One of the most widely cultivated crops in the world is rice, leading to millions of tons of rice husks (also known as rice hulls or chaffs). The large amount of this lignocellulosic biowaste has resulted in an extensive search for its utilization. One such usage of this waste is for the...

Despite the low-carbon environmental policies, coal is expected to remain a main source of energy in the coming decades. Therefore, efficient and environmentally friendly power systems are required. A design process based on the deterministic models and application of the safety factors leads to...

The focus of this dissertation is on improving decision-maker trade-offs and the development of a new constrained methodology for multiple response surface optimization. There are three key components of the research: development of the necessary conditions and assumptions associated with...

This study presents a compromise approach to augmentation of experimental designs, necessitated by the expense of performing each experiment (computational or physical), that yields higher quality parametric polynomial response surface approximations than traditional augmentation. Based on the...

Reliability-based structural optimization methods use mostly the following basic design criteria: I) Minimum weight (volume or costs) and II) high strength of the structure. Since several parameters of the structure, e.g. material parameters, loads, manufacturing errors, are not given, fixed...

Reliability-based structural optimization methods use mostly the following basic design criteria: I) Minimum weight (volume or costs) and II) high strength of the structure. Since several parameters of the structure, e.g. material parameters, loads, manufacturing errors, are not given, fixed...