Engineering Commons^™

Stochastic Distributed Control For Arbitrarily Connected Microgrid Clusters, Maryam Khanbaghi, Aleksandar Zečević

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Due to the success of single microgrids, the coming years are likely to see a transformation of the current electric power system to a multiple microgrid network. Despite its obvious promise, however, this paradigm still faces many challenges, particularly when it comes to the control and coordination of energy exchanges between subsystems. In view of that, in this paper we propose an optimal stochastic control strategy in which microgrids are modeled as stochastic hybrid dynamic systems. The optimal control is based on the jump linear theory and is used as a means to maximize energy storage and the utilization of …

B2b2: Lidar 2d Mapping Rover, Laurence Kim, Isaiah Youngblood, Quintion Turner

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Autonomous machines are becoming more popular and useful with even self-driving cars being a thing of the present. Most of these machines navigate using cameras and LiDAR which does not detect glass, therefore the machines give misleading results when objects and obstacles are transparent to the wavelengths of the light used. This is problematic in modern building floor plans with glass walls. A solution is to build a ROS system that fuses ultrasonic sensors with LiDAR sensors in order for a robot to navigate in a building that has glass walls. Using both sensors, the final product is a robot …

Wage Wizard, Jack Davey, Kyle Felip Mondina, Brett Rimmer

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Wage theft is a severe problem in Santa Clara County, with the Santa Clara Wage Theft Coalition identifying more than 25,000 local wage theft cases as of 20211. In this study we will be addressing the issue of wage theft particularly in the Santa Clara County caregiving industry. Wage theft is prevalent in the caregiving industry for several reasons. First, the industry employs many migrant Filipino workers who are unaware of their legal rights and protections or even the fact if they are experiencing wage theft or not. Second, the sizable undocumented portion of these workers are coerced to lower …

Emergency Hot Car Alert System, Alexander Lopez, Ryan Marquis, Christopher Park

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Children and pets are often forgotten in vehicles, and on hot days this can lead to heat-stroke, coma, and death. To avoid such preventable deaths, we designed a device that would be able to detect the presence of a vulnerable entity, such as a baby, with a temperature sensor and volatile organic compounds sensor. Once occupancy is recognized while the vehicle engine is off, the device will monitor the ambient temperature and will respond in real-time if the environment is deemed unsafe by triggering our alert system. The anticipated outcome is to avoid preventable deaths due to heat-stroke inside a …

Machine Learning Fmri Autism Classifier, Nicholas Luckenbach

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is typically understood by observing patient behaviors. Advances in neuroimaging research and data collection have made it possible to investigate the neurobiological basis for ASD, and differences between subjects with ASD and healthy controls (HC) have been found using a variety of methods. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in particular has provided evidence for and against certain cognitive models of ASD based on measuring the functional connectivity of subjects’ brains. Various techniques have been explored for applying machine learning (ML) to fMRI data in order to find unique patterns and differences between ASD and HC subjects. …

Hardware And Software Infrastructure For An Agricultural Sensor Network, Bennett Dorsey, Mariela Zuniga

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

With the rise of low-power processing and the availability of cheap solar, our project aims to create a low-power sensor network that can gather and report data with little oversight. The project will use a bluetooth mesh network to create a generalized solution where the network can start up regardless of the environment or number of nodes. Our tasks include designing algorithms that tackle redundancy in the face of node failure, self test and diagnostics, and power on and off strategies. The project aims to solve the problem of timing and communication when power is inconsistent and not shared. Our …

Hardware-Accelerated Ecg-Based True Random Number Generator, James Burrill, Sunjit Jayam

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Developing and proving the effectiveness of ECG-based TRNGs for use in cryptography applications related to implantable medical devices (IMDs) offers a novel approach to securing IMDs. Current ECG-based True Random Number Generators (TRNGs) are software orientated and computationally heavy with hardware implementations being suggested as one possible solution to make such TRNGs useful for the medical device industry. Hardware offers the opportunity to increase power efficiency through algorithmic optimization while maintaining device security. In this paper, we use Verilog design and FPGA simulation tools to demonstrate the potential for hardware-accelerated ECG-based TRNGs for use in low power cryptographic applications. This …

A Low-Cost, Long-Range, And Solar-Based Iot Soil Quality Monitor, Salvador Garcia, Trina Nguyen, Julian Wong

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The project objective is to create a low-cost, long-range, and solar-based IoT soil quality monitoring system. The system must transmit packages of data gathered from separate nodes, consisting of two dierent types of sensors, to a centralized gateway receiver to be displayed to the user in an elegant and readable manner. The end goal of the project is to supplement produce grown by large agricultural bodies around the United States without the misuse of water resources. This report presents the need for this system, details the components of the system, and the rationale behind design choices. It serves as a …

Marine Robot Sample Retrieving System, Valeriya Chulyukina, Noah Villar, Kekoa Blair, Mandeep Singh, Nathan Burke

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The exploration of our underwater ecosystems is critical. The aquatic ecosystem has a significant effect on human life, yet our understanding of the oceanic environment is severely lacking. Santa Clara University’s Robotic Systems Lab contributes to subsea exploration through its investment in remotely operated vehicle (ROV) technology. This project was done with the guidance of not only professors in the Robotics Systems Lab, but also stakeholders from the US Geological Survey scientists and researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Our team goal was to further advance SCU’s efforts by creating a sediment sample collection system consisting of …

Bioai For Anti-Infective Drug Discovery, Maria Esquivel, Johann Fernando, Anna Fisher, Cameron Leong, Adam Weaver

