Future postgraduate student scholarships

Engineering research projects

Drying and processing of high-value agricultural products using renewable solar energy

The processing technologies of many agricultural products including medicinal and herbal plants are dedicated and often consume a large amount of energy and fuel. The present research project therefore aims to develop an integrated package of technologies for drying and processing high-value agricultural products such as medicinal and herbal plants, and also to promote the greater use of renewable energy in the agricultural industry. For this purpose, a small-scale prototype solar dryer will be used to test the design concept and the effectiveness of this technology. A computer model will also be developed to optimize the drying process and dryer design, including the determination of optimum air flow distribution inside the dryer. The safe drying and storage condition for various agricultural products will also be investigated and determined.

Lost-cost solar dryer using renewable solar energy offers the great potential for widespread adoption and application in developing countries and in many parts of Australia. This project therefore has significant economic, environmental and social benefits, particularly given the current concern on greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels and climate change. Designing a solar drying facility that meets both the stringent quality and economic requirements of the industry is necessarily a multi-factorial design and optimization problem in which knowledge of technology, product physiology, farm economy and socio-cultural aspects have to be combined to yield the best solution. NCEA and USQ are in a unique and best position to lead this research in Australia.

The main research tasks of this project are:

Project development and literature review. This should produce insight into the gaps of previous research in this topic
Analysis of Australia’s local climate conditions
Design an integrated solar drying facility in consultation with the industry and other researchers. The feasibility of incorporating new and innovative design features such as a suitably-sized photovoltaic module to power the air circulation fan will also be investigated.
Develop a mathematical model and carry out the necessary experiments to optimize the system design and the drying process.

Supervisor

Dr Guangnan Chen is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Head in Agricultural Engineering at USQ. He has so far published one book chapter, 14 journal papers and many other conference and industry papers. His current research on grain drying and energy use and environmental and climate change assessment are both externally funded by the industry. Dr Chen is also a member of the National Committee, the Society for Engineering in Agriculture, Australia (SEAg).

Impact and risk assessment of climate change on irrigation systems and communities

Global climate change and its associated risks are a serious issue for Australia. There is growing evidence of a shift in climate patterns — with flow-on effects for established environmental, economic and social structures and systems. Many of our human and natural systems are strongly influenced by this process. To deal with this situation, a risk management framework will be developed in this project which will be focused on evaluating the risks facing the irrigation industry in Australia. Risks posed by changes to the resource from a range of different drivers and controls will be analysed. The potential adaptation strategy will also be assessed.

Expected Outcomes and Benefits:

Ascertaining the biophysical impacts of climate change on the agriculture in Australia;
Examining the effects of climate change on water resources and irrigation systems;
Costing and valuing effects, treating uncertainties, integrating effects across sectors and regions; and
Building a more solid foundation for understanding how decisions regarding adaptation to future climate change may be taken.

Supervisors

Professor Steve Raine is the Professor of Irrigation and Soil Science within the Faculty of Engineering and Surveying at the University of Southern Queensland. He is also the Principal Scientist (Irrigation, Soils and Land Resources) within the National Centre for Engineering in Agriculture and was previously Program Leader for “Future Irrigation – Practice and Technology” within the Cooperative Research Centre for Irrigation Futures. He has authored over 100 papers and his current research interests are:

Design and management practices to improve the efficiency and productivity of both surface and pressurised irrigation systems;
Decision support systems for irrigation management;
Factors influencing soil slaking and dispersion, and their subsequent effect on infiltration processes;
Mechanisms affecting soil aggregate hierarchy and structural stability;
Salinity, sodicity, soil-water and solute movement under commercial practices; and
Natural resource management.

Managing spatial variability in irrigation through adaptive control

The irrigation research at USQ is largely directed at the automation and real-time adaptive control of irrigation application systems with the view to maximising crop response and water use efficiency. This essentially involves an integrated view of systems that encompasses the system hydraulics, crop and soil behaviours, sensing, and appropriate communication and control technologies. The work covers all types of irrigation application systems including surface and pressurised systems. Component projects are available in the areas of: evaluation and optimisation of application systems, simulation modelling of systems and of crop performance, understanding and managing variability in soil physical and hydraulic properties and in crop responses, development of innovative crop and soil sensing, and development of control and communication technologies.

