7,379 research outputs found

    Meso-scale FDM material layout design strategies under manufacturability constraints and fracture conditions

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    In the manufacturability-driven design (MDD) perspective, manufacturability of the product or system is the most important of the design requirements. In addition to being able to ensure that complex designs (e.g., topology optimization) are manufacturable with a given process or process family, MDD also helps mechanical designers to take advantage of unique process-material effects generated during manufacturing. One of the most recognizable examples of this comes from the scanning-type family of additive manufacturing (AM) processes; the most notable and familiar member of this family is the fused deposition modeling (FDM) or fused filament fabrication (FFF) process. This process works by selectively depositing uniform, approximately isotropic beads or elements of molten thermoplastic material (typically structural engineering plastics) in a series of pre-specified traces to build each layer of the part. There are many interesting 2-D and 3-D mechanical design problems that can be explored by designing the layout of these elements. The resulting structured, hierarchical material (which is both manufacturable and customized layer-by-layer within the limits of the process and material) can be defined as a manufacturing process-driven structured material (MPDSM). This dissertation explores several practical methods for designing these element layouts for 2-D and 3-D meso-scale mechanical problems, focusing ultimately on design-for-fracture. Three different fracture conditions are explored: (1) cases where a crack must be prevented or stopped, (2) cases where the crack must be encouraged or accelerated, and (3) cases where cracks must grow in a simple pre-determined pattern. Several new design tools, including a mapping method for the FDM manufacturability constraints, three major literature reviews, the collection, organization, and analysis of several large (qualitative and quantitative) multi-scale datasets on the fracture behavior of FDM-processed materials, some new experimental equipment, and the refinement of a fast and simple g-code generator based on commercially-available software, were developed and refined to support the design of MPDSMs under fracture conditions. The refined design method and rules were experimentally validated using a series of case studies (involving both design and physical testing of the designs) at the end of the dissertation. Finally, a simple design guide for practicing engineers who are not experts in advanced solid mechanics nor process-tailored materials was developed from the results of this project.U of I OnlyAuthor's request

    Visualisation of Fundamental Movement Skills (FMS): An Iterative Process Using an Overarm Throw

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    Fundamental Movement Skills (FMS) are precursor gross motor skills to more complex or specialised skills and are recognised as important indicators of physical competence, a key component of physical literacy. FMS are predominantly assessed using pre-defined manual methodologies, most commonly the various iterations of the Test of Gross Motor Development. However, such assessments are time-consuming and often require a minimum basic level of training to conduct. Therefore, the overall aim of this thesis was to utilise accelerometry to develop a visualisation concept as part of a feasibility study to support the learning and assessment of FMS, by reducing subjectivity and the overall time taken to conduct a gross motor skill assessment. The overarm throw, an important fundamental movement skill, was specifically selected for the visualisation development as it is an acyclic movement with a distinct initiation and conclusion. Thirteen children (14.8 ± 0.3 years; 9 boys) wore an ActiGraph GT9X Link Inertial Measurement Unit device on the dominant wrist whilst performing a series of overarm throws. This thesis illustrates how the visualisation concept was developed using raw accelerometer data, which was processed and manipulated using MATLAB 2019b software to obtain and depict key throw performance data, including the trajectory and velocity of the wrist during the throw. Overall, this thesis found that the developed visualisation concept can provide strong indicators of throw competency based on the shape of the throw trajectory. Future research should seek to utilise a larger, more diverse, population, and incorporate machine learning. Finally, further work is required to translate this concept to other gross motor skills

    Northern Powerhouses: the homes of the industrial elite, c.1780-1875

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    This thesis explores the world of the industrial elites of Manchester and Liverpool in the period c.1780-1875, through their houses. The homes of the industrial elites, namely merchants and manufacturers, were extremely important tangible communicators of wealth, taste, and comfort. Whilst status-building was closely connected to the house, this thesis argues that the industrial elites carved their own identities into their domestic spheres and that emulation was not solely linked with aspiration. The findings of this thesis are based around its three research aims regarding the changing location of houses in Manchester and Liverpool in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the appearance and use of houses, and the daily routines and involvement of the industrial elite in their domestic routines. An analysis of elite residential patterns in Manchester and Liverpool across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has created a more nuanced look at urban geographies of the region in this period. Though some residential patterns differed because of economic and political structure, a key finding has been that the process of suburbanisation in and around Manchester and Liverpool commenced earlier than previous scholarship has suggested. Suburbanisation among the elites began in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and into the early decades of the nineteenth century, with elite suburban communities being firmly established by the 1820s. This thesis discovered that despite socio-economic and political differences, the industrial elites of Manchester and Liverpool used their houses, gardens, and landed estates in very similar ways. This was a result of conformity which arose from emulation at both a community-based level and the emulation and aspiration of elite, gentrified lifestyle. Also, the merchants and manufacturers analysed within this work were involved in their home at every level of domesticity, from the construction of the house to the financial management of the household, although this latter theme was often a cooperative effort between spouses and family members, adding more to our understanding of gender, domesticity, and familial relations. Through detailed case studies and a combination of sources, the private lives of the industrial elites have been revaluated and redefined, including showing how their houses functions metaphorically and in reality

