Thesis: B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of General Engineering, 1954 / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-95). / by Richard M. Sherwood. / B.S. / B.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of General Engineering

Since the very earliest days of the human race, people have been studying animal behaviours. In those early times, being able to predict animal behaviour gave hunters the advantages required for success. Then, as societies began to develop this gave way, to an extent, to agriculture and early studies, much of it trial and error, enabled farmers to successfully breed and raise livestock to feed an ever growing population. Following the advent of scientific endeavour, more rigorous academic research has taken human understanding of the natural world to much greater depth. In recent years, some of this understanding has been applied to the field of computing, creating the more specialised field of natural computing. In this arena, a considerable amount of research has been undertaken to exploit the analogy between, say, searching a given problem space for an optimal solution and the natural process of foraging for food. Such analogies have led to useful solutions in areas such as numerical optimisation and communication network management, prominent examples being ant colony systems and particle swarm optimisation; however, these solutions often rely on well-defined fitness landscapes that may not always be available. One practical application of natural computing may be to create behaviours for the control of autonomous vehicles that would utilise the findings of ethological research, identifying the natural world behaviours that have evolved over millennia to surmount many of the problems that autonomous vehicles find difficult; for example, long range underwater navigation or obstacle avoidance in fast moving environments. This thesis provides an exploratory investigation into the use of natural search strategies for improving the performance of autonomous vehicles operating in a search role. It begins with a survey of related work, including recent developments in autonomous vehicles and a ground breaking study of behaviours observed within the natural world that highlights general cooperative group behaviours, search strategies and communication methods that might be useful within a wider computing context beyond optimisation, where the information may be sparse but new paradigms could be developed that capitalise on research into biological systems that have developed over millennia within the natural world. Following this, using a 2-dimensional model, novel research is reported that explores whether autonomous vehicle search can be enhanced by applying natural search behaviours for a variety of search targets. Having identified useful search behaviours for detecting targets, it then considers scenarios where detection is lost and whether natural strategies for re-detection can improve overall systemic performance in search applications. Analysis of empirical results indicate that search strategies exploiting behaviours found in nature can improve performance over random search and commonly applied systematic searches, such as grids and spirals, across a variety of relative target speeds, from static targets to twice the speed of the searching vehicles, and against various target movement types such as deterministic movement, random walks and other nature inspired movement. It was found that strategies were most successful under similar target-vehicle relationships as were identified in nature. Experiments with target occlusion also reveal that natural reacquisition strategies could improve the probability oftarget redetection.

Surface defects such as ring cracks are located on silicon nitride ceramic rolling elements.The random nature of ring crack position creates difficulties in predicting rolling contact fatigue (RCF) life. The influence of the lubricant, contact pressure and crack geometry on the RCF mechanism is difficult to determine due to the variable nature of RCF life when the crack location is not defined. In this study, rolling contact fatigue was tested using a novel experimental technique. The test ceramic ball specimen with identified surface ring cracks was precisely located in the contact path. The rolling contact fatigue tests were conducted using a modified four-ball machine in a hybrid ceramic/steel combination with five different types of lubricating mediums at various contact pressures. Detailed analysis of damage progression was carried out to study the mechanisms of fatigue failure. A boundary element analysis was used to determine the stress intensity factors around the crack front and stress distributions on the surface in the presence of the surface crack. The RCF tests of silicon nitride balls with surface ring cracks showed that fatigue life was strongly influenced by load/contact stress, crack size,lubricant and material type. Ring crack spalling failure is not only influenced by sub-surface fatigue crack propagation but also strongly influenced by secondary surface cracks. The formation of the secondary surface cracks is a key factor which dominates spalling of rolling contact fatigue. Modelling work showed that the crack length was an important parameter.Increasing the crack length for given crack radius resulted in higher tensile surface stresses ahead of the original ring crack and also gave higher absolute K11 values. In addition, the crack gap and crack face friction had a significant effect on the formation of secondary surface cracks and fatigue crack propagation behaviour. Increasing the crack face friction decreased both the surface tensile stress and absolute magnitude of K11. Numerical calculation results were consistent with the experimental observations.

Silicon Nitride has traditionally been used as rolling contact bearing material owing to its superior performance compared to bearing steels. Its successful application as a bearing element has led to the development of Silicon Nitride in other rolling contact applications in the automotive industry and the power industry. However, a major limitation of its wider application is its high material and machining cost, especially the cost associated with the finishing process. In the present study, a low cost sintered and reaction-bonded Silicon Nitride is used to study the surface machining effects on its rolling contact fatigue performance. Studies have been carried out to link the surface strengths of Silicon Nitride derived from half-rod and C-Sphere flexure strength specimens to the rolling contact lives of Silicon Nitride rod and ball specimens. The rolling contact fatigue tests were carried out on ball-on-rod and modified four-ball machines. Three types of surface with coarse, fine and RCF-conventional finishing conditions were examined. Flexure strength tests on half-rod and C-Sphere showed an increasing surface strength from specimens with coarse, fine to RCF-conventionally machined conditions. During rolling contact fatigue tests of as-machined specimens, no failures were observed on either ball-on-rod or four-ball tests after 100 million stress cycles. However, a trend of decreasing wear volumes was measured on the contact path of rods and balls with coarse, fine and RCF-conventional conditions. In four-ball tests, spall failures were observed on pre-cracked specimens. There was a trend of increasing rolling contact fatigue lifetime from pre-cracked specimens with coarse, fine to RCF-conventional machining conditions. The study of Silicon Nitride machining was also carried out using an eccentric lapping machine to investigate the effect of eccentricity on the finishing rate of hot isostatically-pressed and sintered and reaction-bonded Silicon Nitride. The eccentricity had no significant impact on finishing rate as concluded in this study. The effect of lubricant viscosity and chemistry on the rolling contact fatigue performance of Silicon Nitride was also studied. The result is inconclusive.

