A Survey on Users' Perspectives to Functionalities of Web-Based Construction Collaboration Extranets

Construction collaboration extranets (CCEs) provide various functionalities depending on the vendors' origins, history, experiences, and financial status. Previous research has listed and described the functionalities that extranet systems can be capable of providing. However, no publication was found so far to systematically analyze users' perspectives to the provided functionalities. This article is to bridge this gap through a questionnaire survey to the users. It aims at examining user's attitude to functionalities of CCEs. The result may be useful to information system vendors, end-users and researchers involved in CCEs development and implementation

Normally Elliptic Singular Perturbations and Persistence of Homoclinic Orbits

We consider a dynamical system, possibly infinite dimensional or non-autonomous, with fast and slow time scales which is oscillatory with high frequencies in the fast directions. We first derive and justify the limit system of the slow variables. Assuming a steady state persists, we construct the stable, unstable, center-stable, center-unstable, and center manifolds of the steady state of a size of order O(1) and give their leading order approximations. Finally, using these tools, we study the persistence of homoclinic solutions in this type of normally elliptic singular perturbation problems

Thermal conduction in nanoscale systems

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Nonequilibrium Green's function approach to mesoscopic thermal transport

We present a formulation of a nonequilibrium Green's function method for thermal current in nanojunction atomic systems with nonlinear interactions. This first-principle approach is applied to the calculation of the thermal conductance in carbon nanotube junctions. It is shown that nonlinearity already becomes important at low temperatures. Nonlinear interactions greatly suppress phonon transmission at room temperature. The peak of thermal conductance is found to be around 400K, in good agreement with experiments. High-order phonon scattering processes are important for diffusive heat transport.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure