Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Safety And/Or Hazard Near Miss Reporting In An International Energy Company, Luke Clancy, Maria Chiara Leva, Victor Hrymak, Michael Sherlock

Conference Papers

This paper presents the preliminary progress of an industry driven programme to improve the data monitoring of safety/hazard near miss reporting from front line staff of a branch of a multinational energy supply company in Ireland. The paper discusses the main factors that emerged as possible causes for underreporting and the course of action selected for addressing them. The initiative, which is only in operation for 4 months has already led to an increase in reporting of “near misses” by a factor of nine. Furthermore, the level and detail of the reports is far greater than had previously being received.

Standalone Software As An Active Medical Device, Martin Mchugh, Fergal Mccaffery, Valentine Casey

Conference papers

With the release of the latest European Medical Device Directive (MDD) standalone software can now be classified as an active medical device. Consequently the methods used to ensure device safety and reliability needs to be reviewed. IEC 62304 is the current software development lifecycle framework followed by medical device software developers but important processes are beyond the scope of IEC 62304. These processes are covered by additional standards. However since the MDD became mandatory these additional standards are not comprehensive enough to ensure the reliability of an active medical device consisting of only software. By employing software process improvement techniques …

Studies Of Shrinkage As A Result Of Holographic Recording In Acrylamide Based Photopolymer Film, Mohesh Moothanchery, Izabela Naydenova, Vincent Toal

Articles

We studied the shrinkage in acrylamide-basedphotopolymer by measuring the Bragg detuning of transmission diffraction gratings recorded at different slant angles and at different intensities. Transmission diffraction gratings of spatial frequency 1000 lines/mm were recorded in an acrylamide-based photopolymer film having 60 ± 5 μm thickness. We have obtained the grating thickness and the final slant angles from the Bragg curve and hence calculated the shrinkage caused by holographic recording. The shrinkage of the material was evaluated for three different recording intensities 1, 5 and 10 mW/cm2, while the total exposure energy was kept constant at 80 mJ/cm2. From the experimental …

A Parametric Analysis Of Domestic Electricity Consumption Patterns In Ireland, Fintan Mcloughlin, Aidan Duffy, Michael Conlon

Conference Papers

This paper reports findings from a study of electrical load profiles obtained from a survey of a representative cross section of approximately 4,000 Irish dwellings. Electricity demand was recorded at half-hourly intervals for each dwelling over a six month period from 1st July 2009 to 31st December 2009. Descriptive statistics are shown for each electrical parameter such as mean, maximum demand, load factor and time of use (ToU) of electricity consumption. The mean power demand and daily mean load factor of the sample was 0.512kW and 23.43% respectively for all dwellings over the monitoring period. A mean daily maximum demand …

A Stochastic Model For Wind Turbine Power Quality Using A Levy Index Analysis Of Wind Velocity Data, Jonathan Blackledge, Eugene Coyle, Derek Kearney

Conference papers

The power quality of a wind turbine is determined by many factors but time-dependent variation in the wind velocity are arguably the most important. After a brief review of the statistics of typical wind speed data, a non- Gaussian model for the wind velocity is introduced that is based on a Levy distribution. It is shown how this distribution can be used to derive a stochastic fractional diusion equation for the wind velocity as a function of time whose solution is characterised by the Levy index. A Levy index numerical analysis is then performed on wind velocity data for both …

An Analysis Of The Mortality Risks Associated With Heat And Heat Waves In Ireland, To Assist In Planning For Climate Change, Mathilde Pascal

Doctoral

Although extreme temperatures have not been identified as a major cause of mortality in Ireland, climate change calls for an evaluation of the past, present and future health risks associated with heat and heat waves. The health impacts of heat were investigated using mortality and temperature data for the period 1981-2003. Data were aggregated in urban areas (Dublin, Cork, Drogheda, Arklow, Dundalk, Galway, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford) and rural areas. Seven heat waves were identified between 1981 and 2003, corresponding to 254 excess deaths (197 in rural areas, and 57 in urban areas). A major episode was observed in rural …

