VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Design, Characterization and Modeling of Biobased Acoustic Foams

Polymeric open cell foams are widely used as sound absorbers in sectors such as automobile, aerospace, transportation and building industries, yet there is a need to improve sound absorption of these foams through understanding the relation between cell morphology and acoustic properties of porous material. Due to complicated microscopic structure of open cell foams, investigating the relation between foam morphology and acoustic properties is rather intricate and still an open problem in the field.The focus of this research is to design and develop biobased open cell foams for acoustic applications to replace conventional petrochemical based foams as well as investigating the link between cell morphology and macroscopic properties of open cell porous structures. To achieve these objectives, two industrially produced biomaterials, polylactide (PLA) and polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) and their composites were examined and highly porous biobased foams were fabricated by particulate leaching and compression molding. Acoustic absorption capability of these foams was enhanced utilizing the effect of co-continuous blends to form a bimodal porous structure. To tailor mechanical and acoustic properties of biobased foams, blends of PLA and PHA were studied to reach the desired mechanical and viscoelastic properties. To enhance acoustic properties of porous medium for having a broad band absorption effect, cell structure must be appropriately graded. Such porous structures with microstructural gradation are called Functionally Graded Materials (FGM). A novel graded foam structure was designed with superior sound absorption to demonstrate the effect of cell arrangement on performance of acoustic fixtures. Acoustic measurements were performed in a two microphone impedance tube and acoustic theory of Johnson-Champoux-Allard was applied to the fabricated foams to determine micro cellular properties such as tortuosity, viscous and thermal lengths from sound absorption impedance tube measurements using an inverse technique. As the next step towards in depth understanding of the relation between cell morphology and sound absorption of open cell foams, a semi-analytical model was developed to account for the effect of micro cellular properties such as cell wall thickness and reticulation rate on overall macroscopic and structural properties. Developed model provides the tools to optimize the porous structure and enhance sound absorption capability.

Keywords: Acoustic Absorption
Biobased polymers
Foam
Morphology design
Open cell
Porous structures
Advisor: Naguib, E Hani
Considerations for a Targeted Self-management Program for Individuals with Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury

Evidence points to the need for increased self-management support efforts to reduce secondary complications in spinal cord injury (SCI). The overall objective of this thesis was to understand the phenomenon of self-management in individuals with traumatic SCI, and then based on this understanding; determine the implementation considerations for a targeted self-management program. This thesis used a mixed methods approach with an exploratory design. . Twenty-six interviews across three stakeholder groups were conducted in Phase I. In the first paper (qualitative), the following five facilitators to self-management were identified: physical support from the caregiver, emotional support from the caregiver, peer support and feedback, importance of positive outlook and acceptance, and maintaining independence. The following five barriers to self-management were identified: caregiver burnout, funding and funding policies, lack of accessibility, physical limitations and secondary complications, and difficulties achieving positive outlook or mood. In the second paper (qualitative), the meaning of self-management among the SCI and caregiver participants related principally to internal responsibility attribution. For the manager participants, the meaning was much narrower and the overarching theme of internal responsibility attribution that was observed among the SCI-caregiver dyads was not as widely expressed by this group. These findings informed the development of a survey that was administered nationally to individuals with traumatic SCI (n=99). In the third paper (quantitative), the components of a tailored self-management program were identified and included the preference for an internet-based program. The final paper examined the association between psychological characteristics in self-management and depression status in individuals with a traumatic SCI. Lower self-efficacy and mastery scores, as well as less time since injury, were associated with depression status. These findings could be used for the development, pilot-testing, and evaluation of a targeted self-management program for individuals with traumatic SCI.

Keywords: qualitative
quantitative
self-management
spinal cord injury
traumatic
Advisor: Jaglal, B Susan
The Application of Novel Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Radioligands as Imaging Biomarkers of Neurochemical Changes in the Brain: Relevance in Schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease

