VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Fatigue Analysis of Automative Tensioner in Front End Accessory Drive Systems

Tensioners, as critical parts of automotive Front End Accessory Drive (FEAD) systems, are subjected to a significant range of dynamic loads due to engine pulsations which can lead to fatigue and operational failure. It is challenging to analytically investigate the fatigue life for powertrain components given the parameters involved. In this paper, the fatigue life assessment of a tensioner is studied through three main steps, namely stress analysis, fatigue properties estimation, and fatigue life prediction. Series of finite element analyses are carried out to investigate stress distribution in the tensioner spindle and pinpoint the critical areas. In addition, the fatigue properties of the tensioner are estimated using the experimental data. The tensioner fatigue behavior is analyzed through strain-life approach. The predicted fatigue parameters was then used to generate the cyclic stress-strain curve for the material of the selected tensioner based on Morrow theory. Finally, the fatigue estimation method was modified based on Neuberâ s rule and using the generated cyclic stress-strain curve for the die cast A380 tensioner. This model presents the Neuber parameter life data to account for plasticity correction. The possibility of using the newly developed HPDC magnesium alloys, MRI 153M and MRI 230D as alternative materials for tensioner casting parts is investigated in this study. Wohler curves for these different alloys AZ91D, MRI153M, and MRI230D are presented and then compared to current material for casting parts of the tensioner, A380 aluminum alloy. Effects of possible design variables were also investigated in the study using the response surface method. A methodology to achieve an optimal design shape for the tensioner based on the application and loading was proposed when considering life of the part. This research work presents an in-depth quantitative modeling approach to estimate the fatigue life of the automotive tensioner under real working condition by developing the stress histories. The developed modeling approach is applicable for evaluating any cases involving power train mechanical components.

Keywords: Fatigue Analysis
Front End Accessory Drives
Tensioner
Advisor: Zu, Jean W.
Collaborative Painting Between Minds and Hands: Art Criticism, Connoisseurship, and Artistic Sodality in Early Modern Italy

The intention of this dissertation is to open up collaborative pictures to meaningful analysis by accessing the perspectives of early modern viewers. The Italian primary sources from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries yield a surprising amount of material indicating both common and changing habits of thought when viewers looked at multiple authorial hands working on an artistic project. It will be argued in the course of this dissertation that critics of the seventeenth century were particularly attentive to the practical conditions of collaboration as the embodiment of theory. At the heart of this broad discourse was a trope extolling painters for working with what appeared to be one hand, a figurative and adaptable expression combining the notion of the united corpo and the manifold meanings of the artist’s mano. Hardly insistent on uniformity or anonymity, writers generally believed that collaboration actualized the ideals of a range of social, cultural, theoretical, and cosmological models in which variously formed types of unity were thought to be fostered by the mutual support of the artists’ minds or souls. Further theories arose in response to Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s hypothesis in 1590 that the greatest painting would combine the most highly regarded old masters, each contributing their particular talents towards the whole. Presented with this ideal involving inimitable hands and minds, Francesco Scannelli, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, and Marco Boschini each reflected on the practical conditions and possibilities of such a scenario. Collectors and connoisseurs, meanwhile, often discerned multiple hands in a single picture, leading to dubious attributions of collaborative authorship, particularly when the social circumstances supporting the collaboration were thought to be projected in the subject matter. The connoisseur’s fanciful tendency could even be exploited by the art market, a phenomenon that is especially observable in a group of half-length figures that was purportedly made by Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Titian. Finally, a case study of the Venetian painters Palma Giovane and Aliense, whose families were bonded in marriage on the eve of a series of joint projects, tests the implications of those values in criticism, theory, and connoisseurship when collaboration was put into social practice.

