“Do it for the kids,” cry climate activists, in an appeal to intergenerational responsibility. Climate change fictions make similar emotional appeals to their audiences by centering their plots around a family struggling to beat the odds of the Anthropocene. Electing the nuclear family as the genre standard reinforces heteronormativity, relies on the misleading catharsis of the “child savior” figure, and furthers procreational narratives. To examine the norms of the family in Cli-fi, this paper examines two popular short stories, “Quiet Town” by Jason Gurley and “The Smog Society” by Chen Qiufan and two Climate Disaster films, 2012 (2009) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004 dir. Roland Emmerich). To contextualize my exploration of such tropes, I consulted theory across multiple relevant disciplines: particularly, Edelman’s Queer theory of reproductive futurism and James Hughes’ work on Sociological Biopolitics informed my analysis. Close reading analyses found that even as Cli-fi work blocked the agency of children they also placed upon them the responsibility of maintaining and perpetuating generational and heteronormative tradition. Times of crisis within the story were mirrored by the destruction of the nuclear family, and times of environmental sustainability were signaled by the nuclear family. With this paper I hope to encourage further research into the emerging genre of Cli-Fi and the norms of gender enshrined within it.

The residential sector is responsible for 20% percent of total U.S. emissions. Emissions from the residential sectors can largely be traced to energy use in buildings. The demand for energy has been on a steady rise despite limited accessibility of non-renewable resources. Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) comprise an alternative technology which has high fuel to electricity efficiency, and can be powered by renewably sourced fuels. In this study, the waste heat from the fuel cell is captured and processed either through an Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) to provide extra power or absorption chiller (AC) to provide cooling for meeting the power and cooling demand of a residence or community. A spatially resolved dynamic model was developed in Matlab/Simulink to study dynamic characteristics of an SOFC system based on a previous model developed at the National Fuel Cell Research Center. A dynamic model was developed for the ORC and AC in Matlab/Simulink to study the dynamic characteristics of the combined system. This model was then used to evaluate the performance of the system in terms of efficiency, capacity, and dispatchability, based upon measured load profiles of residential buildings. Dynamic data from a residential complex were used as an input to evaluate the dynamic system model. The SOFC was capable of following the highly dynamic load with an average electrical efficiency of 46%. Seven present more power was produced through the ORC cycle with 10 % efficiency. The AC generated an average 125 kW of cooling with an average COP of 1.08.

Electricity consumption projections place data centers at up to 13% of global electricity demand in 2030 due to the expected growth in the production and use of electronic devices, cloud services, and computer networks. Cooling infrastructure accounts for up to 40% of the total energy delivered to a data center. With businesses and society relying so much on data centers, there is a greater need for reliable and clean electric power for data centers. Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) systems have the potential to provide more reliable and cleaner electrical load-following characteristics compared to other technologies while enabling dynamic operation and control. The high-temperature exhaust of SOFC can be used to run a bottoming cycle such as a cooling system which makes it an attractive integrated system for data center applications. However, cost and durability are major challenges associated with SOFC technology. On the other hand, the biggest challenge for using hydrogen as an energy carrier for SOFC is the very high pressure or very low temperature required for its storage, transmission, and distribution, which makes the need for a more dense liquid energy carrier like ammonia inevitable.This dissertation, first, focuses on evaluating the integrated system concept and assesses the achievable air conditioning from SOFC waste heat. To explore the feasibility of thermally integrating SOFC with liquid desiccant dehumidification (LDD), a spatially resolved physical model developed in MATLAB is used to simulate the operating characteristics of this SOFC system. A corresponding physical model is developed to simulate the liquid desiccant air conditioner for dehumidification. This research evaluated SOFC systems for powering the demand of a single server rack (~12kW) to powering a row of servers (~240kW). The LDD operation is based on the distributed waste heat from SOFC that powers the servers. This research indicates whether waste-heat-based cooling and dehumidification could power the servers and maintain server operating temperatures and humidity in the safe range for different weather conditions. It calculated the yearly storage capacity required for each location to meet the demand of the data center for the entire year. Next, the performance and degradation of a 1.5kW (AC) commercial system, that is proposed for the source of power and cooling of servers, is evaluated under steady-state and dynamic load cycling conditions for over 6000 hours. The degradation rate and performance characteristics of the SOFC system is analyzed to determine the long-term performance and durability of the SOFC system under dynamic condition. Finally, to analyze and compare the degradation of single-cell SOFC directly fed with ammonia (NH3), externally reformed ammonia (N2-H2), and pure hydrogen (H2), three durability tests are conducted on anode supported SOFC. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) are conducted to study the performance losses during operation and to observe the microstructure changes of the cell after testing.

Many-core systems are of great importance for building the exascale computing machine targeted for 2020. Last-Level Cache (LLC), as the largest on-chip shared memory in many-core systems, plays a crucial role in power, area, and more important in reliability. Reliability in LLC depends on both distributed banks and the communication fabric (Network-on-Chip (NoC) interconnect). In order to achieve high reliability factor, they both need to be

protected against errors. Existent error coding methods protect the cache and communication fabric, but in isolation of each other. Based on the observations in this thesis, when cache and NoC interconnect are considered together, the delay overhead of LLC protection has been decreased. In this thesis, the main contribution is NARC , an integrated method

that minimize the delay overhead of error protection in many-core architectures by integrating the error coding of cache and interconnection network. This new approach sets up a linked error coding scheme that guarantees the end-to-end protection of shared cache data

blocks throughout the on-chip network against both hard and soft errors. NARC partitions each shared cache block into multiple equally-sized segments. It extends each segment with a low-cost ECC, and transmits each extended segment as a flit in NoC. NARC eliminates the large ECC encoder/decoder blocks from the critical path of shared cache remote access

through the network. Using this technique, NARC minimizes latency in the common case of accessing a shared LLC bank over the network, and potentially accessing a local LLC bank, while providing almost the same error protection as strong multi-bit ECC in cache blocks using a segmented per flit ECC. It has been evaluated that on a 6 by 6 platform with mesh NoC, NARC improves the performance of the many-core systems on average of 9.6% about and it can go up to 22% compared to a baseline approach.