Engineering Commons^™

Achieving Universal Liaisons And Healthcare Contact Center Centralization Through The Use Of Decision Support Tools, Jared S. Fiacco

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Healthcare contact centers often experience a large volume of calls and traditional standardized guidelines can be difficult to follow during an active call. While more common workflows can be memorized, they change often because Healthcare is a dynamic field. Constant updates to workflows, an abundance of different processes and provider preferences, and a fast paced environment can lead Customer Service Liaisons (CSLs) to handle patient inquiries incorrectly. Active decision support tools enable a CSL to follow an updated workflow without needing to navigate through complex guidelines and emails. This research shows that contact center centralization through the use of decision …

Using Multifactor Inputs Bp Neural Network To Make Power Consumption Prediction, Hao Song

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

With the development of modern information and technology (IT), smart grids became one of the major components of smart cities, to take full advantage of the smart grid, the capability of intelligent scheduling and planning of electricity delivery is essential. For this purpose, researchers have investigated methodologies for power consumption prediction and demand side management (DSM). In addition, conducting a comprehensive analysis and obtaining an accurate evaluation of power consumption are the premise and basis for a more robust and efficient power grid design and transformation. Therefore, it is meaningful to explore forecasting models that are able to reflect the …

Design And Qualification Of A Robust Polyurethane Based Conformal Coating Process For Sodimms, Rajat Dhiman

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Conformal coatings protect printed circuit board assemblies, including the electronic components that the assemblies are populated with. A variety of materials and application methods can be used to conformally coat assemblies. The process setup is crucial to repeatable process reliability. The manual spray based conformal coating is widely used. This method of application was selected due to its compatibility, affordability, and efficiency with the required application. Polyurethanes, one of the families of conformal coatings, provide resistance against abrasion, heat, and chemicals while reducing the risk of tin whiskers. In order to minimize the need for rework and create an efficient, …

Multi-Objective Design Optimization Of Reverse Total Shoulder Arthroplasty To Maximize Range Of Motion And Joint Stability, Josie A. Elwell

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Reverse total shoulder arthroplasty was developed to restore range of motion (ROM) and joint stability to patients with pre-operative conditions that are not addressed by conventional replacements. Although reverse total shoulder arthroplasty is the current gold standard for treating a range of indications, the effects of varying its design on functional outcomes of the procedure are still not well understood.

To that end, it is not yet clear which configurations, in terms of both design and surgical placement parameters, maximize range of motion and stability of the joint. It was hypothesized that there is trade-off between the two. These types …

Assessing The Tensile And Fatigue Behavior Of Aerosol Jet Printed Nano Silver Particle Traces On Polyimide Substrates, Roshan Muralidharan

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Flexible interconnects are integral to flexible hybrid electronics. Aerosol jet, inkjet or screen printing offer various advantages and disadvantages compared to electroplating, but the behavior of printed metal traces under various types of loading is very different and not yet well understood. This thesis presents an assessment of the electromechanical behavior of aerosol jet printed Nano silver particles on two common polyimide substrates, Upilex and Kapton.

There are many different aspects to electromechanical testing of flexible interconnects, but this work focuses on the effects of tension and cyclic loading. In comparison to the much more widely researched electroplated copper or …

Development Of Collagen-Based Scaffolds For Differentiation Of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, Siteng Fang

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Collagen hydrogel has been broadly studied and applied in engineering 3D scaffold materials in tissue engineering. A collagen hydrogel can provide cells with a porous and soft environment to proliferate and differentiate. However, lacking mechanical stiffness and shrinkage resistance made it a challenge to sustain shape and size during a long stem cell differentiation process. In addition, a cytocompatible scaffold for human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-laden culture has not been fully investigated. The goal of this study is to develop stable and biocompatible collagen-based scaffolds that are suitable for direct seeding and lineage progression of iPSCs. In this work, …

Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling And In Situ Physics-Based Monitoring Of Aerosol Jet Printing Toward Functional Assurance Of Additively-Manufactured, Flexible And Hybrid Electronics, Roozbeh (Ross) Salary

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Aerosol jet printing (AJP)—a direct-write, additive manufacturing technique—has emerged as the process of choice particularly for the fabrication of flexible and hybrid electronics. AJP has paved the way for high-resolution device fabrication with high placement accuracy, edge definition, and adhesion. In addition, AJP accommodates a broad range of ink viscosity, and allows for printing on non-planer surfaces. Despite the unique advantages and host of strategic applications, AJP is a highly unstable and complex process, prone to gradual drifts in machine behavior and deposited material. Hence, real-time monitoring and control of AJP process is a burgeoning need. In pursuit of this …

