Billions of people rely solely on groundwater for drinking and daily use. In the last few decades, groundwater was shown to be contaminated with arsenic in high concentrations, especially in Asian countries such as Bangladesh. Arsenic (As) is ranked the first among 20 toxic substances by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) and United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). Because many diseases and deaths were linked to consumption of arsenic-contaminated groundwater, the...

III-nitride mainly GaN semiconductors are the most important materials for a wide range of applications, in particular high-power devices, due to the tunable direct bandgap, their chemical, and thermal stability. However, their growth on suitable substrates is still problematic, and low UV GaN efficiency hinders the efforts aimed at improving the performance of emitting devices. This dissertation presents novel growth and device fabrication methods capable of overcoming these issues using different novel strategies. The work...

Intimate knowledge of ammonia fueling gas turbines is of crucial importance for power generation sectors, owing to its carbon-free nature and high hydrogen capacity. Anticipated challenges include, among others, the difficulty to stabilize ammonia flames and on top of that the propensity of ammonia flames to produce large quantities of nitrogen monoxide emissions. In gas turbine devices, combustion in practice occurs in a turbulent swirl flow and at elevated pressure conditions. The stability of ammonia...

Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) are sophisticated systems that have to sustain long-term qualified performance, regardless of temporally volatile volumes or compositions of the incoming wastewater. Membrane filtration in the Membrane Bioreactors (MBRs) reduces the WWTPs footprint and produces effluents of proper quality. The energy or electric power consumption of the WWTPs, mainly from aeration equipment and pumping, is directly linked to greenhouse gas emission and economic input. Biological treatment requires oxygen from aeration to perform...

Human health is monitored through several physiological measurements such as heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity, etc. These measurements are taken at predefined points in the body and recorded as temporal signals or colorful images for diagnosis purposes. During the diagnosis, physicians analyze these recordings, sometimes visually, to make treatment decisions. These recordings are usually contaminated with noise caused by different factors such as physiological artifacts or electronic noises of the used electrodes/instruments. Therefore, the...

Colloids and suspensions are frequently encountered in energy geo-engineering applications, from natural processes such as fine particles suspended in subsurface water and oil, to engineered fluids such as drilling muds and proppants. Transported particles can clog porous media and alter the medium permeability and flow paths. This research explores particle laden fluids using pore- and fracture-scale experimental, analytical and numerical techniques. Particle shape emerges as an important dimension in bridge formation at the pore-scale. Experiments...

Infectious diseases from novel viruses have become a major public health concern. Rapid identification of virus–host interactions can reveal mechanistic insights into infectious diseases and shed light on potential treatments. Current computational prediction methods for novel viruses are based mainly on protein sequences. However, it is not clear to what extent other important features, such as the symptoms caused by the viruses, could contribute to a predictor. Disease phenotypes (i.e., signs and symptoms) are readily...

Crude oil recovery is related to surface wettability, which is controlled by crude interactions with rock surfaces. Understanding these interactions is associated with studying the complex asphaltenes that (1) are irreversibly deposited from oil-brine interfaces onto reservoir mineral surfaces, (2) are bulky super-molecules and (3) incorporate several chemical groups by stacking aromatic rings together. This is a difficult task because of varying crude oil composition, asphaltene interfacial and chemical activity, and the potential of irreversibly...

Oligotrophic (sub-)tropical oceans receive intense incident ultraviolet radiation (UV, 280–400 nm) and their water columns are highly transparent due to their nutrient-deficient state. This combination suggests a high potential for adverse effects on organisms, yet only few reports describe the UV exposures received in these waters and the associated impacts on marine biota. Here, we aimed to investigate the UV bio-optics of various open ocean locations and, using the Red Sea as a representative oligotrophic...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a foundational building block for the upcoming information revolution. Particularly, the IoT bridges the cyber domain to anything within our physical world which enables unprecedented monitoring, connectivity, and smart control. The utilization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can offer an extra level of flexibility which results in more advanced and efficient connectivity and data aggregation. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the optimal IoT devices...

Freshwater scarcity and clean energy shortage are two grand challenges to global sustainable development. The inextricably interconnected water-energy nexus is being increasingly felt globally owing to the massive water used for electricity generation and huge amount of energy consumed in water desalination. This dissertation investigated the utilization of the waste heat of the solar cell to produce fresh water. This is achieved by constructing a multistage membrane distillation device (MSMD) at the backside of the...

Description: The dataset contains SARS-COV-2 virus 3D geometry extracted from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) codenamed PDBID 6VXX available at (https://www.rcsb.org/structure/6VXX). In 3D model construction, we first generate a tetrahedral mesh of the volume surrounding the molecular structure of the Spike glycoprotein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a.k.a. the S protein from PDB. Codenamed PDBID 6VXX at the Protein Data Bank (PDB)2, the S protein has been generated with a 2.8Å resolution, i.e., 0.28nm. Once the...

