The aim of the study was to find repetitive behavioral patterns pre calving that could be used as indications of calving in beef cattle. In the study sixteen Standing- and lying down sensors were attached to the leg of sixteen beef cows. Ten of the sixteen beef cows gave birth to calves during the trial period. From these ten cows, data from six cows were used to assess the sensors fitness for use as calving indicators. The analytical part of the experiment was divided into two parts, calculation of divergence of mean lying time within different time intervals, and the number of lying bouts.The first part consisted of optimization of an equation used to highlight divergence in mean lying time within eight different time intervals (3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21 and 24 hours).

This Master Thesis is a product development project that has been carried out in cooperation with Scania CV AB. The purpose has been to find the relationship between geometric parameters and the swirl number for an XPI- cylinder head in order to improve the design specification.The increased focus on environmental issues from society leads to tighter emission legislations for the truck manufactures. In order to drive the development forward considerable resources are spent on research and development on diesel engines and its combustion process. The inlet air has a significant impact on the formation of emissions and the flow that is desired is called swirl. Swirl is achieved by making the air rotate around the vertical axis of the cylinder.Earlier cylinder heads that has been developed at Scania CV AB have shown clear relationships between geometric parameters of the cylinder head and the swirl number.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, OTEC, a technology using the temperature difference between cold deep seawater and warm surface water, can extract the work in the form of electricity. OTEC gives also synergies of drinkable fresh water. The temperature difference has an impact on the efficiency of the technology, which means that the feasibility of OTEC is geographically limited. The project intends to explore the possibility of replacing the atoll Tarawa?s present electricity generation with an OTEC plant and to explore synergies. In the present situation all of Tarawa?s electricity is generated by fossil fuels.

The feed is a major cost in the dairy production and there is a constant interest in findingalternative cost-effective feedstuffs. Competitive dairy producers have to seek ways todecrease their production costs and the pursuit of cost-effective feed rations contributesto lower costs of production. An interesting group of protein concentrates are rapeseedproducts like ExPro (heat treated rapeseed) which have during the autumn 2008 andspring 2009 been very favourable compared to other protein feeds.This study focuses on the feedstuff products ExPro and Raps-Drank 60/40 (rapeseeddistillersgrain). The potential use of ExPro in dairy cow feed rations are also explored.ExPro is a well known feedstuff but Raps-Drank 60/40 is a relatively new product andnot known for many farmers.A field study on the use of rapeseed products was made on a limited number of dairyfarms. The main purpose was to study the management of the feedstuffs on the farms.The Farms were selected in cooperation with two local extension services.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, OTEC, a technology using the temperature difference between cold deep seawater and warm surface water, can extract the work in the form of electricity. OTEC gives also synergies of drinkable fresh water. The temperature difference has an impact on the efficiency of the technology, which means that the feasibility of OTEC is geographically limited. The project intends to explore the possibility of replacing the atoll Tarawa?s present electricity generation with an OTEC plant and to explore synergies. In the present situation all of Tarawa?s electricity is generated by fossil fuels.

This thesis applies to a novel steam expander, one part of a steam engine system, a wobble plateengine. The piston in the expander moves axially with the outgoing rotating shaft and is locatedon a plate, why the engine type is called axial engine. When steam is applied to the plungers theplate wobbles creating a rotation on the shaft going thru the wobble plate. The steam expander issupposed to be used in exhaust gas recovery (bottoming cycle) applications and small scaleenergy production. The commissioner is Ranotor Utveckling AB.

The aim is to develop a new decision-making model for credit-loans. The model will be specific for credit applicants of the OKQ8 bank, becauseit is based on data of earlier applicants of credit from the client (the bank). The final model is, in effect, functional enough to use informationabout a new applicant as input, and predict the outcome to either the good risk group or the bad risk group based on the applicant?s properties.The prediction may then lay the foundation for the decision to grant or deny credit loan.Because of the skewed distribution in the response variable, different sampling techniques are evaluated. These include oversampling with SMOTE, random undersampling and pure oversampling in the form of scalar weighting of the minority class.

In this report the two authors, and project contributors alike, describe their work withdeveloping a solar cooker intended for usage in the developing countries of the world.Specifically, the work aims at developing a new, solar heat driven cooking device, possiblybased upon the current product. This should, in comparison to the current product, be lighter,easier to transport and to produce. Also, the new product?s production mustn?t be more costlythan today and the included materials and components must be obtainable from within theBolivian national borders where the product is currently produced. During the project, certainadvantages with a more efficient, and, above all, a more moderately priced product, werediscovered.

