Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Stability Analysis Of A More General Class Of Systems With Delay-Dependent Coefficients, Chi Jin, Keqin Gu, Islam Boussaada, Silviu-Iulian Niculescu

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This paper presents a systematic method to analyse the stability of systems with single delay in which the coefficient polynomials of the characteristic equation depend on the delay. Such systems often arise in, for example, life science and engineering systems. A method to analyze such systems was presented by Beretta and Kuang in a 2002 paper, but with some very restrictive assumptions. This work extends their results to the general case with the exception of some degenerate cases. It is found that a much richer behavior is possible when the restrictive assumptions are removed. The interval of interest for the ...

Rc Baja: Drivetrain, Nick Paulay

All Undergraduate Projects

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) annually hosts an RC Baja challenge, testing a RC car in three events: slalom, acceleration and Baja. Although ASME will not be holding an event this year, CWU will be holding an event with three RC Baja car teams from CWU as well as other teams from local colleges. The RC car that is tested in these events is designed and manufactured typically in teams of two. The RC car that each team submits must be able to complete these events to score points. One part of great importance for the RC car ...

Thin-Film Sensor For Fatigue Crack Sensing And Monitoring In Steel Bridges Under Varying Crack Propagation Rates And Random Traffic Loads, Xiangxiong Kong, Jian Li, Caroline Bennett, William Collins, Simon Laflamme, Hongki Jo

Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering Publications

Fatigue cracks are critical structural concerns for steel highway bridges, and fatigue initiation and propagation activity continues undetected between physical bridge inspections. Monitoring fatigue crack activity between physical inspections can provide far greater reliability in structural performance and can be used to prevent excessive damage and repair costs. In this paper, a thin-film strain sensor, called a soft elastomeric capacitor (SEC) sensor, is evaluated for sensing and monitoring fatigue cracks in steel bridges. The SEC is a flexible and mechanically robust strain sensor, capable of monitoring strain over large structural surfaces. By deploying multiple SECs in the form of dense ...

Wyoming Wheels, David Tobin

Honors Theses AY 17/18

Manual wheelchair users traditionally suffer from an increased risk of chronic shoulder injury and the inability to travel quickly or uphill independently. Beginning as a senior design project in fall of 2016, Wyoming Wheels is a geared, lever-action, manual wheelchair system designed to mitigate these challenges. For the 2017-2018 school year, the goal of the project was to create a functional prototype by optimizing the previous year’s project. Specifically, the weight and noise output needed to be decreased, and the shifting, braking, and overall ergonomics of the chair needed to be improved. The total weight of the chair was ...

Finisher Alignment Project, Thomas Frye

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Lanthanide Ions Doped In Vanadium Oxide For Sensitive Optical Glucose Detection, Ansam J. Talib, Masfer Alkahtani, Linkun Jiang, Fahad Alghannam, Robert Brick, Carmen L. Gomes, Marlan O. Scully, Alexei V. Sokolov, Philip R. Hemmer

Mechanical Engineering Publications

Blood glucose monitoring is essential to avoid the unwanted consequences of glucose level fluctuations. Optical monitors are of special interest because they can be non-invasive. Among optical glucose sensors, fluorescent upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) have the advantage of good photostability, low toxicity, and exceptional autofluorescence suppression. However, to sense glucose, UCNPs normally need surface functionalization, and this can be easily affected by other factors in biological systems, and may also affect their ability for real-time sensing of both increasing and decreasing glucose levels. Here, we report YVO4 : Yb3+, Er3+@Nd3+core/shell UCNPs with Nd and Yb shell and GdVO4 : Yb3 ...

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Engineering And Computer Science, Spring 2018, Buenaventura "Ven" Basco

Buenaventura "Ven" Basco

No abstract provided.

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Engineering And Computer Science, Fall 2017, Buenaventura "Ven" Basco

Buenaventura "Ven" Basco

No abstract provided.

