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- Bernhard, Irene
(författare)
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E-government and e-governance : Swedish case studies with focus on the local level
- 2013
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The concepts of e-government and e-governance are used interchangeably in most research and there is no single definition of these terms. The objective of this licentiate thesis is to provide a deeper understanding of these concepts through empirical studies in a Swedish context. Further, it aims to analyse whether – and if so in what way – the implementation of local contact centres (CC) affect conditions for local planning. This is reported in three articles. In this thesis e-government is defined to as the use of tools and systems by governmental bodies made possible by ICT that affect the organization of public administration. E-governance is defined as the ICT-based networks of services and administration in New Public Management settings including both public and private actors. Case study methodology is used as research method, including interviews, focus group studies, document studies, and some participatory observations. The analysis is partly built on an inductive methodological approach, since this is a new, emerging field of innovative policy and practice. Based on a theoretical discussion of New Public Management in the digital era, findings show that there is a difference between the concepts of e-government and e-governance from the perspective of e-administration and e-services and that the terms should not be used interchangeably. The study indicates that there are examples of implementation that are referred to the e-governance setting. Further the study indicates that local municipal contact centres may be referred to not only as an implementation of e-government but as a combination of e-governance and e-government. The findings indicate that there is a potential for positive impact on the conditions for local planning through the implementation of municipal contact centres.
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| 2. |
- Gupta, Mohit Kumar, 1986-
(författare)
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Design of Microstructures in Thermal Barrier Coatings : A Modelling Approach
- 2013
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Plasma sprayed Thermal Barrier Coating systems (TBCs) are commonly used for thermal protection of components in modern gas turbine application such as power generation, marine and aero engines. The material that is most commonly used in these applications is Yttria Stabilized Zirconia (YSZ) because of this ceramic’s favourable properties, such as low thermal conductivity, phase stability to high temperature, and good erosion resistance. The coating microstructures in YSZ coatings are highly heterogeneous, consisting of defects such as pores and cracks of different sizes which determine the coating’s final thermal and mechanical properties, and the service lives of the coatings. Determination of quantitative microstructure–property correlations is of great interest as experimental procedures are time consuming and expensive.This objective of this thesis work was to investigate the relationships between coating microstructure and thermal-mechanical properties of TBCs, and to utilise these relationships to design an optimised microstructure to be used for next generation TBCs. Simulation technique was used to achieve this goal. Important microstructural parameters influencing the performance of TBCs were identified and coatings with the identified microstructural parameters were designed, modelled and experimentally verified. TBCs comprising of large globular pores with connected cracks inherited within the coating microstructure were shown to have significantly enhanced performance. Low thermal conductivity, low Young‘s modulus and high lifetime were exhibited by these coatings. The modelling approach described in this work can be used as a powerful tool to design new coatings as well as to achieve optimised microstructures.
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| 3. |
- Gurdal, Sevtap, 1976-
(författare)
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Parenting Across Cultures : Parental attributions, attitudes and behaviour
- 2013
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Previously studies in parenting have mainly been conducted in Western countries. Not uncommonly results from such studies are used to describe general, worldwide trends. In an attempt to make the field of parenting research more culturally heterogeneous, an international research project, Parenting Across Cultures, was started. The project includes nine participant countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and USA) and its purpose is to examine parenting across cultures. This thesis is based on reports from parent participants. The aim of Study I was to investigate mothers’ and fathers’ (77 participants from each group) attributions and attitudes in Sweden. The results revealed that Swedish parents are more polarized in their attitudes than in their attributions, they think more alike for parenting attitudes and there was greater variability for parenting attributions, particularly regarding uncontrollable success, as opposed to attributions regarding adult- or child-controlled failure. Regarding attitudes, mothers and fathers reported more progressive than authoritarian attitudes. Fathers reported higher adult-controlled failure and child-controlled failure attributions than mothers. In Study II the aim was to assess whether mothers’ and fathers’ self-reports of acceptance-rejection, warmth, and hostility/rejection/neglect of their children differ in the nine countries. A total of 1996 parents (998 mothers and 998 fathers) participated in the study. Mothers and fathers reported high acceptance and warmth and low rejection and hostility/rejection/neglect (HRN) of their children in all nine countries. Despite the overwhelmingly high levels of acceptance and low levels of rejection across all countries, and despite our use of statistical controls for parental age, education, social desirability, and child age, some systematic differences between countries emerged. In summary, parents in the studies report higher similarity about parenting in some cases, for example concerning acceptance and warmth and hostility/rejection/neglect, but lower in others, such as the Swedish parents’ reports about attributions.
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| 4. |
- Hagqvist, Petter, 1986-
(författare)
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Instrumentation and estimation for high temperature control
- 2013
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Within a variety of industrially relevant high temperature production processes such as welding, heat treatment and metal deposition, the quality of the manufactured component is largely affected by how well parameters can be controlled during processing. These parameters might be, in the case of metal deposition, power input, material feed, or a parameter which is common for all of the aforementioned processes: material temperature. The ability to correctly measure, or in other ways estimate process parameters is vital in order to successfully control high temperature processes such as above 700 degrees Celsius. In this work, instrumentation and estimation solutions adapted to high temperature control are proposed and implemented with a focus on the laser metal wire deposition process. Special attention is given to temperature measurements on specimens with varying emissivity as commonly found in high temperature processes. A calibration procedure for a single-wavelength pyrometer is also presented together with a general discussion on limitations of such a system for measurands with varying emissivity. A new method for non-contact emissivity compensated temperature estimations using a spectrometer is presented. Simulations and industrially relevant experiments have been carried out validating the method. The theoretical framework for the developed method will be further investigated in the future together with additional experimental validation. In addition to temperature measurements, a method for real-time process control of laser metal wire deposition has been developed and implemented with good results. This control scheme estimates and controls the tool-to-workpiece distance based on resistance measurements. Such measurements allow for placement of instruments outside of the processing chamber and easy integration into existing equipment. Future work will be directed towards incorporation of resistance measurements into an iterative learning control scheme. Also, improvement on the resistance-distance model and further investigation into suitable signal processing methods for the resistance signal will be pursued.
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| 5. |
- Javidi Shirvan, Alireza, 1978-
(författare)
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Modelling of Electric Arc Welding : arc-electrode coupling
- 2013
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Arc welding still requires deeper process understanding and more accurateprediction of the heat transferred to the base metal. This can be provided by CFD modelling.Most works done to model arc discharge using CFD consider the arc corealone. Arc core simulation requires applying extrapolated experimental data asboundary conditions on the electrodes. This limits the applicability. To become independent of experimental input the electrodes need to be included in the arcmodel. The most critical part is then the interface layer between the electrodesand the arc core. This interface is complex and non-uniform, with specific physicalphenomena.The present work reviews the concepts of plasma and arc discharges that areuseful for this problem. The main sub-regions of the model are described, andtheir dominant physical roles are discussed.The coupled arc-electrode model is developed in different steps. First couplingsolid and fluid regions for a simpler problem without complex couplinginterface. This is applied to a laser welding problem using the CFD softwareOpenFOAM. The second step is the modelling of the interface layer betweencathode and arc, or cathode layer. Different modelling approaches available inthe literature are studied to determine their advantages and drawbacks. One ofthem developed by Cayla is used and further improved so as to satisfy the basicprinciples of charge and energy conservation in the different regions of thecathode layer. A numerical procedure is presented. The model, implementedin MATLAB, is tested for different arc core and cathode conditions. The maincharacteristics calculated with the interface layer model are in good agreementwith the reference literature. The future step will be the implementation of theinterface layer model in OpenFOAM.
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