Kremering är idag det vanligaste jordfästningssättet i Sverige, de allra flesta som avlider kremeras och gravsätts i urna. Frågan om hur de metaller som finns i kroppen men inte får plats i urnan hanteras har hittills inte väckt så stor uppmärksamhet, speciellt inte ur miljösynpunkt. Dock handlar det om åtskilliga ton metall som varje år grävs ner på kyrkogårdar runt om i landet. Denna metall påverkar dels miljön negativt, dels kommer det att ta upp mer och mer plats på kyrkogårdarna i framtiden, och att gräva ner metaller imarken är inte ett miljöoptimerat sätt att hantera dessa. Det finns dock andra saker än bara miljön att ta hänsyn till i denna fråga.

Simulations of simulink models using Kalman filters are often very time-consuming. This problem depends mainly on the fact that the Kalman correction has to be performed at each sample instance through the whole simulation. The goal for this thesis work is to reduce that time-consumption for the filtering part (the integration partis treated in a complementary report) of a simulation. Furthermore a Matlab routine to perform parameter tuning and finally a graphical user interface is developed.The filtering part of the simulation in this thesis is based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The time optimization of this filter considers searching for the possibility to replace the today?s existing Matlab functions that is used to perform the filtering calculations.

Since the 1990?s the Swedish school system has undergone major and recurring structural reforms. Two of the most comprehensive changes has been the shift of primary schools as an integral part of the welfare state to the responsibility of the municipalities as well as the introduction of free school choice for the students. Through two months of participant observations and semi-structured interviews this thesis seeks to answer the question of how these reforms has come to effect the work of teachers in a medium sized public school in a small municipality in the outskirts of Stockholm. Earlier research has shown that public schools in socio-economically vulnerable areas are disadvantaged due to the reformation of the school system (Beach & Sernhede, 2011; Östh, Andersson, & Malmberg, 2013).

Syftet med detta examensarbete är att fördjupa vår förståelse kring matematikspråk och kommunikation som verktyg i matematikundervisningen. Detta har sökts svar på genom att observera och intervjua tre stycken matematiklärare i grundskolans lägre åldrar. Vi har undersökt hur dessa lärare använder och ser på muntlig kommunikation samt infor-mellt och formellt matematikspråk. Vi redogör för tidigare forskning kring språk och kommunikation i matematikundervis-ningen. Studiens utgångspunkt är Vygotskijs syn på språk och kommunikation i ett so-ciokulturellt perspektiv.

District heating covers around 80 % of the heating demand in apartment buildings and 10 % in single-family homes in Sweden. In the year 2010 the total input of energy to the Swedish district heating grids was about 70 TWh, which corresponds to 11 % of the total energy input to the whole energy system in the country. Through the combined production of heat and power the CHP-plants often reaches an efficiency of 90 % from energy in the fuel to produced heat and power. In order to keep the efficiency high it is important for the owners of the plant to have good knowledge about the plants performance at different operation points. Strängnäs Energi AB initiated this diploma work together with FVB Sverige ab in order to come up with a program for short term planning of the production of heat and power at the company´s CHP-plant.The work consists of three main parts.

As emission legislations across the world continuously pushes engine development forward,engineers constantly need to come up with and implement fuel saving technologies. During thelast decade, variable cam phasing has become a popular solution to increase gas exchangeefficiency. This configuration is typically mechanically constrained by camshaft limitations, anda solution to circumvent this problem would be to use a different valve actuation principle.One example of this is to use pressurized air controlled by electrical solenoids. Such a systemhas been developed byCargine Engineering and this provides the starting point for this work. Tobe able to operate the valvetrain on an actual engine, a control system is needed.

LevMacinstrumentet är ett analysinstrument under utveckling som utnyttjar leviterade droppar på 100 nl ? 2 ?l. Genom att använda leviterade droppar med den omgivande atmosfären som enda kontaktyta, undviker LevMac?en de vanligaste problemen associerade med miniatyrisering av analytiska tekniker, t.ex. kontaminering av provet genom desorption från provbehållaren eller andra gränsytor, adsorption av analyten till omgivningen med minskat utbyte som följd, och optisk interferens vid väggarna av provbehållaren vilket resulterar i störningar av detektionen.Tillsatser till den leviterade droppen kan göras i pl-området och reaktioner i droppen kan följas med olika spektroskopiska tekniker.