Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Transwerk is a business uint of Transnet. It was established in 1940. Since 1940 unti 1994, Transwerk operated as the engineering section of Spoornet and was known as South African Railways. Transwerk emancipated in 1994 and had plants in all nine provinces of South Africa. In the past, trains were hauled by steam locomatives, which were manually operated. With the improvement of technology, steam locomotives were replaced by diesel locomotives. The recent technology improvement brought about electric locomotives which are more reliable than diesel locomotives.Trnaswerk has a plant in the Eastern Cape Province which is situated in Uitenhage. This plant focuses on refurbishing wagins for Spoornet. This research is about improving the refurbishing processes of Transwerk Uitenhage.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-154). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

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The discovery of single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) gives an important boost to nanomaterial research. Since the nanotubes have exceptional mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties, they are considered very promising reinforcement materials for developing high performance nanocomposites. One of the effective methods for fabricating nanotube composites is to make nanotubes into buckypaper form (Nanotube Buckypaper). The nanotubes are pre-formed into buckypaper of well-dispersed tube network, so as to control tube dispersion and loading as well as microstructures in the resulting composites. In this research, we characterized the quality of buckypaper with different fabricating parameter combinations, and performed statistical analysis on the quality of the produced buckypapers. A statistical model of the nanotube buckypaper process was developed to investigate the contribution of fabricating parameters, including suspension concentration, sonication level and time, filtration vacuum pressure, and surfactant types on nanotube bundle quality as measured by rope size and pore size. Statistical modeling is also used to estimate the variability associated with manufacturing, the image taken, and the measurement processes. The statistical analysis shows that all the selected factors are influential to the quality of buckypaper, and the interactions between these factors contribute more than the factors themselves. Overall, the selection of surfactant is crucial to the formation of a uniform tube rope network of nanotube buckypaper in both average performance and variability. The microscopy characterization of the nanotube buckypaper samples, designed experiment, and variance components analysis all provide strong evidence that Triton X-100 is the best surfactant in terms of better dispersion effect, higher repeatability and less variability in producing nanotube buckypapers. Therefore, the process of fabricating buckypaper with Triton X-100 is suggested to construct a reliable and repeatable model of nanotube buckypaper process, and the model can be further used to optimize operating parameters and predict the quality of nanotube buckypapers. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Industrial Engineering in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2004. / Date of Defense: July 6, 2004. / Buckypaper, Design of Experiment, Nanotube / Includes bibliographical references. / Zhiyong Liang, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; James R. Simpson, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Ben Wang, Committee Member; Chuck Zhang, Committee Member.

Thesis advisor: James E. Anderson / This dissertation contains three chapters, each investigating different topics on wages, employment and trade, based on a common team-production approach with the fundamental assumption that in real economy production is organized in teams of agents, each specializing in different tasks. In the first chapter, I present a model that incorporates multidimensional skill endowment for each agent and team production where team members completely specialize in different tasks into the standard Heckscher-Ohlin framework, and investigates the effects of skill distributions on trade and wages. The equilibrium is characterized by the "effective endowment", the part of endowment that is actually utilized in production, which depends on the team matches and the task specialization within matched teams. The paper shows that: (1) the endowment correlation between skill dimensions for each agent and the skill dispersion across agents, additional to aggregate endowment, both matter for the patter of specialization; (2) the different endowment distributions also generate different wage inequality across countries; a common job polarization patter is generated in all developed economics in the globalization era; (3) there are new gains from trade, attributed to potential adjustments of the effective endowment after integration. It provides an unifying framework to explain both the trade patterns and labor market outcomes between similar countries. It also reveals a new channel through which institutions may have effects on comparative advantage and trade. In particular, the effects of different educational policies and labor market institutions on trade through shaping the skill distributions in each country are highlighted. Moreover, by linking globalization to the labor market, it provides an alternative explanation for some stylized facts on wage inequality and employment changes. In the second chapter, I propose a framework based on the team-production approach to deal with asymmetric information. Information asymmetry may cause market failure. With multiple dimensions of private information and proper market segmentation, this problem may be mitigated or even solved. In a labor market example, there are heterogeneous types of managers and workers. Production is performed by manager-worker pairs. There exist multiple industries with production functions that differ in their intensities of manager/worker tasks. When managers' type and workers' type are both private information, those good managers (workers) choose to locate in industries with higher manager (worker) intensities given the bargaining power between managers and workers. Due to the market segmentation by different industries, each manager (worker) faces a trade-off between a higher pay-off to her own type in a manager-intensive (worker-intensive) industry, and a better partner in a less manager-intensive (worker-intensive) industry. In equilibrium, heterogeneous managers (workers) are endogenously sorted by their types into different industries. Thus information asymmetry is mitigated in the segmented markets. Efficiency may be obtained even with information asymmetry. The third chapter introduces a team-production approach built on a two-sided search problem with task-specific human capital to investigate the specificity and return of human capital. With increasing worker mobility in the labor market, it is important to identify the boundary and return of human capital. Empirical evidences on the specificity of human capital are mixed. There are two categories of heterogeneous agents in the market searching for a partner of a different category in order to form a team and produce. A stable match is formed only when both sides agree. With search frictions, the search equilibrium is characterized by clusters of agents. This approach generates a form of firm-specificity of human capital, which explains the firm-sponsored general-skill training. An empirically found negative correlation between the wage levels and turnover rates also arises from the model. Additionally, this model provides a new micro-foundation for the social increasing returns in human capital accumulation. Several interesting empirical implications from this approach are also discussed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

