The College of Engineering at the United Arab Emirates (UAEU) has approved four MA Theses in different Engineering specializations.

The first MA thesis is in Mechanical Engineering entitled ‘Experimental Investigation of Techniques to Enhance the Cooling Rate of Hot Fluid by Utilizing Gallium as a Heat Sink Material’ by Abdallah Ghazal. The thesis proposes novel techniques to cool hot water in batch-wise operation, which can be used to enhance the rate of heat transfer from the hot water to the gallium either by vibrating the heat sink under a range of amplitudes and frequencies or discretizing the hot water into small bubbles travelling through a liquid gallium bath.

Meriem Rahmani presented her thesis entitled ‘The Impact of Building Form on Energy Consumption in New School Models of Abu Dhabi’. The results of the study showed that the designs of the current architectural forms affect the energy consumption rate and limit access to free energy resources that can be provided by natural lighting and ventilation. It revealed that optimizing the architectural form with regards to its geometry, aspect ratio, spatial height to depth proportion, Form direction, spacing between building masses can help to improve connection to the outdoor environment including daylight, air and outdoor greenery. Another important outcome is the graphical representations of the results; which are introduced in a manner that can directly help architects and decision makers to design low energy and low carbon schools.

Another thesis presented by Md. Didarul Alam from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is titled ‘Calibrating and Evaluating Dynamic Rule-based Transit-signal-priority Control Systems in Urban Traffic Networks’. The study presents the framework and method that entail the application of the Response Surface Methodology (RSM) to calibrate the parameters of any control system incorporating advanced traffic management strategies. The integrated system is a rule-based heuristic controller that reacts to specific triggering conditions, such as identification of priority transit vehicle, downstream signal congestion, and incidents by penalizing the predefined objective function with a set of parameters corresponding to these conditions.  

Haliemeh Sweidan, a MA student in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering defended her thesis entitled ‘Investigation of the effect of supercritical carbon dioxide treatment on the adsorption ability of date pits’. The thesis aims to develop and investigate an innovative use of date pits, a common and abundant agricultural waste in the UAE. It is suggested that date pits may be used to produce date pit oil, and the powder residue from this extraction process may be used as a low cost adsorbent for removal of lead from water. This thesis aims to investigate the effects of the parameters pressure, temperature, and particle size on the extraction yield when using supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) to extract oil from date pit powder. This oil is a valuable component which has many applications in pharmaceutics and foodstuff. The residue powder, symbolized by CO2-DP, is then investigated as a possible adsorbent for removing lead ions from water.