Engineering Commons^™

Thin Film Based Biocompatible Sensors For Physiological Monitoring, Yihao Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

The development and evolution of physiological sensors, from wearable to implantable, has enabled long term continuous physiological monitoring, making possible for the out-of-clinic treatment and management of many chronic illnesses, mental health issues and post-surgery recovery. This technology advance is gradually changing the definition of health care and the way it is delivered, from clinic/emergency room to patient’s own environment. In this dissertation, three general types of sensors have been proposed for physiological monitoring of blood pressure, oxygen content and electrolyte ion concentration level in human body, respectively. The study proved the device concepts and shows promising results with the …

Project Labyrinth: Exploration Of Modulating Guitar Signals, Joseph Andrews, Andrew Patterson

Senior Theses

The overall objective of this project is to create a guitar pre-amplifier in the casing of an effects pedal. The pedal must be able to modulate amplitude and pitch. More specifically, the design for this pedal will include floating frequency filtering, phase shifting, and amplitude modulation.

Dual-Band Non-Stationary Channel Modeling For The Air-Ground Channel, Ruoyu Sun

Theses and Dissertations

Multiple air-to-ground (AG) radio propagation channels are experimentally characterized for two frequency bands, C-band and L-band. These characterizations are aimed to support the specification of the control and non-payload communication (CNPC) links being designed for civil unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). The use of UAS is expected to grow dramatically in the coming decades. In the United States, UAS will be monitored and guided in their operation within the national airspace system (NAS) via the CNPC link. The specifications of the CNPC link are being designed by government, industries, academia and standards bodies such as the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics …

Iii-V Nitride Based Microcantilever Heaters For Unique Multimodal Detection Of Volatile Organic Compounds At Low Temperature, Ifat Jahangir

Theses and Dissertations

Detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are widely used in industrial processes and household products, is very important due to significant health hazards associated with them. VOCs are commonly detected using photo-ionization detectors (PIDs), suspended hot bead pellistors, or heated metal oxide semiconductor functionalization layers. However, these techniques used for detecting VOCs often suffer from one or more of the following issues - high power consumption, limited selectivity, complicated functionalization technique and expensive characterization tools. On the other hand, microcantilevers offer excellent avenues for molecular sensing that arises out of their high sensitivity to various physical parameter changes induced …

Cameron Decomposition Applied To Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar Signature Detection, Sean Wininger

Theses and Dissertations

Cameron et al, have developed a method of decomposing scatterer scattering matrices based on Huynen’s scattering matrix decomposition parameters. Huynen’s decomposition parameters are not unique, in that certain transformation properties, such as the angle of symmetry itself, may misidentify a scattering matriix and therefore misidentify a particular geometric shape. Cameron decomposition derives these parameters by direct calculations from the scatterer itself so that they may not be inferred or interpreted. A detailed explanation of the foundations and method of Cameron decomposition is presented here. A description of how Cameron decomposition is implemented in Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) signature detection …

Fabrication And Characterization Of Graphene Based Biocompatible Ion-Sensitive Field Effect Transistor (Isfet), Rina Patel

Theses and Dissertations

Graphene, a two-dimensional material with a high surface to volume ratio, has drawn extensive research enthusiasm for applications in the field of electronic sensors. The special material properties that make graphene a highly promising material include its biocompatibility, very high mobility, low 1/f and thermal noise, modulation of carrier concentration and fermi level by electrical, optical, and chemical means. To exploit these properties for practical applications a large area high quality graphene, transferred on appropriate substrates, is required. In this work, high quality single monolayer graphene (determined from Raman spectroscopy) has been synthesized by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technique for …

Graphene Based Heterojunctions For Nano-Electronic And Sensing Applications, Md A. Uddin

Theses and Dissertations

Graphene, an atomically thin and semi-metallic two dimensional material, has been extensively researched over the past decade due to its superior intrinsic carrier velocity, electrical and chemically tunable work function, ability to form layered heterostructure with other materials, and relevant potential applications in electronics, sensing, optoelectronics, energy storage, etc. However, the confinement of charge carriers within one atomic layer results in an electrical transport that is extremely sensitive to the surrounding environment, which is beneficial for sensing applications, but at times unfavorable for electronic applications due to scattering from extrinsic impurities. In addition, due to its rather delicate structure, engineering …

