Digital Commons Network^™

An Experimental Investigation Characterizing The Tribological Performance Of Natural And Synthetic Biolubricants Composed Of Carboxylic Acids For Energy Conservation And Sustainability, Carlton Jonathan Reeves

Theses and Dissertations

Over the last several decades the lubrication industry has been striving to bring bio-based lubricants known as biolubricants to prominence. The reasons for the increased environmental initiatives are due to depletion of oil reserves, increases in oil price, stringent government regulations on petroleum-based oils, and most importantly, concerns for protecting the environment. With an estimated, 50% of all lubricants entering the environment and much of these being composed of toxic mineral oils, biolubricants have begun to witness a resurgence. This experimental investigation seeks to develop a new class of ecofriendly biolubricants that are less toxic to the environment, derived from …

A Crowdsourced Hail Dataset: Potential, Biases, And Inaccuracies, Joseph Robert Pehoski

Theses and Dissertations

Hail is a substantial severe weather hazard in the USA, with significant damage to property and

crops occurring annually. Traditional methods of forecasting hail size have limited accuracy, and despite

improvements in remote sensing of precipitation, the fall characteristics of hail make quantification of

hail imprecise. Research into hail is ongoing, but traditional hail datasets have known biases and low

spatiotemporal resolution. The increased usage of smartphones creates the opportunity to use a

crowdsourced dataset provided by the Precipitation Identification Near the Ground (PING) program, a

program developed by the National Severe Storms Laboratory. PING data is compared to approximate …

Mathematical Modeling Of Physiological Characteristics In Female Soccer Athletes, Thomas S. Goeppinger

Theses and Dissertations

Intermittent sports create challenges regarding performance measurement. Quantification of various physiological characteristics can lead to increased performance and injury reduction throughout a season of competition. Currently, a variation of an athletes' heart rate is the primary physiological characteristic used for quantifying load on the athlete. With increasing technology, we have the ability to gather additional characteristics regarding the physicality of athletes during competition. This study statistically compares various models using these new characteristics as predictors to the athletes' lactate concentration in their blood. From this comparison, we determine which physiological characteristic(s) best represent the performance and fatigue of these athletes. …

Bi- And Multi Level Game Theoretic Approaches In Mechanical Design, Ehsan Ghotbi

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a game theoretic approach to solve bi and multi-level optimization problems arising in mechanical design. Toward this end, Stackelberg (leader-follower), Nash, as well as cooperative game formulations are considered. To solve these problems numerically, a sensitivity based approach is developed in this dissertation. Although game theoretic methods have been used by several authors for solving multi-objective problems, numerical methods and the applications of extensive games to engineering design problems are very limited. This dissertation tries to fill this gap by developing the possible scenarios for multi-objective problems and develops new numerical approaches for solving them.

This dissertation …

The Boundedness Of Hausdorff Operators On Function Spaces, Xiaoying Lin

Theses and Dissertations

For a fixed kernel function $\Phi$, the one dimensional Hausdorff operator is defined in the integral form by

\[

\hphi (f)(x)=\int_{0}^{\infty}\frac{\Phi(t)}{t}f(\frac{x}{t})\dt.

\]

By the Minkowski inequality, it is easy to check that the Hausdorff operator is bounded on the Lebesgue spaces $L^{p}$ when $p\geq 1$, with some size condition assumed on the kernel functions $\Phi$. However, people discovered that the above boundedness property is quite different on the Hardy space $H^{p}$ when $0

In this thesis, we first study the boundedness of $\hphi$ on the Hardy space $H^{1}$, and on the local Hardy space $h^{1}(\bbR)$. Our work shows that for …

Constructing Orthogonal Arrays On Non-Abelian Groups, Margaret Ann Mccomack

Theses and Dissertations

For an orthogonal array (or fractional factorial design) on k factors, Xu and Wu (2001) define the array's generalized wordlength pattern (A₁, ..., A_k), by relating a cyclic group to each factor. They prove the property that the array has strength t if and only if A₁ = ... = A_t = 0. In their 2012 paper, Beder and Beder show that this result is independent of the group structure used. Non-abelian groups can be used if the assumption is made that the groups G_i are chosen so that the counting function O …

Invariant Polynomials On Tensors Under The Action Of A Product Of Orthogonal Groups, Lauren Kelly Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Let K be the product O(n₁) × O(n₂) × … × O(n_r) of orthogonal groups. Let V be the r-fold tensor product of defining representations of each orthogonal factor. We compute a stable formula for the dimension of the K-invariant algebra of degree d homogeneous polynomial functions on V. To accomplish this, we compute a formula for the number of matchings which commute with a fixed permutation. Finally, we provide formulas for the invariants and describe a bijection between a basis for the space of invariants and the isomorphism classes of certain r-regular graphs …

