Malaria is the world’s most important parasitic infectious disease, and is a major cause of mortality and morbidity in many developing countries. In this dissertation I study the interaction of malaria and economic development at both the macro- and micro-economic levels.
In the first essay I examine the economic impact...
Different specimen preparation methods such as moist tamping, dry funnel deposition, slurry deposition, dry air pluviation have been reported in the literature to investigate the undrained behavior of silty sands. Similarly, different means have been used to densify the soils prepared with such methods. However, the influence of the densification...
Currently, the technologies used to separate lignocellulosic biomass into its component parts (cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin) and enzymatically hydrolyze the cellulose to glucose for conversion to ethanol could be improved economically and in terms of efficiency. A major impediment to utilizing the biomass is the presence of residual lignin. The...
A significant barrier to the diffusion bonding of large (i.e. 600 mm) microchannel devices is the large capital investment required to setup production. This large capital investment extends from long heating and cooling cycles leading to poor production
capacities. Empirical studies in industry have shown that cooling rate is limited...
This dissertation presents the results of a research effort conducted to better understand the stress-strain, volume change, shear band formation, and strength characteristics of normally consolidated anisotropic clay under fully three-dimensional stress states. A series of consolidated drained true triaxial tests with a constant mean effective stress and constant Lode...
This thesis documents the work carried out investigating the downstream processing of algal biomass for biofuel production. A life cycle assessment was conducted on a hypothetical algal biodiesel process in which it was found drum drying and cell component separation were life cycle intensive processes. A
laboratory experiment was conducted...