Inn Nems And Heterojunction Devices For Sensing Applications, Alina Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

Recent research trends in chemical and biological sensing have been geared toward developing molecular sensor devices that are fast, inexpensive, miniaturized, have low power consumption and are portable. The performance of these devices can be dramatically improved by utilizing multimodal detection techniques, new materials and nanofabrication technologies. To develop such sensor devices, we utilized Indium Nitride (InN) nanowires (NWs) to fabricate nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) based sensors and Graphene/InN NW heterojunctions, and InN thin films to fabricate Graphene/InN thin film heterojunction based sensors. InN NWs, which exhibit interesting properties including high carrier density, superior electron mobility, strong surface charge accumulation, and …

Technology Development And Characterization Of Aiinn/Gan Hemts For High Power Application, Mahbuba Sultana

Theses and Dissertations

AlInN has attracted much attention only recently as a material due to its unique and superior material properties, which is however known to be difficult to be grown among the III-nitride ternary compounds. The electrons confined at the heterointerface of coherently grown AlInN on GaN buffer layers determine crucial electronic properties. This dissertation has been designed targeting the lattice matched AlInN/GaN investigation with very detail to optimize the design, fabrication process, and electronic properties to realize AlInN/GaN HEMTs. Each single step of this process was optimized in order to improve device performance.

The work started with establishing the main features …

An Investigation Into Quasi-Tunable Rf Passive Circuit Design, Terry L. Moss

Theses and Dissertations

Modern wireless electronic circuit design is continually challenged by the needs to reduce circuit size, and to also function reliably with lower power levels. To that end, two aspects of RFIC circuit design and technology have gained great interest, i.e. RF MEMS switching technology, and RF MEMS passive component development. MEMS (Micro-Electromechanical Systems) technology, originally developed for the defense industry, has been in development since the 1970s, and today enjoys wide range of utilization, from the defense industry to the automotive industry. Spiral inductors used in RFIC circuits, e.g. silicon technology, are ubiquitous in wireless RFIC applications. The tradeoff with …

Investigation Of Modular Multilevel Converter Performance Under Non-Ideal Distribution System Conditions, Rostan Rodrigues

Theses and Dissertations

The Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) is an emerging power converter technology that has caught widespread attention mainly because of several technical and economic benefits such as modular realization, easy scalability, low total harmonic distortion, fail-safe operations etc. The MMC is comprised of a series connection of sub-modules (SM). A sub-module is made by either a half-bridge or a full-bridge IGBT device and a capacitor as a source of energy connected across the bridge. This modular structure allows for the possibility to design high-voltage converters handling hundreds of kilo-volts without direct series connection of the power semiconductor devices.

Due to its …

Design, Fabrication, And Characterization Of Pseudomorphic And Quasi-Pseudomorphic Algan Based Deep Ultraviolet Light Emitting Diodes Over Sapphire, Fatima Asif

Theses and Dissertations

III-Nitride based deep ultraviolet (UV) light emitting diodes (LEDs) emitting below 280nm has the potential to replace mercury lamps currently used in the systems for water/air purification, germicidal and medical instruments sterilization applications. However, this potential has not yet been fully realized as the output power, quantum efficiency and lifetime of deep UV-LEDs have been limited by the large number of dislocations in the active region of the devices, arising from the lattice mismatched sapphire substrate, which has been the substrate of choice due to its high transparency to deep UV radiation. To reduce dislocations in the active region of …

Defect Characterization Of 4h-Sic By Deep Level Transient Spectroscopy (Dlts) And Influence Of Defects On Device Performance, Mohammad Abdul Mannan

Theses and Dissertations

Silicon carbide (SiC) is one of the key materials for high power opto-electronic devices due to its superior material properties over conventional semiconductors (e.g., Si, Ge, GaAs, etc). SiC is also very stable and a highly suitable material for radiation detection at room temperature and above. The availability of detector grade single crystalline bulk SiC is limited by the existing crystal growth techniques which introduce extended and microscopic crystallographic defects during the growth process. Recently, SiC based high-resolution semiconductor detectors for ionizing radiation have attracted world-wide attention due to the availability of high resistive, highly crystalline epitaxial layers with very …