VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Unsteady phenomena and realistic geometry effects at the combustor-turbine interface of a large gas turbine

Gas turbines in combined cycle are the cleanest and most efficient form of large-scale thermal power generation, and their use is expected to increase in the future. The most arduous conditions within a turbine are faced by the first stage nozzle guide vanes (NGV). These are located immediately after the combustion chamber and face the highest thermal loads, as well a a complex flow field influenced by combustor conditions. For this thesis, experiments and computational methods are developed and used together to investigate steady and unsteady heat transfer and aerodynamics in the nozzle guide vanes It is beneficial to reduce the heat transfer to components in order to increase efficiency and maximise component life.
Improvements were developed to experimental methods which could be carried out in a scale experimental rig, which operated at realistic Reynolds number and Mach number. Thin film gauges were developed for heat transfer measurements at higher sensitivity and spatial resolution than has been possible in the past. The use of a large numbers of unsteady pressure sensors has been pioneered successfully.
Improved experimental techniques are applied to optimising heat transfer and aerodynamics resulting from realistic features which are often overlooked in simplified studies. Several combustor chamber geometries are compared, finding that a combustor design that minimised length scales of turbulence structures reduces NGV heat transfer coefficients significantly. This shows the benefits which can be achieved by designing combustor and turbine together in a holistic manner.
The unsteady effects of large-scale flow structures generated in the combustion chamber were observed in detail by high resolution unsteady measurements and LES. Instantaneous flow phenomena which occur are measured experimentally, and are explained physically with the support of LES. Instantaneous heat transfer events are found to be sufficient to cause potentially damaging temperature fluctuations to thermal barrier coatings, despite being disguised in time-averaged measurements.
The impact of the mid-passage gap between vane platforms on heat transfer and aerodynamic efficiency is measured. An analytical model is developed, which can be used to assess the importance of such gaps in the general case. It is found that great improvements are possible if gap sizes are reduced below a critical threshold. The optimum distribution of cooling flows required to prevent ingress can be calculated by means of a one-dimensional equation, with no need for iterative optimisation.
Ingress into circumferential gaps is also investigated, and found to cause damaging local heat transfer. A measurement campaign investigating surface texturing effects on heat transfer is also presented.

Keywords: gas turbine
thin film gauge
unsteady
micro-contouring
heat transfer
nozzle guide vane
midpassage gap
Advisor: Rosic, B
Pierre de Belloy (c. 1550-1611): politics, polemic, and political thought during the French wars of religion

Lawyer and royalist, political prisoner and polemicist, Pierre de Belloy (c. 1550-1611) had the misfortune to live through interesting times. During the 1580s, he became the leading Catholic apologist of the Protestant heir-presumptive to the throne of France, Henri of Navarre. Belloy suffered imprisonment in the Conciergerie and the Bastille for his controversial political writings, the most famous of which was the Apologie catholique of 1585. After his escape in 1591, he became a royal representative, as avocat-général, to the Parlement of Toulouse. This thesis uses a combination of archival, manuscript, and printed primary sources to better understand this minor but not insignificant figure in the history of political thought. It reconstructs his formation in the society of royal office-holders in Toulouse as well as his later speeches as avocat-général to the Parlement. In so doing, it connects Belloy’s political thought, particularly his Gallican concern for royal jurisdiction, to his social background. This thesis also shows the importance of Belloy’s voice during the 1580s for his writings on the Salic Law and on the inexcommunicability of the King of France. Although Belloy is known to historians as a theorist of absolute kingship, his writing on obedience and resistance is more notable for its manipulation of Étienne de la Boétie’s La servitude volontaire than for any theory of sovereignty within it. With its dual concern for the intellectual content and social context of Belloy’s political writing, this thesis is a significant study of the place of ideas in the society of early modern France.

Keywords: Legal History
Toulouse
Intellectual History
Wars of Religion
Print
Political Thought
Polemic
Advisor: Garnett, G
Parrott, D
Gathering space: landscape and enclosure in the early neolithic of southern Britain

