This document addresses problems encountered when establishing the very low air-flow speeds required for experimental investigations of the mechanisms of low-Reynolds-number boundary-layer turbulence. Small-scale motions in the near-wall region are important features of turbulent boundary-layer dynamics, and, if these features are to be resolved by measurements in air with conventionally-sized hot-wire probes, a well-behaved canonical turbulent boundary layer must be developed at free stream flow speeds no higher than 4 m/s. However, at such low speeds, the turbulent boundary layers developed on the walls of a wind tunnel are very susceptible to perturbation by non-turbulent time-dependent flow structures which originate upstream from the test section in the laminar flow at the inlet and in the contraction. Four different non-turbulent flow structures have been identified. The first is a result of quasi-two-dimensional separation of the laminar boundary-layer from the surfaces of the wind-tunnel contraction. Potential flow simulations show that susceptibility to this form of separation is reduced by increasing the degree of axisymmetry in the cross-section geometry and by decreasing the streamwise curvature of the concave surfaces. The second source of time-dependence in the laminar boundary-layer flow is an array of weak streamwise vortices produced by Goertler instability. The Goertler vortices can be removed by boundary-layer suction at the contraction exit. The third form of flow perturbation, revealed by visualisation experiments with streamers, is a weak large-scale forced-vortex swirl produced by random spatial fluctuations of temperature at the wind-tunnel inlet. This can be prevented by thorough mixing of the inlet flow; for example, a centrifugal blower installed at the inlet reduces the amplitude of temperature nonuniformity by a factor of about forty and so prevents buoyancy-driven swirl. When subjected to weak pressure gradients near the start of a wind-tunnel contraction, Goertler vortices in laminar wall layers can develop into three-dimensional separations with strong counter-rotating trailing vortices. These trailing vortices are the fourth source of unsteady flow in the test-section. They can be suppressed by a series of appropriately located screens which remove the low-speed-streak precursors of the three-dimensional separations. Elimination of the above four contaminating secondary flows permits the development of a steady uniform downstream flow and well-behaved turbulent wall layers. Measurements of velocity in the turbulent boundary layer of the test-section have been obtained by hot-wire anemometry. When a hot-wire probe is located within the viscous sublayer, heat transfer from the hot-wire filament to the wall produces significant errors in the measurements of both the mean and the fluctuating velocity components. This error is known as wall-proximity effect and two successful methods are developed for removing it from the hot-wire signal. The first method is based on the observation that, if all experimental parameters except flow speed and distance from the wall are fixed, the velocity error may be expressed nondimensionally as a function of only one parameter, in the form DeltaU^+=f(y^+). The second method, which also accommodates the effect of changing the hot-wire overheat ratio, is based on a dimensional analyis of heat transfer to the wall. Velocity measurements in the turbulent boundary layer at the mid-plane of a nearly square test-section duct have established that, when the boundary-layer thickness is less than one quarter of the duct height, mean-velocity characteristics are indistinguishable from those of a two-dimensional flat-plate boundary layer. In thicker mid-plane boundary layers, the mean-velocity characteristics are affected by stress-induced secondary flow and by lateral constriction of the boundary-layer wake region. A significant difference between flat-plate and duct boundary layers is also observed in momentum-balance calculations. The momentum-integral equation for a duct requires definitions of momentumd and displacement thickness which are different from those given for flat-plate boundary layers. Momentum-thickness growth rates predicted by the momentum-integral equation for a duct agree closely with measurements of the newly defined duct momentum thickness. Such agreement cannot be obtained in terms of standard flat-plate momentum thickness. In duct boundary layers with Reynolds numbers Re_theta between 400 and 2600, similarity in the wake-region distributions of streamwise turbulence statistics has been obtained by normalising distance from the wall with the flat-plate momentum thickness, theta_2. This result indicates that, in contrast with the mean velocity characteristics, the structure of mid-plane turbulence does not depend on the proportion of duct cross-section occupied by boundary layers and is essentially the same as in a flat-plate boundary layer. For Reynolds numbers less than 400, both wall-region and wake-region similarity fail because near-wall turbulence events interact strongly with the free stream flow and because large scale turbulence motions are directly influenced by the wall. In these conditions, which exist in both duct and flat-plate turbulent boundary layers, there is no distinct near-wall or wake region, and the behaviour of turbulence throughout the boundary layer depends on both wall variables and on outer region variables simultaneously. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Mechanical Engineering, 1998.

