Hydrodynamic behaviour of silica-DNA microparticles in surface water: A systematic laboratory-based understanding of SiDNA(Fe) tracers

Rivers are vital for maintaining freshwater ecosystems as they distribute nutrients as well as dilute and transport anthropogenic pollution. Tracers provide direct empirical data on complex waterflows and reveal transport processes of waterborne substances. Recent advances in material engineering and biomolecular technology have made it possible...

Structured Kinetic Modeling for Rational Scale-down and Design Optimization of Industrial Fermentations

On the Methods for Explaining Polarization of Private and Unobservable Opinions: An opinion-behavior co-evolutionary approach

Polarized opinions are everywhere. From opposite attitudes towards Hawaiian pizza to the partisan divide in theUnited States, we have experienced enough opinion polarization in recent years. Sadly, it is usually a sign of follow-up criticism when people start to talk about "opinion polarization". The term, which should neutrally describe a...

Metal sulfides for gas sensing applications: devices and mechanisms

Nanostructured materials have attracted more and more attention in the applications of gas sensing due to their high specific surface area, numerous surface-active sites, as well as the effect of crystal facets with high surface reactivity. These kinds of gas sensors are mainly used for detecting air quality, environment situation, and breath...

Applications of Optical Birefringence: With Natural-Materials and Meta-Materials

The beauty of optical birefringence lies in the fact that it provides an independent control of light over different polarization directions, which leads to many important applications in today's optical systems. This thesis describes the applications of existing naturally-occurring birefringent materials as well as the engineered formed...

The Effect of Oil on Foam for Enhanced Oil Recovery: Theory and Measurements

Foam has unique microstructure in pore networks and reduces gas mobility significantly, which improves considerably the sweep efficiency of gas injection. Foam injection is thus regarded as a promising enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technology. One key to success of foam EOR is foam stability in presence of oil. This thesis seeks to understand...

MIP Plasma Decapsulation of Copper-wired Semiconductor Devices for Failure Analysis

The majority of Integrated Circuit (IC) devices are encapsulated in wire-bonded plastic IC packages. Epoxy molding compound is used as the encapsulation material and gold was used as the bonding wire material. However, the increase of gold material price from 400 USD/ounce in year 2005 to 1400 USD/ounce in year 2013 results in a major cost issue...

Carotid Artery Geometry and Plaque Quantification in CTA and MRI

Transistor-Level Statistical Timing Analysis: Solving Random Differential Equations Directly

In this Ph.D. thesis, a novel non-MC Random differential Equation based Statistical Timing Analysis (RESTA) method is proposed, which considers both process variations and electrical circuit effects, such as multiple input simultaneous switching and crosstalk effects. To make the approach practical for analysis of large circuits at high accuracy...

Thermodynamic properties of acid gases in mixture with natural gas and water

The reliable removal of acid gas components, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) from natural gas is an important technical challenge. Crude oil and hydrocarbon gas streams may contain high levels of CO2 and/or H2S as contaminants. It is desirable to prevent any contaminant to reach the surface, or to considerably reduce the...

Information Propagation in Peer-to-Peer Networking: Modeling and Empirical Studies

Although being a young technology, peer-to-peer (P2P) networking has spurred dramatic evolution on the Internet over the recent twenty years. Unlike traditional server-client mode, P2P networking applications are user-centric. Users (peers) generate their own content and share it with others across the Internet. Be it a P2P file-sharing network,...

Two-level preconditioned conjugate gradient methods with applications to bubbly flow problems

The Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) method is one of the most popular iterative methods for solving large linear systems with a symmetric and positive semi-definite coefficient matrix. However, if the preconditioned coefficient matrix is ill-conditioned, the convergence of the PCG method typically deteriorates. Instead, a two-level PCG...

OFDM transmissions over rapidly changing channels

This thesis is dedicated to efficiently estimate and equalize time-varying channels in OFDM and single-carrier systems.