Master of Science

thesisBioretention is a stormwater management best management practice (BMP) designed to treat small yearly occurring storms. Bioretention is typically used on the East Coast, which is a mesic climate, with significant precipitation (500 to 750 mm precipitation annually). For Salt Lake City, UT, a semiarid climate with lower precipitation (250 to 500 mm precipitation annually), a different bioretention design is used that is better suited for this climate. In order to improve bioretention design in the semiarid west and to understand its limitations a performance assessment is needed by designers. A hydrologic performance evaluation is performed on a bioretention garden installed on the University of Utah campus. There are three main methods for water movement out of the bioretention garden including evapotranspiration, vertical infiltration and lateral water movement. Sensors installed on site, and a finite element software that simulates water movement through a variably saturated media (HYDRUS 2D/3D) are used to determine the percentage of water movement through the three methods. Sensors measure water depth in the storage layer, inflow volume, and meteorological conditions on site such as relative humidity, temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and direction. The meteorological conditions estimate evapotranspiration rates by using the Penman-Monteith equation, for nonwater limited conditions. Evapotranspiration accounts for approximately 5% of the total inflow volume for storms from April to September. HYDRUS is not effective at modeling this bioretention garden, and more information is needed on the individual process before bioretention gardens can be effectively simulated. From the data, exfiltration (lateral and vertical soil water movement) and soil water storage account for the other 95% of the inflow volume. The majority of water movement is through vertical infiltration, which is affected by initial soil water content and water temperature

Doves and hawks in economics revisited [An evolutionary quantum game theory-based analysis of financial crises]

The last financial and economic crisis demonstrated the dysfunctional long-term effects of aggressive behaviour in financial markets. Yet, evolutionary game theory predicts that under the condition of strategic dependence a certain degree of aggressive behaviour remains within a given population of agents. However, as the consequences of the financial crisis exhibit, it would be desirable to change the 'rules of the game' in a way that prevents the occurrence of any aggressive behaviour and thereby also the danger of market crashes. The paper picks up this aspect. Through the extension of the in literature well-known Hawk-Dove game by a quantum approach, we can show that dependent on entanglement, also evolutionary stable strategies can emerge, which are not predicted by classical evolutionary game theory and where the total economic population uses a non aggressive quantum strategy.Evolutionary game theory; financial crisis; hawk-dove game; quantum game theory

Implementing Team Based Learning in Freshmen Engineering Courses

Team Based Learning (TBL) is a specific pedagogical tool that emphasizes collaborative learning. Oftentimes TBL is confused with group activities and other active learning strategies involving student teams. TBL is distinct because it follows a prescribed sequence of individual work and group work, and includes immediate feedback as well as peer evaluation. TBL is widely used in medical, pharmacy and nursing schools and the use of TBL in engineering education is growing. The advantages of using TBL in the class room include: (1) students are held accountable for individual (pre-class) and group (in-class) work. (2) The responsibility for learning shifts from the instructor to the students, promoting lifelong learning skills. (3) The majority of class time is used for team assignments that use the course content applied to large difficult problems. (4) The students are actively engaged during class time. Furthermore, TBL is suitable for courses having as little as 12 students, but is also used in courses having up to 400 students. Therefore, TBL is an ideal tool to be used in freshman engineering courses. Implementation of TBL in an Introduction to Engineering course at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the Fall of 2013 is in preparation. In spite of all the benefits of using TBL, a possible deterrent for faculty to adopt TBL is the time intensive development of TBL modules and the lack of available support to develop and improve classroom materials. It is the intent of the authors to form a national freshmen engineering TBL support group to facilitate the implementation of TBL in freshmen engineering courses

Vortices and magnetic impurities

Ginzburg-Landau vortices in superconductors attract or repel depending on whether the value of the coupling constant λ is less than 1 or larger than 1. At critical coupling λ=1,it was previously observed that a strongly localised magnetic impurity behaves very similarly to a vortex. This remains true for axially symmetric configurations away from critical coupling. In particular, a delta function impurity of a suitable strength is related to a vortex configuration without impurity by singular gauge transformation. However, the interaction of vortices and impurities is more subtle and depends not only on the coupling constant λ and the impurity strength, but also on how broad the impurity is. Furthermore, the interaction typically depends on the distance and may be attractive at short distances and repulsive at long distances. Numerical simulations confirm moduli space approximation results for the scattering of one and two vortices with an impurity. However, a double vortex will split up when scattering with an impurity, and the direction of the split depends on the sign of the impurity. Head-on collisions of a single vortex with different impurities away from critical coupling is also briefly discussed

Baby Skyrme models without a potential term

We develop a one-parameter family of static baby Skyrme models that do not require a potential term to admit topological solitons. This is a novel property as the standard baby Skyrme model must contain a potential term in order to have stable soliton solutions, though the Skyrme model does not require this. Our new models satisfy an energy bound that is linear in terms of the topological charge and can be saturated in an extreme limit. They also satisfy a virial theorem that is shared by the Skyrme model. We calculate the solitons of our new models numerically and observe that their form depends significantly on the choice of parameter. In one extreme, we find compactons while at the other there is a scale invariant model in which solitons can be obtained exactly as solutions to a Bogomolny equation. We provide an initial investigation into these solitons and compare them with the baby Skyrmions of other models

Computational tools for quadratic Chabauty

Lecture note