Flexible Laser-Induced Graphene For Nitrogen Sensing In Soil, Nate T. Garland, Eric S. Mclamore, Nicholas D. Cavallaro, Deyny Mendivelso-Perez, Emily A. Smith, Dapeng Jing, Jonathan C. Claussen

Mechanical Engineering Publications

Flexible graphene electronics are rapidly gaining interest, but their widespread implementation has been impeded by challenges with ink preparation, ink printing, and post-print annealing processes. Laser-induced graphene (LIG) promises a facile alternative by creating flexible graphene electronics on polyimide substrates through a one-step laser writing fabrication method. Herein we demonstrate the use of LIG, created through a low-cost UV laser, for electrochemical ion selective sensing of plant-available nitrogen (i.e., both ammonium and nitrate ions: NH4+ and NO3-) in soil samples. The laser used to create the LIG was operated at distinct pulse rates (10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 ...

Intelligent Strain Sensing On A Smart Composite Wing Using Extrinsic Fabry-Perot Interferometric Sensors And Neural Networks, Kakkattukuzhy M. Isaac, Donald C. Wunsch, Steve Eugene Watkins, Rohit Dua, V. M. Eller

Donald C. Wunsch

Strain prediction at various locations on a smart composite wing can provide useful information on its aerodynamic condition. The smart wing consisted of a glass/epoxy composite beam with three extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric (EFPI) sensors mounted at three different locations near the wing root. Strain acting on the three sensors at different air speeds and angles-of-attack were experimentally obtained in a closed circuit wind tunnel under normal conditions of operation. A function mapping the angle of attack and air speed to the strains on the three sensors was simulated using feedforward neural networks trained using a backpropagation training algorithm. This ...

Detection And Classification Of Impact-Induced Damage In Composite Plates Using Neural Networks, Rohit Dua, Steve Eugene Watkins, Donald C. Wunsch, K. Chandrashekhara, Farhad Akhavan

Donald C. Wunsch

Artificial neutral networks (ANN) can be used as an online health monitoring systems (involving damage assessment, fatigue monitoring and delamination detection) for composite structures owing to their inherent fast computing speeds, parallel processing and ability to learn and adapt to the experimental data. The amount of impact-induced strain on a composite structure can be found using strain sensors attached to composite structures. Prior work has shown that strain-based ANN can characterize impact energy on composite plates and that strain signatures can be associated with damage types and severity. This paper reports the extension of this approach for damage classification using ...

A Novel Multirobot System For Plant Phenotyping, Tianshuang Gao, Hamid Emadi, Homagni Saha, Jiaoping Zhang, Alec Lofquist, Arti Singh, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Soumik Sarkar, Asheesh K. Singh, Sourabh Bhattacharya

Mechanical Engineering Publications

Phenotypic studies require large datasets for accurate inference and prediction. Collecting plant data in a farm can be very labor intensive and costly. This paper presents the design, architecture (hardware and software) and deployment of a multi-robot system for row crop field data collection. The proposed system has been deployed in a soybean research farm at Iowa State University.

Experimental Tests And Numerical Simulations For Failure Investigation On Corrugated Boxes Used On Household Appliance Packaging, Diego Fernandes Rodrigues, José Carlos Pereira

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

Packages made of corrugated paper are fundamental to the protection, transportation and handling of the appliance product market. During the storage and sales stages of a product, the package must resist compressive loads in different directions beyond moderate impacts. In this context, the objective of this work is to develop and implement a post-processor that allows the simultaneous analysis of two of the most common failure modes of packages made of corrugated paper: failure due to tensile or compressive stress limit, and failure due to local buckling, when the buckling of the faces of the corrugated paper between two peaks ...