With the advent of modem high-speed passenger ferries and the general increase in maritime traffic, both commercial and recreational, marine safety is becoming an increasingly important issue. From lightweight catamarans and fishing trawlers to container ships and cruise liners one question remains the same. Is anything in the way? This question is addressed in this thesis. Through the use of image processing techniques applied to video sequences of maritime scenes the images are segmented into two regions, sea and object. This is achieved using statistical measures taken from the histogram data of the images. Each segmented object has a feature vector built containing information including its size and previous centroid positions. The feature vectors are used to track the identified objects across many frames. With information recorded about an object's previous motion its future motion is predicted using a least squares method. Finally a high-level rule-based algorithm is applied in order to estimate the collision risk posed by each object present in the image. The result is an image with the objects identified by the placing of a white box around them. The predicted motion is shown and the estimated collision risk posed by that object is displayed. The algorithms developed in this work have been evaluated using two previously unseen maritime image sequences. These show that the algorithms developed here can be used to estimate the collision risk posed by maritime objects.

The central theme of the work undertaken in this thesis involved modelling of diffusion – numerical and microstructural – occurring during high temperature exposure of selected materials and coatings. The materials and coatings and their high temperature treatments included carburization of steel (nonsteady-state diffusion of iron carburized at 950o C after 7.1 hours), a two component Cu-Ni diffusion couple subjected to diffusion anneal at 1054oC for 300 hours, a three component Pt-Ni-Al solid alloy subjected to oxidation and diffusion anneal, Multicomponent Ni -aluminide and Pt-aluminide coatings on MAR M002 subjected to 150 hours of diffusion treatment at temperature 1273K, a Jr and Jr/Pt Low-activity aluminide / MAR M002 system at 1100oC after 100 hours, aluminise coating on low alloy steels at 650oC, Jnnovatial coatings- Ti45Al8Nb coated with Al2Au subjected to air oxidation at 750oC for 1000 hours, and Ti45Al8Nb coated with TiAlCrY subjected to air oxidation at 750oC for 500 hours. Such coatings are being increasingly used to protect materials against high temperature (600-1000oC) degradation by oxidation. The demands for using such coatings have arisen because of the need to increase the efficiency by increasing the operation temperature in many areas of technological applications such as power operation, aero engines, and energy conversion systems and in processing industries. However the one of the major obstacles to use these coatings to prevent high temperature oxidation of materials is the degradation of the coatings due to the coating/substrate interdiffusion. Jnterdiffusion of critical elements from the coating to the substrate will deplete the protective scale forming elements in the coating.

A monitoring of presence, location and activity of various objects on the sea is essential for maritime navigation and collision avoidance. Mariners normally rely on two complementary methods of the monitoring: radar and satellite-based aids and human observation. Though radar aids are relatively accurate at long distances, their capability of detecting small, unmanned or non-metallic craft that generally do not reflect radar waves sufficiently enough, is limited. The mariners, therefore, rely in such cases on visual observations. The visual observation is often facilitated by using cameras overlooking the sea that can also provide intensified infra-red images. These systems or nevertheless merely enhance the image and the burden of the tedious and error-prone monitoring task still rests with the operator. This thesis addresses the drawbacks of both methods by presenting a framework consisting of a set of machine vision algorithms that facilitate the monitoring tasks in maritime environment. The framework detects and tracks objects in a sequence of images captured by a camera mounted either on a board of a vessel or on a static platform over-looking the sea. The detection of objects is independent of their appearance and conditions such as weather and time of the day. The output of the framework consists of locations and motions of all detected objects with respect to a fixed point in the scene. All values are estimated in real-world units, i. e. location is expressed in metres and velocity in knots. The consistency of the estimates is maintained by compensating for spurious effects such as vibration of the camera. In addition, the framework continuously checks for predefined events such as collision threats or area intrusions, raising an alarm when any such event occurs. The development and evaluation of the framework is based on sequences captured under conditions corresponding to a designated application. The independence of the detection and tracking on the appearance of the sceneand objects is confirmed by a final cross-validation of the framework on previously unused sequences. Potential applications of the framework in various areas of maritime environment including navigation, security, surveillance and others are outlined. Limitations to the presented framework are identified and possible solutions suggested. The thesis concludes with suggestions to further directions of the research presented.

