PASSIVE THERMAL CONTROL SYSTEMS FOR SPACE INSTRUMENTS MAKING – SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND, QUALIFICATION, EXPLOITATION IN SPACE

Passive thermal control systems (TCS) are one of obligatory system of any space mission, used as on large spacecraft and microsatellites Supporting of required temperature range for space instruments is supported by rational design of TCS with optimal choice of main thermal control components such as multilayer insulation, optical coatings, heat conductive elements, heat insulation supports, thermal conductive gaskets, radiating surfaces and other elements. New ideology in TCS design has come after appearance of new element – heat pipe(s) which is a super heat conductive thermal conductor with constant or variable thermal properties

Novel Evaluation Methods for Complex Systems via Adaptive Sequential Exploration of Variables Interactions

The complex and coupled behavior of variables in the currently developing Generation IV reactors and Small Modular Reactors is becoming a major incentive to seek efficient design methods. This research develops and validates new methods to evaluate systems with various degrees of variables’ interactions using basic knowledge in variables’ directions of effect and an adaptive number of experiments. The methods replace the commonly used assumption of negligible interactions with a broader assumption of monotonic variables’ effects. The assumption was evaluated using studies of other physical systems’ regularities, and is expected to be significantly present in physical systems. Four methods were developed and analyzed in this dissertation. Three of the introduced methods utilized an adaptive sequential spanning tree concept with a method specific criterion to construct piecewise multidimensional surfaces or subtrees. Each method then used a specific approach to project the results within the subtrees. The fourth method is an expansion to an existing method to explore any order of interactions through the introduction of a new domain of parameters. Three of the four methods significantly outperformed the common orthogonal arrays methods that rely on a uniform distribution of experiments in the design domain. Two of the three methods significantly outperformed the third method and were used in the dissertation’s application. The strength of the applicable methods was demonstrated through their application to two examples from literature, each of which has a different degree of variables’ monotonic behavior. The most applicable method of the two most effective methods was used to decouple the effects of fourteen variables on six performance characteristics in the design of a Small Modular Reactor version of the Advanced Pressurized Water Reactor AP1000. The methods’ application succeeded in finding the most important main effects and interactions of each performance characteristic. The performance of the methods’ application to three performance characteristics was compared to the performance of fractional factorial designs. The methods were found to significantly reduce the projection error when the assumption of variables’ monotonic behavior is valid

Exploring the use of carbohydrate resources for the production of waterborne polymers

292 p.Carbohidratos son unos de las materias primas renovables más interesantes por su abundancia y estructura química.El objetivo de este proyecto es la síntesis de polímeros a partir de monómeros derivados de azucares mediante polimerización radicalaria en medio acuoso para su uso como recubrimientos. Con esta estrategia se pretende sintetizar materiales respetuosos con el medio ambiente a la vez que reducir las emisiones de compuestos orgánicos volátiles (COV). Los resultados obtenidos en este trabajo son muy prometedores y abren una ventana al uso de nuevos materiales poliméricos procedentes de fuentes renovables que son capaces de competir con sus análogos derivados del petróleo.Polyma

Exploring the use of carbohydrate resources for the production of waterborne polymers

292 p.Carbohidratos son unos de las materias primas renovables más interesantes por su abundancia y estructura química.El objetivo de este proyecto es la síntesis de polímeros a partir de monómeros derivados de azucares mediante polimerización radicalaria en medio acuoso para su uso como recubrimientos. Con esta estrategia se pretende sintetizar materiales respetuosos con el medio ambiente a la vez que reducir las emisiones de compuestos orgánicos volátiles (COV). Los resultados obtenidos en este trabajo son muy prometedores y abren una ventana al uso de nuevos materiales poliméricos procedentes de fuentes renovables que son capaces de competir con sus análogos derivados del petróleo.Polyma

Take a chance on me: Cultural crowdfunding as a necessary, complementary, or substitutive business model in the Nordic countries and in Spain