The work of the thesis consists of five studies evaluating two Positron Emission Tomography (PET) radioligands and their molecular targets as imaging biomarkers of neurobiological abnormalities that occur in normal ageing and psychiatric illnesses. The first part of the thesis evaluated the use of [11C]-(+)-PHNO, which has affinity to dopamine D2/3 receptors, as an imaging biomarker of dopamine function. In the first study, [11C]-(+)-PHNO was used to evaluate the effect of personality differences on inter-individual variations of dopamine response to stress. In the second study, [11C]-(+)-PHNO was used to examine whether abnormalities in D2/3 receptor density could be present in the early phase of psychosis, specifically in individuals who have clinical high risk to develop psychosis and in antipsychotic- naïve patients with schizophrenia. The second part of the thesis evaluated the use of a novel second-generation Translocator protein 18kDa (TSPO) radioligand, [18F]-FEPPA, as an imaging biomarker of neuroinflammation. Although biomarker abnormalities may not be sufficient to produce an illness, the presence of biomarker abnormalities in non-affected healthy individuals may represent a biological vulnerability that may lead to an eventual development of a disease. In the third study of the thesis, I used [18F]-FEPPA to examine whether abnormalities in neuroinflammation can be detected in cognitively normal elderly individuals. The fourth study focused on a novel application of [18F]-FEPPA as an imaging biomarker of neuroinflammation in the white matter regions in healthy volunteers across normal adult life span. In this study, the caveats and limitations of [18F]-FEPPA quantification in the white matter regions were also explored. Finally, in the fifth study, [18F]-FEPPA was evaluated as an imaging biomarker of neuroinflammation in a clinical population by comparing the binding of [18F]-FEPPA in cognitively intact healthy control subjects and patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) in both grey and white matter regions. The impact of neuroinflammation on cognitive function was evaluated by examining associations between several cognitive measures and [18F]-FEPPA binding in participants with AD. Collectively, these five studies demonstrate that PET radioligands can be used as imaging biomarkers to evaluate neurochemical changes that are present in both health and disease.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease
biomarkers
dopamine
neuroinflammation
PET imaging
Schizophrenia
Advisor: Mizrahi, Romina
Advancing Life Cycle Comparisons of Future Alternative Light-duty Vehicles

The overall objective of this thesis is to systematically compare the life cycle energy use, air emissions and costs of future alternative light-duty vehicles in a more robust manner than is done in the literature. Models are developed using GREET (Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation), Autonomie vehicle simulation software, Vehicle Attribute Model, Air Pollution Emission Experiments and Policy (APEEP) analysis model, and Crystal Ball (Monte Carlo analysis). Four questions are investigated: • Should the transportation sector use ethanol or bio-electricity? Life cycle assessment results indicate that neither has a clear advantage in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or energy use. This finding is in contrast to those in the literature that favor the use of bio-electricity because this thesis develops pathways with comparable vehicle characteristics. • Do plug-in electric vehicles provide incremental life cycle air pollutant impact benefits over internal combustion engine vehicles using the same primary energy source? The results based on natural gas-derived fuels show that battery electric vehicles (BEV) may not provide benefits, in terms of climate change and health impacts, over hybrid electric vehicles (HEV). This can be attributed to the many sources of uncertainty and stringent tailpipe emissions regulations. • How can vehicles be designed to meet future CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards? Case study results for a reference vehicle show that the 66% increase in fuel economy targets between model years 2012 to 2025 can be met with a 10% vehicle price increase (lightweight HEV powertrain), 31% increase in 0-96 km/h acceleration time (smaller engine), 17% interior volume decrease (smaller body), or 94% driving range decrease (BEV powertrain), while other attributes are maintained. • How might CAFE standards affect the ability for non-petroleum vehicles to mitigate GHG emissions by displacing petroleum vehicles? Life cycle costing results indicate that there is a financial incentive for automakers to produce CNG vehicles that could emit higher well-to-wheel GHG emissions on a per kilometer basis than gasoline vehicles. This is permitted by CAFE standards because non-petroleum fuel incentives allow vehicles using CNG to be less efficient, and thus potentially more affordable, than those using gasoline.

Keywords: Alternative fuels
Electric vehicle
Fuel economy
Life cycle assessment
Life cycle costing
Advisor: MacLean, Heather L
Strange Dwellings: Inhabiting American Literary Modernism

This dissertation probes the relationship between sexuality and the home in American literature from the early twentieth century, asserting forms of dwelling that challenge the values given to itinerancy and vagrancy in criticism on queer modernism. Within queer theory, which since its inception has prescribed an anti-social, anti-normative position, scholars have mined modernist texts for their transgressive potential. Indeed, modernist texts frequently exhibit precisely the qualities that American culture negatively associates with queerness: urbanism, exile, dislocation, disorientation, loss, and infertility. However, I argue that narratives of queerness that privilege anti-social behaviour risk occluding more granular discussions of the murky relationships that queer subjects have with ordinariness and normativity. The basic premise of “Strange Dwellings” is, therefore, that sexuality in American modernism indexes a range of concomitant concerns and anxieties, including a pervasive fascination with home. Affective ambivalence permeates many of the texts in this project, which simultaneously express profound nostalgia and strain toward new aesthetic, social, and political realities. While the home may find its form in the house, home is ultimately an affective state, I conclude, rather than a material space. I re-direct our attention to the ways in which modernist texts refuse to assimilate to traditional social and literary formations, and yet strive to recuperate and transform them. “Strange Dwellings” examines instantiations of the queer home in texts by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Willa Cather, and James Agee. While my aims extend well beyond those of a revisionist project, I deliberately return to well-trodden critical ground in order to consider modernism’s fraught relationship to the peripatetic. Rather than pursuing questions of recovery or canonicity, I contend that the authors I take up envision their place within literary history by conceiving of place in physical terms. Just as their texts come to constitute forms of housing, writing serves as an act of homemaking. These authors mobilize form itself as a dwelling space, recasting the home as a site of endurance. In doing so, they treat writing as a practice with the capacity to aesthetically re-imagine the social.

