Engineering Commons^™

Advancements And Challenges In Additively Manufactured Functionally Graded Materials: A Comprehensive Review, Suhas Alkunte, Ismail Fidan, Vivekanand Naikwadi, Shamil Gudavasov, Mohammad Alshaikh Ali, Mushfig Mahmudov, Seymur Hasanov, Muralimohan Cheepu

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

This paper thoroughly examines the advancements and challenges in the field of additively manufactured Functionally Graded Materials (FGMs). It delves into conceptual approaches for FGM design, various manufacturing techniques, and the materials employed in their fabrication using additive manufacturing (AM) technologies. This paper explores the applications of FGMs in diverse fields, including structural engineering, automotive, biomedical engineering, soft robotics, electronics, 4D printing, and metamaterials. Critical issues and challenges associated with FGMs are meticulously analyzed, addressing concerns related to production and performance. Moreover, this paper forecasts future trends in FGM development, highlighting potential impacts on diverse industries. The concluding section summarizes …

Multi-Mode Regulation Of The Drying Process Of Industrial Gas, Isamidin Xakimovich Sidikov Pr, Nashvandova Gulruxsor Murot Qizi Phd

Technical science and innovation

Currently, much attention is paid to the issue of energy efficiency of gas processing enterprises. The continuous growth of world prices for energy resources requires constant improvement of the management system, providing the most optimal conditions for the flow of technological processes. A conceptual model of the heat-mass transfer process occurring in the absorber as an object of research has been developed, which characterizes the relationship of the variables involved in the drying process of natural gas, control, measurable and immeasurable, as well as controlled parameters have been selected, which are used to develop and study a mathematical model of …

Modular Open-Source Design Of Pyrolysis Reactor Monitoring And Control Electronics, Finn K. Hafting, Daniel G. Kulas, Etienne Michels, Sarvada Chipkar, Stefan Wisniewski, David Shonnard, Joshua M. Pearce

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 2

Industrial pilot projects often rely on proprietary and expensive electronic hardware to control and monitor experiments. This raises costs and retards innovation. Open-source hardware tools exist for implementing these processes individually; however, they are not easily integrated with other designs. The Broadly Reconfigurable and Expandable Automation Device (BREAD) is a framework that provides many open-source devices which can be connected to create more complex data acquisition and control systems. This article explores the feasibility of using BREAD plug-and-play open hardware to quickly design and test monitoring and control electronics for an industrial materials processing prototype pyrolysis reactor. Generally, pilot-scale pyrolysis …

Automation Of Life Cycle Assessment, Jacob Hickman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An automation program, named Jacob LCA, was created to help perform life cycle assessment (LCA). The program uses a template file to perform controlled and consistently ordered actions with the LCA program, SimaPro, and effectively removes the need for manual user input. It can be set to run using data from one or more life cycle inventory (LCI) files, which allows for rapid iteration and testing of data. It also partially addresses some of the limitations of LCA by establishing a procedure through which temporal and spatial variations in data can be integrated into LCI files and then passed to …

Longitudinal Oxygen Imaging In 3d (Bio)Printed Models, Ryan Curtis O'Connell

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), and its molecular imaging modality, is a powerful tool to noninvasively map various biological and chemical markers within objects of interest. Reliable data acquisition is a major impeding factor for longitudinal hands-off measurements. Measurements are especially challenging in biomedical applications, as live objects are not static. Frequent changes occur that require constant fine recalibration of the EPR detection system, called the resonator. To enable longitudinal imaging, a technology permitting automatic digital control of resonator coupling, tuning, and EPR data acquisition was developed. Automation was achieved through the utilization of a microcontroller and digital peripheral components such …

Eagle Medical Tray Denesting & Debris Removal Process, Nicholas Allen Ungefug, Noah Chavez, Susana Shu-Lin Okhuysen, Michael Augustine Pennington

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Eagle Medical Incorporated is a contract medical device packaging and sterilization company. The company purchases thermoformed medical packaging trays, which maintain the sterility of medical devices, from various manufacturers. To ensure packaging quality and to prevent cleanroom contamination, Eagle Medical inspects and sterilizes each blister tray that they order. This process is an essential non-value-added activity that creates a bottleneck. Cleanroom employees must stop packaging medical devices and attend to the processing of blister trays and packaging solutions. The blister trays arrive at Eagle’s facility in nested stacks. Vibration and movement during shipping further compresses the stacks, which makes separation …

Design Of Plastic Contaminant Eliminator In Seed Cotton, Joshua H. Tandio

Theses and Dissertations

Plastic contamination in cotton is a problem in cotton industry and researchers have worked on this problem with different approaches. This thesis documents the design of mechanical and electronic real-time systems for detecting and removing plastic contaminants. The mechanical system was designed to expose plastic embedded inside the seed cotton to the sensor and to separate plastic contaminated cotton from the process stream. The detection system consisted of an embedded computer interfaced with a USB camera and Neural Network (NN) software running in it. Two NN models were tested, a transfer learning model and a built-from-scratch original model. The original …