Embodied Emissions Abatement: A Policy Assessment Using Stochastic Analysis, Adolf Acquaye, Aidan Duffy, Biswajit Basu

Articles

Policymakers traditionally focus on regulating operational energy use in buildings, ignoring other life cycle components such as embodied energy even though this may account for a significant portion of life cycle emissions. Data relating to embodied energy and emissions in buildings is limited. However, stochastic techniques can be used to estimate the distribution of such emissions from buildings. This helps policymakers identify which instruments are appropriate for achieving emissions reductions. A primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate this approach using a sample of apartment buildings in Ireland. A Monte-Carlo simulation suggests that the average probability distribution of embodied …

Synthesis And Characterization Of A Colloidal Novel Folic Acid–Β-Cyclodextrin Conjugate For Targeted Drug Delivery, Antonio Clementi, Maria Chiara Aversa, Carmelo Corsaro, Jeroen Spooren, Rosanna Stancanelli, Christine O'Connor, Mary Mcnamara, Antonino Mazzaglia

Articles

A novel folic acid–b-cyclodextrin (b-CD) conjugate was synthesized and preliminarily characterized by 1H NMR, ESI-MS, and MALDI-MS. 1H NMR shows the presence of a- and c-conjugates which are generated by b-CD linkage in turn with both carboxylic functions of folic acid. Moreover ROESY evidences supramolecular interactions between the benzene ring of the folic acid and the b-CD cavity. DOSY suggests that ethylenediamine derived b-CD–folic acid forms a colloidal dispersion difficult to purify from free folic acid. An analysis of self-diffusion coefficient (Ds) of the three species (a-, c-conjugates, and free folic acid) and relaxation times (T1 and T2) is reported …

Macular Pigment: Practical Implications For Optometric Practice In Preventative Health Care And Visual Performance Enhancement, Grainne Scanlon

Masters

The macula is a specialised part of the retina responsible for detailed central and colour vision. The carotenoids, lutein, zeaxanthin and meso-zeaxanthin are uniquely concentrated in the inner and central layers of the primate macula, where they are known as macular pigment (MP). It has been shown that MP is entirely of dietary origin and that lutein and zeaxanthin levels in serum, diet and retina correlate. Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is a disease of the macula and results in loss of central vision. MP, because of its optical filtration and antioxidant properties, may have an important role in the prevention …

Calculation Of The Electronic And Optical Properties Of Nanoscale Systems, Barry Haycock

Doctoral

At the nanometer length scale, the size of surface features in crystalline semiconductor systems is of the same order as the electron wavelength. This can result in unusual behaviour in the systems electronic, magnetic and optical properties due to electron confinement effects. Such effects can have practical and commercial applications and are currently the subject of considerable study in the disciplines of theoretical, computational and materials technology within nanoscience. This thesis uses molecular dynamics computational methods to examine such effects in the electronic structure of semiconductor-based crystalline systems. Three unique surfaces were studied in detail - the SiC(111) surface, the …

Benchmarking The Pharmaceutical Industry: A Briefing On An Irish Research Study, Nuala Calnan (Editor)

Conference Papers

This paper presents an Irish research study currently being undertaken by the Pharmaceutical Regulatory Science Team at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) into the impact of new pharmaceutical regulatory guidance on the development and manufacture of medicinal drug products.

It launches a Pharmaceutical Industry Benchmarking Questionnaire designed to assess the impact and level of implementation of the ICH Tripartite Quality Guidance Q8, Q9 and Q10.

