Alternative Representations and Techniques for Accelerated Realistic Image Synthesis: Improved Sampling, Reconstruction and Modelling Methods

Realism has always been a major goal in visual content creation - from oil painting to motion pictures, from graphic arts to scientific data visualization. Computer graphics creates a virtual reality with digital representations. Trading between accuracy and speed, realistic rendering either creates photorealistic renders that follow strict...

Molecular simulation of tunable materials: Metal-organic frameworks & ionic liquids theory & application

Undoubtedly, materials that can be tuned on a molecular level offer tremendous opportunities. However, to understand and customize such materials is challenging. In this context, molecular simulation can be helpful. The work presented in this thesis deals with two types of materials, Metal-Organic Frameworks and Ionic Liquids, and the study with...

Molecular Simulation of Liquid Crystals: Phase Equilibrium and the Solubility of Gases in Ordered Fluids

Monte Carlo simulations were performed in the NPT ensemble and in an expanded version of the Gibbs ensemble. The phase behavior of single-phase hard-sphere chain fluids was determined using NPT ensemble simulations, while the isotropic-nematic phase equilibrium of single-component and binary mixtures of hard-sphere and Lennard-Jones fluids was...

The Dynamic Monte Carlo Method for Transient Analysis of Nuclear Reactors

In this thesis a new method for the analysis of power transients in a nuclear reactor is developed, which is more accurate than the present state-of-the-art methods. Transient analysis is important tool when designing nuclear reactors, since they predict the behaviour of a reactor during changing conditions, such as a control-rod movement,...

Compressive Sensing and Fast Simulations: Applications to Radar Detection

In most modern high-resolution multi-channel radar systems one of the major problems to deal with is the huge amount of data to be acquired, processed and/or stored. But why do we need all these data? According to the well known Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, real signals have to be sampled at at least twice the signal bandwidth to prevent...

A zero-variance based scheme for Monte Carlo criticality simulations

The ability of the Monte Carlo method to solve particle transport problems by simulating the particle behaviour makes it a very useful technique in nuclear reactor physics. However, the statistical nature of Monte Carlo implies that there will always be a variance associated with the estimate obtained, making the reduction of this variance,...

Molecular simulations in microporous materials: Adsorption and separation

The adsorption of water on hydrophobic zeolites such as silicalite and on hydrophilic MOF (metal-organic framework), Cu-BTC, is completely different, as described in chapters 2 and 4. While in hydrophobic materials water adsorption isotherms are very steep and difficult to measure, both experimentally and by simulation, in hydrophilic materials...

Improved Monte Carlo Methods with Applications to Borehole Logging Simulations

Positrons and positronium for polymer thin film analysis