Keywords: American literature
Critical Theory
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Modernism
Queer Theory
Advisor: Cobb, Michael
Arthurus Redivivus: Arthurian Imitation in Early Plantagenet England, 1154–1307

This dissertation is a diachronic study of when and how the first five Plantagenet kings of England and their opponents attempted to use the figure of King Arthur for political gain. Medieval chronicles, chivalric biographies and occasional poetry from the British Isles and Continental Europe constitute its raw materials. Fundamental to this work is the reconstruction of the ways in which the pseudo-historical Arthur existed in historical memory in the time and places under consideration. This study provides a history of Arthurian self-fashioning that is concomitantly a reception study on medieval understandings of Arthur. The ideological basis for the practice of Arthurian imitation is the myth of King Arthur’s return: the idea that the legendary sixth-century hero of the Britons would somehow rise again and ‘re- establish’ a great Western European empire based in Britain. Although it is commonly assumed that exspectare Arthurum was an indigenous belief of the Brittonic peoples of Brittany, Cornwall and Wales, this dissertation underscores that there is no evidence to sustain the position that the construct was either ancient or Brittonic in origin. The idea’s earliest attestation dates from 1125 and is a statement about Brittonic belief by a non-Brittonic writer. The central argument of this dissertation is that the Plantagenets, beginning with Henry II, exploited the myth of Arthur’s return in two ways. First, they advanced the idea that the Brittonic Celts mistakenly clung to a literal interpretation of exspectare Arthurum and were fruitlessly awaiting the return of the original King Arthur. Explicit analogies were drawn with the Jews awaiting their messiah; the purpose of this racist stereotype was to provide moral justification for Plantagenet expansion into Wales and Brittany. Second, the Plantagenets communicated that the myth should be understood figuratively and that they, by virtue of their insular crown and territorial possessions, were Arthur’s true successors. The monarchy’s exploitation of the Arthurian myth reached a highpoint with Edward I, after the reigns of John and Henry III, who, for political reasons, gave the myth less attention.

Keywords: Chronicles
King Arthur
Medieval French Literature
Medieval Latin Literature
Plantagenet England
Political Propaganda
Advisor: Carley, James P
Meyerson, Mark
Controlling Electromagnetic Fields Using Periodic Structures: Gratings, Metamaterials, and Photonic Crystals

This thesis presents novel devices and techniques that enable new methods for enhancement, concentration, refraction, shaping, collimation, and directive beaming of electromagnetic fields. These unprecedented methods to control electromagnetic fields are achieved by exploring and harnessing the unique wave-interactions in periodic gratings, metamaterials, and photonic crystals, with emphasis on Epsilon-Near-Zero (ENZ) metamaterials and zero-index media. The presented solutions impact a wide variety of applications ranging from microwave to optical frequencies. A discovery of dramatic radiation enhancement of an invisible array of sources next to a sub-wavelength periodic metal strip grating is reported, both theoretically and experimentally. The phenomenon is first systematically theorized by introducing the `spectral impulse response' approach for the aperiodic excitation problem, followed by the `spectral array factor' approach for designing the near-field of array of sources. Such radiation enhancement has applications in sensing, detection, and accurate measurement of distance. The shaping and collimation of radiation of a simple dipole source near or buried inside a general anisotropic ENZ half-space is then systematically studied using the Lorentz reciprocity method. Various elliptic and hyperbolic anisotropic ENZ media are considered, showing how the air-side radiation can be enhanced and shaped using certain ENZs. A novel device and technique is proposed for collecting, refracting and concentrating incident waves into an area of high power concentration, at extremely short distances. This flat low-profile light-concentrator comprises a hetero-junction of anisotropic ENZ metamaterials (hyperbolic or elliptic), and is realized with plasmonic layered media at optical frequencies. By harnessing an extremely oblique refraction process in ENZs, the light-concentrator significantly outperforms the size requirements of existing thick high curvature lenses, useful in various applications (e.g. as microlenses). The hetero-junction can also serve as a thin beam-splitter and beam-shifter. Lastly, the Dirac Leaky-Wave Antenna (DLWA) is introduced for reliable and continuous scanning of directive leaky-wave radiation from photonic crystals. The DLWA is based on a zero-index photonic crystal with a Dirac-type dispersion at its Г-point. The DLWA solves the classic open broadside stopband in leaky-wave structures not only at microwaves, but for terahertz and optical frequencies, with feasible dimensions and low losses.

