Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a debilitating lung condition causing distressing symptoms. People with COPD experience variability of symptoms and have a greater number of comorbidities and lower quality of life than people with other long-term conditions. COPD is typically diagnosed from the age of 40, at a time where individuals are working to have a stable income and might be saving towards retirement. Employment is important for generating an income, social stimulation, a...

Analysis is an important part of understanding and exploiting performance of football teams. Traditional approaches of analysis have centred around events that may not fully incorporate the highly dynamic nature of matches. To circumvent this weakness, applications of collective behaviour metrics applying spatial temporal and social network analyses to data in football have been trending over the last 10 years. The aims of this PhD were to: 1) establish the strengths and limitations of current...

Environmental concerns dominate every stage of oil and gas operations, from production to consumption stages. At the production stage, there is the problem of waste of associated gas through flaring emissions, while pipeline leakages and tanker accidents are common during transportation of products and services. During consumption, the combustion of these gases also causes environmental pollution and impact negatively on the health of people and communities. In emerging markets, the oil and gas sector is...

Over the past two decades, the International Organisation for Migration highlighted the increasing proportion of international migration from 2.8% (150 million in 2000) to 3.5% (272 million in 2020) of the total world population. In 2019, the Labour Force Survey conducted by the Planning and Statistical Authority in Qatar estimated that migrants represented 91% of the total population in Qatar. Several studies have investigated the effect of migration on migrants' health, particularly relating to metabolic...

Entrepreneurship has become an indispensable instrument for stimulating economic activities in the global economy. It is getting more attention because of the significant contributions of small businesses as key drivers to the growth and socio-economic transformation of nations. Recent entrepreneurship discourse has focused on entrepreneurial behaviour and motivation; this includes what entrepreneurs do, why and how they do it, and their decision-making logic, particularly at the start of a venture. Beyond conventional job and wealth...

Underbalanced drilling facilitates the effective control of wellbore pressures - amongst several other important advantages - when compared to conventional drilling technology. However, this involves the flow of multiphase fluids, which introduces additional complexities due to highly transient flow patterns, unpredictable wellbore hydraulics and increased tendency for the settling of drilled cuttings in the wellbore. An accurate prediction of fluid dynamics and cutting transport efficiency is required to achieve an effective pressure-management hole-cleaning operation. In...

The work presented in this thesis is principally concerned with the development of a method and set of tools designed to support the identification of class-based similarity in collections of object-oriented code. Attention is focused on enhancing the potential for software reuse in situations where a reuse process is either absent or informal, and the characteristics of the organisation are unsuitable, or resources unavailable, to promote and sustain a systematic approach to reuse. The approach...

Lipid macroamphiphiles (LMAPs) are cell envelope components of bacteria that have been extensively associated with the pathogenesis of disease. It has been reported that these components can also influence the in vivo metabolism of lipids in mammals. For the onset of the skin condition acne vulgaris, in addition to the presence of Propionibacterium acnes on the skin, changes in the composition of skin lipids has been identified as an important etiological factor in the development...

The tactical planning problem for members of the service industry with large multi-skilled workforces is an important process that is often underlooked. It sits between the operational plan - which involves the actual allocation of members of the workforce to tasks - and the strategic plan where long term visions are set. An accurate tactical plan can have great benefits to service organisations and this is something we demonstrate in this work. Sitting where it...

Although understanding the relationship between gas-liquid two-phase fluid flows and the effects of the major drilling variables is critical to optimising underbalanced drilling (UBD) operations, to date, this has been an area of limited research and knowledge. This study contributes to the limited knowledge base by: 1) determining the key operational drilling parameters which shape the gas-liquid two-phase multiphase flow behaviour characteristics during UBD operations, 2) evaluating the most critical operational issues that have impacted...

Since the discovery of the commercial hydrocarbon deposit in 1956, activity of Nigeria's petroleum industry has dramatically increased. The industry now contributes an average of two million barrels of crude oil daily to the global oil market. However, while bringing this development, the industry has become a source of misery for the oil-producing host communities, whose survival is endangered by the scourge of pollution from associated gas flaring. Associated gas (AG) flaring is widely acknowledged...

The study espoused a multi-strategy approach-encompassing system thinking (ST) tool, which uses causal loop diagram (CLD) and mixed-method methodology to address local content policy (LCP) challenges of infrastructure, human resource capacity (HRC), technology and finance in the Ghanaian oil industry. ST considered the challenges as a 'system', thereby providing a comprehensive approach to identifying and analysing the interconnections among the variables affecting the challenges of LCP implementation. Underpinning ST and CLD is the concept of...

The United Kingdom Government has moved on from the unconventional oil and gas (UOG) development discourse since the moratorium in 2019. Shale gas was expected to be produced commercially and to act as a bridge fuel with arguable lower carbon emissions until renewable energy sources can be produced at a large scale and become readily available, accessible to all. The socio-economic, health, environmental and policy implication of extracting these hydrocarbons using hydraulic fracturing 'fracking' resulted...

Taiwan's prevailing motorcycle usage has been widely discussed in relation to urban air quality. As Taiwan's policy-makers seek to reduce mobile pollution sources in cities, the large number of petrol-powered motorcycles within cities have become a major target to be addressed. In addition to promoting public transport usage, the shift of petrol-powered motorcycles to electric ones has been one of the goals that the Taiwan government has vigorously implemented in recent years. Many scholars have...