Microfluidic Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy System Automation And Characterization, Keaton Frahmann

Master's Theses

In this work, a novel microfluidic cell culture platform capable of automated electrical impedance measurements and immunofluorescence and brightfield microscopy was developed for further in-vitro cellular research intended to optimize cell culture conditions. The microfluidic system design, fabrication, automation, and design verification testing are described. Electrical and optical measurements of the 16 parallel cell culture chambers were automated via a custom LabView interface. A proposed design change will enable gas diffusion, removing the need for an environmental enclosure and allow long-term cell culture experiments. This "lab on a chip" system miniaturizes and automates experiments improving testing throughput and accuracy while …

A Microfluidics-Based Cross-Flow Filtration Platform For Rapid Processing Of Amphiphilic Biomarkers From Blood, Kiersten D. Lenz

Biomedical Engineering ETDs

Early and accurate detection of bacterial infections can help save lives, prevent the spread of disease, and decrease the overuse of antibiotics. Our team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed novel assays to detect bacterial biomarkers from patient blood at the point-of-care in order to facilitate a universal diagnostic platform. However, these biomarkers are amphiphilic in nature, and this biochemical property causes them to be sequestered by high-density and low-density lipoproteins (HDL and LDL) in the host’s blood. Extraction of the bacterial biomarkers from the lipoprotein complexes is thereby required for the development and deployment of a diagnostic …

Accelerated Bioprocess Characterization By Data Enrichment In Scale-Down Models, Viktor Konakovsky, Graham Mccreath, Jarka Glassey

Cell Culture Engineering XV

Scale-down models are often used for the definition of operating ranges in process development and validation and therefore data exploitation is an important task. Usually, the experimental scientists have very tight timelines and consequentially may often only perform the required routine of cleaning and sorting the data without more sophisticated analyses, even though it might improve data quality. This problem is more exacerbated by the rise of fully automated, miniaturized high-throughput equipment in up- and downstream process development where data processing automation is not just optional but a must. However, cleaned, sorted and time-aligned data alone do not guarantee a …

Automated Solid-Substrate Cultivation Of The Anaerobic Bacterium Clostridium Thermocellum, Mathew J. Ruwaya

Theses and Dissertations--Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

The organism Clostridium thermocellum grows on cellulosic substrates and produces ethanol, acetate, lactate, formic acid, and CO₂. The organic acids produced alter the growth environment in which the bacteria grows and ultimately inhibit bacterial growth. One method which has been used successfully to maintain the system at acceptable growth conditions is to intermittently flush out the spent media and metabolic products and replace with new fermentation media. Our goal was to design and build an automated system that will automatically flush the spent media from the growing culture and resupply new media without manual intervention. An automated control …

Protein Refinery Operations Lab (Pro Lab): A Sandbox For Continuous Protein Production & Advanced Process Control, Mark Brower, David Pollard, Finn Hung

Integrated Continuous Biomanufacturing II

Significant strides towards implementation of continuous bioprocessing are being made at an ever increasing rate. Advances in technology for traditional unit operations such as cell-retention devices in perfusion cell culture, continuous multi-column chromatography (CMCC) and single-pass tangential flow filtration have led to demonstrations of both semi-continuous and fully-continuous protein production processes operating at periodic steady states at the pilot-scale. Previous proof of concept work at Merck & Co., Inc. has shown an automated (DeltaV) and single-use monoclonal antibody (mAb) purification scheme through Protein A CMCC and pH viral inactivation with minimal human interaction for 30 days fed from a perfusion …

High-Throughput Secondary Screening At The Single-Cell Level, Joseph Robinson

Joseph P Robinson

No abstract provided.

Automation Of Orthodontic Wire Tester For Performing Three Point Bending Tests, Adithya Venkatesan

Master's Theses

Abstract

Understanding the biomechanical factors in orthodontics is important in order to improve the overall effectiveness of actual clinical treatment. An accurate method to study the threedimensional (3D) force systems and the resulting movements of teeth during orthodontic treatment is needed along with the understanding of the material properties of any orthodontic wire. Until recently, most of the orthodontic biomechanics literature was limited to twodimensional experimental studies. Recent advances in threedimensional computer modeling have also been developed but have been limited to the manual control of tooth movement. Overall, there is very little published evidence in the literature on the …

Automated Migration Analysis Based On Cell Texture: Method & Reliability, Jianfeng Qin, Thomas W. Chittenden, Ling Gao, Justin D D. Pearlman

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background: In this paper, we present and validate a way to measure automatically the extent of cell migration based on automated examination of a series of digital photographs. It was designed specifically to identify the impact of Second Hand Smoke (SHS) on endothelial cell migration but has broader applications. The analysis has two stages: (1) preprocessing of image texture, and (2) migration analysis.

Results: The output is a graphic overlay that indicates the front lines of cell migration superimposed on each original image, with automated reporting of the distance traversed vs. time. Expert preference compares to manual placement of leading …