Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Nuclear Power Plant In Las Vegas, Ryan W. Murray

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

This research focuses on the impact of a “Nuclear Power Plant in Las Vegas” or ‘NPP in LV’ for short. Nuclear power is clean, has no greenhouse gas emissions, and has a moderate cost of kilowatt hours. Las Vegas, or more specifically Clark County uses Gas power plants to produce a majority of their electricity. My project will show what a nuclear plant could do if built in the city of Las Vegas. What is a Nuclear power plant? The EIA’s definition is “A nuclear power plant uses the heat that a nuclear reactor produces to turn water into steam, …

Autonomous Gyroscopic 2-Wheel Differential Robot, Haruka Kido, James Vrtis, Luke Anderson, Tarek Elderini

Electrical Engineering Student Publications

This paper demonstrates the implementation of an autonomous gyroscopic 2-wheel differential robot, including a forward and inverse kinematics simulation in MatLAB, a test hardware robot and programmed demonstration of a simple move forward and spin left motion, and a final configuration of a complete square path based on programming kinematics, gyroscopic speed responses, and remote-control functionality.

Carbon-Al Interface Effect On The Performance Of Ionic Liquid-Based Supercapacitor At 3 V And 65 OC, Zhen-Zhen Ye, Shu-Ting Zhang, Xin-Qi Chen, Jin Wang, Ying Jin, Chao-Jie Cui, Lei Zhang, Lu-Ming Qian, Gang Zhang, Wei-Zhong Qian

Journal of Electrochemistry

Ionic liquid (IL) electrolyte-based supercapacitors (SCs) have advantages of high operating voltage window, high energy density and nonflammability, as compared to conventional acetonitrile-based organic electrolyte SCs, and are typically suitable for the large-scale energy storage in the era of carbon neutrality full of renewable, but unstable electricity. However, current efforts were concentrated on the study with coin-cell type of IL-SCs, and less has been reported on the pouch type of IL-SCs for a long cycling time yet. To fabricate a reliable SC for the life time test or for the accelerated aging test under high temperature, one should concern the …

A Low-Cost, Low-Power, Scada Testbed Solution For Secure Remote Monitoring, Connor Berger

Symposium of Student Scholars

Similar to software application systems adopted by companies and businesses for product logging, payroll, human resources, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems control the distributed processes with multiple components located on different machines that communicate and coordinate actions in order to appear as a single coherent system. SCADA systems severely lack the appropriate security and hack prevention measures. We propose a low cost, low power SCADA testbed solution for secure remote monitoring. The goal of this research is to implement and test the testbed’s security by emulating attack vectors on both hardware components and communication channels to probe the …

Small-Separation Speckle Contrast Optical Spectroscopy For Intraoperative Assessment Of Parathyroid Glands Viability During Thyroid Surgery, Connor Berger

Symposium of Student Scholars

The parathyroid glands (PTGs) are often damaged during thyroid surgeries due to a lack of methods identifying PTGs and assessing their viability. Damage to PTGs can cause hypocalcemia, a deficiency of calcium in the body. This complication can lead to detrimental consequences with economic burden. The surgeon’s current method of viability assessment is qualitative and subjective. Our technical solution is to employ an optical technique called speckle contrast optical spectroscopy (SCOS) that noninvasively quantifies the blood flow index (Db) of biological tissues at deep tissue levels (>1cm). The goal of this project is to verify SCOS at small source-detector-separation …

Context-Aware Collaborative Neuro-Symbolic Inference In Internet Of Battlefield Things, Tarek Abdelzaher, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Susmit Jha, Lance Kaplan, Mani Srivastava, Venugopal Veeravalli

ACI Journal Articles

IoBTs must feature collaborative, context-aware, multi-modal fusion for real-time, robust decision-making in adversarial environments. The integration of machine learning (ML) models into IoBTs has been successful at solving these problems at a small scale (e.g., AiTR), but state-of-the-art ML models grow exponentially with increasing temporal and spatial scale of modeled phenomena, and can thus become brittle, untrustworthy, and vulnerable when interpreting large-scale tactical edge data. To address this challenge, we need to develop principles and methodologies for uncertainty-quantified neuro-symbolic ML, where learning and inference exploit symbolic knowledge and reasoning, in addition to, multi-modal and multi-vantage sensor data. The approach features …

A Robust Platform For Mobile Robotics Teaching And Developing Using Arduino’S Integrated Development Environment (Ide) For Programming The Arduino Mega 2560, Sajjad Alhassan

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research from Electrical & Computer Engineering

In light of the rapid pace at which development happens with modern technology, mobile robots play an important role in our daily lives. This is due to their great importance in facilitating the affairs of life in various economic, commercial, industrial, scientific, and many other fields. In this research and project, we have restructured the microcontroller and system for one of the mobile robots (CEENBOT) that was designed by the University of Nebraska and replaced it with an Arduino Mega 2560.

