VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Effect of nozzle guide vane shaping on high pressure turbine stage performance

This thesis presents a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) study of high pressure gas turbine blade design with different realistic inlet temperature and velocity boundary conditions. The effects of blade shaping and inlet conditions can only be fully understood by considering the aerodynamics and heat transfer concurrently; this is in contrast to the sequential method of blade design for aerodynamics followed by cooling. The inlet boundary conditions to the NGV simulations are governed by the existence of discrete fuel injectors in the combustion chamber. An appreciation of NGV shaping design under engine realistic inflow conditions will allow for an identification of the correct three dimensional shaping parameters that should be considered for design optimisation.
The Rolls-Royce efficient Navier-Stokes solver, HYDRA, was employed in all computational results for a transonic turbine stage. The single passage unsteady method based on the Fourier Shape Correction is adopted. The solver is validated under both rich burn (hot steak only) and the case with swirl inlet profiles for aerothermal characteristics; good agreement is noted with the validation data. Post processing methods were used in order to obtain time-averaged results and blade visualisations. Subsequently, a surrogate design optimisation methodology using machine learning combined with a Genetic Algorithm is implemented and validated.
A study of the effect of NGV compound lean on stage performance is carried out and contrasted for uniform and rich burn inlets, and subsequently for lean burn. Compound lean is shown to produce a tip uploading at the rotor inlet, which is beneficial for rich burn, but detrimental for lean burn. It is also found that for rich burn, fluid driving temperature is more dominant than HTC in determining rotor blade heat transfer, the opposite sense to the uniform inlet. Also, for a lean burn inlet, there is another role reversal, with HTC dominating fluid driving temperature in determining heat transfer.
A novel NGV design methodology is proposed that seeks to mitigate the combined effects of inlet hot streak and swirling flow. In essence, the concept two NGVs in a pair are shaped independently of each other, thus allowing the inlet flow non uniformity to be suitably accommodated.
Finally, two numerical NGV optimisation studies are undertaken for the combined hot streak and swirl inlet for two clocking positions; vane impinging and passage aligned. Due to the prohibitive cost of unsteady CFD simulations for an optimisation strategy, a suitable objective function at the NGV exit plane is used to minimise rotor tip heat flux. The optimised shape for the passage case resulted in the lowest tip heat flux distribution, however the optimum shape for the impinging case led to the highest gain in stage efficiency. This therefore suggests that NGV lean and clocking position should be a consideration for future optimisation and design of the HP stage.

Keywords: hot streak
Compound lean
swirling flow
Advisor: Khanal, B
Portfolio of original compositions and critical writing

On a May morning in 2013 news broke that a unique figure within British musical life had died unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of fifty-eight. First coming to notoriety in the early 1980s, the composer Steve Martland’s output spanned fusions of classical and popular instruments, a song cycle/pop album released on an independent alternative label, a predilection for string music descended as much from Dutch and American minimalists as his more pastoral English forebears, works for his own band of winds, guitars and drums, and ended with a choir piece giving traditional seafaring texts a minimalist treatment. Paralleling this stylistic evolution, all the while he was an opinionated and outspoken left-winger, frequently commenting on both the politics of music-making and broader socio-political topics. But from my perspective most compelling is how he sought to address these concerns with his compositions.
With little sustained attention having been paid to Martland beyond journalistic writings and some from a sociological perspective, this dissertation seeks both to be the first tracing of his career but have as its central focus an examination of just how his politics were expressed in his compositions and how this evolved. I cast a critical eye toward the works themselves, sketches held at the British Library and interviews and reviews to build insight into an idiosyncratic artistic response to a period of great social and cultural change in Britain that reveals itself to be a great deal more nuanced, conscientious and sometimes contradictory than it first appears.

Keywords: Music
Postmodernism
Steve Martland
Louis Andriessen
Politics
Composition
Thatcherism
Sexual/gender politics
Advisor: Saxton, R
Cross, J
The structure and activities of the Big Circle Boys in Canada