Supervisors

Dr Nigel Hancock (Associate Professor, USQ) who is an environmental physicist with 30 years micrometeorology and instrumentation design experience, including agriculture-related evapotranspiration and evaporation measurement techniques.

Prof Rod Smith, Prof Steven Raine, Dr Rabi Misra, Dr Simon White

Signal Processing for Tomography

This work involves investigation of methods for reconstructing images from cryo-electron tomography. Tomography is the reconstruction of images from projections, and is commonly used for medical applications. Recent advances in electron microscopy have enabled cross-sections to be taken at the cellular level, and thus to obtain details of the structure not previously available. Multiple projection slices are taken through the object; a 3-dimensional visualization may be obtained through mathematically-based reconstruction algorithms. This part of the project involves the investigation of these signal processing algorithms, with application to cellular projection slice data.

Supervisor

Dr John Leis received the Bachelor of Engineering in 1988, the Master of Engineering Science in 1991, and the Doctor of Philosophy in 1999. His doctorate, awarded by the Queensland University of Technology, involved research into algorithms for low bit rate speech encoding.

Currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering & Surveying at the University of Southern Queensland, his previous appointments have been in a teaching capacity with Queensland University of Technology, and as a communications software engineer. He has authored many technical papers in areas involving signal processing and networking, as well as a book on signal processing.

He is a Senior Member of the Institution of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (Computer Society and Signal Processing Society), and a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Recognition of Chemical Signatures from an Electronic Nose

Low-cost, lightweight silicon sensors for detecting the presence of certain vapour combinations have recently become available. These sensors are non-specific, meaning that they have a broad range of detection and are not tuned to any particular chemical vapour signature. Information from arrays of such sensors can be combined in order to produce robust detectors capable of detecting and analyzing the concentration of extremely small (parts-per-billion) concentration. The goal is to be able to detect and classify explosive and chemical agents for security purposes. This part of the project is concerned with the pattern-recognition aspects of the approach. The time-profile output of the sensor arrays must be combined in some way to produce outputs which indicate the required presence and concentration information. Various signal processing and neural network approaches are under investigation.

Supervisor

He is a Senior Member of the Institution of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (Computer Society and Signal Processing Society), and a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Remote Laboratory Access

This project is concerned with the remote access to laboratories for experimental work. In particular, remote computer monitoring and control are required, together with visual information such as still images and, ideally, a video stream. Although potentially very useful in sharing resources, this approach is not without problems. These are, primarily, security of access and bandwidth utilization. The project aims to utilize a test bed equipped with packet monitoring software to investigate the performance issues, and then to simulate a real scenario in terms of packet loss, delay, jitter and so forth. This information will help trial remote monitoring systems before they are deployed. Other applications such as remote healthcare (tele-health) are also envisaged.

Supervisor

He is a Senior Member of the Institution of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (Computer Society and Signal Processing Society), and a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Cross-layer Networking

Current network design assumes a distinct layered paradigm. Obtaining the maximum efficiency for multimedia and other content over variable channel conditions (delay/bandwidth) may require information at the link/network layer regarding the type of content - aspects such as error resilience and delay tolerance of the source may be useful to the network/link layers. Similarly, congestion and delay information may be used to inform the channel coder of the most appropriate type of compression/coding.

Supervisor

He is a Senior Member of the Institution of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (Computer Society and Signal Processing Society), and a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

CFD modeling of water-atmosphere interactions in standard-geometry agricultural water storages

Evaporation from dams and other storages represents a very major loss of water for agriculture and the environment (of order 2000GL annually across Australia). Reduction (mitigation) of evaporation may be achieved by various surface cover techniques including physical covers and chemical monolayers, however their feasibility, and especially their cost-effectiveness, is not fully established. Research to evaluate these techniques is active at USQ; and to support this largely-experimental effort to date, more detailed knowledge is required of the air flow and the associated heat and water vapour exchange at the water surface for typical agricultural storages.

