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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Elevation-Distributed Multistage Reverse Osmosis Desalination With Seawater Pumped Storage, Hani E. Elsayed-Ali Jan 2023

Elevation-Distributed Multistage Reverse Osmosis Desalination With Seawater Pumped Storage, Hani E. Elsayed-Ali

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

A seawater reverse osmosis (RO) plant layout based on multistage RO with stages located at different elevations above sea level is described. The plant uses the weight of a seawater column from pumped storage as head pressure for RO (gravity-driven multistage RO) or to supplement high-pressure pumps used in RO (gravity-assisted multistage RO). The use of gravitational force reduces the specific energy for RO compared to using high-pressure pumps. By locating the RO stages at different elevations based on demand sites, the total specific energy consumption for RO and permeate transport to different elevations above sea level is reduced from …


Monocular Camera Viewpoint-Invariant Vehicular Traffic Segmentation And Classification Utilizing Small Datasets, Amr Yousef, Jeff Flora, Khan Iftekharuddin Oct 2022

Monocular Camera Viewpoint-Invariant Vehicular Traffic Segmentation And Classification Utilizing Small Datasets, Amr Yousef, Jeff Flora, Khan Iftekharuddin

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The work presented here develops a computer vision framework that is view angle independent for vehicle segmentation and classification from roadway traffic systems installed by the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT). An automated technique for extracting a region of interest is discussed to speed up the processing. The VDOT traffic videos are analyzed for vehicle segmentation using an improved robust low-rank matrix decomposition technique. It presents a new and effective thresholding method that improves segmentation accuracy and simultaneously speeds up the segmentation processing. Size and shape physical descriptors from morphological properties and textural features from the Histogram of Oriented Gradients …


Assessment Of Cu(In, Ga)Se₂ Solar Cells Degradation Due To Water Ingress Effect On The Cds Buffer Layer, Deewakar Poudel, Benjamin Belfore, Shankar Karki, Grace Rajan, Sina Soltanmohammad, Angus Rockett, Sylvain Marsillac Jan 2021

Assessment Of Cu(In, Ga)Se₂ Solar Cells Degradation Due To Water Ingress Effect On The Cds Buffer Layer, Deewakar Poudel, Benjamin Belfore, Shankar Karki, Grace Rajan, Sina Soltanmohammad, Angus Rockett, Sylvain Marsillac

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The effect of water ingress on the surface of the buffer layer of a Cu(In, Ga)Se2 (CIGS) solar cell was studied. Such degradation can occur either during the fabrication process, if it involves a chemical bath as is often the case for CdS, or while the modules are in the field and encapsulants degrade. To simulate the impact of this moisture ingress, devices with a structure sodalime glass/Mo/CIGS/CdS were immersed in deionized water. The thin films were then analyzed both pre and post water soaking. Dynamic secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS) was performed on completed devices to analyze impurity diffusion …


An Accurate Vegetation And Non-Vegetation Differentiation Approach Based On Land Cover Classification, Chiman Kwan, David Gribben, Bulent Ayhan, Jiang Li, Sergio Bernabe, Antonio Plaza Nov 2020

An Accurate Vegetation And Non-Vegetation Differentiation Approach Based On Land Cover Classification, Chiman Kwan, David Gribben, Bulent Ayhan, Jiang Li, Sergio Bernabe, Antonio Plaza

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Accurate vegetation detection is important for many applications, such as crop yield estimation, landcover land use monitoring, urban growth monitoring, drought monitoring, etc. Popular conventional approaches to vegetation detection incorporate the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), which uses the red and near infrared (NIR) bands, and enhanced vegetation index (EVI), which uses red, NIR, and the blue bands. Although NDVI and EVI are efficient, their accuracies still have room for further improvement. In this paper, we propose a new approach to vegetation detection based on land cover classification. That is, we first perform an accurate classification of 15 or more …


Vegetation Detection Using Deep Learning And Conventional Methods, Bulent Ayhan, Chiman Kwan, Bence Budavari, Liyun Kwan, Yan Lu, Daniel Perez, Jiang Li, Dimitrios Skarlatos, Marinos Vlachos Jan 2020

Vegetation Detection Using Deep Learning And Conventional Methods, Bulent Ayhan, Chiman Kwan, Bence Budavari, Liyun Kwan, Yan Lu, Daniel Perez, Jiang Li, Dimitrios Skarlatos, Marinos Vlachos

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Land cover classification with the focus on chlorophyll-rich vegetation detection plays an important role in urban growth monitoring and planning, autonomous navigation, drone mapping, biodiversity conservation, etc. Conventional approaches usually apply the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for vegetation detection. In this paper, we investigate the performance of deep learning and conventional methods for vegetation detection. Two deep learning methods, DeepLabV3+ and our customized convolutional neural network (CNN) were evaluated with respect to their detection performance when training and testing datasets originated from different geographical sites with different image resolutions. A novel object-based vegetation detection approach, which utilizes NDVI, computer …


Manufacturing Applications Of The One-Dimensional Cutting Stock Problem As A Team Project, Hüseyin Sarper, Nebojsa I. Jaksic Jan 2018

Manufacturing Applications Of The One-Dimensional Cutting Stock Problem As A Team Project, Hüseyin Sarper, Nebojsa I. Jaksic

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper explains the beneficial and practical impact of operations research in two real manufacturing settings. Two manufacturing examples used in student projects were (1) cutting rails (80‘ or 40‘) to manufacture railroad frogs of many sizes and (2) cutting round metal rolls (12‘ to 20‘) to meet customer demands for various lengths of cuts. Student teams in Engineering of Manufacturing Processes and Operations Research courses wrote computer programs. The program first identified all possible patterns that can be cut out of a given stock length. Next, the program created a mathematical model (a text file) as an output. This …


Counting And Classification Of Highway Vehicles By Regression Analysis, Mingpei Liang, Xinyu Huang, Chung-Hao Chen, Alade Tokuta Jan 2015

Counting And Classification Of Highway Vehicles By Regression Analysis, Mingpei Liang, Xinyu Huang, Chung-Hao Chen, Alade Tokuta

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we describe a novel algorithm that counts and classifies highway vehicles based on regression analysis. This algorithm requires no explicit segmentation or tracking of individual vehicles, which is usually an important part of many existing algorithms. Therefore, this algorithm is particularly useful when there are severe occlusions or vehicle resolution is low, in which extracted features are highly unreliable. There are mainly two contributions in our proposed algorithm. First, a warping method is developed to detect the foreground segments that contain unclassified vehicles. The common used modeling and tracking (e.g., Kalman filtering) of individual vehicles are not …


Impact Of Data Resolution On Peak Hour Factor Estimation For Transportation Decisions, Jan-Mou Li, Lee D. Han, Chung-Hao Chen Jan 2013

Impact Of Data Resolution On Peak Hour Factor Estimation For Transportation Decisions, Jan-Mou Li, Lee D. Han, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Inductance loop detection systems serve as a primary data source to contemporary traffic information systems. Measures like 20-second or 30-second average velocity, flow, and lane occupancy can be aggregated from individual loop detector actuation sampled at 60 Hz typically. Practically, these measures would sometimes be further aggregated into a much lower, e.g. 15-minute, resolution and then the raw data were lost. Valuable traffic information like flow variation may be distorted when the lower resolution aggregation is practiced. A biased conclusion could be drawn from a data integration system consisted of this kind of distortions. Three approaches estimating a peak hour …