Scholars have long made two claims: ethnic-Chinese criminal entrepreneurs have replaced traditional organised crime in transnational criminal markets including in high-level drug trafficking; there is no discernible structure or commonality (other than the desire for profit) among these informally organised criminals. This study assesses the validity of these assertions by investigating the Big Circle Boys (BCB) in Canada, drawing on qualitative data gathered from the field and from official documents. The BCB is found to be a decentralised network of career criminals comprised of illegal immigrants from Guangzhou, China. Their numbers have been steadily declining since the late 1990s. Among other activities, the BCB are found to be mainly involved in the drug markets, where they have competitively dominated the heroin trade during the 1990s. They do not fit the models of organised criminal group or mafia, but are classified to be a communal business based on Natarajan and Belanger's (1998) typology; this is attributed to their highly connected and collaborative core network comprised of BCB individuals and BCB cell leaders. Other overlapping typological categories found in their cellular network include those of freelance criminal, family business, and corporation. The BCB's violent reputation is not found to be superficial due to documented violent conducts, despite the false perpetuation of this image at times by non-BCB criminals. Internally, the BCB are capable of managing relations and resolving disputes without resorting to violence. The sources of their trust are derived from a combination of achieved and preordained ties, both of which have strong (sub)cultural underpinnings in the Chinese notion of guanxi and the Western concept of social capital. A third BCB generation is not likely to emerge primarily due to the lack of historical and sociocultural conditions which gave rise to the two earlier generations as explained by various classic criminological theories.

Advisor: Varese, F
Identification of chromatin modifying mechanisms in inflammatory macrophages in rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a debilitating chronic inflammatory disease causing bone and cartilage degradation. Macrophages are known to play a role in RA pathology by producing pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, which activates immune cells, drives inflammation and facilitates the degradation of bone and cartilage. Alterations in epigenetic mechanisms, processes that regulate gene expression, have been implicated in the regulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines in RA. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to determine specific epigenetic variation between RA patient blood and synovial fluid (SF)-derived macrophages (SF MLS). Granulocyte and macrophages colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) was used to differentiate healthy donor and RA patient blood monocytes into macrophages. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was used to stimulate blood and SF-derived macrophages to initiate inflammatory cytokine production. A library of small molecule inhibitors was used to identify key epigenetic regulators of pro-inflammatory cytokine production. Bromodomain and extra-terminal (BET) protein inhibitors (JQ1, I-BET151, PFI-1) were the only class of inhibitor to show consistent down regulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines in both healthy and RA patient-derived macrophages. However, only JQ1 was shown to reduce TNFα production significantly in SF MLS. Transcriptional profiling of RA patient SF MLS indicated a preference for a pro-inflammatory phenotype, and a resistance to steroids (a trait found in 30% of RA patients); SF MLS production of chemokines and cytokines were not downregulated by glucocorticoids in comparison to corresponding blood-derived macrophages. However, JQ1 treatment successfully suppressed these genes. In addition, silencing of BRD4 in blood-derived macrophages from healthy donors reduced pro-inflammatory cytokine production. Chromatin immunoprecipitation studies showed BRD4 was localised to pro-inflammatory promoter regions upon LPS stimulation and displaced in the presence of JQ1. These studies identified BET proteins BRD2, 3 and 4, as essential epigenetic regulators of pro-inflammatory cytokine and chemokine production in both healthy donors and RA patient macrophages. Furthermore, the observation that BET inhibitors can regulate genes that are steroid resistant in RA patient SF MLS, highlights their therapeutic potential in RA.

Keywords: In vitro
Patients
Small molecule inhibitors
Cell biology
Human cell biology
Synovial fluid
Rheumatoid arthritis
Epigenetics
Advisor: Oppermann, U
Swales, C
Mander, P
Prinjha, R
Disraeli and Religion

This thesis offers a new understanding of Benjamin Disraeli’s religious thought. Historians remember Disraeli as a mercurial self-fashioner, who adopted various personae throughout his public life. In focusing on his eccentric self-fashioning as a political actor and novelist, many scholars have removed Disraeli from his nineteenth-century intellectual contexts in their analyses of his ideology. No full-length study of Disraeli’s religious position yet exists; instead, writers have subsumed his ideas about Judaism into analyses of his strategic presentation of Jewishness, and dismissed his Christian religious practice as politically expedient.
This study takes a different approach. Rather than asking whether Disraeli can be considered a Christian or a Jew, it examines the complicated religious ideas that emerge from his body of written work, and especially from his novels. Disraeli’s Judeo-Christian theism was panoramically and imaginatively conceived, and therefore less invested in complex Victorian ecclesiastical politics than the religious beliefs of some of his parliamentary contemporaries. Nevertheless, his publicly-expressed ideas about faith can be comfortably situated within the dynamic religious atmosphere of nineteenth-century Britain. The main arguments are offered in Chapters 2-5, which consider salient religious themes in Disraeli’s work: his inflection of the Bible in his early novels, his figurative notion of Zionism, his religious conception of chosenness, his interest in ‘Neology’ and biblical criticism, the religious assumptions that undergird his language of race, and his view of England’s soil and constitution as sacred. Chapter 1 provides important contexts for these discussions by outlining the manner in which Disraeli’s work intervened in the religious debates of his time.
Placing Disraeli’s religious ideas in these contexts not only fills an important gap in Disraeli scholarship; it also addresses methodological issues in writing religious history. Twentieth-century histories focused on Disraeli’s Romanticism, orientalism, racial otherness, and political ideology at the expense of his engagement with the religious testimonies and traditions of his time. This thesis therefore offers an important corrective to both Disraeli studies and Victorian historical scholarship.