Keywords: Art Theory and Practice
Collaboration
Connoisseurship
Italy
Style
Workshops
Advisor: Sohm, Philip
Regional Deformation and Dynamic Processes of the Southern Puna Plateau, Central Andes

The southern Puna Plateau of the central Andes offers an excellent opportunity to (1) advance our understanding in orogenic models for non-collisional mountain belts, (2) test Earth’s upper-crustal responses to lower lithospheric processes, and (3) explore uses of low-temperature thermochronology in studying landscape evolution. This thesis provides important constraints on regional deformation and landscape evolution for the southern Puna Plateau since the late Paleozoic, and focuses on reconstructing its Cenozoic history in detail, using field, laboratory and numerical methods. Sedimentary data, sandstone modal composition, detrital zircon U-Pb geochronological and detrital apatite fission-track thermochronological data suggest that the oldest sedimentary units on the SE (southeastern) and SW (southwestern) Puna Plateau belong to upper Eocene to lower Oligocene, defining a regional sedimentary basin across the plateau region during ~38-28 Ma. Provenance analysis suggests that this basin was sourced from active orogenic front to the west and re-activated relict landscape to the east. During the late Oligocene (~25 Ma) to mid-late Miocene (~8 Ma), the southern Puna Plateau started to be compartmentalized by several major, ~N-S-trending intervening ranges, such as the Sierra de Calalaste and Sierra Laguna Blanca, documented by bedrock apatite fission-track and (U-Th-Sm)/He thermochronology. Field mapping, structural analysis, zircon U-Pb and whole-rock 40Ar/39Ar dating reveal that the southernmost Puna Plateau experienced upper-crustal contraction during the late Miocene (~12-8 Ma). Before the late Eocene, the region of the southern Puna Plateau was home to several episodes of exhumation and related topographic highs. Using bedrock apatite fission-track and zircon and apatite (U-Th-Sm)/He thermochronology and modeling, this thesis documents evidence for major topographic highs during the late Paleozoic and the late Cretaceous, and refines paleogeographical models for the southern central Andes. Particularly, the late Cretaceous exhumation related to the development of rift shoulders has caused larger amounts of exhumation compared to that introduced by Cenozoic mountain building processes.

Advisor: Schoenbohm, Lindsay M
Troubling Inclusion: The Politics of Peer Work and 'People with Lived Experience' in Mental Health Interventions

Abstract This thesis is a study of how some mad people come to be known as ‘people with lived experience,’ an emerging identity and strategic essentialism which attempts to valorize the knowledge of those with experiences of distress/mental health system encounters. Currently, claiming such an identity authorizes us to work professionally as peer workers within mental health research and service systems. Thus, by virtue of our ‘lived experience,’ the peer worker becomes enmeshed in the governance of ‘similar others.’ This study maps the emergence, performance, and performativity of the peer worker through the case study of the At Home/Chez Soi project (2009-2013), a national research demonstration project which both implemented services and studied their effects to learn how to best manage the ‘chronically homeless mentally ill’ in Canada. Because peer inclusion is now considered a best practice in mental health interventions, peer workers are key paraprofessionals recruited to be part of the project assemblage. Through ethnographic and interview data, I offer a critical analysis of how peer participation is mobilized and put to work within the confines of mental health governances. By demonstrating how peers actively work to self-govern our subjectivity and subject-positions to become recognizable as peers, this work denaturalizes peer identity. I argue that peer work is ‘bridge work:’ we work as informants to bridge the divides between respectable and degenerate bodies in order to help inform neoliberal governance. Key to this process is peer storytelling, a central way in which our experiences become commodities, consumed as recovery narratives which help maintain us as the problems that need to be fixed. The study elaborates two main conclusions that elucidate a paradox inherent to peer work. First, that our participation is conceived as useful when the target of our experiential knowledge is directed at managing abject populations. Secondly, that when we make attempts to deploy our knowledge to challenge the regimes of truth and practices that govern us, this work is troubled and managed. In this way, peers workers, through practice, learn the rules of engagement that govern our inclusion within the folds of systems of power.

