| 1. |
- Ekström, Erik, 1989-
(author)
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Growth and thermoelectric properties of CaMnO3-based thin films
- 2018
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The field of them1oelectrics started in early 19th century. Since the discovery of the Seebeck effect and the Peltier effect, thermoelectric modules have found their way into, mostly, niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators on space missions. Thermoelectric modules can also be used for cooling, utilizing the Peltier effect.Thermoelectrics are promising materials due to the operation nature of the modules. That is, they have no moving parts, no exhaust, long lifetime without maintenance, features that make them attractive for many applications. Despite these promising properties, thermoelectric modules are mostly used in niche applications. The main reason for this is conventional modules with the highest efficiency are commonly made of expensive and/or rare elements which prevents mass production.To tackle this problem, new materials are investigated to find a module that can be made widely available. Oxides are one possibility, where an added benefit is that they are chemically stable even at elevated temperature. The perovskite CaMnO3 is one of the more promising oxides, with elements that are abundant on earth and cheap. The material does suffer from low electrical conductivity which results in a low electrical conductivity and efficiency. A substantial effort has been put in to increase the efficiency of CaMnO3, hut it still needs improvement.In my thesis, I have investigated the CaMnO3 system. CaMnO3 was synthesized using co-reactive RF-magnetron sputtering and post annealing. The synthesis method is already known hut has not been used for deposition of perovskites. I have also demonstrated that this synthesis method can be used to dope CaMnO3 with niobium at appropriate levels for enhancing the efficiency.
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| 2. |
- Engelhardt, Ilka. A. D., 1986-
(author)
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Plasma and Dust at Saturn's Icy Moon Enceladus and Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
- 2016
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Saturn’s moon Enceladus and comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko both are examples of icy solar system objects from which gas and dust flow into space. At both bodies, the gas becomes partly ionized and the dust grains get charged. Both bodies have been visited by spacecraft carrying similar Langmuir probe instruments for observing the plasma and the charged dust. The conditions at Enceladus and the comet turn out to be different, so we emphasize different aspects of their plasma environments. At Enceladus, we concentrate on the characteristic plasma regions and charged dust. At the comet, we investigate cold electrons.At Enceladus, internal frictional heating leads to gas escaping from cracks in the ice in the south pole region. This causes a plume of gas, which becomes partially ionized, and dust, becoming charged. We have investigated the plasma and charged nanodust in this region by the use of the Langmuir Probe (LP) of the Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument on Cassini. The dust charge density can be calculated from the quasineutrality condition, the difference between ion and electron density measurements from LP. We found support for this method by comparing to measurements of larger dust grains by the RPWS electric antennas. We use the LP method to find that the plasma and dust environment of Enceladus can be divided into at least three regions. In addition to the well known plume, these are the plume edge and the trail region.At the comet, heat from the Sun sublimates ice to gas dragging dust along as it flows out into space. When gas molecules are hit by ionizing radiation we get a plasma. Models predict that the electron temperature just after ionization is around 10 eV, but that this collisions with the neutral gas should cool the electrons to below 0.1 eV. The Langmuir Probe instrument LAP has previously been used to show that the warm component exists at the comet. We present the first measurements of the cold component, co-existing with the warm component. We find that that the cold plasma often is observed as brief pulses in the LAP data, which we interpret as filamentation of the cold plasma.
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| 3. |
- Keskisärkkä, Robin, 1987-
(author)
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Towards Semantically Enabled Complex Event Processing
- 2017
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The Semantic Web provides a framework for semantically annotating data on the web, and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) supports the integration of structured data represented in heterogeneous formats. Traditionally, the Semantic Web has focused primarily on more or less static data, but information on the web today is becoming increasingly dynamic. RDF Stream Processing (RSP) systems address this issue by adding support for streaming data and continuous query processing. To some extent, RSP systems can be used to perform complex event processing (CEP), where meaningful high-level events are generated based on low-level events from multiple sources; however, there are several challenges with respect to using RSP in this context. Event models designed to represent static event information lack several features required for CEP, and are typically not well suited for stream reasoning. The dynamic nature of streaming data also greatly complicates the development and validation of RSP queries. Therefore, reusing queries that have been prepared ahead of time is important to be able to support real-time decision-making. Additionally, there are limitations in existing RSP implementations in terms of both scalability and expressiveness, where some features required in CEP are not supported by any of the current systems. The goal of this thesis work has been to address some of these challenges and the main contributions of the thesis are: (1) an event model ontology targeted at supporting CEP; (2) a model for representing parameterized RSP queries as reusable templates; and (3) an architecture that allows RSP systems to be integrated for use in CEP. The proposed event model tackles issues specifically related to event modeling in CEP that have not been sufficiently covered by other event models, includes support for event encapsulation and event payloads, and can easily be extended to fit specific use-cases. The model for representing RSP query templates was designed as an extension to SPIN, a vocabulary that supports modeling of SPARQL queries as RDF. The extended model supports the current version of the RSP Query Language (RSP-QL) developed by the RDF Stream Processing Community Group, along with some of the most popular RSP query languages. Finally, the proposed architecture views RSP queries as individual event processing agents in a more general CEP framework. Additional event processing components can be integrated to provide support for operations that are not supported in RSP, or to provide more efficient processing for specific tasks. We demonstrate the architecture in implementations for scenarios related to traffic-incident monitoring, criminal-activity monitoring, and electronic healthcare monitoring.
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