This research work investigates heat transfer through the contact line between a glass mould and plunger in a press forming process. Models are formed and compared with experimental measurements to enable clarification of the glass properties that should be used in the optimisation process and have been suggested in previous research works. Two case of heat transfer are considered in the models firstly the case of both conductive and radiative are present and then the case of radiative (reheat). The models developed during the study are based on one-dimensional heat transfer. The model is based on the period of the formation process starting from the point at which the molten glass is brought into contact with a mould until the time at which the formed glass is inverted. The models are concerned with the changes in temperature profile during this period at both the centre and the surface of the glass depending on the mode of heat transfer considered, the properties of the glass, and the properties of the tooling. The properties of the glass considered in the models include the absorption coefficient, refractive index, heat transfer coefficient, internal and external emissivity, specific heat and conductivity. In the radiation case the modelling results show the internal emissivity has a little effect on the surface temperature while the external emissivity has an effect temperature fall. Modelling of changes in glass thickness and glass absorption coefficient during the reheat stage of the process has been carried out based on white and green glass. Validation of these models has been accomplished by performing experimental work.

The work reported in this thesis details the original research undertaken by the author into the cutting mechanics of wood-working handsaw tooth geometries. The research can be separated into three distinctive sections. The first section is a review of both fundamental and recent literature regarding wood characteristics and machining processes. The second section documents the findings of a cutting process in which a variety of work-piece parameters were evaluated whilst limiting the parameters associated with tooth geometry. The third and final section documents the findings of a cutting process in which a variety of tooth geometry parameters were evaluated whilst limiting work-piece variation. Two separate experimental procedures were developed to carry out the work for sections two and three respectively: The first of these procedures utilised a CNC router machine to perform the controlled cutting action. A single “rip” tooth was attached to the tool holder. The workpiece was constrained to a tri-axis dynamometer which was used to measure the resultant tool forces in the relative X, Y and Z axes. At the same time a universal testing machine was employed to perform mechanical test procedures on a variety of wood species. A predictive cutting force model was developed using the obtained mechanical properties as categorical predictors. The second procedure utilised a shaper machine to perform the controlled cutting action. Three different saw tooth geometries were evaluated for only one variety of wood species. A tri-axis dynamometer was again used to measure the resultant tool forces. The geometric parameters of each tooth were carefully evaluated at using SEM micrographs. A predictive cutting force model using the geometric parameters as categorical predictors was developed. Chip and surface formation was carefully evaluated. For procedure one this involved observation of the chip/surfaces under an optical microscope. For procedure two this involved capturing footage of the cutting process using a high speed camera. The findings of the research show that un-bevelled teeth with orthogonal edges generally yield high cutting forces. However, these teeth are very effective at removing material along the wood grain in a “chisel like” cutting action. Bevelled teeth with sharp lateral edges generally yield low cutting forces. These teeth are well suited to severing the wood fibres perpendicular to the grain in a “knife like” cutting action.

As a result of the significant growth of wind turbines in size, blade load control has become the main challenge for large wind turbines. Many advanced techniques have been investigated aiming at developing control devices to ease blade loading. Individual pitch control system, adaptive blades, trailing edge microtabs, morphing aerofoils, ailerons, trailing edge flaps, and telescopic blades are among these techniques. Most of the above advanced technologies are currently implemented in, or are under investigation to be utilised, for blade load alleviation. The present study aims at investigating the potential benefits of these advanced techniques in enhancing the energy capture capabilities rather than blade load alleviation. To achieve this goal the research is carried out in three directions: (i) development of a simulation software tool suitable for wind turbines utilising nonconventional control systems, (ii) development of a blade design optimisation tool capable of optimising the topology of blades equipped with nonconventional control systems, and (iii) carrying out design optimisation case studies with the objective of power extraction enhancement towards investigating the feasibility of advanced technologies, initially developed for load alleviation of large blades, for power extraction enhancement. Three nonconventional control systems, namely, microtab, trailing edge flap and telescopic blades are investigated. A software tool, AWTSim, is especially developed for aerodynamic simulation of wind turbines utilising blades equipped with microtabs and trailing edge flap as well as telescopic blades. As part of the aerodynamic simulation of these wind turbines, the control system must be also simulated. The simulation of the control system is carried out via solving an optimisation problem which gives the best value for the controlling parameter at each wind turbine run condition. Developing a genetic algorithm optimisation tool which is especially designed for wind turbine blades and integrating it with AWTSim, a design optimisation tool for blades equipped with nonconventional control system is constructed. The design optimisation tool, AWTSimD, is employed to carry out design case studies. The results of design case studies reveal that for constant speed rotors, optimised telescopic blades are more effective than flaps and microtabs in power enhancement. However, in comparison with flap and microtabs, telescopic blades have two disadvantages: (i) complexity in telescopic mechanism and the added weight and (ii) increased blade loading. It is also shown that flaps are more efficient than microtabs, and that the location and the size of flaps are key parameters in design. It is also shown that optimisation of the blade pretwist has a significant influence on the energy extraction enhancement. That is, to gain the maximum benefit of installing flaps and microtabs on blades, the baseline blades must be redesigned.