M.Ing. / This study considers improving the azimuth beam steering resolution of the circular Switched Parasitic Array (SPA) antennas (made up of dipoles) by a factor of two or more. In circular SPA antennas, beam steering is conventionally achieved by open-circuiting and shortcircuiting different parasitic elements and usually only one parasitic element is open-circuited at a time. However, such an approach results in low beam steering resolutions especially for the SPA antennas with few parasitic elements. In order to increase the azimuth beam steering resolution for the circular SPA antennas, two beam steering methods are proposed in this research work. In the first method, parasitic elements are open-circuited and short-circuited based on different combinations of the parasitic elements and the possible switch states. The proposed method was first validated by simulation tests using the MATLAB tool and WIPL-D. A prototype of the circular SPA antenna consisting of five elements was then implemented. It is noted that the simulation and measurement results match very well at 2.4 GHz. In order to have at least two combinations (from the first method) with almost similar gain and return loss, another simpler beam steering method was developed. The latter method is based on simultaneously open-circuiting either two or three neighbouring parasitic elements. The performance of the second method was studied through simulations using the circular SPA antenna geometries consisting of five, seven and nine elements. These geometries were first optimized (for gain and input impedance) and then modelled using WIPL-D. It was observed that the two methods double the azimuth beam steering resolution of the circular SPA antennas when compared to the conventional beam steering approaches of open-circuiting one parasitic element at a time. Variations in the structural parameters of the five elements circular SPA antenna at 2.4GHz were also investigated. In this procedure, the effects of variations (also considered as random errors) in the structural parameters (or antenna dimensions) on the performance of the SPA antennas were examined. Firstly, variations in each structural parameter were modelled with other structural parameters fixed as per specifications. Thereafter, effects of combined errors were also investigated. The simulation results demonstrated that variations in the structural parameter can either increase or decrease the gain and input impedance of the SPA antenna depending on the given specifications. The gain and input impedance sensitivities per variations in each structural parameter were computed to determine the degree at which the gain and input impedance can vary for a predefined change (error) in the structural parameter.

Connections in wood have been investigated and advanced ever since the ground-breaking work of Johansen in the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, not much investigation has been undertaken on the existence of load-displacement path dependency in a sheathing-to-framing connection. Herein, a sheathing-to-framing connection is investigated in relation to displacement path dependency. This work uses 3D Finite Element beam-on-foundation models of an Oriented Strand Board (OSB/2) sheathing nailed to a C24 wood framing, to study possible strategies to numerically simulate the displacement path dependency. The models are used to study if non-linear elastic or elastic-plastic embedment properties of an annular-ringed shank nail in the wood-based materials bring about the path dependency using Connector elements in combination with different material models in the FE software Abaqus. Numerical results are compared with corresponding experimental test results of the connection together with the Eurocode 5 approach. The outcome of the numerical study both; confirms the existence of displacement path dependency and shows that this property in the connection can be described by plasticity properties in nail, sheathing material and the wood framing.

Magister Scientiae - MSc / Nowadays, the availability of radiographic modalities from conventional radiography to more advanced approaches such as medical computed tomography as well as cone beam computed tomography have been useful in providing insights of relevant anatomy prior to surgical procedures. The increased popularity of cone beam computed tomography has prompted interest in the utility of this approach for diagnostic application in dentistry, including the assessment of the proximity of impacted mandibular third molars to the inferior alveolar canal. It is important to understand the reliability of conventional panoramic radiograph in the assessment of this criterion since it is more commonly used as first line radiographic approach due to its availability and lower radiation dose. This study is aimed to investigate the reliability of conventional panoramic radiograph in the evaluation of the proximity of impacted mandibular third molar root tip to the inferior alveolar canal by correlating the results with cone beam computed tomography. A retrospective study of forty nine patients who underwent panoramic radiography as well as cone beam computed tomography for examination of impacted mandibular third molars was conducted. Two observers were participated in all image evaluation. In this study, both observers recorded statistically significant differences in the measurement of the apices of vertically impacted third molars and the inferior alveolar canal from panoramic radiographs and cone beam computed tomography images. The low reliability of panoramic radiograph to assess the vertical proximity between these two anatomical structures suggests the importance of additional assessment with cone beam computed tomography in cases where panoramic radiograph shows superimposition of the third molar root on the roof of the canal, presence of root below the roof of the canal and presence of bone height of less than one millimetre separating the third molar from the inferior alveolar canal.

