Turbulent flows present structures with a wide range of scales. The computation of the complete physics of a turbulent flow (termed DNS) is very expensive and is, for the time being, limited to low and medium Reynolds number flows. As a way to capture high Reynolds number flows, a part of the physics complexity has to be modeled. Large eddy simulation (LES) is a simulation strategy where the large turbulent eddies present on a given mesh are captured and the influence of the non-resolved scales onto the resolved ones is modeled. The present thesis reports on the development and validation of a methodology in order to apply LES for complex wall-bounded flows. Discretization methods and LES models, termed subgrid scale models (SGS), compatible with such a geometrical complexity are discussed. It is proved that discrete a kinetic energy conserving discretization of the convective term is an attractive solution to perform stable simulations without the use of an artificial dissipation, as upwinding. The dissipative effect of the SGS model is thus unaffected by any additional dissipation process. The methodology is first applied to a developed parallel fourth-order incompressible flow solver for cartesian non-uniform meshes. In order to solve the resulting Poisson equation, an efficient multigrid solver is also developed. The code is first validated using DNS (Taylor-Green vortex, channel flow, four-vortex system) and LES (channel flow), and finally applied to the investigation of an aircraft two-vortex system in ground effect. The methodology is then applied to improve a RANS-based industrial unstructured compressible flow solver, developed at CENAERO, to perform well for LES applications. The proposed modifications are tested successfully on the unsteady flow past a sphere at Reynolds of 300 and 10000, corresponding to the subcritical regime.

In this thesis a model reference adaptive sliding mode control scheme is proposed for a class of linear time-invariant MIMO systems with unstructured and input, output uncertainties to solve the robust tracking problems. The designing of the proposed control scheme is divided into three steps. The first step is to design the sliding functions, the second step is to construct the estimators of the lumped perturbation. These estimators are able to estimate the derivatives of the tracking errors. The third step is to design the adaptive sliding mode controller. The proposed control scheme is designed without requiring the information of the upper bound of perturbations, and guarantee the stability of the controlled system. In fact the asymptotical stability can be achieved for some special cases. Finally, three numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed control scheme.

The reaction-diffusion master equation (RDME) is a stochastic model for spatially heterogeneous chemical systems. Stochastic models have proved to be useful for problems from molecular biology since copy numbers of participating chemical species often are small, which gives a stochastic behaviour. The RDME is a discrete space model, in contrast to spatially continuous models based on Brownian motion. In this thesis two accuracy issues of the RDME on unstructured meshes are studied. The first concerns the rates of diffusion events. Errors due to previously used rates are evaluated, and a second order accurate finite volume method, not previously used in this context, is implemented. The new discretisation improves the accuracy considerably, but unfortunately it puts constraints on the mesh, limiting its current usability. The second issue concerns the rates of bimolecular reactions. Using the macroscopic reaction coefficients these rates become too low when the spatial resolution is high. Recently, two methods to overcome this problem by calculating mesoscopic reaction rates for Cartesian meshes have been proposed. The methods are compared and evaluated, and are found to work remarkably well. Their possible extension to unstructured meshes is discussed.

The encysted embryos (cysts) of the crustacean Artemia franciscana have several molecular mechanisms to enable anhydrobiosis – life without water. This study examines the function of group 1 Late Embryogenesis Abundant (LEA) proteins, hydrophilic unstructured proteins which accumulate in the stress-tolerant cysts of A. franciscana. Group 1 LEA proteins were knocked down in cysts using RNA interference. Cysts without group 1 LEA proteins exhibited low survival following desiccation and/or freezing, suggesting a role for these proteins in tolerance of low water conditions. In contrast, cysts with or without group 1 LEA proteins responded similarly to hydrogen peroxide exposure , indicating little to no function in reducing damage due to oxidative stress. This is the first in vivo functional study of group 1 LEA proteins in an animal, and may have applied significance in aquaculture, where Artemia is an important feed source, and in the cryopreservation of cells for therapeutic applications.