The purpose of using the Arduino Mega 2560 robot is to provide alternative programming for the CEENBOT platform to …

An Integrated Electronic-Skin Patch For Real-Time And Continuous Monitoring Of A Panel Of Biomarkers Combined With Drug Delivery, Tanzila Noushin

Electrical Engineering Theses

Inflammatory biomarkers present in the human body play a vital role in medical field by guiding the clinician in decision-making for many diseases. The levels of these inflammatory biomarkers are associated with the severity and progress of several diseases. Researchers have found that increasing severity of many diseases such as cardiovascular disease, after surgery infection, and adverse clinical outcomes due to infectious diseases, results in the elevation of the level of inflammatory biomarkers in human sweat. Furthermore, the inflammatory cytokines indicate the pathophysiology and prognosis of critically ill SARS‑CoV‑2 patients. In this thesis work, different sensors have been developed for …

A Low-Power, Low-Area 10-Bit Sar Adc With Length-Based Capacitive Dac, Zhili Pan

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research from Electrical & Computer Engineering

A 2.5 V single-ended 10-bit successive-approximation-register analog-to-digital converter (SAR ADC) based on the TSMC 65 nm CMOS process is designed with the goal of achieving low power consumption (33.63 pJ/sample) and small area (2874 µm^2 ). It utilizes a novel length-based capacitive digital-to-analog converter (CDAC) layout to achieve low total capacitance for power efficiency, and a custom static asynchronous logic to free the dependence on a high-frequency external clock source. Two test chips have been designed and the problems found through testing the first chip are analyzed. Multiple improved versions of the ADC with minor variations are implemented on the …

A Stacking-Based Misbehavior Detection System In Vehicular Communication Networks, Troy Green

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research from Electrical & Computer Engineering

Over the past few decades communication systems for vehicles have continued to advance. Communications between these vehicles can be classified into safety related and non safety related messages. An example of a safety related message would be one vehicle warning others of an icy road it encountered, where a non safety related communication would be a passenger streaming a movie. In either case it's important to secure the communications so that the system continues to behave as expected. In this thesis we propose a Misbehavior Detection System (MDS), which is a system that monitors messages sent between vehicles, and detects …

Low Power Multi-Channel Interface For Charge Based Tactile Sensors, Samuel Hansen

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research from Electrical & Computer Engineering

Analog front end electronics are designed in 65 nm CMOS technology to process charge pulses arriving from a tactile sensor array. This is accomplished through the use of charge sensitive amplifiers and discrete time filters with tunable clock signals located in each of the analog front ends. Sensors were emulated using Gaussian pulses during simulation. The digital side of the system uses SAR (successive approximation register) ADCs for sampling of the processed sensor signals.

Adviser: Sina Balkır

Smartphone Detector, Ryan Coldiron

Electrical Engineering

There is a wide variety of times when it is unacceptable to be using a smartphone, and this device could help to minimize when people are using their devices. People have become more and more reliant on their various pieces of technology such as their smartphones, and are often using them when they should be paying attention in class, attending an important meeting, watching a movie, or should just be present to their other surroundings. A device that could detect the use of smartphones at these inopportune times would be something that would benefit a wide variety of people.

The …

Battery Energy Storage System, Carlos Gonzalez, Philip Tafoya, Mariely Caraballo, William Hoang

Electrical Engineering

The Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) project consists of bringing an existing photovoltaic battery energy storage system into service within Cal Poly’s Energy Conversion Lab. Information regarding the BESS is limited to the existing manuals as the original equipment manufacturer has ceased supporting the product in the United States. Results from previous projects on the BESS speculated that a DC input may be required to enable the system’s to be fully operational. The goal of the project is to provide a DC input into BESS and test the system’s functionality. Initially, a Photovoltaic Thevenin Equivalent was expected to be utilized …

A Retrospective On 2022 Cyber Incidents In The Wind Energy Sector And Building Future Cyber Resilience, Megan Egan