Wakefields and the corresponding frequency-domain phenomenon beam coupling impedance have been well studied for a number of years as a source of beam instabilities within particle accelerators. With the development of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the large beam currents stored in the LHC during fills for physics production, wakefield driven instabilities and strong beam induced heating have become a limiting factors in luminosity production due to both instantaneous luminousity and the available time for collisions.In this thesis is presented an in depth study of the beam coupling impedance of two important (from an impedance and operational point of view) devices in the LHC; the collimation system and the injection kicker magnets (MKIs). These systems have both been sources of concern for the beam impedance of the LHC, the collimators due to their large transverse impedance and the MKIs due to the strong heating observed during the increased of beam current during operation in 2011 and 2012. The source of the heating for the MKIs is studied in depth, found to be power lost by the beam to wakefields in the MKIs. Simulations and measurements are used to characterise the impedance and localise the areas responsible for the high impedance, here the beam screen and ferrite yoke of the magnet; improvements are proposed to better screen the ferrite yoke and verified. A new RF damping system using ferrite for the collimation system is studied and compared to the existing RF damping system, focusing on the heating of the damping system. Highlights include a new method for measuring the quadrupolar and constant transverse impedances of an asymmetric structure using a coaxial wire technique is proposed and verified using computational simulations, and a study of the heat loss in a ferrite damped cavity, focusing on the location of the power loss for cavities being damped to varying degrees.

De nombreuses applications civiles et militaires (faisceaux hertziens, futurs réseaux mobiles, communications par satellite, radars automobiles, systèmes d’imagerie haute résolution) nécessitent des antennes à faisceau reconfigurable (dépointage de faisceau, faisceaux multiples, faisceaux formés). Les antennes à réseaux transmetteurs apparaissent comme une alternative aux réseaux phasés classiques ou aux réseaux réflecteurs pour ces applications. L’objectif principal de cette thèse est de démontrer la faisabilité de réseaux reconfigurables fabriqués avec des technologies standards en bande Ka (20-30 GHz). Divers cellules élémentaires utilisant des diodes p-i-n et fonctionnant en polarisation linéaire ou circulaire ont été conçues, optimisées et caractérisées. Les mesures en guide d’onde montrent des pertes minimales de 1,09 dB à 29,0 GHz et une bande passante à 3 dB de 14,7%. Une méthode de simulation hybride a été développée afin d’analyser efficacement des réseaux de grandes dimensions utilisant des rotations séquentielles d’éléments pour optimiser la qualité de polarisation et les diagrammes de rayonnement. Un réseau de 400 cellules élémentaires fonctionnant en polarisation circulaire a été réalisé et testé en chambre anéchoïque. Un dépointage électronique de ±60° et la possibilité de commuter entre les deux polarisations circulaires (droite/gauche) ont été démontrés. / Several civil and military applications (hertzian beams, satellite communications, automotive radars, high resolution imaging systems) require antennas with reconfigurable beam capabilities (beam-scanning, beamshaping, multiple beam generation). Transmitarray antennas are good candidates and represent an alternative to classical phased arrays or reflect-arrays for these applications. The main objective of this thesis is to demonstrate the feasibility of reconfigurable transmitarrays fabricated with standard technologies in Ka-band (20-30 GHz). Different unit-cell designs based on p-i-n diodes have been developed to work in linear and circular polarization. Their optimization and experimental characterization have been performed. Waveguide measurements show insertion losses of 1.09 dB at 29.0 GHz with a 3-dB bandwidth of 14.7%. A hybrid simulation technique has been developed in order to analyze efficiently large transmitarrays in which the sequential rotation technique has been applied to optimize the polarization quality and the radiation patterns. A 400-elements transmitarray operating in circular polarization has been realized and tested in anechoic chamber. A beam-scanning angular coverage of ±60° and circular polarization selection (left/right) have been demonstrated.

