The failure of oil well drillstrings due to torsional and longitudinal stresses caused by stick-slip phenomena during the drilling operation causes great expense to industry. Due to the complicated and harsh drilling environment, modelling of the drillstring becomes an essential…
With the objectives of designing a solar cooling system with cold storage unit for the Iraqi climate, solar energy resources were assessed and methods were proposed to enhance harvesting the solar energy in the Iraqi climate. Where the results showed that adopting monthly averag…
Reverse Osmosis (RO) is a membrane-based separation process applied in several industrial and food processing applications. In this research, performance of RO process is investigated in respect of two applications (a) wastewater treatment (b) concentration fruit juices using mo…
The problem of algorithm selection is of great importance to the optimisation community, with a number of publications present in the Body-of-Knowledge. This importance stems from the consequences of the No-Free-Lunch Theorem which states that there cannot exist a single algorit…
Owners of infrastructure assets have responsibility for the management of a diverse portfolio of civil engineering assets. These assets make up the foundations of modern society and are arguably pivotal in the economic growth and wellbeing of a nation. It is of no surprise there…
Due to the high energy consumption demand and restrictions in the installation of new transmission lines, using Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) devices is inevitable. In power system analysis, transferring high-quality power is essential. In fact, one of the important fa…
Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are a search heuristic modeled on the processes of evolution. They have been used to solve optimisation problems in a wide variety of fields. When applied to the optimisation of intervention schedules for optimal control problems, such as cancer chemothe…
This study focuses on the development of a multi-objective optimisation methodology for the vacuum assisted resin transfer moulding composite processing route. Simulations of the cure and filling stages of the process have been implemented and the corresponding heat transfer and…
The global competitive environment and the growing demand for personalised products have increased the interest of companies in producing similar product models on the same assembly line. Companies are forced to make significant structural changes to rapidly respond to diversifi…
A qualitative description of the personal armour design system is elicited by comparing armour throughout the ages. Inputs that 'shape' designs are the materials technology, threat, wearer, task and environment. The emergent properties of protection, ergonomic effectiveness and …
Traditionally the reactor is recognised as the `heart' of a chemical process system and hence the focus on this part of the system is usually quite detailed. Steam reforming, however, due to the `building block' nature of its reaction products is unusual and generally is perceiv…
Concrete, our most widely used construction material, is a fluid that offers the opportunity to economically create structures of almost any geometry. Yet this unique fluidity is seldom capitalised on, with concrete instead being cast into rigid prismatic moulds to create high m…
Asymmetric composite laminates can have a bistable response to loading. The potentially large structural deformations which can be achieved during snap-through from one stable state to another with small and removable energy input make them of interest for a wide range of engine…
Decision making under uncertainty is an important yet challenging task; a number of alternative paradigms which address this problem have been proposed. Stochastic Programming (SP) and Robust Optimization (RO) are two such modelling ap-proaches, which we consider; these are natu…
A novel continuously variable transmission has previously been designed that is capable of addressing a number of concerns within the automotive industry such as reduced emissions. At the commencement of this research, the design was in the early stages of development and little…
The focus of this thesis is to develop a generic approach for solving reliability design optimisation problems which could be applicable to a diverse range of real engineering systems. The basic problem in optimal reliability design of a system is to explore the means of improvi…
A computer simulation model of the table contact phase of gymnastics vaulting was developed to gain an understanding of the mechanics of this phase of the vault. The model incorporated a gymnast and a vaulting table, and used a novel two-state contact phase representation to sim…
Desalination technology provides fresh water to the arid regions around the world. Multi-Stage Flash (MSF) distillation process has been used for many years and is now the largest sector in the desalination industry. Top Brine Temperature (TBT) (boiling point temperature of the …
This thesis aims to review and analyze the scheduling problem in general and Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) in particular and the solution techniques applied to these problems. The JSSP is the most general and popular hard combinational optimization problem in manufacturing …