Greenhouses located in extreme climates such as the Canadian prairies only function during warmer months of the year to avoid extreme cold conditions. Improving sustainable production of greenhouse produce with optimal growing conditions in the Canadian Prairies is a challenge. The increasing cost in energy and the tremendous amount of heat loss from poor greenhouse …

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Given increasing challenges of oil and gas production from partially depleted conventional or unconventional reservoirs, reservoir characterization is a key element of the reservoir development workflow. Reservoir characterization impacts well placement, injection and production strategies, and field management. Reservoir characterization projects point and line data to a large three-dimensional volume. The relationship between variables, e.g. …

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Circular air-coupled ultrasonic testing ACUT) setup for the inspection of commercial carbon-carbon composite aircraft brake disks was developed in Intelligent Measurement and Evaluation Laboratory IMEL) at Southern Illinois University Carbondale SIUC). The developed test setup utilizes Airstar single channel air-coupled equipment and has only manual A-scan and B-scan capability. The developed ACUT technique is unique …

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The decision making processes in todays manufacturing systems represent very complex and challenging tasks. The desired flexibility in terms of the functionality of a machine adds more components to the machine. The real time monitoring and reporting generates large streams of data. However the intelligent and real time processing of this large collection of system …

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Information retrieval is much more challenging than traditional small document collection retrieval. The main difference is the importance of correlations between related concepts in complex data structures. These structures have been studied by several information retrieval systems. This research began by performing a comprehensive review and comparison of several techniques of matrix dimensionality estimation and …

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The application of enzymes as catalysts for industrial processes spawned what is now a rapidly growing field of biocatalysis. Numerous enzymes have been found and characterized according to their functions and/or three-dimensional structures. Directed Evolution DE) is a field of research in biocatalysis, where mutations are made in the sequence of a native or what …

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This dissertation presents the development of a fault tolerant control scheme for helicopters fitted with individually controlled blades. This novel approach attempts to improve fault tolerant capabilities of helicopter control system by increasing control redundancy using additional actuators for individual blade input and software re-mixing to obtain nominal or close to nominal conditions under failure. …

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Abstract not available.

There have been increased interests in mobile robot research due to its many applications in areas such as material handling, explorations in hazardous environments, and military missions under extreme conditions. Many control schemes and robot systems have been developed, yet most of these systems eventually become individual experiments that are unique or specific to particular …

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In this research, we propose metaheuristics for solving two p-hub median problems. The first p-hub median problem, which is NP-hard, is the uncapacitated single p-hub median problem (USApHMP). In this problem, metaheuristics such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and tabu search, are applied in different types of representations. Caching is also applied to speed up …

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