Engineering Commons^™

Pollution Prevention And Water Reuse At Utah Department Of Transportation Facilities, Amanda Stoudt

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As stormwater flows over roads, sidewalks, and other impervious surfaces, it picks up pollutants that are deposited on these surfaces. One common pollutant transported by stormwater is road salt. While the application of road salt is crucial for wintertime public safety, road salt has a host of negative environmental impacts. Road salt has been linked to increasing levels of dissolved solids in groundwater, vegetation damage, and behavioral changes in aquatic organisms. Studies have shown that these impacts are concentrated around salt storage facilities. As a result, the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued many state departments of transportation municipal separate ...

Strategic Infrastructure Planning For Autonomous Vehicles, Zhaocai Liu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Compared with conventional human-driven vehicles (HVs), AVs have various potential benefits, such as increasing road capacity and lowering vehicular fuel consumption and emissions. Road infrastructure management, adaptation, and upgrade plays a key role in promoting the adoption and benefit realization of AVs.This dissertation investigated several strategic infrastructure planning problems for AVs. First, it studied the potential impact of AVs on the congestion patterns of transportation networks. Second, it investigated the strategic planning problem for a new form of managed lanes for autonomous vehicles, designated as autonomous-vehicle/toll lanes, which are freely accessible to autonomous vehicles while allowing human-driven vehicles ...

Toward Controlling Cardiac Tissue Pacing Using Modified Mrna, Yicheng Zhao

Engineering and Applied Science Theses & Dissertations

Arrhythmia is a common heart disease that happens when the heart is beating too fast, too slow, or irregularly. To study the mechanisms and treatments of this disease, it is important to acutely control the beating rate of the model as it will help distinguish the contribution of different potassium currents and drug-induced action potential in cardiomyocytes. The current method of tissue pacing, electrical pacing, causes contamination and corrosive damage to tissues, thus the tissues fail to be used repeatedly or in future studies. In this study, red-shifted channelrhodopsin (ReaChR) is applied as a non-chemical means to control the beating ...

Cfd Modeling Of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Arrays Using Actuator Cylinder Theory, Cory Schovanec

Engineering and Applied Science Theses & Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to analyze the flow field and power generation from a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) by extending the Actuator Cylinder Model to include the viscous effects. Turbulent flow effects in the Actuator Cylinder Model are modeled by solving the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations with the Spalart-Allmaras (SA) turbulence model in ANSYS FLUENT. A study is performed to establish mesh independence of the solutions. Numerical solutions on a fine mesh are compared to existing theoretical results based on inviscid theory for a series of flow conditions and turbine sizes. Similar trends in the present turbulent ...

Dmd And Pod Modal Analysis For Store Separation, Nicholas Peters

Dissertations and Theses

Store separation from aircraft and spacecraft has historically been a critical and in some cases fatal issue for the aerospace industry. Given the severity of the issue much effort has been spent on the development of processes to identify failure flight conditions for store separation. The processes currently used for identifying potential failure conditions however are both resource intensive and iterative processes. A potential remedy to reducing resource use and improve turn around time in this process is the implementation of a mode based reduced order model (ROM) for modeling store separation. The objective of this study was to first ...

Development And Test Of High Temperature Surface Acoustic Wave Gas Sensors, Armando E. Ayes Moncada

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The demand for sensors in hostile environments, such as power plant environments, exhaust systems and high-temperature metallurgy environments, has risen over the past decades in a continuous attempt to increase process control, improve energy and process efficiency in production, reduce operational and maintenance costs, increase safety, and perform condition-based maintenance in equipment and structures operating in high-temperature, harsh-environment conditions. The increased reliability, improved performance, and development of new sensors and networks with a multitude of components, especially wireless networks, are the target for operation in harsh environments. Gas sensors, in particular hydrogen gas sensors, operating above 200°C are required ...

Investigation Of Infiltration Measurements Using Wind Induced Pressure Response On An Enclosure, Aaron R. French

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Air infiltration into a building is unintentional air leakage, resulting in heat losses or gains and the consequent energy usage to recondition the building to comfortable levels. Methods of evaluating air infiltration provide accurate measures of air exchange rate but must be done per building and take significant experimentation and data collection. This warrants investigation into ways to decrease the time to evaluate building infiltration to decrease the associated costs. For this reason, interior pressure response is the subject of investigation in the present work. Interior pressure of a building responds to a pressure rise on the building face when ...

Potential Of Hydrodynamic Metamaterial Cloak For Drag Reduction, Rong Zou

Engineering and Applied Science Theses & Dissertations

Metamaterials are rationally designed artificial materials composed of tailored functional building blocks densely packed into an effective material. While metamaterials historically are primarily thought to be associated with negative index of refraction and invisibility cloaking in electromagnetism or optics, it turns out that the simple metamaterial concept also applies to many other areas of physics namely the thermodynamics, classical mechanics including elastostatics, acoustics, fluid dynamics and elastodynamics, and in principle also to the quantum mechanics. The goal of this thesis is to introduce and evaluate the potential of a hydrodynamic metamaterial cloak for drag reduction of objects in viscous flow ...

Emergency Eye Simulation Model, Gavin L. Warrington, Christopher Forsyth, Lexus Morris, Natalie Ledezma

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Application Of An Ultrasonic Sensor To Monitor Soil Erosion And Deposition, Jessica E. Johnson

Biological Systems Engineering--Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

While erosion and deposition are naturally occurring processes, these processes can be accelerated by human influences. The acceleration of erosion causes damage to human assets and costs billions of dollars to mitigate. Monitoring erosion at high resolutions can provide researchers and managers the data necessary to help manage erosion. Current erosion monitoring methods tend to be invasive to the area, record low frequency measurements, have a narrow spatial range of measurement, or are very expensive. There is a need for an affordable monitoring system capable of monitoring erosion and deposition non-invasively at a high resolution. The objectives of this research ...