Stochastic Hybrid Embodied Co2-Eq Analysis: An Application To The Irish Apartment Building Sector, Adolf Acquaye, Aidan Duffy, Biswajit Basu

Articles

Although embodiedCO2-eq analysis has seen recent developments as evident in the establishment of the ISO14040 and 14044 LCA standards, it is recognized that due to weaknesses in gathering data on product-related emissions,embodiedCO2-eq values are probabilistic. This paper presents a stochastic analysis of hybrid embodied CO2-eq in buildings to account for this weakness in traditional methods and, by way of example, applies it to an Irish construction-sector case study. Using seven apartment buildings, 70,000 results are simulated with Monte Carlo analysis and used to derive probabilistic and cumulative embodied CO2-eq intensity distributions for apartment buildings in Ireland. A Wakeby distribution with …

Identification Of ‘Carbon Hot-Spots’ And Quantification 1 Of Ghg Intensities In The Biodiesel Supply Chain Using Hybrid Lca And Structural Path Analysis, Adolf Acquaye, Thomas Wiedmann, Kuishang Feng, Robert Crawford, John Barrett, Johan Kuylenstierna, Aidan Duffy, Lenny Koh, Simon Mcqueen-Mason

Articles

It is expected that biodiesel production in the EU will remain the dominant contributor as part of a 10% minimum binding target for biofuel in transportation fuel by 2020 within the 20% renewable energy target in the overall EU energy mix. Life cycle assessments (LCA) of biodiesel to evaluate its environmental impacts have, however, remained questionable, mainly because of the adoption of a traditional process analysis approach resulting in system boundary truncation and because of issues regarding the impacts of land use change and N2O emissions from fertiliser application. In this study, a hybrid LCA methodology is used to evaluate …

Development And Characterisation Of Integrated Microfluidics On Waveguide-Based Photonic Platforms Fabricated From Hybrid Materials, Robert Copperwhite, Mary O'Sullivan, Catherine Boothman, Arnaud Gorin, Colette Mcdonagh, Mohamed Oubaha

Articles

This article reports on a detailed investigation of sol–gel processed hybrid organic–inorganic materials for use in lab-on-a-chip (LoC) applications. A particular focus on this research was the implementation of integrated microfluidic circuitry in waveguide-based photonic sensing platforms. This objective is not possible using other fabrication technologies that are typically used for microfluidic platforms. Significant results on the surface characterisation of hybrid sol–gel processed materials have been obtained which highlight the ability to tune the hydrophilicity of the materials by careful adjustment of material constituents and processing conditions. A proof-of-principle microfluidic platform was designed and a fabrication process was established which …

Recognition Situations Using Extended Dempster-Shafer Theory, Susan Mckeever

Other resources

Weiser’s [111] vision of pervasive computing describes a world where technology seamlessly integrates into the environment, automatically responding to peoples’ needs. Underpinning this vision is the ability of systems to automatically track the situation of a person. The task of situation recognition is critical and complex: noisy and unreliable sensor data, dynamic situations, unpredictable human behaviour and changes in the environment all contribute to the complexity. No single recognition technique is suitable in all environments. Factors such as availability of training data, ability to deal with uncertain information and transparency to the user will determine which technique to use in …

Multifluid Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulent Decay, Turlough Downes, Stephen O'Sullivan

Articles

It is generally believed that turbulence has a significant impact on the dynamics and evolution of molecular clouds and the star formation that occurs within them. Non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effects are known to influence the nature of this turbulence. We present the results of a suite of 5123 resolution simulations of the decay of initially super-Alfv enic and supersonic fully multifluid MHD turbulence. We find that ambipolar diffusion increases the rate of decay of the turbulence while the Hall effect has virtually no impact. The decay of the kinetic energy can be fitted as a power law in time and …

A Stability Study Of A New Explicit Numerical Scheme For A System Of Differential Equations With A Large Skew-Symmetric Component, Katharine Gurski, Stephen O'Sullivan

Articles

Abstract. Explicit numerical methods for the solution of a system of stiff differential equations suffer from a time step size that approaches zero in order to satisfy stability conditions. Implicit schemes allow a larger time-step, but require more computations. When the differential equations are dominated by a skew-symmetric component, the problem is not stiffness in the sense that the size of the eigenvalues are unequal, rather the that the real eigenvalues are dominated by imaginary eigenvalues. We present and compare analytical results for stable time step limits for several explicit methods including the super-time-stepping method of Alexiades, Amiez, and Gremaud …

