QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 113 matching student topics
Displaying 1–12 of 113 results
Control of concentrating solar thermal power plants
Concentrating solar power (CSP) is a technology that utilises mirrors (heliostats) to focus the sun’s rays on a solar receiver. This provides heat for a power generation cycle, creating thermal energy.Control of the heat transfer fluid temperature in the solar receiver is crucial for the efficient use/storage of thermal energy and to minimise the degradation of the receiver. The aim of this project is to design controllers for the heat transfer fluid pumps and the heliostats using a previously developed model of the receiver's thermodynamics.
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Finite element modelling of 3D auxetic structures
Protection of structures has become a priority for saving lives and preventing structural collapses caused by increased natural or man-made disasters. Most injuries and mortalities in these disasters are caused due to fragmentation of structures, and therefore, structural protection through systems that can absorb more energy and effectively contain the fragments (debris) are needed. Additive manufacturing (such as 3D printing) can be used to develop special geometries called auxetic geometries and composites using sustainable bioplastics which can absorb shock energy …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Synergic identification of prestress force, moving force and interfacial force for corroborative substructural modelling
We are looking for an appropriate PhD candidate working for a recently awarded ARC Discovery Project. The PhD candidate will work on the further improvement of the previously developed Synergic identification of prestress force [1] and moving force applying to continuous supported prestressed concrete bridges using regularisation techniques [2-7] and corroborative substructural modelling.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Low Cost Catalysts for Biofuels Production
As the world transitions from fossil fuels to biomass based fuels there is a corresponding drive to create new technologies to enable this situation to come to fruition.Biofuels represent one option in terms of mitigating the impacts of global warming.The conversion of biomass to biofuels typically requires a catalyst. Many different materials have been investigated, with zeolites showing considerable promise.However, zeolite catalysts can be expensive and thus there is a challenge to create new catalysts which are low cost.This project …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Coarse-grained molecular dynamics modelling in expansive soil
Expansive soil/active soil has wide applications in geotechnical engineering and other engineering disciplines due to its desirable special properties - for example, low permeability and swelling pressure under saturated condition. But these materials are highly susceptible to experiencing huge volume change and even damage due to moisture content reduction. However, the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon is still not clear for geotechnical engineers. Therefore, there is no optimum solution available to solve the problem.In this project, a special modelling approach …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Virus Search Algorithms
Meta-heuristics are powerful search algorithms for solving intractable optimization problems. There are many population based approaches, like genetic algorithms, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm, etc. but most of these have a static population size.Viruses arise and attack populations periodically. They typically appear when populations become abundant. Viruses infect population members, and often reduce the number of individuals. Viruses create spaces for more individuals and balance competition.The concept of viruses may be mimicked and could be a useful optimization paradigm.
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Investigating factors impacting urban heat vulnerability in subtropical cities
In recent years, with the rise in climate change impact, urban heat has become a major issue for many cities to tackle consequently. Extreme heat events are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, which has directly caused a substantial increase in heat-related morbidity and mortality. This indispensably puts an extra burden on medical systems and national finance. Meanwhile, the urban heat island effect has been exaggerating the consequences caused by the increased extreme heat in metropolitan areas. …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Architecture and Built Environment
Understanding responsible deployment of computer vision for urban planning
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer urban planning practice many novel prospects. By the responsive use of AI, planners can effectively analyse data, improve processes, increase efficiency, and prioritise human-centric aspects of planning to develop sustainable cities. Computer vision is one of the key areas where responsible AI is applied in urban planning to revolutionise the analysis and interpretation of visual data, like images and videos captured in cities to aid decision and plan making processes. While the potential impacts …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Architecture and Built Environment
From LiDAR or drone imagery to structural geometries
LiDAR geo-spatial data (3D coordinates) are freely available from government websites such as "QSpatial data portal". Alternatively, the use of drones have also become popular in aerial surveys and imagery.The geospatial data from these sources include 3D coordinates of various built structure. The data can be downloaded (in case of LiDAR) or processed from images (in case of drone survey) to create actual 3D picture of building structures. This work is commonly done using rendering software. The use of this …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
Capture and reuse of phosphate nutrients
Nutrients such as ammonium and phosphate species are essential in agriculture. However, release of excessive amounts of nutrients to waterways may result in eutrophication which can lead to toxic algae blooms, killing of fish and destruction of the environment.Compounding this issue is the fact that phosphate rock sources are gradually being exhausted. Hence, finding a means to capture and reuse phosphate species from sources such as wastewater treatment plants is potentially attractive.Consequently, this project involves the development of new phosphate …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Improving the resilience of older masonry building roofs against winds and cyclones
Wind and cyclonic actions are important in the design of new buildings in many Australian regions including in QLD. Cyclone Tracy in NT proved that older masonry building were particularly vulnerable to cyclonic actions, and the even resulted in the improvement of construction codes.However, there are many buildings that predate the introduction of modern codes. These buildings may be vulnerable to wind and cyclonic actions. This project has been designed to study the wind vulnerability of older masonry buildings and …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Centre for the Environment
Drone and satellite Artificial Intelligence
Satellite and drone/UAV data has a great potential to provide large-scale analytics for many domain applications. However, the wide range of data of diverse nature (e.g., optical vs. SAR, high-resolution vs. wide-coverage, mono- vs. hyper-spectral, 2-D vs. 3-D) also poses significant challenges for analytics.Deep learning holds great promise to deal with these tasks. While the number of research in this area is increasing, there still exists challenges such as co-learning of multimodal data, limited data annotation, and uncertainty in the …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
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