Keywords: Dirac Dispersion
Epsilon Near Zero
Grating
Leaky Wave Antenna
Metamaterial
Photonic Crystals
Advisor: Eleftheriades, George V.
The Applicability of Kraichnan-Leith-Batchelor Similarity Theory to Inverse Cascades in Generalized Two-Dimensional Turbulence

This thesis examines how well Kraichnan-Leith-Batchelor (KLB) similarity theory describes turbulent inverse cascades in `generalized two-dimensional fluids', also known as ` turbulence' models. These models have varying relationships between the streamfunction and advected active scalar = (-)

Keywords: EDQNM closure
intermittency
non-Gaussianity
similarity theory
turbulence
two dimensional
Advisor: Shepherd, Theodore G.
Development of a Platform for Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering Endoscopy

Surgical resection or ablation remains the primary curative treatment strategy for most early-stage solid cancers and, as such, an enormous amount of effort has been dedicated to technologies that augment the vision of the surgeon to better `see' the margins of the tumor being removed. With our ever-expanding knowledge of the genetic changes which underpin malignancies, the idea of adding `biochemical vision' to the surgeon's decision making process should allow for clearer identification of margins, more complete resections with no residual tissue left in-situ, and consequent improvement in local recurrence rates. By performing such early-stage resections endoscopically, patients may benefit from lower morbidity rates as compared to traditional open approaches. Molecular imaging using surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) nanoparticles represents a platform which is well-suited for cancer detection in-vivo. It has already been established that SERS offers the ability to carry out multiplex assays far in excess of what is possible with fluorescence, that the SERS signal is detectable at concentrations far below what is resolvable with similar amounts of fluorophores, and that the SERS signal is temporally stable and does not photobleach over time. The work reported here demonstrates: 1) a method for reliably generating molecularly-targeted SERS nanoparticles suitable for in-vivo use, 2) a framework for detecting these SERS nanoparticles in-vivo, not using slow point-by-point spectroscopic screening, but rather by fast large-area widefield imaging, 3) results from widefield quantitative, multiplexed SERS imaging in-vivo using phantom models, 4) the first reported study showing widefield SERS imaging of antibody-targeted SERS nanoparticles in a murine xenograft tumour model and 5) proof-of-concept data showing widefield SERS imaging in-vitro using two clinically available endoscopy platforms. Together these results have demonstrated the potential utility of SERS endoscopy in cancer imaging and have established a roadmap to future clinical translation in specific oncologic fields.

Keywords: Biomarker
Endoscopy
Nanoparticle
Raman
SERS
Advisor: Wilson, Brian C
Unsettling Migrants? The Impact of Internal Migration on Sons of the Soil Conflict in China and Indonesia

Recent instances of large-scale inter-provincial migration have resulted in open clashes between indigenous populations and migrants--i.e., `Sons of the Soil' (SoS) conflict--in several minority regions around the world. Yet, equally large population movements have been peacefully integrated elsewhere. Under what conditions does internal migration lead to SoS conflicts? Based on quantitative population data and over 100 interviews conducted in nine months of fieldwork in China and in Indonesia, I argue that large and consistent socio-economic and political Horizontal Inequalities (HIs) between migrants and locals is a key condition explaining why some minority regions erupt in SoS conflicts while others remain relatively quiet. Fearing demographically-induced socio-economic and political marginalization, local communities resort to violence against migrants when the latter appear to benefit disproportionately from their relocation at the expense of the local population -i.e. when they are "dominant migrants" with close connection to the State and its dominant ethnicity. However, any single dimension of HIs is unlikely to result in SoS conflict independently. It is the coalescing of various mutually-reinforcing HIs that render the situation most explosive. Yet, local people do not always act on these grievances and mobilize against migration. A favourable institutional context is necessary for migration-related tensions to transform into SoS conflicts. Alongside HIs, I contend that political liberalization influences the likelihood, frequency and intensity of SoS conflicts, as it affects internal migratory patterns and local people's abilities to organize or mobilize against migrants. As political liberalization also contributes to socio-economic and political inequalities between migrants and locals, it simultaneously tilts the balance of power between groups. By analyzing the different migration trajectories and how they relate to SoS conflict, this dissertation highlights the conditions transforming the otherwise peaceful internal migration into a violent process. The empirically-informed model herein developed puts migrant/local relations squarely at the center of our analysis, providing a more nuanced and disaggregated analysis of the different dimensions of their relations. While the empirical focus is on migration-conflict dynamics in China and Indonesia, the model developed provides important insights for countries with large-scale internal migration to minority regions.

Keywords: China
conflict
Indonesia
migration
Sons of the Soil
violence
Advisor: Bertrand, Jacques