This study explores therapists' spiritual experience, personally and within the therapeutic relationship. It focuses on the lived experience of therapists and the different meanings made of what is experienced. The purpose of this research is to bring into the light spiritual experiences of therapists and how they are experienced in the therapeutic process. It contributes to current debate about spiritual experience in the day- to- day practice of psychotherapy. The methodology of phenomenological hermeneutics is chosen as it provides the means to study therapists' lived experience. The study is guided by the philosophical thinking of Heidegger, Gadamer and Van Manen.The findings of this study reveal different types of spiritual experience. These include non-ordinary states of consciousness where there is a feeling sense of being beyond the boundaries of linear time and space. Experiences involve noticing subtle body feelings before they manifest in everyday consciousness. They include hearing and seeing phenomena that may normally be overlooked or disavowed in psychotherapy. The findings show therapists' ability to notice, explore and utilize subtle body phenomena was a combination of their own capabilities, their spiritual practice, and years of experience as therapists. The therapist's body appeared to be like a doorway into experiences that had transformative effects on both therapists and clients. The meanings made of experiences reflected therapists' spiritual and cultural beliefs. These beliefs meant that therapists are attuned to something bigger than everyday identity that gave meaning and purpose to the work and was a rich source of wisdom and guidance, comfort and a sense of being held in the work. Specific attitudes and qualities of presence are revealed that reflect therapists' spiritual beliefs. Participants described experiences that emerged out of the context of the therapeutic relationship but could not be explained clinically. The findings show therapists' world views, their spiritual and cultural beliefs and capacity to experience the unknown, bring a richness and diversity of meanings to the therapeutic relationship that includes the wider contexts of culture and the environment. This study explores current thinking about spiritual experience in psychotherapy and its effects on the therapist. It raises issues for further discussion relating to the role of therapists' spiritual experience in contemporary psychotherapy.

The study seeks an in-depth understanding of how gender is being constructed in elementary school. More specifically, the essay aims at investigating the creation of gender during free play at the breaks in primary school. On the basis of this purpose, the essay sets the following questions: How is gender created during free play? How are boundaries between male and female / boy and girl established? What scopes are there for violations and breach of the gender contract? The questions are answered based on socio-cultural perspectives and gender theory. A central aspect emphasized by Hirdman is the gender contract. This theory assumes that social contexts are gender coded and governed by invisible “gender contracts” that govern how men and women should think and behave. The study is based on observations throughout the schoolyard made for a total of five days. The focus is on children in one class, from grade 1 to 3. The results confirm that children's play is gender coded and governed by norms for how men and women should behave. Boundaries between male and female / boy and girl are established both through the choice of games, and through how the children act in the different games. An interesting detail here is the way in which teachers at school changed the conditions for children's play by scheduling football games so girls and boys can play separately on certain days of the week. As regards the issue of infringements, the survey has shown that there is both an overrun of the gender contract through "interspersed gender interactions" and an enhancement of the gender contract by children themselves marking when others exceed limits and norms.

Plasma-assisted processing and deposition of materials is an important component of modern industrial applications, with plasma reactors sharing 30% to 40% of manufacturing steps in microelectronics production [1]. Development of new flexible electronics increases demands for efficient high-throughput deposition methods and roll-to-roll processing of materials. The current work represents an attempt of practical design and numerical modeling of a plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition system. The system utilizes plasma at standard pressure and temperature to activate a chemical precursor for protective coatings. A specially designed linear plasma head, that consists of two parallel plates with electrodes placed in the parallel arrangement, is used to resolve clogging issues of currently available commercial plasma heads, as well as to increase the flow-rate of the processed chemicals and to enhance the uniformity of the deposition. A test system is build and discussed in this work. In order to improve operating conditions of the setup and quality of the deposited material, we perform numerical modeling of the plasma system. The theoretical and numerical models presented in this work comprehensively describe plasma generation, recombination, and advection in a channel of arbitrary geometry. Number density of plasma species, their energy content, electric field, and rate parameters are accurately calculated and analyzed in this work. Some interesting engineering outcomes are discussed with a connection to the proposed setup. The numerical model is implemented with the help of high-performance parallel technique and evaluated at a cluster for parallel calculations. A typical performance increase, calculation speed-up, parallel fraction of the code and overall efficiency of the parallel implementation are discussed in details.