Use Of A Triboelectric Generator For A Tunable Wideband Energy Harvester And A Threshold Shock Sensor, Daniel S. Nelson

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

The prevalence of triboelectricity as a transduction mechanism has increased rapidly in recent years. We will discuss two uses for triboelectric generators. One design is a tunable wideband energy harvester. An axial force and amplitude limiter work together to create an energy harvester that can accommodate various frequency sources and have a large operating bandwidth. The addition of the compressive axial force also softens the system, which allows for higher voltage outputs. A proof of concept of a threshold shock sensor is proposed that incorporates bi-stability along with the triboelectric effect. A clamped-clamped buckled beam will switch stable states when …

Design And Synthesis Of Novel Nanometallic Catalysts And Electrode Materials For Green Fuel Cells, Jing Zhang

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

The United Nations formally adopted 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) at its 2015 summit. Many of these goals addressed issues such poverty, hunger, health, education, climate-change, gender equality, water, sanitation, energy, urbanization, environment and social justice. The seventh SDG seeks to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. So among all renewable forms of energy, fuel cells with high efficiency have attracted a lot of attention recently. In particular, the direct ethanol fuel cells (DEFCs) and microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are significant due to their green fuel, less waste generated and environmental friendliness. Hence the overall …

Mechanical Reinforcement Of Polyacrylamide Hydrogels Using Pristine Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes, Wuxiang Feng

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Hydrogels have great promise as an innovative biomedical material possessing many advantages such as high water content, porous structure, and excellent biocompatibility. Although hydrogels have been used to develop some successful applications, they commonly do not have sufficient mechanical strength required for artificial soft tissues. Here, the author fabricated reinforced PAAm hydrogels using single-walled carbon nanotubes as reinforcing materials. The fusion of SWCNTs and the PAAm matrix successfully generated SWCNTs/PAAm hybrid gels with improved mechanical strength. Moreover, the aqueous dispersion of SWCNTs used for engineering the hybrid gels remained excellent stability after two months. SEM images from previous research and …

Ensemble Machine Learning To Predict Family Consent For Organ Donation, Md Ehsan Khan

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

There is ever increasing disparity between number of organs needed for transplantation and numbers available for donation to save lives. As a result, thousands of people die every year waiting for organs. Therefore, it is now more important than ever before to take serious actions to decrease this disparity. One way to bridge gap between organ demand and supply is to increase family consent for organ donation. This research studied the factors associated with family consent. Machine Learning approach had been used in very few literature to understand factors related to family consent. This study uses six Ensemble Machine Learning …

Utilizing Data Mining Techniques And Ensemble Learning To Predict Development Of Surgical Site Infections In Gynecologic Cancer Patients, John R. Mcdonough

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Surgical site infections are costly to both patients and hospitals, increase patient mortality, and are the most common form of a hospital acquired infection. Gynecological cancer surgery patients are already at higher risk of developing an infection due to the suppression of their immune system. This research leverages popular data mining techniques to create a prediction model to identify high risk patients. Implemented techniques include logistic regression, naive Bayes, recursive partitioning and regression trees, random forest, feed forward neural network, k-nearest neighbor, and support vector machines with linear kernel. Weighted stacked generalization was implemented to improve upon the individual base …

Cyber-Physical Embedded Systems With Transient Supervisory Command And Control: A Framework For Validating Safety Response In Automated Collision Avoidance Systems, Daniel K. Trembley

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

The ability to design and engineer complex and dynamical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) requires a systematic view that requires a definition of level of automation intent for the system. Since CPS covers a diverse range of systemized implementations of smart and intelligent technologies networked within a system of systems (SoS), the terms “smart” and “intelligent” is frequently used in describing systems that perform complex operations with a reduced need of a human-agent. The difference between this research and most papers in publication on CPS is that most other research focuses on the performance of the CPS rather than on the correctness …

Image Series Prediction Via Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks With Limited Training Data, Zao Zhang

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This thesis focuses on developing deep learning algorithms that can be used to forecast the image series under limited training data. Specifically, we study the problem of using a pine tree's existing appearance images to predict its future appearance images.

Side-Information For Steganography Design And Detection, Tomas Denemark

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Today, the most secure steganographic schemes for digital images embed secret messages while minimizing a distortion function that describes the local complexity of the content. Distortion functions are heuristically designed to predict the modeling error, or in other words, how difficult it would be to detect a single change to the original image in any given area. This dissertation investigates how both the design and detection of such content-adaptive schemes can be improved with the use of side-information.

We distinguish two types of side-information, public and private: Public side-information is available to the sender and at least in part also …