This thesis centres around a form of early Neolithic architecture described as the causewayed enclosure. Though detailed research has focused on the material recovered from their ditches, much of their wider interpretation is based on, or has roots in, the territorial models produced in the 1970s. This study draws on theoretical approaches including, Affordance, Proxemics, Phenomenology, and Agency to challenge these earlier interpretations.
The theoretical concepts are considered through a standardised methodology applied to 34 causewayed enclosures in four discrete areas. A Geographic Information System (GIS) is used to manage a very large dataset of early Neolithic components, ground conditions, and geospatial characteristics, and to construct ‘cost of movement’ and ‘visibility’ models.
These mathematical models examine the potential, capacity, and the presence and nature of contemporary activity. The output is used to contrast and compare characteristics, and to elucidate common landscape physiognomies.
The contribution of this research includes:
• A new interpretation of the relationship between causewayed enclosures and long barrows.
• A revised consideration of the spatiotemporal development of enclosures and the relationship between causewayed enclosures and the landscape.
• New ideas on the implications of these characteristics. Particularly in terms of mobility, the development of farming practice, though also and more generally, for social relations in the early Neolithic.
The research has demonstrated that these enclosures were carefully situated to extract very particular characteristics. A consistent pattern of avoidance emerges in respect of their relationship with long barrows. The research highlights the importance of river systems and challenges notions of fixed territories. The work shows that rivers facilitated both riverine and overland mobility, and had a pre-eminent role as ‘cultural assets’. Whilst regional variability emerges as a constant theme, a sufficient consistency of results has enabled new commentary on the context of this important early intervention in the landscape, and on some facets of early Neolithic society.
In a wider context, the synthesis of GIS based mathematical modelling and the manipulation of large datasets, coupled with the integration of archaeological theory, offers a new intra and interregional methodology, that may be applied more broadly within archaeology.

Keywords: GIS
long barrow
early neolithic
Bayesian
digital terrain model
archaeology
spatial analysis
cost model
neolithic
causewayed enclosure
visibility model
Advisor: Pollard, J
Hey, G
Bayer, O
Splitting the check: a political economy of climate change policy

The literature on climate politics has often treated policy as being nationally uniform, obscuring the ways in which different groups in the economy face different costs from mitigation. Chapter 2 develops a formal model of climate change policymaking in which stringency can vary across sectors of the economy. I show that if capital-owners have some disproportionate influence over the government, it should affect which sectors get targeted with mitigation policy. Chapter 3 uses “shadow price” data developed by Althammer and Hille to measure the stringency of climate policy on a sectoral level. Using multi-level modelling, I show that economic interests have an advantage over environmental ones, that producers have an advantage over consumers, and that capital receives more protection than labor. Chapter 4 examines the role of ideology, and shows that while most parties protect capital to some extent, right parties do so more than left ones. Chapter 5 tests whether broader political economy arrangements that protect labor enable or block stronger mitigation policy. I find that an enabling effect predominates: labor-intense sectors accept heavier policy burdens when labor-protective institutions and policies are stronger. Chapter 6 moves beyond shadow pricing data to look at public opinion. It offers the first many-country study to show that climate attitudes are shaped by individuals’ sector of employment. Chapter 7 concludes with a review of the results and avenues for future research.

Keywords: regulation
labor
shadow prices
greenhouse gasses
climate change
global warming
emissions
capital
mitigation
distributional politics
political economy
comparative politics
Advisor: Bermeo, N
Sensorimotor hand representation following altered input

This thesis investigates to what extent cortical representation of the human hand is affected by differences in tactile experience. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging as well as questionnaires, psychophysics and other imaging techniques, the included experiments aim to develop a better understanding of plasticity of the primary somatosensory cortex. In the first experiment, a diverse group of upper-limb amputees is shown to have maintained representation of their missing hand. As such, preservation of hand representation appears not to depend on continuous somatosensory inputs or even vivid phantom limb sensations. In contrast, congenital one-handers do not represent a hand they do not have. Together, this suggests hand representation is preserved in all amputees, but does require some prior hand experience. Then, congenitally blind individuals are shown to have typical hand representation in the primary somatosensory cortex. This suggests that the subtle differences in behaviour due to tactile skill acquisition (e.g. Braille reading) does not continue to shape low-level sensory areas in adulthood. In contrast, two individuals who have acquired starkly different limb behaviour from birth, professional foot painters, are shown to show different foot representation from controls. Unlike in controls, foot painters’ S1 foot area contains organised toe clusters, marking the scope of early-life sensorimotor plasticity. Finally, the immediate effects of input loss are modelled us- ing healthy controls who received a brief anaesthetic block of the afferent input from one digit. The rapid plasticity that was observed simultaneously with preservation of inter-digit relationships may help resolve apparent discrepancies between studies indicating sensorimotor representational change and long-term stability observed in amputees. Together, these studies stress the importance of early-life behaviour in shaping the primary somatosensory cortex and how later in life, the scope of sensorimotor plasticity is much more limited than previously thought.