Preliminary work at USQ (Mossad, 2006) has demonstrated that 2-D computational fluid mechanics (CFD) modeling of air flow, energy exchange and hence evaporative flux is both feasible and yields very useful results. Full modeling and verification now needs to be undertaken spanning a range of size scales and atmospheric conditions.

The utility and value of the work arises because agricultural storages (‘dams’) are generally not naturally-occurring structures. To minimise the cost of construction (on mostly level sites) the great majority of storages are of regular and very similar geometry. Hence they are amenable to generic analysis with regard to both air flow over the dam and water/atmosphere energy exchange, diurnally and seasonally, and are adequately represented by a two-dimensional model. In addition to describing the micrometeorology of such water bodies, the results will also inform two current applied research objectives:

the conditions in which a chemical monolayer must perform (to reduce evaporation); and
the relationship between dam evaporation and the (recent) history of atmospheric conditions at positions adjacent to the storage.

The research topic will encompass CFD modeling for a range of dam scales and environmental conditions, using (principally) FLUENT software available to the project; plus some experimental work to validate and verify the model results. The project would suit a mechanical engineer, physicist or applied mathematician with an interest in environmental fluid mechanics.

Supervisors

Dr Ruth Mossad (Senior Lecturer, USQ) is a fluid mechanics modeler with 30 years finite difference (FD), finite element (FE) and CFD applications experience, including many agricultural and environmental topics.

Dr Ian Craig is involved in teaching and research at the Faculty of Engineering and Surveying, University of Southern Queensland. He holds a PhD in Agricultural / Environmental Physics from Cranfield University UK and has twenty years experience in industry, government and universities. After completing post doctoral studies at Imperial College UK, Ian relocated to the University of Queensland Gatton where he carried out field trials measuring drift from crop spraying aircraft and contributed to best management practices for the cotton industry. Ian now lectures at USQ on several courses including Environmental Technology, Hydrology, Irrigation Science, Land Studies and Engineering Problem Solving. His research interests include agricultural water use efficiency, evaporation control technology, micrometeorology and air quality.

Accurate evaporation measurement from agricultural water storages using eddy covariance techniques

Evaporation from dams and other storages represents a very major loss of water for agriculture and the environment. Two million or so ‘small’ dams across Australia together hold 9% of the national water resource, of order 8000 GL. Evaporation losses are 20 – 40% of water in storage. However, this proportion can only be poorly estimated because neither of the two major loss components, namely evaporation and seepage, can be readily measured using low-cost, affordable techniques. Optimal management of such dams, both for agricultural production and for environmental sustainability, is therefore severely compromised.

Current techniques applied to the measurement of dam evaporation, namely estimation via a standard automatic weather station (Penman-Monteith-type automatic weather station), or physical simulation via a evaporation pan, produce major errors due to the ‘oasis climate’ situation of most small dams, especially over short (less than monthly) time scales. (The so-called oasis (micro) climate of dams involves substantial energy advection into / out of the water body, varying diurnally and seasonally, and this invalidates both simple Penman-Monteith estimation and the simple scaling of evaporation pan measurements.) Therefore these techniques cannot be reliably used for dam seepage assessment or dam management.

However, the technique of eddy covariance (also labeled eddy correlation) can be used to directly measure the flux of water vapour effectively ‘at a point’ by measurement within the turbulent eddies of the air flow (wind) blowing across an evaporating surface, i.e. actual evaporation. This is achieved by correlation of the rapid (millisecond-scale) changes in water vapour concentration with fluctuations of the vertical air movement. Application of this technique at various positions across the dam surface will permit accurate measurement of the total evaporative plume.