The development of charged particle accelerators is today reaching far beyond the realm of fundamental particle physics research. Many non-trivial social and political problems may find part of their solution lies in accelerator physics. For example, with fossil fuels becoming ever more controversial and expensive to obtain, the use of Accelerator Driven Sub-critical Reactors (ADSR) powered by rapid cycling, high current proton accelerators and thorium fuel could become part of the energy solution. Through the simplicity of the Bragg peak, cancer therapy could be enhanced through the use of high repetition rate, variable energy proton accelerators small enough to use in treatment centres. The growing problem of long lived nuclear waste storage could become a moot point through the use of high current, high power proton accelerators coupled with neutron spallation. These rapidly growing areas of study are fuelled by the development of the Fixed-Field Alternating-Gradient (FFAG) accelerator, and more recently the non-scaling FFAG. The FFAG has the ability to accelerate high current, low quality bunches of particles in very short time scales due to the fixed-field nature of its magnets. This rapid acceleration can be of the order 500 nanoseconds to 1 microsecond meaning a fast cycling rate of the machine is possible. This allows the realistic development of the ADSR, proton therapy machine and even the muon accelerator. The Electron Model with Many Applications (EMMA) accelerator is the world's first linear non-scaling FFAG and is an electron proof-of-principle accelerator based at Daresbury Laboratory, UK. EMMA can accelerate over its energy range of 10 - 20 MeV in approximately 5 - 10 machine revolutions (~275 - 500 nanoseconds) using fixed-frequency novel acceleration techniques. The accelerator contains fixed-field, constant gradient quadrupole magnets which provide all the bending and focussing to the particles. Due to the linear non-scaling nature of EMMA, many transverse integer tune values are crossed which typically cause resonant effects resulting in bunch degradation and loss. It was proposed and demonstrated that rapid crossing (in 5 - 10 turns) of integer tune values in EMMA did not result in transverse amplitude growth and particle loss. If the wider societal goals of the non-scaling FFAG are to be realised, protons and other heavy ions must be accelerated. Current technological limitations dictate that longer acceleration times of the order 1000's of turns would be necessary in proton machines of similar design to EMMA. Hence slower integer tune crossing was studied using acceleration in a synchrotron bucket in EMMA. It was found experimentally that below the nominal EMMA operating acceleration rate of 2.0 MV per turn, instabilities begin to manifest. This was indicated in the growth of closed orbit distortion (COD) and through simulation it was found that betatron amplitude growth coupled with COD resulted in eventual loss of particles to the physical aperture when crossing integer tunes. Through simulation, the amplitude growth of particles crossing integer tunes in the EMMA non-scaling FFAG was found to agree with a theory of resonance crossing proposed by R. Baartman. This theory shows that amplitude growth is proportional to $1/\sqrt(Q')$ where $Q'$ is the tune crossing rate of the particles. This means that the slower the acceleration, the slower an integer tune is crossed and hence more amplitude is gained. It was also shown that strength of the magnetic errors driving the resonant conditions was proportional to the amplitude growth.

Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) has become increasingly popular in dentistry. It is usually associated with radiation doses that are lower than those seen with conventional computed tomography (CT) but greater than those seen with dental radiography. Because exposure to ionising radiation is associated with risks, the radiation protection principles of justification and optimisation should be applied. These are especially important in children and young people due to their greater risk of developing stochastic effects. Justification requires a balancing of the radiation risk with the potential benefits and the latter is dependent on diagnostic efficacy. There has been a proliferation of articles published on dental CBCT and there is a need to review this systematically so that diagnostic efficacy can be judged. In terms of optimisation, radiation dose reduction can be achieved in various ways, but the use of barrier materials to protect younger patients in CBCT has not been adequately tested. Reduction in exposure parameters in CBCT will lower doses but at the expense of a loss of image quality. While some efforts have been made to relate radiation exposure and image quality in CBCT, there is a need to develop low-dose CBCT protocols specifically for children and young people. The first aim of this thesis was to survey current uses of CBCT in children and young people in three United Kingdom dental hospitals. The second aim was to determine the efficacy of thyroid shielding in a child phantom testing several different designs, materials and thickness of thyroid shields. The third aim was to evaluate the evidence on diagnostic efficacy of dental CBCT for root fractures in permanent, non-endodontically treated, anterior teeth by conducting a systematic review. The fourth aim was to evaluate objective and subjective image quality in a laboratory study to determine a low-dose CBCT protocol which maintains adequate diagnostic image quality for a clinical indication in children. Finally, the aim was to evaluate this low-dose protocol in terms of image quality in real clinical situations. A high adherence to the European guidelines No 172 on radiation protection in dental CBCT was found amongst the surveyed hospitals. Thyroid shielding was found to be effective in dose reduction when performing a large field of view CBCT scan in a child phantom, but design influenced efficacy. The systematic review showed that research articles investigating CBCT diagnostic accuracy for vertical and horizontal root fractures had deficiencies in methodology, while only one study was identified addressing higher levels of diagnostic efficacy. A low-dose imaging protocol was identified in a laboratory study, which has been shown to be an effective tool in dose reduction providing an adequate diagnostic image quality and reducing radiation doses considerably for clinical indications in the anterior maxilla in children and young people.