Advisor: Tamar, M
Figures of love: amor from antiquity to the Italian middle ages

Love is a slippery subject, its effect can be physical—capturing, striking, controlling—but its physical form is not always clearly described. This ambiguity is exacerbated by the fact that the Latin word 'amor', the root of love in romance languages, is both an abstract concept and the name of a series of famous figures, from the Cupid of Classical Antiquity to the Lord of Love developed in medieval poetry, and sometimes even the Christian God. Tracing the tendrils of tradition that link these figures into one history of 'amor', this thesis examines visual as well as literary culture to arrive at an overview of the many looks of Love from classical Rome to pre-Renaissance Italy. As well as canonical authors including Virgil, Ovid, and Dante, this thesis explores the depiction of love in works of lesser known late antique poets (Ausonius, Dracontius, Ennodius), various medieval sources (from the 'Roman d’Enéas' to the laude of Jacopone da Todi), a number of Christian exegetical traditions, and a broad spread of examples from visual culture, from Roman Imperial wall-painting to late antique silverware and thirteenth-century manuscript illuminations. Rather than seeking to separate and divide the multitude of meanings that crowd around this single noun, this thesis focuses on the threads of continuity that bring the sacred and secular into touch, placing love on a spectrum of meanings—from the erotic to the divine—that often defy clear categorisation. As well as a map to the survival of Cupid in the Middle Ages, this is a study of the enduring ambiguity of 'amor', the vast signifying power of love, and the slipperiness of the many figures that have been used to represent it.

Keywords: Virgil
Dante
Late Antiquity
Text and Image
Medieval Studies
Amor
Cupid
Ovid
Advisor: Lombardi, E
Elsner, J
Beloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at Saqqara

This thesis investigates the distinctive ways in which personal names were integrated into the textual and iconographic programme of an ancient Egyptian funerary complex: that of 6th Dynasty vizier Mereruka Meri and his family. The name (rn) was a principal part of the ancient Egyptian person—which also incorporated the body, heart, the kA, and the bA—and the tomb was the primary site for the monumental memorialisation of these aspects of the self. In the context of the ancient Egyptian tomb, the survival of the name was achieved through inscribing it in stone and reaffirming it in speech, thus ensuring that the essence of the deceased lived in the memory of others. The tomb was also a site in which dependants and people associated with the deceased had their names memorialised, either as named figures which were part of the planned reliefs, or which were added (in the manner of ‘graffiti’) to the reliefs sometime after the completion of the tomb’s decoration. This thesis approaches Old Kingdom onomastics from a socio-linguistic and anthropological perspective. The primary enquiry that this thesis seeks to address is how a name’s meaning was materialised in an ancient Egyptian commemorative monument. This is achieved, firstly, by examining the possible meanings in names themselves, with careful attention to the ways in which names communicated the social, geographic, and temporal context (‘deixis’) of their referents. It is secondly achieved through studying the ways in which inscribed names were situationally embedded and contextually bound by the wider visual and architectural setting of the tomb space. Ultimately, I argue that the meanings and orthographies of ancient Egyptian personal names were affected by the ritual space(s) in which they were inscribed.

Keywords: Saqqara
personal names
onomastics
names
graffiti
socio-onomastics
veneration
funerary inscriptions
materiality
Old Kingdom
Advisor: Frood, E
Parkinson, R
After Justinian: foreign policy in the Byzantine Empire during the reigns of Justin II and Tiberius II Constantine (565-582)

This thesis focuses on state and society in the reigns of two emperors which have not been fully explored by scholars, namely those of Justin II (565-578) and Tiberius II (578-582). It sets out to provide valuable insight about the transitional period the empire underwent in the late sixth century by examining the roles of emperors Justin II and Tiberius II in regards to foreign policy. By comparison, most of the scholarship of this period focuses on the policies and reforms of either Justinian (527-565) or Maurice (582-602). This thesis attempts to provide a necessary bridge in the scholarship between these two emperors and seeks to highlight the importance of this period to the wider development of Late Antique society in the sixth century. The dissertation takes a comparative approach, by focusing on the literary and archaeological evidence available, and determining the changes that took place after the reign of Justinian. It also adopts a holistic approach. After an analysis of each set of policies separately, it will attempt to draw conclusions on how these policies influenced each other as a whole and how this contributed to the shifting frontiers that occurred during the late sixth century.

