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 34 matching student topics
Displaying 1–12 of 34 results
Diffusion and first passage times in random media
Diffusion in homogenous environments is relatively well understood, but the problem becomes more complicated in complex environments - such as wood tissue, cells, filters and catalysts. At QUT there is extensive expertise in using advanced numerical methods to model diffusions and first passage times in complex environments.The ability to combine this expertise with realistic models of random media based on level-sets of Gaussian random field.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Computational communication and culture
The Computational Communication and Culture research program within the Digital Media Research Centre investigates how rapid advances in computation and human-machine communication are transforming society, through automation and AI, the Internet of Things, and disintermediating technologies such as blockchain. We draw on and extend computer science and critical humanities theory and methods (including agent-based modelling, machine vision, critical simulation, and information visualisation) to help explore and explain emergent phenomena in the digital media environment, including the fundamental transformation of communication …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice
- School
- School of Communication
- Research centre(s)
- Digital Media Research Centre
Simulation of turbulent fluid flow through a microfluidic device using CFD
Microfluidic devices (MFD) are extensively used in microbial studies. Bacterial cell attachment onto surfaces under flow conditions in laminar regime has been previously studied using a custom designed MFD.As an extension of this study, microbial attachment under turbulent flow is to be studied in a future project. The suitability of current MFD for microbial studies under turbulent flow must be evaluated to adopt / redesign the MFD.A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis is proposed to examine the fluid flow inside …
- Study level
- Honours, Vacation research experience scheme
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Simulation of bacterial cell motion using CFD and DPM methods
Studying bacterial motion under flow conditions demands greater amount of resources. Computer simulations can reduce the need for expensive experimental investigations by predicting bacterial motion under specific flow conditions.Computer Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used to analyse fluid flow using computer simulations, and Discrete Phase Method (DPM) is used to analyse flow of particles in a fluid. Combining these two methods, bacterial motion under fluid flow has been simulated.However, these simulation models have limitations such as absence of bacterial interactions, or …
- Study level
- Vacation research experience scheme
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Optimisation of piezoelectric materials for robotics applications
Piezoelectricity, which translates to “pressure electricity”, is the phenomenon in which certain materials convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, and vice versa. Such materials are common-place and are used in a variety of applications including sensor, actuator, and energy harvesting technologies. The capabilities of such piezoelectric materials have not yet been fully realised. We plan to use computational structural optimisation to design new piezoelectric materials and components that may contribute to novel sensing technologies for robotics applications. Essentially, robots need …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Scalable Bayesian Inference using Multilevel Monte Carlo
Bayesian inference is a popular statistical framework for estimating the parameters of statistical models based on data. However, Bayesian methods are well known to be computationally intensive. This fact inhibits the scalability of Bayesian analysis for real-world applications involving complex stochastic models. Such models are common in the fields of biology and ecology.Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods are a promising class of techniques for dealing with the scalability challenge. These approaches use hierarchies of approximations to optimise the trade-off between …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Making the most of many models
In the age of Big Data, machine learning methods, and modern statistics the adage "all models are wrong but some are useful" has never been so true. This project will investigate data science approaches where more than one model makes sense for the data. Is it better to choose a single model or is there something to be gained from multiple models?This project will look at variable selection methods, penalised regression, Bayesian model averaging and conformal prediction. The research has …
- Study level
- Honours, Vacation research experience scheme
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Design, derivation, and implementation of mesh-free finite volume solvers based on 3D unit cell morphology to estimate biomass particle effective parameters
The aim of this PhD project is to use lignocellulosic morphological features extracted from high resolution micro-CT images of biomass particles undergoing a dilute acid pretreatment process to perform computational homogenisation over representative unit cell configurations. Mesh-free finite volume solvers will be developed based on 3D point cloud data sets to estimate virtual biomass particle effective parameters, such as diffusivity, thermal conductivity, and permeability. The simulation results will be analysed to provide a fundamental understanding of the impact that changes …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
How do healthy people sleep? Biomechanics, physiology, and environment - what matters most?
In the Westernized world a person typically spends one third of their life in bed, with more time spent sleeping in a bed than in any other single activity. Sleep amount and quality of sleep have a direct impact on mood, behaviour, motor skills and overall quality of life. Yet, despite how important restful sleep is for the body to maintain good health, there is a comparatively small amount of studies evaluating key multi-factorial and biomechanical determinants of restful sleep …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Topics in computational Bayesian statistics
Bayesian statistics provide a framework for a statistical inference for quantifying the uncertainty of unknowns based on information pre and post data collection.This information is captured in the posterior distribution, which is a probability distribution over the space of unknowns given the observed data.The ability to make inferences based on the posterior essentially amounts to efficiently simulating from the posterior distribution, which can generally not be done perfectly in practice.This task of sampling may be challenging for various reasons:The posterior …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Mathematical and computational techniques for advection diffusion reaction models
Mathematical models of advection diffusion reaction processes are fundamental to many applied disciplines including physics, biology, ecology and medicine. This project will focus on developing mathematical and computational techniques for continuum (PDE) and/or stochastic (random walk) models of advection diffusion reaction.Potential project topics include:building new simplified models that are easier to implement, interpret and analyseextracting new mathematical insights into advection diffusion reaction processesproposing new methods for parameterising models from datadeveloping new numerical and/or analytical methods for solving PDE models.All project …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Exact and approximate solutions of diffusion on evolving domains
Classical applications of mathematical analysis involve solving partial differential equation models on fixed domains, e.g. 0 < x < L. Applications in biology, however, involve studying diffusive transport on rapidly evolving domains, e.g. 0 < x < L(t), where L(t) represents the length of the evolving tissue. While many problems have been addressed for the case where L(t) increases, less attention has been paid to cases where we consider diffusion on an oscillating domain.In this project we will construct exact …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
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