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Modern antibacterial drugs are quickly becoming insufficient for medical, agricultural and veterinary use, and the drug design techniques used to supplement the supply are not able to adequately and quickly produce enough effective candidates. We took a multi-pronged approach to remedying this problem, including shifting the target mechanism from antibiotic drugs in favor of anti-infective drugs, developing an AI which aimed to predict the interactions of small molecule fragments with the target protein, and refining wet lab testing protocols in order to make the drug design process holistically more efficient and effective. We have shown that there is potential in …

A Parallelizable Algorithm For Stabilizing Large Sparse Linear Systems With Uncertain Interconnections, Aleksandar Zečević, Maryam Khanbaghi

Electrical and Computer Engineering

This paper proposes a new method for permuting sparse matrices into an upper block triangular from. The algorithm is highly parallelizable, which makes it suitable for large-scale systems with uncertain interconnection patterns. In such cases, the proposed decomposition can be used to develop flexible decentralized control strategies that produce a different gain matrix whenever the configuration changes. Applications to interconnected microgrids and supply and demand networks are provided to illustrate the versatility of the proposed approach.

Cost Efficient Radio Telescope, Nick Arroyo, Brian Benedicto, Tyler Ikehara

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

This project aims to construct a smaller and less expensive radio telescope compared to traditional radio telescope designs by utilizing a Software Defined Radio (SDR). This is the first stage of a multi-year effort to bring radio astronomy capabilities to Santa Clara University. The implementation of this project includes designing and building a pyramidal horn antenna centered around the hydrogen line frequency of 1420 MHz. The project will also be comparing specifications of low noise amplifiers (LNA) and designing band-pass filters. Lastly, this project implements an SDR to process the signals received by the telescope to recreate a map of …

Remote Crop Disease Detection Using Deep Learning With Iot, Ivy Chung, Anoushka Gupta

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Agriculture is such a vital part of our society, and according to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), plant diseases are considered one of the two main causes of decreasing food availability. This paper explores not only the methods and findings of building a CNN-based disease detection model, but that of building a deployable remote crop disease detection system incorporating IoT technology. By using transfer learning with AlexNet, we were able to predict with 89.8% accuracy tomato plant images into one of the ten pre-defined disease classes. Our proposed system tracks plant health throughout the day by using …

Neurogen: Eeg And Near-Infrared Light Stimulation Control System, Karina Sanchez, Sruthi Sakthivel, Michael Bose, Evan Jennings

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are widespread, affecting millions of people worldwide. These diseases occur when neurons in the brain or peripheral nervous system progressively lose function and deteriorate. Current pharmacological treatments manage some of the neurological symptoms, but there is no cure yet. Interventions that mitigate or restore loss of function can fill the void until that goal is met. Light stimulation, or transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM) therapy, can help treat people with neurodegenerative diseases, as it has been shown to improve sleep, attention, memory, and cognitive function.

The objective of this project is to develop …

Microgrid For Scu With Vehicle-To-Grid, Kurt Williams, Cameron Refaee

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Santa Clara University is a large loads in Santa Clara needed two finders and a maximum of over 8MW peak demand; however, this consumption will only increase as the student body and electric vehicles on campus continue to grow. To meet this rising demand in both a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner, we proposed and simulated a complete energy management system with cost analysis of energy savings of a microgrid capable of reducing the power supplied to Santa Clara University’s campus from the grid by 40% using renewable energy, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) functionality, and real SCU energy data. The project further …

Healthy Hive: A Beehive Health Management Tool, Kwadwo Amoako

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Honeybees are important pollinators and are essential in the preservation of ecosystems as well as agricultural production. They are crucial to the pollination of 85% of the world’s food crops. However, honeybee populations have been in decline over the past decade, due to external environmental conditions such as diseases and pests (invasive varroa mite), pollution (insecticide), or inadequate forage/poor nutrition. These conditions can have a severe impact on the health of hives. This project will serve as a tool for the monitoring system of tracking the activities of honeybees entering and exiting their beehive. The health condition of the bee …

A Low-Cost, Long-Range, And Solar-Based Iot Soil Quality Monitor, Salvador Garcia, Trina Nguyen, Julian Wong

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

The project objective is to create a low-cost, long-range, and solar-based IoT soil quality monitoring system. The system must transmit packages of data gathered from separate nodes, consisting of two different types of sensors, to a centralized gateway receiver to be displayed to the user in an elegant and readable manner. The end goal of the project is to supplement produce grown by large agricultural bodies around the United States without the misuse of water resources. This report presents the need for this system, details the components of the system, and the rationale behind design choices. It serves as a …

Deep Learning-Based Low Complexity And High Efficiency Moving Object Detection Methods, Bingxin Hou

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Moving object detection (MOD) is the process of extracting dynamic foreground content from the video frames, such as moving vehicles or pedestrians, while discarding the nonmoving background. It plays an essential role in computer vision field. The traditional methods meet difficulties when applied in complex scenarios, such as videos with illumination changes, shadows, night scenes,and dynamic backgrounds. Deep learning methods have been actively applied to moving object detection in recent years and demonstrated impressive results. However, many existing models render superior detection accuracy at the cost of high computational complexity and slow inference speed. This fact has hindered the development …

Optimal Power And Frequency Control Of Microgrid Cluster With Mixed Loads, Saleh Dinkhah, Johana Salazar Cuellar, Maryam Khanbaghi

Electrical and Computer Engineering

In recent years, voltage and frequency regulation issues have been extensively discussed for the microgrid clusters (MGCs), as the high penetration of renewable energy resources (RES) might affect the continuous operation of the microgrid (MG). Furthermore, to enhance the MGC’s operation reliability, stability concerns need to be addressed. In this study, a residential MGC connected to a commercial MGC has been considered. A novel control scheme that combines both droop control and virtual inertia control is proposed. This control strategy relies on online measurements, and it can be adapted to different situations. At each iteration, the damping coefficient and droop …