This thesis concerns the acquisition of newly developed production equipment in factories. Types of Manufacturing Technology Acquisition (MTA) can range from in-house development through to outright purchase from a supplier. MTA projects often fail because the new equipment fails to perform well enough or the expected financial benefits are not achieved. The purpose of this research has been to find out how to select the right manufacturing technology acquisition projects, and having chosen them, how to make them successful. Very little guidance on this subject was found in the literature. Therefore the approach taken was to adapt techniques widely used in the much more deeply researched field of New Product Development (NPD). The Success Factor method was applied by conducting interviews with managers in a number of factories to develop lists of factors thought to affect success or failure in their MTA projects. The Portfolio method from NPD was adapted to the case of managing a total MT'A budget, and developed through its use in three annual cycles of equipment acquisition in the researcher's Company. A formula for Expected Commercial Value in NPD was modified to become Expected Manufacturing Benefit, and tried out in practice. An important consideration in manufacturing equipment projects was discovered to be the replication of projects which had proved successful, and ways to incorporate this factor into the project selection procedure were developed. A detailed case study of a single project was carried out, which verified the validity of the findings at the level of a single project. This case study also revealed the considerable impact that corporate strategic events can have on technology acquisitions. This led to a case study on corporate strategy in the Company being carried out. Finally the findings were brought together to present a complete model for managing MTA.

With new government regulations and emerging knowledge of the risk to the environment posed by the failure of stormwater pipelines, stormwater infrastructure asset management is becoming increasingly important in the U.S. An essential aspect of asset management practice is the accurate performance assessment of one's assets. This paper presents a weighted factor framework to determine the performance of stormwater pipes. This paper prepares a list of 50 parameters affecting the performance of stormwater pipelines; the list is based on a review of the literature, existing asset management plans, and feedback from utilities. This list is broken down into essential and preferential parameters. Indeed, not all utilities necessarily possess sufficient resources to collect such a large set of parameters. This study also develops a three-level hierarchical structure of the degradation of stormwater pipeline infrastructure. The structure consists of five failure modules and the essential parameters only. On the basis of the survey results gathered from 10 utilities across the EPA regions, the study combines the essential parameters into a performance index. The index is a scale of 1 to 5, similar to the National Association of Sewer Service Companies' Pipeline Assessment and Certification Program grading system. Grade 1 implies excellent condition and Grade 5 implies collapse is imminent. / Master of Science

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<p>The built environment usually constitutes a very important part of the real capital of a nation, and the construction sector represents more than 10% of the yearly Gross National Product of the industrialised world. Good planning of all construction is important, and consideration of the service life of the work is of great interest and is a significant aspect of sustainability considerations. The need for more knowledge about degradation of materials, for structured methodology, and for working tools for those involved in the planning process, has resulted in an extensive effort in pre-normative research and standardisation regarding this field.</p><p>This thesis presents a discussion on service life planning and the role of the Factor Method in such work, and especially, discussion of modification and development of the methodology. In the design process, the need to evaluate the service life of products is a great challenge, as the results will depend on both material properties and the environment in which the material is placed or used. A practical solution has to be based on a good knowledge in the field, but also on a sound working strategy, to ensure that different design scenarios can be compared in a standardised or structured way. The Factor Method is a promising working tool for such an evaluation and comparison, but is as such, still more of a methodology, than a method. Examples of the use of the methodology are still very limited, and the method as such, is much discussed by researchers. However, its future will depend upon how practical it will be to apply in use. The method is useful to estimate the service life of products, based on a known reference service life and a number of modifying factors. These factors in turn depend on the conditional differences between the specific project and the reference, in-use conditions. This thesis discusses the required precision of such a methodology, especially in light of inherent distributions in material properties, and the fact that the consequences of failure are often very limited. In such cases, the standardised Factor Method is considered to be quite useful, and should give the parties involved a good means for working in a structured and systematic way. </p>

The built environment usually constitutes a very important part of the real capital of a nation, and the construction sector represents more than 10% of the yearly Gross National Product of the industrialised world. Good planning of all construction is important, and consideration of the service life of the work is of great interest and is a significant aspect of sustainability considerations. The need for more knowledge about degradation of materials, for structured methodology, and for working tools for those involved in the planning process, has resulted in an extensive effort in pre-normative research and standardisation regarding this field. This thesis presents a discussion on service life planning and the role of the Factor Method in such work, and especially, discussion of modification and development of the methodology. In the design process, the need to evaluate the service life of products is a great challenge, as the results will depend on both material properties and the environment in which the material is placed or used. A practical solution has to be based on a good knowledge in the field, but also on a sound working strategy, to ensure that different design scenarios can be compared in a standardised or structured way. The Factor Method is a promising working tool for such an evaluation and comparison, but is as such, still more of a methodology, than a method. Examples of the use of the methodology are still very limited, and the method as such, is much discussed by researchers. However, its future will depend upon how practical it will be to apply in use. The method is useful to estimate the service life of products, based on a known reference service life and a number of modifying factors. These factors in turn depend on the conditional differences between the specific project and the reference, in-use conditions. This thesis discusses the required precision of such a methodology, especially in light of inherent distributions in material properties, and the fact that the consequences of failure are often very limited. In such cases, the standardised Factor Method is considered to be quite useful, and should give the parties involved a good means for working in a structured and systematic way. / QC 20101019