It is estimated that 80% of companies’ data is unstructured. Unstructured data, or data that is not predefined by numerical values, continues to grow at a rapid pace. Images, text, videos and voice are all examples of unstructured data. Companies can use this type of data to leverage novel insights unavailable through more easily manageable, structured data. Unstructured data, however, creates a challenge since it often requires substantial coding prior to performing an analysis. The purpose of this study is to describe the steps and introduce computational methods that can be adopted to further explore unstructured, online reviews. The unstructured nature of online reviews requires extensive text analytics processing. This study introduces methods for text analytics including tokenization at the sentence level, lemmatization or stemming to reduce inflectional forms of the words appearing in the text, and ‘bag of n-grams’ approach. We will also introduce lexicon-based feature engineering and methods to develop new lexicons for capturing theoretically established constructs and relationships that are specific to the domain of study. The numeric features generated in the analysis will then be analyzed using machine learning algorithms. This process can be applied to the analysis of other unstructured data such as dyadic information exchange between customer service, salespeople, customers and channel members. Although not a comprehensive set of examples, companies can apply results from unstructured data analysis to examine a variety of outcomes related to customer decisions, managing channels and mitigating potential crisis situations. Understanding interdisciplinary methods of analyzing unstructured data is critical as the availability of this type of data continues to accelerate and enables researchers to develop theoretical contributions within the marketing discipline.

Cavitation is detrimental to the performance of ships and submarines, causing noise, erosion, and vibration. This study seeks to understand cavitation inception and delay on a typical ducted propulsor by utilizing the SimCenter's unstructured simulation and design system: U2NCLE. Specifically, three fundamental questions are addressed: 1. What are the macroscale flow physics causing cavitation inception? 2. How does cavitation inception scale with Reynolds number? 3. How can tip-leakage vortex cavitation inception be suppressed? To study the physics of cavitation inception, a ducted propulso simulation is developed and extensively validated with experimental results. The numerical method is shown to agree very well with experimental measurements made in the vortex core. It was discovered that the interaction of the leakage and trailing edge vortices cause the pressure to drop to a local minimum, providing ideal conditions for inception to occur. However, experimental observation shows that inception does not occur at the minimum pressure location, but rather at the point where the two vortices completely coalesce. At the point of coalescence, the simulation reveals that the streamwise core velocity decelerates, causing the air nuclei to stretch and burst. A Reynolds number scaling analysis is performed for the minimum pressure and maximum velocity in the vortex core. First, the numerical method is validated on a flate plate at various Reynolds numbers to assess the ability of typical turbulence models to predict Reynolds numbers ranging from one million to one billion. This scaling analysis methodology is then applied to the propulsor simulation, revealing that the minimum pressure in the vortex core is much less dependent on Reynolds number than was previously hypothesized. Lastly, to investigate means of delaying cavitation inception, the propulsor is parameterized and studied using design optimization theory. Concepts of vortex alleviation evident in nature are used to suggest suitable parameterizations. Also, dimension reduction is used to reduced the number of design variables. Finally, the concepts are implemented, evaluated, and shown to completely decouple the two vortices causing cavitation inception. Moreover, the minimum pressure in the vortex core is significantly increased.

Within the design process, computational fluid dynamics is typically used to compute specific quantities that assess the performance of the apparatus under investigation. These quantities are usually integral output functions such as force and moment coefficients. However, to accurately model the configuration, the geometric features and the resulting physical phenomena must be adequately resolved. Due to limited computational resources a compromise must be made between the fidelity of the solution obtained and the available resources. This creates a degree of uncertainty about the error in the computed output functions. To this end, the current study attempts to address this problem for two-dimensional inviscid, incompressible flows on unstructured grids. The objective is to develop an error estimation and grid adaptive strategy for improving the accuracy of output functions from computational fluid dynamic codes. The present study employs a discrete adjoint formulation to arrive at the error estimates in which the global error in the output function is related to the local residual errors in the flow solution via adjoint variables as weighting functions. This procedure requires prolongation of the flow solution and adjoint solution from coarse to finer grids and, thus, different prolongation operators are studied to evaluate their influence on the accuracy of the error correction terms. Using this error correction procedure, two different adaptive strategies may be employed to enhance the accuracy of the chosen output to a prescribed tolerance. While both strategies strive to improve the accuracy of the computed output, the means by which the adaptation parameters are formed differ. The first strategy improves the computable error estimates by forming adaptation parameters based on the level of error in the computable error estimates. A grid adaptive scheme is then implemented that takes into account the error in both the primal and dual solutions. The second strategy uses the computable error estimates as indicators in an iterative grid adaptive scheme to generate grids that produce accurate estimates of the chosen output. Several test cases are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the error correction procedure and the grid adaptive methods.