Raman Scattering Analysis Of Silicon Dioxide Single Crystal Treated By Direct Current Plasma Discharge, Dusan M. Poparic, Vladimir Milosavljevic, Andrijana Zekic, N Romcevic, Steven Daniels

Articles

Low-k materials such as silicon dioxide (SiO2) play an important role in the semiconductor industry. Plasma has become indispensable for advanced materials processing. In this work a treatment of SiO2single crystal by direct current plasma discharge is studied in detail. Offline metrology is conducted for silicon dioxide wafers by Raman scattering, energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy, and ellipsometry. Broad Raman peak at around 2800 cm−1 is observed for the treatedSiO2 wafers. Effects of plasma treatment on position of this peak are reported in the paper. An analysis of this correlation could be a framework for creating virtual etch rate sensors, which might …

On The (Non)-Integrability Of The Perturbed Kdv Hierarchy With Generic Self-Consistent Sources, Vladimir Gerdjikov, Georgi Grahovski, Rossen Ivanov

Conference papers

Non-holonomic deformations of integrable equations of the KdV hierarchy are studied by using the expansions over the so-called "squared solutions" (squared eigenfunctions). Such deformations are equivalent to perturbed models with external (self-consistent) sources. In this regard, the KdV6 equation is viewed as a special perturbation of KdV equation. Applying expansions over the symplectic basis of squared eigenfunctions, the integrability properties of the KdV hierarchy with generic self-consistent sources are analyzed. This allows one to formulate a set of conditions on the perturbation terms that preserve the integrability. The perturbation corrections to the scattering data and to the corresponding action-angle variables …

Using Hotspots As A Novel Method For Accessing Key Events In A Large Multi-Modal Corpus, Catherine Oertel, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Emer Gilmartin, Petra Wagner

Conference papers

n 2009 we created the D64 corpus, a multi-modal corpus which consists of roughly eight hours of natural, non-directed spontaneous interaction in an informal setting. Five participants feature in the recordings and their conversations were captured by microphones (room, body mounted and head mounted), video cameras and a motion capture system. The large amount of video, audio and motion capture material made it necessary to structure and make available the corpus in such a way that it is easy to browse and query for various types of data that we term primary, secondary and tertiary. While users are able to …

The Paradoxical Effect Of Permitting Emissions, Fiacra P. Mcdonnell, Thomas Power

Other Resources

Progress has been made from the "either-or-scenario", whereby environmentalists regarded the market as an implacable enemy. The market is instead proving to be a potentially powerful ally. The rigidity of the traditional regulatory system with its mandatory approach is far from the ideal. An economic incentives approach has special merit in that it allows polluters a certain freedom of choice in the matter of compliance with pollution thresholds. This has important implications in the area of information. One of the barriers to perfect information is the private nature of information. Freedom of choice of policy in regard to achieving environmental …

Influence Of Angular Orientation Of The Embedded Highly Birefringent Fiber On Pmd Changes Under Axial Stress, Daniel Budaszewski Daniel Budaszewski, Piotr Lesiak, Robert Plaga, Ginu Rajan, Yuliya Semenova, Gerald Farrell, Anna Boczkowska, Andrzej W. Domanski's, Tomasz R. Woliński

Articles

In the paper we present results of the research on polarization mode dispersion changes inside the polarimetric optical fiber sensors based on highly birefringent optical fibers embedded into composite materials with different angular orientations of the optical axes. Based on measurements made for different types of highly birefringent optical fiber sensors we have shown that strain sensitivities after lamination process are different in comparison to the data obtained before lamination. Our results indicate that polarization mode dispersion in side-hole highly birefringent fibers under axial stress strongly depends on fiber orientation in the composite material suggesting that orientation of the polarization …