No description available.

The GlueX experiment aims to study meson photoproduction while utilizing the coherent bremsstrahlung technique to produce a 9 GeV linearly polarized photon beam incident on a liquid $\mathrm{H_{2}}$ target. A Start Counter detector was fabricated to properly identify the accelerator electron beam buckets and to provide accurate timing information. The Start Counter detector was designed to operate at photon intensities of up to $\mathrm{10^{8}\gamma/s}$ in the coherent peak and provides a timing resolution $\mathrm{\sim 300\ ps}$ so as to provide successful identification of the electron beam buckets to within 99\% accuracy. Furthermore, the Start Counter detector provides excellent solid angle coverage, $\sim 90 \%\ \mathrm{of}\ 4 \pi\ \mathrm{hermeticity}$, and a high degree of segmentation for background rejection. It consists of a cylindrical array of 30 scintillators with pointed ends that bend towards the beam at the downstream end. Magnetic field insensitive silicon photomultiplier detectors were selected as the readout system. An initial measurement of the beam asymmetry $\Sigma$ in the exclusive reaction $\vec{\gamma}p \rightarrow \pi^{0}p$, where $\pi^{0} \rightarrow \gamma \gamma$ has been carried out utilizing the GlueX spectrometer during the Spring 2015 commissioning run. The tagged photon energies ranged from $2.5 \leq E_{\gamma} \leq 3.0\ \mathrm{GeV}$ in the coherent peak. These measurements were then compared to the world data set and show remarkable agreement with only two hours of physics production running.

Radiotherapy delivered using scanned beams of protons enables greater conformity between the dose distribution and the tumour than conventional radiotherapy using X rays. However, the dose distributions are more sensitive to changes in patient anatomy, and tend to deteriorate in the presence of motion. Online dose calculation during treatment delivery offers a way of monitoring the delivered dose in real time, and could be used as a basis for mitigating the effects of motion. The aim of this work has therefore been to investigate how the computational power offered by graphics processing units can be harnessed to enable fast analytical dose calculation for online monitoring in proton therapy. The first part of the work consisted of a systematic investigation of various approaches to implementing the most computationally expensive step of the pencil beam algorithm to run on graphics processing units. As a result, it was demonstrated how the kernel superposition operation, or convolution with a spatially varying kernel, can be efficiently implemented using a novel scatter-based approach. For the intended application, this outperformed the conventional gather-based approach suggested in the literature, permitting faster pencil beam dose calculation and potential speedups of related algorithms in other fields. In the second part, a parallelised proton therapy dose calculation engine employing the scatter-based kernel superposition implementation was developed. Such a dose calculation engine, running all of the principal steps of the pencil beam algorithm on a graphics processing unit, had not previously been presented in the literature. The accuracy of the calculation in the high- and medium-dose regions matched that of a clinical treatment planning system whilst the calculation was an order of magnitude faster than previously reported. Importantly, the calculation times were short, both compared to the dead time available during treatment delivery and to the typical motion period, making the implementation suitable for online calculation. In the final part, the beam model of the dose calculation engine was extended to account for the low-dose halo caused by particles travelling at large angles with the beam, making the algorithm comparable to those in current clinical use. By reusing the workflow of the initial calculation but employing a lower resolution for the halo calculation, it was demonstrated how the improved beam model could be included without prohibitively prolonging the calculation time. Since the implementation was based on a widely used algorithm, it was further predicted that by careful tuning, the dose calculation engine would be able to reproduce the dose from a general beamline with sufficient accuracy. Based on the presented results, it was concluded that, by using a single graphics processing unit, dose calculation using the pencil beam algorithm could be made sufficiently fast for online dose monitoring, whilst maintaining the accuracy of current clinical systems.