    Supernatural crossing in Republican Chinese fiction, 1920s–1940s

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    This dissertation studies supernatural narratives in Chinese fiction from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. The literary works present phenomena or elements that are or appear to be supernatural, many of which remain marginal or overlooked in Sinophone and Anglophone academia. These sources are situated in the May Fourth/New Culture ideological context, where supernatural narratives had to make way for the progressive intellectuals’ literary realism and their allegorical application of supernatural motifs. In the face of realism, supernatural narratives paled, dismissed as impractical fantasies that distract one from facing and tackling real life. Nevertheless, I argue that the supernatural narratives do not probe into another mystical dimension that might co-exist alongside the empirical world. Rather, they imagine various cases of the characters’ crossing to voice their discontent with contemporary society or to reflect on the notion of reality. “Crossing” relates to characters’ acts or processes of trespassing the boundary that separates the supernatural from the conventional natural world, thus entailing encounters and interaction between the natural and the supernatural. The dissertation examines how crossing, as a narrative device, disturbs accustomed and mundane situations, releases hidden tensions, and discloses repressed truths in Republican fiction. There are five types of crossing in the supernatural narratives. Type 1 is the crossing into “haunted” houses. This includes (intangible) human agency crossing into domestic spaces and revealing secrets and truths concealed by the scary, feigned ‘haunting’, thus exposing the hidden evil and the other house occupiers’ silenced, suffocated state. Type 2 is men crossing into female ghosts’ apparitional residences. The female ghosts allude to heart-breaking, traumatic experiences in socio-historical reality, evoking sympathetic concern for suffering individuals who are caught in social upheavals. Type 3 is the crossing from reality into the characters’ delusional/hallucinatory realities. While they physically remain in the empirical world, the characters’ abnormal perceptions lead them to exclusive, delirious, and quasi-supernatural experiences of reality. Their crossings blur the concrete boundaries between the real and the unreal on the mental level: their abnormal perceptions construct a significant, meaningful reality for them, which may be as real as the commonly regarded objective reality. Type 4 is the crossing into the netherworld modelled on the real world in the authors’ observation and bears a spectrum of satirised objects of the Republican society. The last type is immortal visitors crossing into the human world. This type satirises humanity’s vices and destructive potential. The primary sources demonstrate their writers’ witty passion to play with super--natural notions and imagery (such as ghosts, demons, and immortals) and stitch them into vivid, engaging scenes using techniques such as the gothic, the grotesque, and the satirical, in order to evoke sentiments such as terror, horror, disgust, dis--orientation, or awe, all in service of their insights into realist issues. The works also creatively tailor traditional Chinese modes and motifs, which exemplifies the revival of Republican interest in traditional cultural heritage. The supernatural narratives may amaze or disturb the reader at first, but what is more shocking, unpleasantly nudging, or thought-provoking is the problematic society and people’s lives that the supernatural (misunderstandings) eventually reveals. They present a more compre--hensive treatment of reality than Republican literature with its revolutionary consciousness surrounding class struggle. The critical perspectives of the supernatural narratives include domestic space, unacknowledged history and marginal individuals, abnormal mentality, and pervasive weaknesses in humanity. The crossing and supernatural narratives function as a means of better understanding the lived reality. This study gathers diverse primary sources written by Republican writers from various educational and political backgrounds and interprets them from a rare perspective, thus filling a research gap. It promotes a fuller view of supernatural narratives in twentieth-century Chinese literature. In terms of reflecting the social and personal reality of the Republican era, the supernatural narratives supplement the realist fiction of the time

    Graphical scaffolding for the learning of data wrangling APIs

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    In order for students across the sciences to avail themselves of modern data streams, they must first know how to wrangle data: how to reshape ill-organised, tabular data into another format, and how to do this programmatically, in languages such as Python and R. Despite the cross-departmental demand and the ubiquity of data wrangling in analytical workflows, the research on how to optimise the instruction of it has been minimal. Although data wrangling as a programming domain presents distinctive challenges - characterised by on-the-fly syntax lookup and code example integration - it also presents opportunities. One such opportunity is how tabular data structures are easily visualised. To leverage the inherent visualisability of data wrangling, this dissertation evaluates three types of graphics that could be employed as scaffolding for novices: subgoal graphics, thumbnail graphics, and parameter graphics. Using a specially built e-learning platform, this dissertation documents a multi-institutional, randomised, and controlled experiment that investigates the pedagogical effects of these. Our results indicate that the graphics are well-received, that subgoal graphics boost the completion rate, and that thumbnail graphics improve navigability within a command menu. We also obtained several non-significant results, and indications that parameter graphics are counter-productive. We will discuss these findings in the context of general scaffolding dilemmas, and how they fit into a wider research programme on data wrangling instruction

    Platform protocol place: a practice-based study of critical media art practice (2007-2020)