Deep Rc: Enabling Remote Control Through Deep Learning, Jaron Ellingson, Gary Ellingson, Tim Mclain

All Student Publications

Human remote-control (RC) pilots have the ability to perceive the position and orientation of an aircraft using only third-person-perspective visual sensing. While novice pilots often struggle when learning to control RC aircraft, they can sense the orientation of the aircraft with relative ease. In this paper, we hypothesize and demonstrate that deep learning methods can be used to mimic the human ability to perceive the orientation of an aircraft from monocular imagery.

This work uses a neural network to directly sense the aircraft attitude. The network is combined with more conventional image processing methods for visual tracking of the aircraft ...

Modular Crates – A Holistic Design Approach For Optimizing Cube Size In Industrial Packaging, Marshal Louie, Kumar B

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

Global market is a field where all industries strive to provide personalized product for every customer demand in order to compete with their competitors in the business battlefield. Product personalization varies with customer to customer which increases the product variety. When the product size variability is vast, producing packages for every individual product is not only difficult but also increases the design time, production time, total manufacturing cost and inventory cost. For the present scenario, Industrial packages does not opt customizability for variable product sizes. Customized package for personalized product is achievable only by redesigning the existing distribution package with ...

Application Of Computational Mbd For Simulation Of Wrap Packaging Performance, Niels Hojen Ostergaard, Stephane Danjou

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

This paper concerns evaluation of the performance of plastic wrap films applied for packaging engineering by numerical simulation. In particular, the feasibility of computational techniques as supporting tool for packaging testing is investigated. A wrap film model constituted by a web of point masses connected by springs and dampers is applied to a number of stacked box-shaped objects. These will be modeled as perfectly rigid using simulation techniques from 3D multibody dynamics. Contact mechanics are simulated by penalization methods. A simple example demonstrates the potential of the developed framework.

Numerical Simulation Of Three-Phase Flows In The Inverse Fluidized Bed, Yunfeng Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The inverse three-phase fluidized bed has excellent potentials to be used in chemical, biochemical, petrochemical and food industries because of its high contact efficiency among each phase which leads to a good mass and heat transfer. The understanding of the hydrodynamics and flow structures in inverse three-phase fluidized beds is important for the design and scale up purposes.

A CFD model based on the Eulerian-Eulerian (E-E) approach coupled with the kinetic theory of the granular flow is successfully developed to simulate an inverse three-phase fluidization system. The proposed CFD model for the inverse three-phase fluidization system is validated by comparing ...

Effect Of Wall Cooling On Boundary-Layer-Induced Pressure Fluctuations At Mach 6, C. Zhang, Lian Duan, M. Choudhari

Lian Duan

No abstract provided.

Signal Mast Arm Fatigue Failure Investigation, Genda Chen, Michael G. Barker, Lokeswarappa R. Dharani, Christopher W. Ramsay

Genda Chen

The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) has discovered and documented failures in several cantilever mast arms in the recent years. The failures were primarily by fatigue at the weld of the arm to the base plate attached to the mast. With over 6000 mast arms in service in Missouri, the failures raised concerns with the existing mast arm inventory and future mast arm design. This report presents findings from an effort to determine the cause of unexpected cracking in Missouri mast arms. Three causes of premature failure were investigated: the stress ranges experienced at the weld detail were higher than ...

Microstructure Design Using Graphs, Pengfei Du, Adrian Zebrowski, Jaroslaw Zola, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Olga Wodo

Mechanical Engineering Publications

Thin films with tailored microstructures are an emerging class of materials with applications such as battery electrodes, organic electronics, and biosensors. Such thin film devices typically exhibit a multi-phase microstructure that is confined, and show large anisotropy. Current approaches to microstructure design focus on optimizing bulk properties, by tuning features that are statistically averaged over a representative volume. Here, we report a tool for morphogenesis posed as a graph-based optimization problem that evolves microstructures recognizing confinement and anisotropy constraints. We illustrate the approach by designing optimized morphologies for photovoltaic applications, and evolve an initial morphology into an optimized morphology exhibiting ...