Biofouling and biocorrosion are due to unwanted deposition of microorganisms on surfaces that are exposed to different types of water. This dissertation focuses on the application of innovative strategies to inhibit biofouling and biocorrosion. Specifically, the strategies examined in this dissertation, namely the use of bacteriophages and quorum quenchers, aim to minimize reliance on the conventional chemical cleaning agents and to reduce chemical-induced hazards on health, safety and environment. First, we analyzed the use of...

Out-of-Core simulation systems often produce a massive amount of data that cannot t on the aggregate fast memory of the compute nodes, and they also require to read back these data for computation. As a result, I/O data movement can be a bottleneck in large-scale simulations. Advances in memory architecture have made it feasible and a ordable to integrate hierarchical storage media on large-scale systems, starting from the traditional Parallel File Systems (PFSs) to intermediate...

Crystals of the SF2 Nef:FynR96I SH3 complex were obtained by sitting drop vapour diffusion (details to be published). All data for SF2 Nef:FynR96I SH3 were collected at 100K at the beamline Proxima 2A at the SOLEIL Synchrotron (France), EIGER 9M detector, respectively (proposal numbers 2016 0098, 20161236, 20170193). Data from three crystals were processed, scaled and combined using XDS as implemented in the XDSme pipeline. The resulting scaled but unmerged and not anisotropically cut data...

Extensive analysis of the physical and chemical effects controlling the operation of combustion modes driven by auto-ignition is presented in this thesis. Specifically, the study integrates knowledge attained by analyzing the effects of fuel molecular structure on auto-ignition, quantity or quality of charge dilution, and in-cylinder temperature and pressure on burning characteristics in single and multiple injection strategies employed in compression ignition (CI), partially premixed combustion (PPC) and homogenous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engines. In...

Real-time monitoring of fluid properties in tubular systems, such as viscosity, flow rate, and pressure, is essential for industries utilizing the liquid medium. Today such fluid characteristics are studied off-line using laboratory facilities that can provide accurate results. Nonetheless, it is inadequate to match the pace demanded by the industries. Therefore, off-line measurements are slow and ineffective. On the other hand, commercially available real-time monitoring sensors for fluid properties are generally large and bulky, generating...

There has been an increasing demand for describing, predicting, and drawing inferences for various environmental processes, such as air pollution and precipitation. Environmental statistics plays an important role in many related applications, such as weather-related risk assessment for urban design and crop growth. However, modeling the spatio-temporal dynamics of environmental data is challenging due to their inherent high variability and nonstationarity. This dissertation is composed of four signi cant contributions to the modeling, simulation, and...

Graphite and graphitic materials underpin a number of modern technologies such as electrodes for energy storage and conversion systems. Due to their aromatic honeycomb-type lattice and layered structure, these carbons host a rich variety of foreign elements in their interstices. Whether possessing a tubular morphology - that enables the encapsulation of inorganic compounds, or a planar texture - where anions and molecules can intercalate, the chemical analysis of graphite and graphitic materials is often confronted...

B-Ga2O3 is one of the emerging semiconductor materials with high breakdown field strength (~ 8 MV/cm) and ultrawide-bandgap (UWBG) 4.9 eV. Therefore, B-Ga2O3 and related compound semiconductors are ideal for power electronics and deep/vacuum ultraviolet-wavelength photodetector applications. High-crystal-quality B-Ga2O3 semiconductor materials epitaxially deposited on the various substrate are prerequisites for realizing any practical application. However, it is still challenging to grow high-crystal-quality V-Ga2O3 layer and to integrate B-Ga2O3 with other semiconductor materials by direct epitaxy....

Living in the booming age of information, we have to rely on powerful information retrieval tools to seek the unique piece of desired knowledge from such a big data world, like using personalized search engine and recommendation systems. As one of the core components, ranking model can appear in almost everywhere as long as we need a relative order of desired/relevant entities. Based on the most general and intuitive assumption that entities without user actions...

Human-robot interaction is an important and broad area of study. To achieve success- ful interaction, we have to study human decision making rules. This work investigates human learning rules in games with the presence of intelligent decision makers. Par- ticularly, we analyze human behavior in a congestion game. The game models traffic in a simple scenario where multiple vehicles share two roads. Ten vehicles are con- trolled by the human player, where they decide on...

In 1938 Dr. Eugene Gudger concluded of the Red Sea that "whale sharks must surely abound in this region." Seventy years later, multi-method research began on a whale shark (Rhincodon typus) aggregation at Shib Habil, a reef near Al Lith, Saudi Arabia. However, in 2017 and 2018, a dramatic decline in encounters at this site drew questions about the aggregation's future and overall whale shark population trends in the region. In this dissertation, I describe...

MXenes, a new class of two-dimensional (2D) materials, have recently demonstrated impressive optoelectronic properties associated with its ultrathin layered structure. Particularly, Ti3C2Tx, the most studied MXene by far, was shown to exhibit intense surface plasmons (SPs), i.e. collective oscillations of free charge carriers, when excited by electromagnetic waves. However, due to the lack of information about the spatial and energy variation of those SPs over individual MXene flakes, the potential use of MXenes in photonics...