This thesis describes the possibilities of wearable antennas and the basic properties description. Numeric model for ISM 2,4 GHz band is created by CST Microwave Studio®. The thesis also deals with the human body proximity effect by two models of human tissue. The effect of flexibility to antenna parameters is evaluated. Several samples of the antenna has been created and measured. Obtained results has been compared with numeric model and with the literature.

Les systèmes hybrides supraconducteur-ferromagnétique présentent souvent de nouveaux phénomènes physiques, et pourraient également être utiles pour concevoir de nouvelles mémoires non-volatiles et haute densité pour les circuits supraconducteurs. Cette thèse étudie deux types différents d'hybrides SF, chacun suivant une approche possible de dispositif mémoire, en se focalisant sur les aspects fondamentaux. L'un porte sur l'effet de proximité dans des hétérostructures d'oxydes. Dans celles-ci, des corrélations triplet apparaissent, qui sont à la fois supraconductrices et polarisées en spin. Elles permettraient d'utiliser des effets de la spintronique comme la GMR, mais sont également très sensibles aux propriétés d'interface. Nous les avons étudiées dans des tricouches SFS d'oxydes, par des mesures de conductance. Celles-ci montrent des oscillations, en partie liées à ces états triplets. Nous observons également que les effets d'interface affectent les propriétés électroniques du ferromagnetique, en particulier lorsque cette couche est mince. Un autre genre d'interaction se produit par les champs de fuite provenant des structures de domaines. Des propositions théoriques récentes ont suggéré que de petites structures en tourbillon appelées skyrmion peuvent interagir avec la supraconductivité par ce mécanisme. Nous avons étudié ce couplage dans des bicouches, dans lesquelles les propriétés de transport sont dominées par la dynamique des vortex supraconducteurs. Nous avons vu une augmentation du courant critique en présence de skyrmions comme de domaines. Celles-ci créent également un effet Hall inhabituel dans l'état supraconducteur. La plupart de ces propriétés peuvent être expliquées qualitativement par la dynamique et le mouvement guidé des vortex. / Superconductor-ferromagnet hybrid systems often bring about new physics and may as well be useful to design new non-volatile, high-density memory devices for superconducting electronics.In this thesis, we study two different types of SF hybrids, each following a possible approach to memory devices, but focusing on fundamental aspects. One is about the proximity effect in oxide heterostructures. In these, triplet correlations appear, that are both superconducting and spin-polarized. These enable using effects from spintronics like GMR, but are also very dependent on interface properties. We investigated these in SFS oxide trilayers by conductance measurements. These showed oscillations which may, in part, be related to these triplet states. We also observed that interface effects affect the electronic properties of the ferromagnet, especially when that layer is thin. Another type of interaction occurs through stray magnetic fields from the domain structures. Recent theoretical proposals suggested that small swirling spin textures called skyrmions could similarly interact with superconductivity through this mechanism. We investigated such coupling in bilayers, in which the superconducting vortex dynamics dominate the transport properties. We found that the presence of skyrmions and domains alike enhances the critical current. It also leads to an unusual Hall effect in the superconducting state. Most of these properties can be explained qualitatively in terms of vortex pinning and guided motion.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Significant stray magnetic field exists around the coils when charging the electric vehicles (EVs) with inductive power transfer (IPT), owning to the large air gap between the transmitter and receiver. The methods for field attenuation usually introduce extra losses and reduce the efficiency. This study focuses on the synergetic attenuation of stray magnetic field which is optimized simultaneously with the efficiency. The optimization is realized with Pareto front. In this dissertation, three methods are discussed for the field attenuation. The first method is to tune the physical parameters of the winding, such as the inner radii, outer radii, distribution of the turns, and types of the litz wires. The second method is to add metal shields around the IPT coils, in which litz wires are used as shields to reduce the shielding losses. The third method is to control the phases of winding currents, which avoids increasing the size and weight of the IPT coils. To attenuate the stray magnetic field by tuning the physical parameters, the conventional method is to sweep all the physical parameters in finite-element simulation. This takes thousands of simulations to derive the Pareto front, and it's especially time-consuming for three-dimensional simulations. This dissertation demonstrates a faster method to derive the Pareto front. The windings are replaced by the lumped loops. As