The research project will utilise a Campbell Scientific eddy covariance apparatus at locations across several instrumented storages available to the USQ evaporation research group (via National Centre for Engineering in Agriculture). It is anticipated that some development of the measurement technique will be required for this application. Measurements will span a range of dam scales and environmental conditions and will be related to parallel meteorological measurements made adjacent to the storage so that the results may be extrapolated and generalized to other dams. The project would suit an engineer, physicist or applied scientist with an interest in environmental measurement and micrometeorology, and an aptitude for practical fieldwork.

Supervisors

Dr Nigel Hancock (Associate Professor, USQ) is an environmental physicist with 30 years micrometeorology and instrumentation design experience, including agriculture-related evapotranspiration and evaporation measurement techniques.

Dr Ian Craig (Lecturer, USQ) is a research scientist with 20 years practical agricultural & environmental physics experience.

Numerical modelling of polymer processing

Polymer processing is one of the fastest growing sectors of the manufacturing industry. Numerical modelling plays a crucial role in the design of polymer products. Conventional modelling technologies use a mesh and a low-order interpolation scheme to represent the solution variables, making the preprocessing costly and the solution convergence slow. This research project is concerned with the development of a new numerical simulation technology based on integrated high-order interpolation schemes and Cartesian-grid discretisations. It is expected that the great potential of the proposed technology to eliminate finite-element meshes and enable faster convergence rates will allow more complex engineering problems to be solved (National Research Priorities--Frontier Technologies for Building and Transforming Australian Industries--Breakthrough Science, Frontier technologies).

Supervisors

Dr Nam Mai-Duy’s research is focused on computational fluid mechanics and numerical methods. His specific areas of interest are computational rheology and mechanics, boundary-integral-equation methods, meshless RBFN-based methods and spectral methods. During his career he has produced two book chapters, over 30 journal papers and over 20 refereed conference papers and has received two ARC-DP research grants (chief investigators).

Dr Mai-Duy referees several Australian and international journals such as Computer Modeling in Engineering and Sciences, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids, and Australian Journal of Mechanical Engineering. He is also a member of IACM, AACM and AAEE.

Prof Thanh Tran-Cong earned his BE (Hons, Aeronautical, 1979, The Graduates' Prize, The R.W. McKenzie Prize, The Institution of Engineers' Prize) and PhD (1989) from the University of Sydney. He worked in private industry as an automation engineer between his two university degrees.

He joined the USQ in June 1989 and was appointed to the RME Chair in Computational Engineering in 2000, and Associate Dean (Research and Higher Degrees) in the Faculty of Engineering and Surveying in 2001-2002. Since 2003, Prof Tran-Cong has been the Executive Director of the Computational Engineering and Science Research Centre (CESRC) at the USQ. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the international journal CMC: Computers, Materials & Continua, and has been a referee for over 20 international journals, a reviewer for the ARC and other national and international research grant bodies. He has published 46 international refereed journal papers and also 46 refereed conference papers. He has delivered six invited papers and four Keynote lectures at international conferences since 1995.

Prof Tran-Cong has supervised successfully three PhD candidates and is currently supervising three other PhD students and two visiting scholars. His research programs are currently supported with two ARC grants and by two local engineering firms.

Numerical modelling of the macroscopic rheological properties of particulate suspensions

Suspensions, which involve transport of solid particles suspended in a fluid medium, have been of great industrial interest. Predicting the macroscopic rheological properties of these multiphase materials from the microstructure parameters is at the core of the study of suspension mechanics. Due to the complexity of the problem, most presently used numerical models have been limited to the case of spherical particles and Newtonian creeping flows. This research project is concerned with the development of a new numerical model that is capable of dealing with complicated shapes of particles and also different types of fluids including a viscoelastic liquid. The proposed model is underpinned by three advanced numerical tools, namely the high-order accuracy of the neural-network approximation technique, the effective implementation of boundary conditions of the integral collocation formulation, and the ability to handle multiply-connected domains of the fictitious-domain technique. It is expected that the outcome of this project will offer an advantage for a diverse range of industry, from the food preparation sector to water filtration and recycling (National Research Priorities—Frontier Technologies for Building and Transforming Australian Industries--Breakthrough Science, Advanced Materials).

