitness landscape and neutral neighbourhood. Two well-known biochemical systems are modelled in this dissertation to validate the developed theory. One is the KaiABC circadian clock in the cyanobacterium S. elongatus, the other is a mitogen-activated protein kinase cascade. In each case we study the system itself as well as its predicted evolutionary variants. Simpler examples, particularly that of a generic enzymatic reaction, are used throughout the thesis to illustrate important concepts as they are introduced.

Enemy integrated air defense systems (IADS) using low probability of intercept (LPI) emitters can cause significant problems for suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) techniques. New threat emitter configurations using low-power random noise modulation have a significant processing gain unavailable to non-cooperative intercept receivers. Consequently, the detection of these emitters can not be accomplished with conventional intercept receiver detection methods. This thesis examines the use of time-frequency, bi-frequency signal detection techniques to identify the parameters of the four types of continuous waveform noise radar recently reported. These include: (a) random noise, (b) noise plus frequency modulation continuous wave (FMCW), (c) noise FMCW plus sine and (d) random binary phase modulation. Quadrature mirror filtering for wavelet decomposition is used to investigate the four types of noise signals in order to extract the signal parameters. The FFT accumulation method for estimating the spectral correlation density function is also used to examine the cyclostationary bi-frequency properties of the waveforms. In addition, the periodic autocorrelation function and periodic ambiguity function are studied to determine the waveform properties in the delay- Doppler offset domain. Results show that non-cooperative intercept receivers can increase their processing gain using these types of signal processing techniques providing a more efficient response time to the threat.

This thesis proposes a continuous low-thrust guidance and control strategy for satellite formation-flying. Stabilizing feedback based on mean relative orbit elements and Lyapunov theory is used. A novel feedback gain matrix inspired by the fuel-optimal impulsive solution is designed to achieve near-optimal fuel consumption. A reference governor is developed to autonomously guide the spacecraft through the relative state-space in order to allow for arbitrarily constrained satellite formations. Constraints include desired  thrust levels, time constraints, passive collision avoidance and locally constrained state-space areas. Keplerian dynamics are leveraged to further decrease fuel consumption. Simulations show fuel consumptions of only 4% higher delta-v than the fuel-optimal impulsive solution. The proposed control and guidance strategy is tested in a high-fidelity orbit propagation simulation using MATLAB/Simulink. Numerical simulations include orbit perturbations such as atmospheric drag, high-order geopotential, solar radiation pressure and third-body (Moon and Sun) effects. Test cases include reconfiguration scenarios with imposed wall, thrust and time constraints and a formation maintenance experiment as flown by TanDEM-X, the TanDEM-X Autonomous Formation-Flying (TAFF) experiment.