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    This practice-based research project focuses on critical media art practices in contemporary digital culture. The theoretical framework employed in this inquiry draws from the work of the Frankfurt School, in particular Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Using Adorno & Horkheimer’s thesis as a theoretical guide, this research project formulates the concept of the digital culture industry - a concept that refers to the contemporary era of networked capitalism, an era defined by the unprecedented extraction, accumulation and manipulation of data and the material and digital infrastructures that facilitate it. This concept is used as a framing mechanism that articulates certain techno-political concerns within networked capitalism and responds to them through practice. The second concept formulated within this research project is Platform Protocol Place. The function of this second concept is to frame and outline the body of practice-based work developed in this study. It is also used to make complex technological issues accessible and to communicate these issues through public exhibition and within this written thesis. The final concept developed in this research project is tactical media archaeology. This concept describes the techniques and approaches employed in the development of the body of practice-based work that are the central focus of this research project. This approach is a synthesis of two subfields of media art practice and theory, tactical media and media archaeology. Through practice, tactical media archaeology critiques the geopolitical machinations and systems beneath the networked devices and interfaces of the digital culture industry

    Buddhist Poetics, Beat “Cosmo-Politics,” and the Maker Ethos: Asian Americanist Critiques of Whiteness in Midcentury American Beat Writing

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    Buddhist Poetics, Beat “Cosmo-Politics,” and the Maker Ethos: Asian Americanist Critiques of Whiteness in Midcentury American Beat Writing employs Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “ruin”—which is not just a noun or notion, but also a verb, a mode of criticism—to intervene in the ostensibly well-trodden ground of what is known as “Beat literature.” The project broadly argues for the “ruination” of Beat literature, where ruination means not destruction or annihilation, but a return to an unkempt state (as in the image of a ruined building) that more accurately reflects this literature’s many layers of cultural, interpersonal, and transpacific exchange and extraction. Though many have rightly suggested that Beat literature is broadly Orientalist and transpacific in nature, I reveal the specific cultural appropriations, adaptations, and translations that occurred in this period and in these literary texts: the broadly East Asian cultural materials (like Zen Buddhism) so valued in Beat literature and its social communities were derived not solely from “the East” nor from translated Chinese and Japanese texts, but also from the Asians in America with whom Euro Americans were friends and worked alongside. My chapters on Asian diasporic poetry, letters, and autobiographical writing highlight Beat literature’s connections to ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, gender studies, and critical race theory, applying an interdisciplinary approach to text and culture and bringing forward the cultural productions and expertise of Asian/Americans during this midcentury period. Because I am suggesting the work of Asian/Americans be read alongside other canonical Beat texts, their work destabilizes or “ruins” Beat literature, which has been seen as a body of texts that articulate a political, anticapitalist critique of post-WWII and Cold War-era America, but which I show to be reflective of a specific, European American identity grounded in a politics that does not accommodate the effects of settler colonialism and imperialism. The seeming stability and coherence of the category of “Beat” has only been possible because the work of Asian/Americans in this period was erased, unacknowledged. My project’s major intervention may be found in its combination of critique—where I show how whiteness influenced Euro Americans’ artistic choices and cultural appropriations—and recovery, where I reveal from whom and how these appropriations occurred. Further, I suggest that we begin to analyze American Buddhist writing beyond the limited rubrics formerly available to us in “Beat” and avant-garde literatures and in their communities of reception

    The Politics of Intermediality: Late Modernist Circulations of the Event

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    This dissertation examines late modernist, intermedial representations of events, considering art as an event and how art depicts and circulates events. Through cross-media close readings and interdisciplinary theories and methods derived from media studies, music and sound studies, intermedial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and literary theory, I study multimedia opera, civilian bombardments during the Spanish Civil War, the 1943 Harlem riot, and the atomic bombing of Japan in order to evaluate media practices from a range of cultural and historical contexts. Employing eventalization, my research illuminates intersections of media, gender, race, nation, and sexuality. Some of the artists I engage with include Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Ann Petry, Mina Loy, John Hersey, Shda Shinoe, and Nagai Takashi. The four chapters comprising this project take up fluctuating interactions among sonic, verbal, and visual mediations that were produced between 1927 and 1949, juxtaposing various newer media (photojournalism, radio, and others) with works of art (poetry, fiction, and painting). Stein and Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, transposed first into a staged opera and then as a radio broadcast, highlights how its many remediations offer formal innovation while reinforcing historical inequities. Picasso and Woolf's collage-like responses to war in Spain demonstrate hypermediacy and immediacy—remediation's twinned impulses—with each artist treating public and private divisions (as materials and as politics) differently. In their depictions of state violence against Black Americans, Hughes, Lawrence, and Petry draw differently on sonic, visual, and verbal modes. Hughes and Petry's fictional rioters publicly express dissatisfaction and challenge the containment strategies used during the actual riot. My concluding chapter also considers how intermediality resists containment, tracing the disparate availability of media in North America and Japan. Simultaneously empty and excessive, these atomic media reveal the ways knowledge and power produce nuclear subjects. My findings reveal that late modernism offers a particularly resonant set of texts and contexts from which to evaluate literature as a medium. Moreover, literature's porous borders enable multiple movements and engagements. The eventalization of these circulations reveal the political stakes and uses of intermediality
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