Keywords: foreign policy
Justin II
Byzantine
Justinian
Tiberius II
Advisor: Booth, P
A hybrid additive manufacturing framework for the multi-phase fabrication and in-line characterization of functional devices

Multi-material, multi-technology (MMMT) manufacturing systems combine or hybridize the benefits of individual fabrication and characterization techniques into a single manufacturing platform. In particular MMMT systems based on additive manufacturing (AM) technologies offer new opportunities for increased design freedom and additional functionality. However, the realization of the potential of AM-based MMMT systems is held back by the lack of accessible, affordable and reconfigurable hybrid-AM systems.
In this thesis, a novel, extendable hybrid-AM framework/concept is introduced. A corresponding, modular machine has been designed and built from the bottom-up. Detailed insights into the design considerations, operating principles, associated digital workflows and potential applications are discussed. The machine provided design freedom and in-line functionality previously unachievable. These aspects are then demonstrated through the: (1) AM of functional, form-factor free energy storage devices (supercapacitors, EDLC’s) in a single, automated multi-material operation; and (2) measurement of a material property distribution (the local dielectric permittivity (εr) in 3D) within printed parts as they are being formed. Careful consideration was given to the underlying materials- and AM processing-science. The supercapacitor behaviour was assessed through a range of electro-chemical and other characterization techniques, and provided encouraging energy storage behaviour. A ring-shaped supercapacitor was fabricated in a single manufacturing operation, unachievable by conventional manufacturing. Non-destructive, in-line permittivity data was reconstructed into three dimensional (3D) dielectric “images” of a printed object, and techniques to understand and improve the spatial resolution are presented.
The research aimed to accelerate the integration of functional devices in product manufacture (in particular for applications with irregular volume/shape and mass-customization requirements), accelerate the design-make-test cycle for functional devices through insight in device conformance to intended design (in-line quality control), and provide a versatile hybrid-AM environment for further research.

Keywords: Energy Storage Devices
RF
Hybrid-AM
Dielectric Imaging
In-line Characterization
Capacitors
3D Printing
Additive Manufacturing
Advisor: Grant, P
Djuna Barnes: melancholy, body, theodicy

My thesis formulates an account of melancholy as a soteriological crisis in the writings of the queer American avant-garde writer, Djuna Barnes. A critical account of melancholy is set up via a theoretical intersection of psychoanalysis, philosophical anthropology, and theology. I unfold the ontological structures that support theories of the divided subject across these fields to establish the theoretical ground where they are brought into meaningful contact. Melancholy is established as an existential predicament of the divided subject, implicating it in, i. the Fall and Original Sin (with its secular analogues); and, ii. a host of corporeal effects and affects from laughing and crying to hybridization across sex- and species-difference. The purpose here is to formulate how the psychosomatic suffering of the melancholic subject is presented in Barnes’s art, and to articulate such suffering with the aesthetic and metaphysical response it provokes in each instance. This response is elaborated in relation to the question of theodicy – that is, is God (or the God-adjuncts, the ‘Creator’ and ‘Creation’) justified in the face of suffering and evil?
Melancholy is thus unfolded in dialectical relation to the question of theodicy: the problem of suffering prompts questions concerning its purpose/non-purpose, vindication/non-vindication, meaning/non-meaning, and ultimately, the value of life itself. I present Barnes’s meditations on this motif in systematic theology in her letters and her various references to Proust, Joyce, and Dostoevsky, to develop an account of a weak theodicy. I synthesize the insights of narrative theory (Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Northrop Frye) and the theory of worlds (Martin Heidegger, Jonathan Flatley) to unfold how a response to the question of theodicy is encrypted in the work of art, as its theodistical unconscious. This response is understood as a fundamental ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the Creator and the work of Creation – otherwise put, a comic or a tragic judgement on the value of life, alongside its prosopopoeic trace, God. In encapsulating a world of suffering, each work of art exhibits an authorial reckoning on the value of life – that it is worth living, or it is not. The theodistical or anti-theodistical unconscious of each literary world is thus reconstructed via close-reading.
This thesis pivots on the possibility of reconciliation as the crux of the theodistical question. It is divided accordingly into two halves: the first considers the comic response to suffering as a minimal, or maximal, affirmation of life; the tragic response repudiates this. The body in pain that focalises this question is thus presented in different terms in each chapter, moving from dysmorphia to disassemblage, deferred recovery to a new orientation to the resurrection, or a commitment to death and a reversal into the negative.

Keywords: Theology
Literary Worlds
Avant-Garde
Tragedy
Psychoanalysis
Queer
Women's Writing
Laughing and Crying
Modernism
Comedy
Advisor: Dwan, D
Mukherjee, A