Cyber Operations and Resilience Program Graduate Projects

Between February and June 2022, multiple wind energy sector companies were hit by cyber-attacks impacting their ability to monitor and control wind turbines. With projected growth in the United States of 110.66 GW from 2020 to 2030, wind energy will increasingly be a critical source of electricity for the United States and an increasingly valuable target for cyberattacks. This paper shows the importance of redundant remote communications, secure third-party providers, and improving response and recovery processes that would ensure this growth period fulfills its potential as a unique opportunity to build in cyber resilience from the outset of new installations …

Decentralized Resource Allocation Through Constrained Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations, Bhagyashri Telsang

Doctoral Dissertations

The advancements in the fields of microelectronics facilitate incorporating team elements like coordination into engineering systems through advanced computing power. Such incorporation is useful since many engineering systems can be characterized as a collection of interacting subsystems each having access to local information, making local decisions, interacting with neighbors, and seeking to optimize local objectives that may well conflict with other subsystems, while also trying to optimize certain global objective. In this dissertation, we take advantage of such technological advancements to explore the problem of resource allocation through different aspects of the decentralized architecture like information structure in a team. …

Depth Estimation Using 2d Rgb Images, Taher Naderi

Doctoral Dissertations

Single image depth estimation is an ill-posed problem. That is, it is not mathematically possible to uniquely estimate the 3rd dimension (or depth) from a single 2D image. Hence, additional constraints need to be incorporated in order to regulate the solution space. As a result, in the first part of this dissertation, the idea of constraining the model for more accurate depth estimation by taking advantage of the similarity between the RGB image and the corresponding depth map at the geometric edges of the 3D scene is explored. Although deep learning based methods are very successful in computer vision and …

Oscillation Analysis And Its Mitigation Using Inverter-Based Resources In Large-Scale Power Grids, Khaled Alshuaibi

Doctoral Dissertations

In today's interconnected power grids, forced oscillations and poorly damped low-frequency oscillations are major concerns that can damage equipment, limit power transfer capability, and deteriorate power system stability.

The first part of the dissertation focuses on the impact of a wide-area power oscillation damping (POD) controller via voltage source converter-based high voltage direct current (VSC-HVDC) in enhancing the power system stability and improving the damping of low-frequency oscillation. The POD controller's performance was investigated under a three-phase temporary line fault. The Great Britain (G.B.) power grid model validated the POD controller performance via active power modulation of VSC-HVDC through TSAT-RTDS …

Power System Transients: Impacts Of Non-Ideal Sensors On Measurement-Based Applications, Aaron Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

The power system is comprised of thousands of lines, generation sources, transformers, and other equipment responsible for servicing millions of customers. Such a complex apparatus requires constant monitoring and protection schemes capable of keeping the system operational, reliable, and resilient. To achieve these goals, measurement is a critical role in the continued functionality of the power system. However, measurement devices are never completely reliable, and are susceptible to inherent irregularities; imparting potentially misleading distortions on measurements containing high-frequency components. This dissertation analyzes some of these effects, as well as the way they may impact certain applications in the grid that …

High-Performance Vlsi Architectures For Lattice-Based Cryptography, Weihang Tan

All Dissertations

Lattice-based cryptography is a cryptographic primitive built upon the hard problems on point lattices. Cryptosystems relying on lattice-based cryptography have attracted huge attention in the last decade since they have post-quantum-resistant security and the remarkable construction of the algorithm. In particular, homomorphic encryption (HE) and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) are the two main applications of lattice-based cryptography. Meanwhile, the efficient hardware implementations for these advanced cryptography schemes are demanding to achieve a high-performance implementation.

This dissertation aims to investigate the novel and high-performance very large-scale integration (VLSI) architectures for lattice-based cryptography, including the HE and PQC schemes. This dissertation first presents …

Enhancing The Performance Of Poly(3-Hexylthiophene) Based Organic Thin-Film Transistors Using An Interface Engineering Method, Eyob Negussie Tarekegn

All Dissertations

An original design and photolithographic fabrication process for poly(3-hexylthiophene-2, 5-diyl) (P3HT) based organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) is presented. The structure of the transistors was based on the bottom gate bottom contact OTFT. The fabrication process was efficient, cost-effective, and relatively straightforward to implement. Current–voltage (I-V) measurements were performed to characterize the primary electronic properties of the transistors. The measured mobility of these transistors was significantly higher than most results reported in the literature for other similar bottom gate bottom contact P3HT OTFTs. The higher mobility is explained primarily by the effectiveness of the fabrication process in keeping the interfacial layers …