Advisor: Skinner, S
Foot, S
Characterisation of the mitochondrial RNase P complex and associated diseases

Human mitochondrial RNase P protein 1 (MRPP1) and 2 (MRPP2) form a methyltransferase complex with N1-methylation activity towards purine-9 on mitochondrial tRNA. A third component, mitochondrial RNase P protein 3 (MRPP3), adds RNase P 5'-end ribonuclease processing activity to the complex. MRPP2 alone is a dehydrogenase reductase (SDR) involved in many reactions e.g. steroid metabolism and isoleucine β-oxidation. Inherited MRPP2 missense mutations cause the rare neurological HSD10 disease, where, due to the multifunctional nature of MRPP2, no clear genotype-phenotype relationship has been established. In this study, investigations are performed on the molecular properties of the individual proteins, as well as interactions within the methyltransferase/RNase P MRPP1-MRPP2-MRPP3 complex, to shed light on disease-causing mutations.
At the molecular level, the N-terminal region of MRPP1, with no known structural fold, is responsible for dimerisation, whilst the C-terminal region contains a methyltransferase (MT) domain. The structure of the MRPP1 MT-domain to 1.96 Å resolution reveals the binding of the methyl donor S-adenosyl-methionine (SAM). Assembly of the MRPP1-MRPP2 methyltransferase complex requires intact proteins, and formation of the MRPP1-MRPP2-MRPP3 RNase P complex further requires the pre-tRNA substrate. Low-resolution small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) models of the complexes, with and without tRNA substrate, provide clues into the protein-tRNA interaction. Reported patient mutations in MRPP2 alters the biochemical properties of the protein with each effect correlating with the structural location of the mutation. From the biochemical data, a correlation exists between phenotype and MRPP2 protein abundance. A novel missense mutation, causing a mild phenotype, show devastating effects on all functions involving MRPP2, thus no clear correlation exists between disease severity and residual activity. A patient mutation in MRPP3, leading to the rare disorder Perrault syndrome, targets the active site and leads to a decrease in product formation. The mutation does not affect MRPP1-MRPP2-MRPP3 complex assembly, hence agreeing well with it being a catalytic mutant.
Together, these structural and biochemical data provide a better understanding of the molecular facets affected by HSD10 disease patient mutations, to further explore the diverse disease severity observed in patients. Long term, this will hopefully lead to novel treatments designed for patients suffering from HSD10 disease.

Advisor: Yue, W
Oppermann, U
The well-disposed mind: Joyce, Loyola, and the psychoanalysis of ambivalence

This thesis examines the relationship between the fiction of James Joyce and the theological practices outlined by Ignatius of Loyola. By deliberately foregoing claims of direct or simple influence, the thesis illustrates the way in which Loyola’s concepts of belief, irony, discernment, and indifference illuminate the operations of the Joycean text.
These operations in both Loyola and Joyce are themselves best explicated through the use of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory. Klein and her followers analyze dynamics of belief, representation, and meaning as products of frustration. Loyola and Joyce both force the reader into symmetrical situations of frustration, and Kleinian analysis helps us see how Joyce uses his texts as a kind of exercise for the reader—an exercise of productive frustration, disappointment, and loss.
I trace the way this loss can turn reading into a reparative act, one that moves through the Kleinian ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position into a more productive, contingent, depressive position. I thus address Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s proposal for reparative reading. By examining both Loyola's and Joyce's engagement with (and invitations into) frustrating, paranoid reading, I show how this engagement might become reparative.
The thesis begins with an analysis of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, finding there a specific structure of 'earnest irony.' It continues with a close reading of 'The Dead,' discerning how this structure operates in the Joycean text at the levels of both content and narration. It then takes up Kleinian theory directly to see precisely what paranoid reading—of the kind both Joyce and Loyola demand—accomplishes, and what its failure achieves. Its final two chapters consider A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where it finds the narrative apparatus forcing the reader into a particular form of productive frustration, and Ulysses, which requires the greatest form of ‘earnest irony’ from the reader.