Keywords: Disability Studies
Identity
Mad Studies
Peer Support Work
Recovery
Social Movements
Advisor: Razack, Sherene
The Korean Internet Freak Community and Its Cultural Politics, 2002–2011

In this dissertation I will shed light on the interwoven process between Internet development and neoliberalization in South Korea, and I will also examine the formation of new subjectivities of Internet users who are also becoming neoliberal subjects. In particular, I examine the culture of the South Korean Internet freak community of DCinside.com and the phenomenon I have dubbed “loser aesthetics.” Throughout the dissertation, I elaborate on the meaning-making process of self-reflexive mockery including the labels “Internet freak” and “surplus (human)” and gender politics based on sexuality focusing on gender ambiguous characters, called Nunhwa, as a means of collective identity-making, and I explore the exploitation of unpaid immaterial labor through a collective project making a review book of a TV drama Painter of the Wind. The youth of South Korea emerge as the backbone of these creative endeavors as they try to find their place in a precarious labor market that has changed so rapidly since the 1990s that only the very best succeed, leaving a large group of disenfranchised and disillusioned youth. I go on to explore the impact of late industrialization and the Asian financial crisis, and the nationalistic desire not be left behind in the age of informatization, but to be ahead of the curve. I argue that DCinside users are ambivalent subjects who try to become a desirable and successful neoliberal subject but, at the same time, are aware of their subordinated status in which they can easily become a failure and fall into a position of social loser. The culture “anything goes” of DCinside enables its users to speak out their voice and belie the consequences of neoliberalization, which makes up the politics of loser aesthetics in DCinside. As DCinside users challenged the protocols of their predecessors the netizens, so now a more extremist group has evolved to challenge the current status quo.

Keywords: DCinside
Internet
Loser Aesthetics
Neoliberalism
Politics of Aesthetics
South Korea
Advisor: Song, Jesook
Discursive Formations of Community Music and the Production of Canadian Citizens in Toronto's Settlement Movement, 1900s-1930s

This thesis examines the discursive formations of community music through the history of Toronto’s settlement house movement, from the opening of University Settlement House in 1910 to the onset of World War Two. Settlement houses created community-based educational and leisure programs for poor and immigrant residents with the objective of citizenship training, and music permeated settlement work, including the establishment of Canada’s first community music schools. Settlement organizers reconfigured music not as an end in itself, but as a tool in fostering ‘civic betterment’ of poor, working class, and immigrant neighborhoods. Using primarily Foucaultian archaeological methods, this study examines how settlement music practices contributed to the discursive formation of community music with two central arguments: first, the ways in which settlement organizers used and described music through its social purpose contributed to the discursive production of community music through an emerging social rationality; second, given the explicit focus on citizenship training, different kinds of musics articulated to different ideas of citizenship in a mutually conditioning relationship. The ensemble of music practices paradoxically challenged and reinforced musical and social hierarchies by emphasizing cultural uplift without social mobility. The dissertation comprises four studies that collectively explore the multiple, contingent, and often competing practices and rationales that contributed to the formation of inter-connected discourses of citizenship and community music. The first study examines how settlement movement proponents used culture and recreation as solutions to the social problems they saw emerging from Toronto’s urbanization. The second study focuses on specific music practices used within settlement democratic and social clubs to foster self-governing behaviours among participants differentiated by gender and age. The third study takes up the rationales and practices of the settlement music schools, analyzing how the trope of good music contributed to the repeatability of conservatory music training as a technique in the cultivation of citizens, while also exalting Western European Art Music within a musical hierarchy, articulated to a corresponding social hierarchy. The final study examines how settlement house workers began integrating musics of immigrant participants to construct the social rationality of music in terms of cultural difference.