Supervisors

Experimental investigation and numerical simulation of heat transfer in internal combustion engines

The project will include setting up experimental apparatus for transient radiation measurement in diesel combustion and subsequent data analysis. A horizontal gun tunnel facility is already available at the University of Southern Queensland laboratory and can be used as part of the total experimental set-up. It is anticipated that quasi-dimensional simulation and finite element analysis will be performed as needed. This project will benefit from the expertise and on-going research on internal combustion heat transfer measurements and radiating hypersonic flows at USQ. Commercial Finite Element software ABAQUS can be used to study the gas flow during compression and expansion, and the simulation results will be compared with the experimental data obtained from the shock tunnel apparatus.

Supervisors

Dr Talal Yusaf is currently a lecturer in Mechanical Engineering. He earned his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from University of Technology – Baghdad in 1988. He completed his Master and PhD programs at the National University Malaysia UKM in the field of combustion technology and renewable energy in 2000.

In April 2003, Dr Yusaf joined a research team of the University of Southern Queensland and took part in research in the area of micro-organism disruption using non-conventional techniques, which was part of his PhD program at the USQ.

He is well published and currently has active research programs in the areas of Renewable Energy (Bio-fuels) and Ultrasonic techniques for bacteria treatment.

Assoc Prof David Buttsworth earned his BE (1989) and PhD (1994) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Queensland. He then spent four years as a Research Assistant, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, developing and applying instrumentation for aerospace and turbomachinery applications. He joined USQ in 1997 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005.

He is also currently the Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Engineering and surveying. Assoc Prof Buttsworth has been an active researcher in the area of Instrumentation, Thermofluid Mechanics, and Hypersonic Aerodynamics. His research has covered aspects of fuel mixing in scramjet engines years as well as several thermofluids instrumentation problems. He has won several major research grants, including Queensland Smart State and ARC grants. He is well published and has successfully supervised a number of PhD students.

Cross-Layer Design of Wireless Relay Networks for Real-Time Video Communications

This project aims to address the important problem of wireless video communications using an innovative cross-layer design approach. With the widespread use of multimedia services such as wireless video telephony and Internet video streaming, reliable and cost-effective wireless video communications have become increasingly important. One of the main challenges confronting next generation wireless networks is to transmit high-quality video signals over vulnerable wireless links subject to given bandwidth and power constraints. Conventional design methods, which separately optimise each layer in the wireless relay networks, are unable to meet system design challenges. In this project, we propose to address this important and fundamental problem in the area of information and communications technology (ICT) using an innovative approach termed cross-layer design. The new approach differs from conventional methods in the sense that it aims to jointly design all layers in the wireless relay networks from a global optimisation point of view, and thus promises to deliver best performance under given bandwidth and power constraints.

This project has been awarded funding from the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) of the Australian Government for three years starting from 2008 under its International Linkage Program (ISL). The project involves research collaboration with a leading university in China. Students who participate in the project will have the opportunity to participate in international research collaboration.

Expected Outcomes and Benefits

Develop a software simulation platform for the wireless real-time video communications system.
Calibrate the results obtained via the software simulation platform against existing and other well known results.
Participate in a major international conference in the field to disseminate research findings to international peers.
Publish joint articles with Chinese collaborators on results achieved at the second stage of the project.

Supervisors

Dr Wei Xiang received the Bachelor of Engineering in 1997 the Master of Engineering Science in 2000, and the Doctor of Philosophy in 2004. His doctorate, awarded by the University of South Australia, involved research into algorithms for wireless image transmission using joint source and channel coding.

Dr Xiang is currently a lecturer in the Discipline of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at the USQ. He has published extensively in the area of wireless communications, information theory and coding theory. He has recently been successful in obtaining a national competitive research grant funded by the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) of the Australian Government.