Enterprise Analysis of Strategic Airlift to Obtain Competitive Advantage through Fuel Efficiency

The rising cost of fuel has led to increasing emphasis on fuel efficiency in the aviation industry. As fuel costs become a larger proportion of total costs, those entities with a dynamic capability to increase their fuel efficiency will obtain competitive advantage. Assessing cargo throughput and fuel efficiency requires the creation of all routes of potential value for a given set of requirements that need to be airlifted from source to destination airfield. The time required for route computation can be significantly reduced through the use of nodal reduction. Use of the proposed model can assist evaluation of enterprise wide efficiency and effectiveness

Design and development of a debris flow tracking Smart Rock

This thesis covers the design and development of a Smart Rock sensor package to be used in U.S. Geological Survey research of debris flow phenomena. This instrumented Rock, containing inertial sensors and pressure sensors, provides information about the movement of the flow as well as the pressures seen within the flow. The goal of the sensor package is to use this information to track the position of a particle in the flow with an accuracy of 1 m over the course of 10 s.. It is found that using an ad hoc filtering method provides the required level of accuracy. Any known positions are incorporated into the filter. Large scale motions over tens of meters can be distinguished as well as small scale motions on the order of centimeters. Thus, the data gathered by the Smart Rock can be used to help verify and refine debris flow models

Numerical analysis on stainless steel diamond bird-beak joints subjected to compressive and tensile forces

The study is focused on the behaviour of structural links subjected to cyclic loading following a material variation including both stainless and high-strength steel