Interpreting nature: shifts in the presentation and display of taxidermy in contemporary museums in Northern England
Taxidermy is an organised craft which synthesises preserved animal skins with man-made materials to recreate a resemblance of living animals. As products of a cultural practice, displayed and interpreted in museums for the public, taxidermied animals are material manifestations of contingent value judgements. Despite the now widely held view in museum studies that the meanings of museum objects are constructed through their interpretation and reception, and therefore can have a multiplicity of meanings, many museums today continue to present and interpret taxidermied animals as objective species representatives. Although scientific themes continue to be privileged by many museums which maintain natural science as a discrete discipline, various social, ethical and political themes relating to the environment and to relationships between people have become more pronounced in recently redeveloped museums. Using Leeds City Museum, the Great North Museum: Hancock, and Museums Sheffield: Weston Park as case studies, this thesis investigates these changes to trace wider cultural shifts in politics, ethics, education and science. By analysing the frameworks within which museums and their staff operate, this investigation is concerned with the relationship between discourse and social practice in the form of museum exhibitions as a means of creating knowledge. It highlights how the public understanding of the natural world is more mutable than some of the enduring traditions of science may suggest, and how the discourses on science, and the objects through which they are articulated, are subject to cultural shifts which put their meanings in flux. 
This study is both part of, and a response to, an expanding field in museum studies and material culture studies which re-frames taxidermy objects as culturally contingent and therefore reflective of the subject positions of their makers, and the broader contexts of their making. In collating and investigating a diverse collection of archival material, this study recovers some of taxidermy’s histories, and contributes to the historical discourse on the display and interpretation of museum collections.
Nature, Nation and the Museum: the mid-twentieth century New Zealand experience
The mid-twentieth century is commonly identified as a transformative period for the display of the natural world, characterised by a shift from the didactic displays of natural history to interactive displays of science. But is this account sufficient? This question is explored through an examination of display practices of nature found within New Zealand’s Dominion Museum. With a focus on the 1930s -1950s this analysis is developed with consideration of contemporaneous displays produced in Australia’s National Museum of Victoria and the American Museum of Natural History. This period is revealed as one of great intensity, fuelled by the convergence of nationalism, nature study, education and new display techniques of the diorama and habitat series. Accordingly, displays of nature shift to naturalise science and the citizen within the ecological specifics of the local. While the Australian museum mirrors this experience, the American museum presents a spectacular nature, a difference which can be partially explained by different temporalities of nationalism.
Numerical and experimental investigation on air distributor design of fluidized bed reactor of sawdust pyrolysis
Abstract An improved biomass conversion in a lab-scale fluidized bed reactor (FBR) is achieved by optimizing the air distributor orifice size and number. Two approaches for introducing air were numerically and experimentally examined. These included perforated plate and downward orifice sparger. 3 mm and 5 mm orifice diameters, and 7, 9 and 13 holes were simulated at flow velocities of 2, 4, 6, and 8 times the minimum fluidization velocity, Umf. The simulation results revealed that increasing the orifice number has a positive effect on gas holdup, particularly for the perforated plate, which showed a uniform distribution of bubbles. The sparger configuration produced larger bubbles sizes, which could lead to better recirculation of solid flux, while stagnant particle zones were observed at the lower section of both distributors. A pyrolysis unit is also inserted at the top of freeboard of the FBR. For perforated plate with 6Umf, the pyrolysis process achieved thermal and cold gas efficiencies of 82.91% and 52.03%, respectively, while combustible gases with 41.6%mol CO, 8.7%mol CH 4 and 2.17%mol HC, were obtained. For sparger pipe and 6U mf _sp, 35.33 ppm NOx and 111 ppm SO 2 were measured in flue gas from combustion process at bed region.