Keywords: citizenship
community music
Foucault
music education
music schools
settlement movement
Advisor: Gould, Elizabeth
Disorderly Multispecies Living: Nonhuman Animals in the Spaces of Indian Modernity

The construction and policing of a hygienic boundary between human and nonhuman animals is one of the ways that Western modernity has established the otherness of the postcolonial world. Drawing on Haraway’s idea of “ordinary multispecies living,” this dissertation attends to the representation of disorderly multispecies living in texts from India. Disorderly multispecies living, I argue, is a form of resistance to the hygiene of modernity and a powerful mode of alliance between human and nonhuman subalterns. In this analysis, I bring together the fields of animal studies and postcolonial studies in order to complicate the dominant Western focus of the former and the dominant humanism of the latter, and I also emphasize the intersections between these two parallel fields. Each of my chapters considers a physical and conceptual zone of proximity between human and nonhuman beings. My first chapter analyzes the discourse of conservation and its division of space into human and animal in three texts (by Corbett, Roy, and Ghosh). In the second chapter, I consider the way the body itself is imagined as a space of both multispecies contact and subaltern political agency in texts by M.K. Gandhi and Vikram Chandra. Chapter Three examines the connection between home and nation through companionate relationships in novels by Anita Desai and R.K. Narayan. My fourth chapter analyzes Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and journalistic accounts of the leopards of Sanjay Gandhi National Park in order to redefine the imaginative geography of the city. Here, I consider urban space as multispecies space, and discover in what I call this spatial transfection the potential for cross-species subaltern alliances. Throughout this dissertation, I am attuned to the way that texts instrumentalize nonhuman animals as figures of disturbance; at the same time, I attend to the moments when these textual animals evade narrative control and create lines of flight outside their own appropriation. I show that multispecies inhabitations disturb the function of oppressive discourses, as they apply to both human and nonhuman animals. This study proposes both an ethics of representation and an ethics of reading that has wider implications for the study of relationships between human and nonhuman animals in both literature and in life.

Keywords: Animal Studies
Critical Theory
Indian Literature
Nonhuman Animals
Postcolonial Studies
South Asian Studies
Advisor: Kanaganayakam, Chelva
Li, Victor
The Role of the Dopamine D1-D2 Receptor Heteromer in Brain Reward Function: Relevance to Drug Addiction and Depression

We have identified a novel dopamine-mediated signaling complex, the D1-D2 receptor heteromer, which couples to Gq protein to elicit phospholipase C-mediated intracellular Ca2+ release. Activation of the D1-D2 heteromer was further shown to modulate the expression of proteins implicated in reward in the nucleus accumbens, such as calcium calmodulin kinase II (CaMKII) and brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a finding which may be of relevance in neuropsychiatric disorders that exhibit altered reward perception such as addiction and depression. Therefore, the purpose of current study was to investigate a role for the D1-D2 heteromer in reward-related behaviours using animal models of cocaine addiction and depression. The results show that D1-D2 heteromer stimulation by agonist SKF 83959 attenuated addiction-related behaviours including cocaine conditioned place preference (CPP), the maintenance and reinstatement of cocaine self-administration (SA), and the expression of locomotor sensitization to cocaine, whereas D1-D2 heteromer inactivation by a selective disrupting peptide TAT-D1 consistently augmented cocaine-induced behaviours, whereas a control scrambled peptide had no such effects. Moreover, D1-D2 heteromer stimulation alone was shown to induce conditioned place aversion, whereas its selective inactivation induced CPP. In the tests for depression, D1-D2 heteromer stimulation by SKF 83959 induced a pro-depressive and anxiogenic state in the forced swim test, novelty-induced hypophagia, and the elevated plus maze, effects that were abolished by pretreatment with TAT-D1 peptide. Lastly, it was shown that the D1-D2 heteromer exerts dual modulation on neuronal activity in certain regions of brain, increasing activity in the NAc, and exerting tonic inhibition in the prelimbic and infralimbic cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, lateral habenula, and the thalamus, which likely reflects the dual excitatory/inhibitory capabilities of the GABA/Glu-co-expressing D1R/D2R MSNs. Collectively, these findings indicate that the D1-D2 heteromer may be a single molecular entity that could bidirectionally modulate brain reward function depending on its state of activation. Such an unprecedented function of a receptor complex makes the D1-D2 heteromer an attractive and novel therapeutic target for cocaine addiction and major depression, two reward-related neuropsychiatric disorders that are currently without effective treatments.

