Crystallization Kinetics in Polymorphic Organic Compounds

Polymorphism is frequently encountered in many pharmaceutical, chemical, and food products. Polymorphs have the same chemical composition but different crystal structures, and therefore differ in their physicochemical properties such as stability, solubility, and bioavailability. These property differences can influence the product performance....

Polyhydroxyalkanoates production by bacterial enrichments

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) is a natural bacterial storage compound, which can be used as carbon and electron source. Their remarkable similarities in physical properties to conventional plastics, such as polypropylene, attract great commercial interest. This thesis focuses on PHAs production by bacterial enrichments. As compared to the current...

Mechanical Behaviour and Durability of FRP-to-steel Adhesively-bonded Joints

During the last two decades, fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) bridge decks have been increasingly used as a competitive alternative for wood, concrete and orthotropic steel decks, due to their various advantages: light-weight, good corrosion resistance, low maintenance cost and rapid installation for minimizing the traffic disturbing time. These...

From “Made in China” to “Created in China”: Development of ICT-enabled medical device and system for rural China

Health problems are a major concern for rural Chinese people. One of the causes is shortages of medical resources, such as medical equipment and skilled medical staff. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is usually seen as a useful tool, by which medical resources in urban areas can be accessed for rural areas. Design and development...

Coulomb interactions in charged particle optical columns

Organizational Compliance: An agent-based model for designing and evaluating organizational interactions

The motivation of this research comes from the need of devising and evaluating solutions to achieving organizational compliance, which is an important factor in ensuring the success of business operations and the safety of business environments. Using normative multi-agent systems as the basis of conceptual design, the OperA+ framework presented...

Capacitively-Coupled Bridge Readout Circuits

This Ph.D. dissertation describes the design and realization of energy efficient readout integrated circuits (ROICs), that have an input referred noise density < 5 nV/√Hz and a linearity of < 30 ppm, as required by Wheatstone bridge sensors used in precision mechatronic systems. Novel techniques were developed, at both the system-level and...

High-silica Zeolites as Novel Adsorbents for the Removal of Organic Micro-pollutants in Water Treatment

A broad range of organic micropollutants (OMPs), including pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, are present in drinking water sources and effluent of wastewater treatment plants (Kolpin et al., 2002; Stackelberg et al., 2004). The presence of OMPs in water significantly threatens public health and thus calls for effective...

CMOS Wide-Bandwidth Magnetic Sensors for Contactless Current Measurements

This Ph.D. dissertation describes the theory and realization of wide-bandwidth magnetic sensors for current measurements which breach the conventional offset and noise constraints in CMOS processes. These are achieved by several circuit-level and system-level innovations, including the use of three orthogonal ripple reduction loops (RRLs) in...

Safety Risk Assessment of Unmanned Aircraft System Operations for Urban Air Mobility

Technology developments has enabled Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) to be adopted for various applications, including Urban Air Mobility (UAM) – an air transportation system for passengers and cargo in and around urban environments. The operations of UAS in urban environment inevitably raises concerns about the safety impact of UAS. <br/>The...

Graphene-Based Computing: Nanoribbon Logic Gates & Circuits

As CMOS feature size is reaching atomic dimensions, unjustifiable static power, reliability, and economic implications are exacerbating, thus prompting for research on new materials, devices, and/or computation paradigms. Within this context, Graphene Nanoribbons (GNRs), owing to graphene’s excellent electronic properties, may serve as basic...

Multiscale microstructure-based modelling of cleavage in high strength steels

The need for more accurate cleavage modelling is particularly acute for a new generation of high-strength steels because they obtain their favourable properties through complex, multi-phase microstructures. One of the challenges in cleavage modelling is the strong sensitivity to material characteristics at the microlevel. This thesis proposes a...