long as the number of turns for each loop is known, the efficiency and magnetic field are calculated directly from the permeance matrices and current-to-field matrices. The sweep of physical parameters in finite-element simulation is replaced by the sweep of the turns numbers for the lumped loops in calculation. Only tens of simulations are required in the entire procedure, which are used to derive the matrices. An exemplary set of coils was built and tested. The efficiency from the matrix calculation is the same as the experimental measurement. The difference for stray magnetic field is less than 12.5%. Metal shields attenuate the stray magnetic field effectively, but generates significant losses owning to the uneven distribution of shield currents. This dissertation uses litz wires to replace the conventional plate shield or ring shield. Skin effect is eliminated so the shield currents are uniformly distributed and the losses are reduced. The litz shields are categorized to two types: shorted litz shield and driven litz shield. Circuit models are derived to analyze their behaviors. The concept of lumped-loop model is applied to derive the Pareto front of efficiency versus stray magnetic field for the coils with litz shield. In an exemplary IPT system, coils without metal shield and with metal shields are optimized for the same efficiency. Both the simulation and experimental measurement verify that the shorted litz shield has the best performance. The stray magnetic field is attenuated by 65% compared to the coils without shield. This dissertation also introduces the method to attenuate the stray magnetic field by controlling the phases of winding currents. The magnetic field around the coils is decomposed to the component in the axial direction and the component in the radial direction. The axial component decreases with smaller phase difference between windings' currents, while the radial component exhibits the opposite property. Because the axial component is dominant around the IPT coils, decreasing the phase difference is preferred. The dual-side-controlled converter is applied for the circuit realization. Bridges with active switches are used for both the inverter on the transmitter side and the rectifier on the receiver side. The effectiveness of this method was verified both in simulation and experiment. Compared to the conventional series-series IPT with 90° phase difference between winding currents, stray magnetic field was attenuated by up to 30% and 40% when the phase differences of winding currents are 50° and 40°, respectively. Furthermore, an analytical method is investigated to calculate the proximity-effect resistance of the planar coils with ferrite plate. The objective of this method is to work together with the fast optimization which uses the lumped-loop model. The existence of the ferrite plate complicates the calculation of the magnetic field across each turn which is critical to derive the proximity-effect resistance. In this dissertation, the ferrite plate is replaced by the mirrored turns according to the method of image. The magnetic fields are then obtained from Ampere's Law and Biot-Savart Law. Up to 200 kHz, the difference of the proximity-effect resistance is less than 15% between calculation and measurement. / Ph. D.

This thesis presents an experimental study of the superconducting proximity effect in sub-micrometer sized ferromagnetic discs. Such discs belong to a class of mesoscopic ferromagnets intermediate between microscopic magnets with dimensions below about 10nm that behave as single giant spins and macroscopic structures that are larger than approximately 1 micrometer where domains are formed to minimise stray fields. The magnetic structure of mesoscopic magnets is strongly dependent on their geometric shape, allowing for purposeful engineering of magnetic structures using modern lithographic techniques. The ground magnetic state of mesoscopic ferromagnetic discs is the magnetic vortex where unusual time-asymmetric triplet superconductivity is predicted to exist and survive up to the non-magnetic coherence length, that is orders in magnitude larger than the ferromagnetic singlet coherence length. Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) was used to directly study the magnetic structure of the discs. To detect the proximity effect in the vortices, Andreev interferometers were used with normal parts replaced with mesoscopic ferromagnetic discs in the magnetic vortex state. The samples were fabricated using electron-beam lithography and a modified shadow evaporation technique developed within this project, allowing the whole structure to be made with highly precise alignment, without breaking vacuum and avoiding redundant ferromagnetic elements disturbing the magnetic vortices. Observations were made of superconducting phase periodic oscillations in the conductance of the Andreev interferometers. Such oscillations provide unambiguous evidence of phase coherent electron transport through the ferromagnetic vortex. Finally, further experiments are discussed that would provide a more detailed understanding of the long range proximity effect in SFS junctions.