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Entering the era of information, video has become a popular form of media to convey human’s emotions that appeal to the audiences. As cinema intertwines with different aspects of our daily life, it also provides a space for people to emphasize their ideologies and emotional feelings. Through different genres of films, the audiences are able to experience the stories that take place at a distant location on the world, and feel the extraordinary emotions that are unusual in the daily life. Despite the diversity of cultures within the worldwide cinema, the audiences are usually able to connect to the film’s sentiment even if the story adopts a different language and social setting. Such empathy will be enhanced in my capstone project as the participants directly expose their emotions of being touched, which will be edited with the audio materials triggering such sentiment, to connect to the audiences’ inner softness. As my capstone project, this 3-5 minute long experimental documentary will point out how human’s emotions can be interlinked even among strangers by calling forth the viewers’ empathy to the display of the interviewees’ emotions.

The focus of this thesis was to employ the use of two widely used types of photovoltaic (PV) modules namely monocrystalline and polycrystalline in a tracking system to determine which produces the greater output and compare these results to those reached by my predecessor, Michael O. Case[Case, 2003]. Several factors affect the overall productivity of a solar system. These include but are not limited to, time of day, time of year, latitude and atmospheric conditions, all of which were dealt with throughout this thesis. The thesis began with the design and assembly of a solar tracking system. This system was used to collect data using monocrystalline and polycrystalline modules in various configurations. The configurations were stationary zero degrees, stationary forty degrees and solar tracking at forty degrees. Once data was acquired, it was entered in to the statistical software "Design Expert V6.0". Statistical analysis was then performed to determine the effect the chosen factors had on the power output of the two types of modules in terms of which type provides greater output and in what configuration. It was determined that the monocrystalline module produces greater power output than its polycrystalline counterpart. A final experiment was set up to determine the mode that produces the greatest power output. The results from the experiment revealed that monocrystalline modules deliver greater power in a tracking configuration. However, it may be necessary to consider the effects of temperature depending on application of these modules. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Industrial Engineering in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: October 15, 2006. / Solar Tracking, Crystalline Photovoltaic, PV / Includes bibliographical references. / Yaw A. Owusu, Professor Directing Thesis; James Simpson, Committee Member; Carl A. Moore, Committee Member.

Good tool management and job operating strategies will result in reduction in tool inventory and associated costs. Very little empirical research has been conducted on a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) as a whole in relation to its performances with tool movement approach, specifically in a dynamic job shop in a tool shared environment. This study evaluated job loading rules and tool selection policies in a tool shared environment with regards to the job shop performance as a whole. This research also examined the relationship between job loading rules and tool selection policies when tool movement approach was employed. A process oriented manufacturing system simulation procedure was used as the theoretical framework for this research, which was pursued in two phases. The first phase was focused on the development of a generalized simulation model and identification of the bottleneck conditions and merits of different simple rules. The second phase, then, was emphasized on development of bi-criterion rules and determining the "best" strategies used for bottlenecks under different simulation models and operating conditions. This research concentrated on heuristic rules. The nature of the study was observational, in which computer simulation outputs were collected and analyzed by multifactor analysis of variance, Fisher's Least Significant Difference method, and non-parametric tests. Experimental designs were used for comparing job loading rules and tool selection policies, as well as shop operating conditions. Significant differences were found among job loading rules, tool duplication levels, and tool selection policies. Furthermore, significant interaction effects were also observed between some independent factors. Job loading rules play the most important role in the system performance, specially with more tool copies. Tool selection policies affect the percent tardy jobs with single tool copy. It is noticed that in the multiple-machine and multiple-tool situations higher machine utilization can be obtained at higher tool duplication levels. The analysis of results showed that different processing time distributions also effect system performance measures. / Graduation date: 1996