Over the last 15 years, online crowdfunding has emerged as a decentralised, alternative micropatronage platform for raising capital for projects and businesses with for-profit and nonprofit goals. Concurrently, a growing body of literature has been published on crowdfunding as a new and innovative funding mechanism. Most of this literature focuses on the success of campaigns, finding that two factors usually determine their performance: firstly, the quality of the campaign’s presentation and its communication of the project or venture to potential contributors, and secondly, the choice of service model (investment versus non-investment). Fewer studies investigate what motivates adoption among entrepreneurs as promoters and how crowdfunding is used as a business model at the sector level. The objective of this thesis is to shed light on which factors motivate or inhibit the use of crowdfunding by artists and cultural entrepreneurs, as well as on how crowdfunding is used as a business model in the cultural and creative industries. A critical realist stance is adopted, and the thesis integrates findings from exploratory, intensive (qualitative), and extensive (quantitative) research designs to address these questions, using the Nordic countries and Spain as an empirical context. Several empirical and theoretical advances are made in this thesis. The primary contribution of this study's empirical research is that it finds that claims that crowdfunding in the cultural and creative industries (CCI) represents a "viable" alternative or "democratisation" of funding and financing arrangements are not supported by an analysis of cross-sectional campaign data. Instead, the evidence favours "winner-take-all" market structures. Important theoretical progress was made by showing that the micro perspective alone is insufficient for understanding the motivations behind – and the adoption of – cultural crowdfunding. Mesolevel (platform environment, industry category, and the configuration of production systems) and macro-level (configuration of institutional environments and arrangements) structures and mechanisms are also relevant in understanding what drives or impedes the adoption and use of crowdfunding. This thesis makes a significant contribution by considering these contexts in order to unpack differences in motivations that help to explain how crowdfunding is actually being used by artists and cultural entrepreneurs. Most of these promoters adopt crowdfunding out of necessity due to a lack of alternatives. In a few project- and industry-specific circumstances, crowdfunding serves as either a complementary or substitutive source of funding. Using longitudinal data, this thesis is one of the few contributions that exist that describe and explain the various forms of cultural crowdfunding. Being aware of and responsive to geographical contexts, institutional settings, and project types demonstrates the value of a focus on object specificity. It also demonstrates the value and benefits of combining methods to unpack crowdfunding as a phenomenon in ways that few other studies of cultural crowdfunding have accomplished.Sammendrag I løpet av de siste 15 årene har nettbasert folkefinansiering vokst frem som en desentralisert, alternativ mikrofinansieringsmodell brukt til pengeinnsamling for prosjekter og virksomheter av både allmennyttig og profittbasert karakter. Samtidig har det blitt publisert en voksende litteratur om folkefinansiering som en ny og innovativ tjeneste. Mesteparten av denne litteraturen setter søkelys på kampanjesuksess, og finner at to faktorer vanligvis avgjør utfallet: kampanjens presentasjon og formidling til støttespillere samt valg av tjenestemodell (innhenting av egenkapital versus belønnings- eller donasjonsbasert?). Færre studier undersøker hva som motiverer til adopsjon blant jobbskapere og hvordan folkefinansiering brukes som forretningsmodell på sektornivå. Målet med avhandlingen er å belyse hva som motiverer eller hemmer bruken av folkefinansiering blant kunstnere og kulturelle jobbskapere, samt hvordan folkefinansiering brukes som forretningsmodell i kulturelle og kreative næringer. Oppgaven inntar en kritisk realistisk metodologisk innfallsvinkel som innpasser funn fra utforskende, intensive (kvalitative) og ekstensive (kvantitative) forskningsdesign for å adressere spørsmålene. De nordiske land og Spania brukes som en empirisk kontekst. Avhandlingen kommer med flere empiriske og teoretiske bidrag. Det primære empiriske bidraget er at påstander om at folkefinansiering innen de kulturelle og kreative næringer i seg selv representerer et "levedyktig" alternativ eller "demokratisering" av tilgang til finansiering. Dette støttes ikke av en analyse av tverrsnittsdata på kampanjenivå. «Winner-takes-it-all» strukturer favoriseres i stedet. Et teoretisk hovedbidrag er å vise at mikroperspektivet alene er utilstrekkelig for å forstå motivasjonen for å ta i bruk kulturell folkefinansiering. Strukturer og mekanismer på både meso- (plattformmiljø, bransjekategori og konfigurasjon av produksjonssystemer) og makronivå (konfigurasjon av institusjonelle miljøer og ordninger) må også inkluderes for å forstå hva som driver eller hindrer adopsjon og bruk av folkefinansiering. Avhandlingen bidrar med en kontekstuell analyse som synliggjør forskjeller i motivasjoner som bidrar med forklaring av hvordan folkefinansiering faktisk brukes av kunstnere og kulturelle jobbskapere. Et flertall av disse bruker folkefinansiering av nødvendighet på grunn av mangel på tilgang til alternative finansieringskilder. I noen få prosjekt- og bransjespesifikke omstendigheter fungerer folkefinansiering enten som en komplementær eller substituerende finansieringskilde. Ved å bruke langsgående data er oppgaven ett av få eksisterende bidrag som beskriver og forklarer de ulike formene for kulturell folkefinansiering. Ved å være sensitiv til forskjeller forårsaket av geografi, institusjonelle rammevilkår og prosjekttyper viser avhandlingen verdien av et søkelys på objektspesifisitet. Den demonstrerer også verdien og fordelene ved å kombinere metoder i studier av folkefinansiering som et fenomen på måter få andre tilsvarende studier har klart å få til.publishedVersio