When bulk helium-4 is cooled below T = 2.18 K, it undergoes a phase transition to a superfluid, characterized by a complex wave function with a macroscopic phase and exhibits inviscid, quantized flow. The macroscopic phase coherence can be probed in a container filled with helium-4, by reducing one or more of its dimensions until they are smaller than the coherence length, the spatial distance over which order propagates. As this dimensional reduction occurs, enhanced thermal and quantum fluctuations push the transition to the superfluid state to lower temperatures. However, this trend can be countered via the proximity effect, where a bulk 3-dimensional (3d) superfluid is coupled to a low (2d) dimensional superfluid via a weak link producing superfluid correlations in the film at temperatures above the Kosterlitz-Thouless temperature. Recent experiments probing the coupling between 3d and 2d superfluid helium-4 have uncovered an anomalously large proximity effect, leading to an enhanced superfluid density that cannot be explained using the correlation length alone. In this work, we have determined the origin of this enhanced proximity effect via large scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations of helium-4 in a topologically non-trivial geometry that incorporates the important aspects of the experiments. We find that due to the bosonic symmetry of helium-4, identical particle permutations lead to correlations between contiguous spatial regions at a length scale greater than the coherence length. We show that quantum exchange plays a large role in explaining the anomalous experimental results while simultaneously showing how classical arguments fall short of this task.

L'état supraconducteur étant un condensat de paires de Cooper constitué d'électrons de moments et de spins opposés, il peut être fortement influencé par des effets de spin. Au cours de cette thèse, nous étudions l'effet d'un fort champ d'échange et d'un effet spin-orbite de type Rashba sur les propriétés supraconductrices. Dans une première partie, on étudie les effets associés à l'interaction entre supraconductivité et fort champ d'échange, se caractérisant par une transition de phase vers un état supraconducteur inhomogène découvert par Fulde, Ferrell, Larkin et Ovchinnikov (FFLO). On étudie tout particulièrement les fluctuations supraconductrices à l'approche de la transition de phase. On montre que ces fluctuations peuvent servir de révélateur à cette phase. Notamment, la capacité calorifique et la paraconductivité divergent de façon caractéristique à la transition vers un état modulé. On décrit également comment les effets paramagnétiques modifient les fluctuations de l'aimantation, annulant la réponse diamagnétique ou produisant des oscillations entre réponse para- et dia-magnétique. La seconde partie est dévolue aux jonctions supraconducteur-ferromagnétique (S/F). Dans les jonctions Josephson S/F/S, le champ d'échange donne lieu à des oscillations du courant critique en fonction de la longueur de la jonction, charactérisées par une alternance des états 0 et . On prédit une transition entre les états 0 et induite par la température, même dans la limite ballistique. Dans cette limite ballistique, on montre également que le courant de Josephson s'atténu sous la forme de lois de puissance en fonction de la longueur de la jonction, alors que le cas diffusif présente une atténuation exponentielle. On étudie ensuite la seconde harmonique de la relation courant-phase en présence d'une faible quantité d'impuretés. La dernière partie traite des effets de proximité lorsque les deux effets paramagnétique et spin-orbite sont présents dans une jonction Josephson. On montre que l'association d'une interaction Rashba et d'un champ d'échange induit un couplage direct entre les ordres magnétique et supraconducteur. En particulier, ce couplage permet de générer toute la dynamique magnétique par l'application d'une simple tension électrique. / The superconducting state being a Cooper pair condensate built on opposite spin and momentum electrons, it can be strongly influenced by any spin effect. In this thesis, we investigate the roles of strong paramagnetic and spin-orbit effects on superconducting properties. In a first part, the interplay between paramagnetic effect and bulk superconductivity is studied, leading to the modulated Fulde, Ferrell, Larkin and Ovchinnikov phase (FFLO phase). We focus on superconducting fluctuations near to the FFLO state. We show that these fluctuations can serve as a smoking gun for this phase. Noticeably, the fluctuation heat capacity and paraconductivity diverge in a characteristic way when approaching the phase transition towards a modulated state. Moreover, the fluctuation induced magnetization is predicted to be drastically quenched or to oscillate between dia- and para-magnetic responses. The second part is devoted to superconductor-ferromagnetic (S/F) junctions. In S/F/S Josephson junctions, the exchange field is responsible for the critical current oscillation, characterized by alternative 0- and -states, with respect to the junction length. We predict a temperature induced (0-) state transition, even in the ballistic case. Moreover, the ballistic case exhibits some power law decays of the Josephson current, in contrast to the exponentially decaying current in dirty limit. The moderately dirty limit is then investigated, and the second harmonic of the current-phase relation is established. The last part deals with proximity effects when both paramagnetic and spin-orbit interactions are present in a Josephson junction. We show that the association of both Rashba interaction and exchange field induces a direct coupling between magnetic and superconducting orders. Particularly, this coupling generates the complete magnetization dynamics by applying an appropriate d.c. voltage.