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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Simulation Of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines With Variable Pitch Foils, L. Damon Woods, John F. Gardner, Kurt S. Myers Nov 2013

Simulation Of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines With Variable Pitch Foils, L. Damon Woods, John F. Gardner, Kurt S. Myers

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A dynamic computer model of a turbine was developed in MATLAB in order to study the behavior of vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) with variable pitch (articulating) foils. The simulation results corroborated the findings of several empirical studies on VAWTs. The model was used to analyze theories of pitch articulation and to inform the discussion on turbine design. Simulations of various models showed that pitch articulation allowed Darrieus-style vertical axis wind turbines to start from rest. Once in motion, the rotor was found to accelerate rapidly to very high rotational velocities. The simulations revealed a plateau region of high efficiency …


All-Optical Photoacoustic Detection Of Absorbers In Tissue Phantoms, Jami Johnson, Michelle Sabick, Kasper Vanwijk Sep 2013

All-Optical Photoacoustic Detection Of Absorbers In Tissue Phantoms, Jami Johnson, Michelle Sabick, Kasper Vanwijk

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Visualizing and characterizing vascular structures is important for many areas of health care, from accessing difficult veins and arteries for laboratory testing, to diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Photoacoustic (PA) imaging, one of the fastest growing fields of biomedical imaging, is well suited for this task. PA imaging is based on the photoacoustic effect, which starts with a pulsed laser source incident on biological tissue. If the wavelength of the source matches an absorption wavelength of a chromophore within the tissue, a portion of the pulse energy is absorbed by the chromophore and converted into heat. A subsequent increase …


Stochastic Reconstruction Of Multiple Source Atmospheric Contaminant Dispersion Events, Derek Wade, Inanc Senocak Aug 2013

Stochastic Reconstruction Of Multiple Source Atmospheric Contaminant Dispersion Events, Derek Wade, Inanc Senocak

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reconstruction of intentional or accidental release of contaminants into the atmosphere using concentration measurements from a sensor network constitutes an inverse problem. An added complexity arises when the contaminant is released from multiple sources. Determining the correct number of sources is critical because an incorrect estimation could mislead and delay response efforts. We present a Bayesian inference method coupled with a composite ranking system to reconstruct multiple source contaminant release events. Our approach uses a multi-source data-driven Gaussian plume model as the forward model to predict the concentrations at sensor locations. Bayesian inference with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling …


Quantitative Assessment Of Program Outcomes Using Longitudinal Data From The Fe Exam, Joe C. Guarino, James R. Ferguson, V. Krishna C. Pakala Jun 2013

Quantitative Assessment Of Program Outcomes Using Longitudinal Data From The Fe Exam, Joe C. Guarino, James R. Ferguson, V. Krishna C. Pakala

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

There have been many studies providing details on using results from the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam as metrics for meeting ABET program outcomes1. However, implementing an FE-based set of metrics poses challenges not limited to assessing validity of results. Programs using FE-based metrics must also determine the position of the metrics in the overall assessment process. We present a method for using FE-based metrics as an integral part of the ABET program assessment process. The principle issues we address are: (1) The validity of using FE metrics for a group of graduating students when not all of …


Correlations Between Internal And External Power Outputs During Weightlifting Exercise, Kristof Kipp, Chad Harris, Michelle B. Sabick Apr 2013

Correlations Between Internal And External Power Outputs During Weightlifting Exercise, Kristof Kipp, Chad Harris, Michelle B. Sabick

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Identifying loads that maximize mechanical power is important because training at such loads may optimize gains in dynamic athletic performance. The purpose of this study was to examine correlations between measures of external mechanical power output and internal mechanical joint power output across different loads during a weightlifting exercise. Ten subjects performed 3 sets of the clean exercise at 65, 75, and 85% of 1 repetition maximum (1RM). Peak external mechanical power output was calculated with 4 commonly used methods, whereas an inverse dynamics approach was used to calculate peak internal mechanical power output for the hip, knee, and ankle …


Multi-Level Parallelism For Incompressible Flow Computations On Gpu Clusters, Dana A. Jacobsen, Inanc Senocak Jan 2013

Multi-Level Parallelism For Incompressible Flow Computations On Gpu Clusters, Dana A. Jacobsen, Inanc Senocak

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

We investigate multi-level parallelism on GPU clusters with MPI-CUDA and hybrid MPI-OpenMP-CUDA parallel implementations, in which all computations are done on the GPU using CUDA. We explore efficiency and scalability of incompressible flow computations using up to 256 GPUs on a problem with approximately 17.2 billion cells. Our work addresses some of the unique issues faced when merging fine-grain parallelism on the GPU using CUDA with coarse-grain parallelism that use either MPI or MPI-OpenMP for communications. We present three different strategies to overlap computations with communications, and systematically assess their impact on parallel performance on two different GPU clusters. Our …