Determining The Alignment Of Math 105 - Intermediate Algebra At The University Of Wisconsin--Milwaukee To The Goals Of The Common Core State Standards, Raymond Dempsey

Theses and Dissertations

In this analysis we examine the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and compare them to content presented in Math 105 - Intermediate Algebra at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in order to determine how well the UW-Milwaukee course develops the skills described in the standards. This is done by examining the structure, textbook content, and assessments of the course. Examining relevant high school standards, we determine that many of the procedural elements of these standards are present in the course while many of the conceptual elements are absent or poorly developed. After, we discuss content that is present in the …

Pbw Deformations Of Artin-Schelter Regular Algebras And Their Homogenizations, Jason D. Gaddis

Theses and Dissertations

A central object in the study of noncommutative projective geometry is the (Artin-Schelter) regular algebra, which may be considered as a noncommutative version of a polynomial ring. We extend these ideas to algebras which are not necessarily graded. In particular, we define an algebra to be essentially regular of dimension d if its homogenization is regular of dimension d+1. Essentially regular algebras are described and it is shown that that they are equivalent to PBW deformations of regular algebras. In order to classify essentially regular algebras we introduce a modified version of matrix congruence, called sf-congruence, which is equivalent to …

An Analysis Of The Common Core State Standards For Mathematics And The Content Of Math 095: Essentials Of Algebra At The University Of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Hayley Nathan

Theses and Dissertations

In this analysis we present the content in Math 095: Essentials of Algebra at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that is aligned to the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. We find that the content in Math 095 is aligned to a small subset of the high school Number and Quantity, Algebra, and Function standards. We present a representative sample of homework and assessment items from the traditional lecture format of Math 095 and compare them to assessment items released by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and Illustrative Mathematics. We then discuss content from the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics …

Risk-Based Indifference Pricing In Jump Diffusion Markets With Regime-Switching, Torben Bielert

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is concerned with risk indifference pricing of a European type contingent claim in an incomplete market, where the evolution of the price of the underlying stock is modeled by a regime-switching jump diffusion. The rationale of using such a model is that it can naturally capture the inherent randomness of a prototypical stock market by incorporating both small and big jumps of the prices as well as the qualitative changes of the market. While the model provides a realistic description of the real market, it does introduces substantial difficulty in the analysis. In particular, in contrast with the …

Statistical Investigation Of The Immune Response In Non-Human Primate Models, Annika Laser

Theses and Dissertations

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was first detected more than 30 years ago. Since then, intensive research has been done to develop a broadly protective vaccine, though without success. Our goal is to unveil some features of the protective immunity in non-human primate lentiviral infections in order to emulate HIV-infection. Two primate species have been studied, rhesus macaques (Rh) (Macaca mulatta) and African

green monkeys (Ag) (Chlorocebus spp.). Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) infection is non-pathogenic to Ag while Rh develop an AIDS-like illness. In this study, peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from 8 Ag and 27 Rh were stimulated with …

Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation Of The Wright-Fisher Diffusion, Markus Joseph Wahl

Theses and Dissertations

In population genetics, the proportions of alleles at any given time are of interest. From generation to generation, these proportions vary and over a long time horizon the likelihoods for the proportions are given by a stationary distribution corresponding to the dynamics of the population. We investigate a diffusion approximation for the Wright-Fisher model and develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation to approximate the evolution of the proportions of alleles in the population. Our aim is to estimate the stationary distribution, especially for parameters of the model for which no analytical formulas are known. We discretize the space of …

Category O Representations Of The Lie Superalgebra Osp(3,2), America Masaros

Theses and Dissertations

In his seminal 1977 paper [Kac77], V. G. Kac classified the finite dimensional simple Lie superalgebras over algebraically closed fields of characteristic zero. However, over thirty years later, the representation theory of these algebras is still not completely understood, nor is the structure of their enveloping algebras.

In this thesis, we consider a low-dimensional example, osp(3,2). We compute the composition factors and Jantzen filtrations of Verma modules over osp(3,2) in a variety of cases.

Behavior Of Random Dynamical Systems Of A Complex Variable, Simon Albert Wagner

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis we examine some methods of adding noise to the discrete dynamical system z → z^2 + c, in the complex plane.

We compare the "; Traditional Random Iteration "; : choosing a sequence of c-values and applying that sequence of maps to the entire plane, versus what we introduce as "; Noisy Random Iteration "; : for each z and for each iterate calculated, we choose a different c-value. We examine two methods of choices for c: (1) Uniform distribution on a neighborhood of c, versus (2) a Bernoulli choice from two values {a,b}, with varying probability …