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Recently, resistive switching devices have emerged as promising candidates for next generation non-volatile memory and neuromorphic computing applications. In general, resistive switching device consists of a two-terminal metal-insulator-metal structure, in which metal oxide is widely employed as the insulator. Among a variety of metal oxides, SrTiO3 has attracted extensive attention owing to its superior physical and chemical properties. In this dissertation, novel SrTiO3 resistive switching devices through solution processed approaches have been developed and their electrical properties are tuned through engineering the defects and interfaces. The thesis includes the following parts: (1) Specific cation doping is utilized to modulate the electrical properties of SrTiO3 nanoparticles film. In Cr-doped SrTiO3 device, oxygen vacancies are induced since the Ti4+ is partly replaced by Cr3+, leading to reversible hysteresis loops upon application of voltage, while negligible resistance change is observed in the undoped device. (2) By insertion of a reduced graphene oxide layer between SrTiO3 and the bottom electrode, a transition from digital switching to analog switching is demonstrated. Typical potentiation and depression behaviours are implemented towards neuromorphic computing applications. (3) To explore the potential applications of silver nanowires as electrodes and artificial filaments, controlled fragmentation of silver nanowires has been realized through ultraviolet (UV)/ozone irradiation and a low-temperature annealing process. Based on the fragmented silver nanowire network, the device exhibits a reliable threshold switching effect with a selectivity of 5 × 105. (4) A facile sol-precipitation method is introduced to prepare SrTiO3 nanocubes and thin films. Using silver top electrode deposited by ink-jet printing, the device shows a typical bipolar switching behaviour. After deposition of silver nanowires onto the bottom electrode, unipolar switching with a high on/off ratio (~105) is demonstrated. This work provides facile and cost-effective solution-based methods to fabricate SrTiO3 devices for potential resistive switching applications. Meanwhile, the systematic study on modification of switching behaviour of SrTiO3 devices may give a better understanding of switching mechanism and offer ways to improve the device performance.

3D environment reconstruction has received great interest in recent years in areas such as city planning, virtual tourism and flood hazard warning. With the rapid development of computer technologies, it has become possible and necessary to develop new methodologies and techniques for real time simulation for virtual environments applications. This thesis proposes a novel dynamic simulation scheme for flood hazard warning. The work consists of three main parts: digital terrain modelling; 3D environmental reconstruction and system development; flood simulation models. The digital terrain model is constructed using real world measurement data of GIS, in terms of digital elevation data and satellite image data. An NTSP algorithm is proposed for very large data assessing, terrain modelling and visualisation. A pyramidal data arrangement structure is used for dealing with the requirements of terrain details with different resolutions. The 3D environmental reconstruction system is made up of environmental image segmentation for object identification, a new shape match method and an intelligent reconstruction system. The active contours-based multi-resolution vector-valued framework and the multi-seed region growing method are both used for extracting necessary objects from images. The shape match method is used with a template in the spatial domain for a 3D detailed small scale urban environment reconstruction. The intelligent reconstruction system is designed to recreate the whole model based on specific features of objects for large scale environment reconstruction. This study then proposes a new flood simulation scheme which is an important application of the 3D environmental reconstruction system. Two new flooding models have been developed. The first one is flood spreading model which is useful for large scale flood simulation. It consists of flooding image spatial segmentation, a water level calculation process, a standard gradient descent method for energy minimization, a flood region search and a merge process. The finite volume hydrodynamic model is built from shallow water equations which is useful for urban area flood simulation. The proposed 3D urban environment reconstruction system was tested on our simulation platform. The experiment results indicate that this method is capable of dealing with complicated and high resolution region reconstruction which is useful for many applications. When testing the 3D flood simulation system, the simulation results are very close to the real flood situation, and this method has faster speed and greater accuracy of simulating the inundation area in comparison to the conventional flood simulation models