Proliferation-proof Uranium/Plutonium and Thorium/Uranium Fuel Cycles: Safeguards and Non-Proliferation

Thermal and neutron physics analysis show that above certain concentrations of the isotope Pu-238 hypothetical nuclear explosive devices, made of reactor-grade plutonium, are technically not feasible. Future proliferation-proof fuel cycles are proposed which make use of methods of actinide tansmutation.Reactors operating in the thorium/uranium fuel cyce are loaded with <20% U-235 uranium fuel which can be made proliferation-proof against re-enrichment by adding a certain ppm level of U-232

Subsurface Characterization by Means of Geovisual Analytics

This Thesis is concerned with one of the major problems in subsurface characterizations emerging from ever-increasing loads of data in the last decades: What kind of technologies suit well for extracting novel, valid and useful knowledge from persistent data repositories for the characterization of subsurface regions and how can such technologies be implemented in an integrated, community-open software platform? In order to address those questions, an interactive, open-source software platform for geoscientific knowledge discovery has been developed, which enables domain experts to generate, optimize and validate prognostic models of the subsurface domain. Such a free tool has been missing in the geoscientific community so far. The extensible software platform GeoReVi (Geological Reservoir Virtualization) implements selected aspects of geovisual analytics with special attention being paid to an implementation of the knowledge discovery in databases process. With GeoReVi the human expert can model and visualize static and dynamic systems in the subsurface in a feedback cycle. The created models can be analyzed and parameterized by means of modern approaches from geostatistics and data mining. Hence, knowledge that is useful to both the assessment of subsurface potentials and to support decision-making during the utilization process of the subsurface regions can be extracted and exchanged in a formalized manner. The modular software application is composed of both integrated and centralized databases, a graphical user interface and a business logic. In order to fulfill the needs of low computing time in accordance with high computational complexity of spatial problems, the software system makes intense use of parallelism and asynchronous programming. The competitiveness of industry branches, which are aimed at utilizing the subsurface in unknown regions, such as the geothermal energy production or carbon capture and storage, are especially dependent on the quality of spatial forecasts for relevant rock and fluid properties. Thus, the focus of this work has been laid upon the implementation of algorithms, which enhance the predictability of properties in space under consideration of uncertainty. The software system was therefore evaluated in ample real-world scenarios by solving problems from scientific, educational and industrial projects. The implemented software system shows an excellent suitability to generically address spatial problems such as interpolation or stochastic simulation under consideration of numerical uncertainty. In this context, GeoReVi served as a tool for discovering new knowledge with special regard to investigating the heterogeneity of rock media on multiple scales of investigation. Among others, it could be demonstrated that the three-dimensional scalar fields of different petrophysical and geochemical properties in sandstone media may diverge significantly at small-scales. In fact, if the small-scale variability is not considered in field-scale projects, in which the sampling density is usually low, statistical correlations and thus empirical relationships might be feigned. Furthermore, it could be demonstrated that the simple kriging variance, which is used to simulate the natural variability in sequential simulations, systematically underestimates the intrinsic variability of the investigated sandstone media. If the small-scale variability can be determined by high-resolution sampling, it can be used to enhance conditional simulations at the scale of depositional environments