Studies Of Oval Tube And Fin Heat Exchangers, Phillip Nielsen

Undergraduate Student Works

Heating Ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) is a system which changes the temperature of the surroundings for the purposes of cooling or heating. This system requires energy to maintain a temperature difference from the outside temperature. Optimizing the flow over the evaporator coils is one way to increase the cooling efficiency. This will reduce the power required to have a sustainable system. Optimizing the flow to increase the energy transfer between the fins and the incoming air could result in a greater Coefficient of Performance (COP). This will be achieved by changing the geometry of the tubes for greater interaction with ...

Optics Of Two-Dimensional Materials Used As Substrates For Nanoparticle-Based Devices, Reagan Newman

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Using Infrared Radiometry Thermometer For Irrigation Management Of Dry Edible Beans In Western Nebraska, Isabella Presotto Possignolo

Biological Systems Engineering--Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Proper irrigation management requires farmers to determine the right timing and amount to irrigate. Soil water sensors are one of the most popular sensor-based approach used by farmers to decide when and how much to irrigate. However, installation and retrieval of soil water sensors require excavation of soil and can be challenging. Other than soil water sensors, there are plant-based water stress monitoring technologies that are less soil disturbing such as infrared radiometry thermometer (IRT). Using canopy temperature measured from IRT, researchers can calculate thermal-based indices such as crop water stress index (CWSI) for many crops around the world. Yet ...

Antimicrobial Resistance Needs To Be Combated At Primary Levels Of Prevention By Nurses, Sarah Oerther, Daniel B. Oerther

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Hardware Accelerator For Star Centroiding, Nazmus Sakib

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the dawn of civilization mankind has gazed upon the night sky and looked for directions. In this modern age, the stars have proved to be a reliable reference point for navigation in space. From small-satellites for gathering weather data to inter-planetary missions like Cassini Orbiter, figuring out the location of a spacecraft has been done successfully by taking images of star filed visible from the spacecraft, processing and analyzing the image to find the stars and then finding out from a star catalog which part of the sky the patterns of the visible stars best matches. But a lot ...

System-Level Analysis Of Autonomous Uav Landing Sensitivities In Gps-Denied Environments, Terran R. Gerratt

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents an analysis of the navigation accuracy of an fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) landing on a aircraft carrier. The UAV is equipped with typical sensors used in landing scenarios. Data from the Office of Naval Research is used to accurately capture the behavior of the aircraft carrier. Through simulation, the position and orientation of both the UAV and carrier are estimated. The quality of the UAV’s sensors are varied to determine the sensitivity of these estimates to sensor accuracy. The system’s sensitivity to GPS signals and visual markers on the carrier is also analyzed. These ...

Flash Lab: A High-Speed Imaging Laboratory, Cody D. Hatch

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports

To help students become better acquainted with high-speed instrumentation and measurement techniques, a high-speed imaging laboratory for the College of Engineering is equipped with a high-speed camera and schlieren imaging device. The laboratory will be used for labs in classes, such as Instrumentation, Thermal/Fluids Lab, Experimental Solids, and Mechanical Experiments. In addition, graduate students will use it for research purposes. The laboratory also has the potential to have a course associated with it that would include the image processing techniques for a variety of applications (e.g., a course on high-speed imaging). The scope of this project will be ...

Improvement Of Ultraviolet Digital Image Correlation (Uv-Dic) At Extreme Temperatures, Thinh Quang Thai

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Extreme temperature has increasingly played an essential role in design and operation of various engineering applications including spacecraft re-entry, hypersonic flight, next-generation nuclear reactors, and hot-fire rocket testing. To protect instruments against the harsh environments, it is preferable to use non-contacting measurements when monitoring the integrity of those mechanical structures. Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is a popular method which uses digital cameras in order to track motion thanks to images acquired before and after deformation. Displacements and strains are plotted over a full-field region which is conducive to identify highly risky zones. At high temperature, objects emit light which interferes ...

Practical Optical Survey Strategies For Near Geostationary Orbital Debris, Akhter Mahmud Nafi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Uncontrolled space objects, more commonly known as space debris, consist of dead satellites, satellite deployment packages, and lost elements of these systems such as insulation blankets. These uncontrolled objects represent hazards to our nation’s most valuable space assets which include communication satellites, weather satellites, Earth monitoring systems, and military assets. To help mitigate this problem, this research proposes using the known astrodynamics of the near geosynchronous orbit (GEO) along with the known concentration of the uncontrolled GEO objects and observation constraints to design ground-based optical surveys that will detect uncatalogued debris. Furthermore, a scoring metric is developed to evaluate ...

Arsenic Release From Surface Soils Induced By Stormwater Bioretention, Kaisa H. Patterson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Arsenic is a naturally occurring element known for its chronic and acute toxicity. The solubility of arsenic is highly dependent on environmental conditions. The soils of Cache Valley, UT, contain naturally occurring arsenic.

Bioretention systems rely on a combined plant-soil system to remove pollutants carried by stormwater, typically nitrogen, phosphorus, dissolved organic carbon, and select metals. Phosphate from stormwater potentially increases arsenic mobility, which makes stormwater pollutant loading an important factor for evaluating risks associated with stormwater bioretention. Pollutant removal in these systems occurs through sorption of contaminants onto the soils, physical filtration by the soil media, and uptake by ...