Hybrid Zirconium Sol-Gel Thin Films With High Refractive Index, Arnaud Gorin, Robert Copperwhite, Salem Elmaghrum, Colette Mcdonagh, Mohamed Oubaha

Articles

We describe the synthesis of optical quality thin film materials with high refractive index, employing zirconium based hybrid sol-gel precursors. As the zirconium propoxide precursor is unstable in the presence of a strong nucleophilic agent such as water, two synthesis routes have been performed employing a chelating agent and an organosilane precursor to avoid the formation of any undesired ZrO2 agglomerates, leading to organo-zirconate complexes and silicato-zirconate copolymers, respectively. The prepared hybrid sol-gel materials were deposited by spin-coating to form a transparent thin film on silicon substrates, and heat treated at 100 °C for the final stabilisation of the layer. …

Application Of Niobium Enriched Ormosils As Thermally Stable Coatings For Aerospace Aluminium Coatings, P.C. Rajath Varma, Mohamed Oubaha, Pradeepan Periyat, Colette Mcdonagh, Brendan Duffy

Articles

The aim of this experimental research is to study the ability of niobium rich sol-gel coatings to withstand thermal stress, while remaining impermeable to corrosive agents for the protection of aerospace alloys. The coating material is developed via polymeric sol-gel synthesis employing 3-(trimethoxysilyl)propylmethacrylate (MAPTMS) and niobium ethoxide precursors as a source of silicon and niobium, respectively. The beneficial effect of niobium inclusion within coating was characterised spectroscopically, calorimetrically and electrochemically. The thermal cycling effects of the coating were studied using microscopic and accelerated test methods. Electrochemical tests showed that corrosion current of the material was 2 orders lower in magnitude …

Deciphering The Story Of The Musuem, Eoin Kilfeather

Publications

No abstract provided.

Crystallisation And Phase Transition Characteristics Of Sol-Gel-Synthesized Zinc Titanates, Suresh Pillai, Michael Seery, Nicholas Nolan

Articles

No abstract provided.

Daemon Decay And Cosmic Inflation, Emil Prodanov

Articles

Quantum tunneling in Reissner--Nordstroem geometry is studied and the tunneling rate is determined. A possible scenario for cosmic inflation, followed by reheating phases and subsequent radiation-domination expansion, is proposed.

On The Singular Weyl-Titchmarsh Function Of Perturbed Spherical Schrödinger Operators, Aleksey Kostenko, Gerald Teschl

Articles

We investigate the singular Weyl–Titchmarsh m-function of perturbed spherical Schrödinger operators (also known as Bessel operators) under the assumption that the perturbation q(x) satisfies xq(x) ∈ L1(0, 1). We show existence plus detailed properties of a fundamental system of solutions which are entire with respect to the energy parameter. Based on this we show that the singular mfunction belongs to the generalized Nevanlinna class and connect our results with the theory of super singular perturbations.

On The (Non)-Integrability Of Kdv Hierarchy With Self-Consistent Sources, Vladimir Gerdjikov, Georgi Grahovski, Rossen Ivanov

Articles

Nonholonomic deformations of integrable equations of the KdV hierarchy are studied by using the expansions over the so-called “squared solutions” (squared eigenfunctions). Such deformations are equivalent to a perturbed model with external (self-consistent) sources. In this regard, the KdV6 equation is viewed as a special perturbation of KdV. Applying expansions over the symplectic basis of squared eigenfunctions, the integrability properties of the KdV6 equation are analysed. This allows for a formulation of conditions on the perturbation terms that preserve its integrability. The perturbation corrections to the scattering data and to the corresponding action-angle (canonical) variables are studied. The analysis shows …

Rational Bundles And Recursion Operators For Integrable Equations On A.Iii-Type Symmetric Spaces, Vladimir Gerdjikov, Georgi Grahovski, Alexander Mikhailov, Tihomir Valtchev

Articles

We analyze and compare the methods of construction of the recursion operators for a special class of integrable nonlinear differential equations related to A.III-type symmetric spaces in Cartan’s classification and having additional reductions.