Persistence of Invariant Objects under Delay Perturbations

In this dissertation, we investigate functional differential equations which come from adding delay-related perturbations to ODEs or evolutionary PDEs. Despite the singular nature of the perturbations, when the perturbations are small, we get that some invariant objects of the unperturbed equations persist and depend on the parameters with high regularity. The results apply to equations with state-dependent delay perturbations and equations arising in electrodynamics. This is based on joint work with Joan Gimeno and Rafael de la Llave.Ph.D

Control Shift

The legacy of industrialisation counts only a few decades of being accepted as cultural heritage. The change of perceptions over its connotation and significance, from a menace to historic landscapes to an outstanding historical resource, took place in an era of massive sociocultural and economic upheavals. Those far-reaching developments reshaped both the theory and the practice of heritage conservation. Since the 1970s, new conservation approaches started emerging and being employed, next to the long established strategies of preservation and restoration. Adaptive reuse was included in the repertoire of conservation and quickly gained ground, as a strategy which allowed both the preservation of heritage values and sustainable development. The incorporation of adaptive reuse as an alternative conservation approach marked a noteworthy shift in heritage care. Contemporary conservation seized aiming at the prevention of change. Instead, it embraced it, following the new axiom: ‘Managing change’. This dissertation, positioned in the crossroads of the heritage conservation, architectural and spatial planning fields, focuses on Industrial Heritage Reuse practice in Europe. Despite widely employed in the last half century, Industrial Heritage Reuse still remains particularly challenging and highly confusing, hiding internal and external risks. Those resonate from the conditions of present times, the ambiguities of the contemporary framework of conservation, the embedded dilemmas of the Reuse practice as well as from the particularities of this special heritage group. This vastly complex yet fascinating topic has not yet been studied holistically under the circumstances dictated by the contemporary era. A deeper and broader understanding of the practice has assumed greater urgency in the 21st century, as it is the stepping stone for the enhancement of the practice -a demand that is increasingly stressed by academic and professional circles. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the potential of enhancement of the Industrial Heritage Reuse through the identification and analysis of its influencing Aspects, under the light of the contemporary theoretical conservation concepts, the current demands of the field of practice and the rising challenges of the 21st century context. This research addresses a topical issue, drawing from the concepts of the contemporary theory of conservation, challenging outdated theoretical notions and conventional practical and methodological applications. Furthermore, it sheds light to a hazy and confusing subject, addressing the tensions and the unresolved issues, highlighted by the existing literature on multiple disciplines. It revisits and reinterprets the standing axiom ‘Managing Change’, providing the scientific community with missing answers on the way, the Actors and the criteria based on which this can be achieved. Drawing upon both theory and practice on an international level, this inquiry gives a holistic and multileveled view on the subject under investigation, stimulating further thought and debate. Apart from extending the academic body of knowledge, the intention of this doctoral research is also to become a useful springboard for the practitioners that engage with Industrial Heritage Reuse. In order to achieve that, this dissertation presents an international and retrospective review of Industrial Heritage care, allowing experience drawn from one country to inform approaches on safeguarding via Reuse on other countries. Furthermore, it offers inspiration and raises awareness through the ‘ReIH’ online knowledge platform (http://reindustrialheritage.eu/projects) and the analysis of twenty cases studies of best practice. Lastly, taking into account the pressing issues of sustainability, equality and multilateralism, it offers guidance, providing a much needed alternative framework for the conservation of Industrial Heritage. This framework is capable of practical implementation and can contribute to an enhanced, more responsive, more sustainable, more inclusive, more value-driven and more holistic practice