Keywords: Addiction
Animal Behaviour
Depression
Dopamine Receptors
Receptor Heteromer
Advisor: George, Susan R
Regulation of Actin Dynamics during Salmonella Invasion

Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium) invasion begins with the translocation of bacterial virulence proteins (called effectors) into host cells via a type 3 secretion system (T3SS). These effectors serve to manipulate host cell machinery leading to the formation of a cell surface structure called an invasion ruffle that subsequently mediates bacterial internalization into the host cell. Following entry, the bacteria continues to manipulate host signalling factors to establish a replicative niche. There is still much to be learned about the host machinery that is exploited by S. Typhimurium during infection. In my thesis, I show that the formin, FHOD1 plays an important role in S.Typhimurium invasion. FHOD1 is phosphorylated during S. Typhimurium invasion, a process that requires the bacterial T3SS effectors SopB and SopE/E2, as well as host proteins RhoA and ROCKII. FHOD1 and Arp2/3 are both recruited to the same invasion ruffle, but contribute differently to its formation and also display different kinetics of recruitment. The Rho GTPase family of proteins is comprised of 20 members. In the context of S. Typhimurium invasion, only Rac1, Cdc42, and RhoG have been extensively studied. A screen was conducted and revealed recruitment of RhoB, RhoD, RhoH, and RhoJ to the S. Typhimurium invasion site in a SopB-dependent manner. Regulation of Rho GTPases is achieved via post-translational modifications such as palmitoylation. To this end, I demonstrated that palmitoylation of host proteins promotes S. Typhimurium invasion and PI(3,4,5)P3 production at the invasion ruffle. Furthermore, the ability of SopB to recruit lipid rafts to the S. Typhimurium invasion site may allow for specific recruitment of palmitoylated Rho GTPases. Collectively, this data provides new insight on formation of the invasion ruffle and identifies new host factors that are exploited by S. Typhimurium to invade host cells.

Keywords: FHOD1
formin
Rho GTPase
Salmonella
Advisor: Brumell, John H
Immature Pleasures: Affective Reading in Margery Kempe, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Modern Fan Communities

This thesis explores the ideological significance of immaturity to several late medieval texts that focus on the conjunction between reading and feeling. Using examples from modern fanfiction to help theorize affective reception (that is, reading and response that privileges feeling), this thesis argues that approaching medieval texts with a ‘fannish hermeneutics’ highlights how ideas of age and temporality structure relationships between reader and text across late medieval reading communities. In particular it examines how Margery Kempe, Petrarch, and Chaucer performed, resisted and played with the idea of immature reading in their texts. For each author, an immature relationship with texts becomes a space of inappropriate desires and emotional excess, ambivalence, anxiety, and subversive power. Although these authors moved in different intellectual communities, all interacted with a shared cultural ideology of immaturity and reading that emerged primarily from monastic theories of reading and worship from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. This study argues for the centrality of a ‘fannish hermeneutics’ to this reading tradition in Chapters One and Two, and in Chapters Three and Four further argues Petrarch’s debt to this same tradition of affective piety. Chapter Five treats Chaucer’s reception of Petrarch in the Clerk’s Prologue and Tale, arguing that Petrarch’s portrayal of vernacular poetry as childish is central to Chaucer’s poetics of reception. Finally, in addition to analyses of individual late medieval texts, this study also examines how metaphors of immaturity have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century reception of medieval texts, particularly in the relationship between ‘amateur’ (a category I juxtapose with ‘fan’) and ‘professional’ medievalism. How does the cultural narrative of the movement from childish love to mature objectivity structure our understanding of history? And how might returning to ‘childishness’ as a theoretical category shape studies of medieval literature?

Keywords: Affective piety
Latin literature
Middle English literature
Queer theory
Renaissance
Advisor: Townsend, David