This thesis presents an analysis of misidentified leptons in the Higgs boson decaychannel H → W W ∗ → lνlν. Misidentified leptons, resulting from jets misidentifiedas leptons, mimic the signal of a Higgs boson decay, resulting in a backgroundcontribution to the signal. The analysis is performed on proton-proton collisions ata center-of-mass energy of 13.6 TeV recorded by the ATLAS experiment at CERN’sLarge Hadron Collider. The estimation of misidentified leptons is done using theso-called Fake Factor method, which is used to assess the contributed backgroundwith misidentified leptons in the signal region. The Fake Factor values increasewith increasing momenta for misidentified electrons while it remains constant formisidentified muons. An analysis of the impact parameters d0 and z0 show thatthe accuracy of the Monte Carlo simulation to correctly predict the contribution ofmisidentified leptons from heavy quarks is high. / Denna avhandling presenterar en analys av felaktigt identifierade leptoner i Higgsbosonens sönderfallskanal H → W W ∗ → lνlν. Felaktigt identifierade leptoner frånhadroner imiterar signalen av ett sönderfall från en Higgs boson, vilket resulterar ibakgrund till signalen. Analysen utförs på proton-proton kollisioner med energier på13.6 TeV som samlats in av ATLAS-experimentet vid CERNs Large Hadron Collider.Denna avhandling fokuserar främst på uppskattningen av felaktigt identifieradeleptoner genom användningen av Fake Factor-metoden, vilket används för att bedömaden bidragande bakgrunden med felidentifierade leptoner i signalregionen. Värdenaför Fake Factors ökar med ökande rörelsemängd för felidentifierade elektroner medanför det förblir konstant för felidentifierade muoner. En analys av ”impact parameters”d0 och z0 visar att Monte Carlo-simuleringens noggrannhet att uppskatta antaletfelidentifierade leptoner från tunga kvarkar är hög.

Phased array feeds (PAFs) are a promising new technology for astronomical radio telescopes. While PAFs have been used in other fields, the demanding sensitivity and calibration requirements in astronomy present unique new challenges. This dissertation presents some of the first astronomical PAF results demonstrating the lowest noise temperature and highest sensitivity at the time (66 Kelvin and 3.3 m^2/K, respectively), obtained using a narrowband (425 kHz bandwidth) prototype array of 19 linear co-polarized L-band dipoles mounted at the focus of the Green Bank 20 Meter Telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia. Results include spectral line detection of hydroxyl (OH) sources W49N and W3OH, and some of the first radio camera images made using a PAF, including an image of the Cygnus X region. A novel array Y-factor technique for measuring the isotropic noise response of the array is shown along with experimental measurements for this PAF. Statistically optimal beamformers (Maximum SNR and MVDR) are used throughout the work. Radio-frequency interference (RFI) mitigation is demonstrated experimentally using spatial cancelation with the PAF. Improved RFI mitigation is achieved in the challenging cases of low interference-to-noise ratio (INR) and moving interference by combining subspace projection (SP) beamforming with a polynomial model to track a rank 1 subspace. Limiting factors in SP are investigated including sample estimation error, subspace smearing, noise bias, and spectral scooping; each of these factors is overcome with the polynomial model and prewhitening. Numerical optimization leads to the polynomial subspace projection (PSP) method, and least-squares fitting to the series of dominant eigenvectors over a series of short term integrations (STIs) leads to the eigenvector polynomial subspace projection (EPSP) method. Expressions for the gradient, Hessian, and Jacobian are given for use in numerical optimization. Results are given for simulated and experimental data, demonstrating deeper beampattern nulls by 6 to 30dB. To increase the system bandwidth toward the hundreds of MHz bandwidth required by astronomers for a fully science-ready instrument, an FPGA digital backend is introduced using a 64-input analog-to-digital converter running at 50 Msamp/sec and the ROACH processing board developed at the University of California, Berkeley. International efforts to develop digital back ends for large antenna arrays are considered, and a road map is proposed for development of a hardware correlator/beamformer at BYU using three ROACH boards communicating over 10 gigabit Ethernet.

This thesis deals with the topic of assessing the design load-bearing capacity of a prestressed concrete railway bridge structure. The determination of the structure’s load-bearing capacity is carried out using probabilistic nonlinear analysis using the finite element method. Load-bearing capacity is determined for the recommended limit states. A fully probabilistic approach is compared to other reliability semi-probabilistic methods, such as the ECoV method according to Červenka and Eigen ECoV, and deterministic methods, like partial safety factor method, or the method according to ČSN EN 1992-2. The results are evaluated in terms of accuracy, consistency and time consumption for each method.