Keywords: Paranoid Reading
Psychoanalysis
Modernism and Religion
Advisor: Johnson, J
Ordination and episcopacy in the Severan-Jacobite church AD 518-c. 588

On 29 September 518, the patriarch Severus of Antioch, faced with a change in imperial religious policy following the elevation of the emperor Justin I, fled into exile in Egypt. Between 518 and 522, the remaining anti-Chalcedonian bishops in Oriens either defected or followed their patriarch into exile. From this watershed descended a new, exilic church and with it an episcopate, outside of the jurisdictional structures of the imperial church.
Although the persistence of an anti-Chalcedonian communion during this period has been the subject of previous study, modern scholars have tended uncritically to accept the testimony of the extant narrative tradition, without paying adequate attention to its rhetorical methods and objectives. This study aims to redress this problem. By incorporating a detailed examination of the documentary and canon legal evidence, it offers a reinterpretation of both the consecratory practices and apologetic program of the Severan-Jacobite church.
In doing so, this study makes two principal conclusions. First, the process of adaptation undergone by the Severan-Jacobite episcopate, in the period after 518-522, was marked by its progressive alienation from the jurisdictional framework, which circumscribed and defined the consecratory role of the episcopate within the imperial church. In response to this, the church developed an increasingly sophisticated series of compensatory mechanisms; these, though largely successful, nevertheless remained in tension with the territorial expectations underlying existing canon law, and thus were open to contestation. Second, concurrent with these procedural developments, the Severan-Jacobite church produced a discursive response – typified by the works of John of Ephesus –, which sought apologetically to rationalize its own consecratory practices, while delegitimizing and invalidating those adopted by rival anti-Chalcedonian sects.
The role of NUCKS in DNA repair

NUCKS is a vertebrate-specific, extensively post-translationally modified transcriptional regulator whose over- and under- expression is associated with cancer and obesity, respectively. We have previously found that NUCKS protein levels increase in DNA-damaged cells, and other studies have reported DNA damage-dependent NUCKS phosphorylation. However, the full impacts of NUCKS depletion on DNA damage repair has not been established. Addressing this question, we show that NUCKS depletion activates some DNA damage response proteins and might be associated with accumulation of DNA damage in cancer cells. Furthermore, the transcriptional targets for NUCKS are poorly defined. To this end, we couple data from a published ChIP-Seq analysis for NUCKS with a bioinformatics approach to identify genes coexpressed with NUCKS in cancer patient samples and cell lines. We identify a number of genes, including many involved in DNA repair. We correspondingly find that NUCKS-depleted cells express lower levels of these genes and exhibit some hallmarks of their deficiency. Finally, we investigate how NUCKS’ putative transcriptional targets relate to disease, and therefore how NUCKS might be used as a biomarker for disease.

Advisor: Dianov, G
Legrand, A
The tonal webern: a physiognomy of early modernism

As a consequence of the elevation of Anton Webern as the figurehead of atonality and a precursor to post-war serialism, the composer’s tonal repertoire has been widely regarded as embarrassing works of juvenilia and so merely a parergon to what was yet to come, to the extent that it has remained little known and understudied up to this day.
The first extensive account of Webern’s tonal music (1899–1908), this dissertation explores the complex and variegated ways in which the young Webern engaged with, and sought actively to contribute to, the cultural ideas and discourses of turn-of-the-century modernism, well before he would self-consciously embark upon his famous ‘path’ to the New Music. Through close study of key works such as the symphonic tone poem Im Sommerwind, the ‘Segantini’ string quartet, and the Passacaglia for large orchestra op. 1 in light of recent developments in the theory and analysis of late nineteenth-century tonal music (sonata deformation theory, extended Schenkerian techniques, and neo-Riemannian transformations), each chapter illuminates a unique aspect of Webern’s early modernist imagination. Providing a wealth of new historical and philological insights from the manuscripts, sketches, and biographical documents archived at the Paul Sacher Foundation, this study addresses Webern’s aesthetic interest in the evocation of atmosphere and lyrical temporality, the Zarathustrian meaning-strata embedded in his musical language, the formal functions of his use of energetic waves, and his revisionary understanding of Viennese Classicism at a time when Vienna was precariously poised between historicist tendencies on the one hand and attempts at a radical reformation of the past on the other.
The discussion is framed by a post-Adornian/post-Dahlhausian concern for a critical reappraisal of the category of ‘early style’. While acknowledging the rapid stylistic transformation that Webern’s tonal language underwent, shaped in particular by his studies with Arnold Schoenberg from 1904–1908, it will be suggested that ‘earliness’ in Webern is not simply a chronological term but is rather best understood in terms of a constitutive tension between phenomenological and dialectical modes of musical thought – a tension which had crystallised at the turn-of-the-century as essentially irreconcilable and yet formed the discursive matrix though which much of Webern’s aesthetic physiognomy was shaped. In this way, this dissertation is as much a study of the generative elements of Webern’s musical imagination as it is a study of the intellectual milieus of Viennese modernism.

Advisor: Cross, J