Engineering Commons^™

Pd-Fe3o4/Rgo: A Highly Active And Magnetically Recyclable Catalyst For Suzuki Cross Coupling Reaction Using A Microfluidic Flow Reactor, Hany A. Elazab

Chemical Engineering

There are several crucial issues that need to be addressed in the field of applied catalysis. These issues are not only related to harmful environmental impact but also include process safety concerns, mass and heat transfer limitations, selectivity, high pressure, optimizing reaction conditions, scale-up is-sues, reproducibility, process reliability, and catalyst deactivation and recovery. Many of these issues could be solved by adopting the concept of micro-reaction technology and flow chemistry in the applied catalysis field. A microwave assisted reduction technique has been used to prepare well dispersed, highly active Pd/Fe3O4 nanoparticles supported on reduced graphene oxide nanosheets (Pd-Fe3O4/RGO), which act …

Factor Analysis Of Mixed Data (Famd) And Multiple Linear Regression In R, Nestor Pereira

Dissertations

In the previous projects, it has been worked to statistically analysis of the factors to impact the score of the subjects of Mathematics and Portuguese for several groups of the student from secondary school from Portugal.

In this project will be interested in finding a model, hypothetically multiple linear regression, to predict the final score, dependent variable G3, of the student according to some features divide into two groups. One group, analyses the features or predictors which impact in the final score more related to the performance of the students, means variables like study time or past failures. The second …

Lupd - Leisure Underwater Propulsion Device, James Abraham, Tanner Nordell, Holden Schmidt, Noah Trimark

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The main objective of this Design Project was to create a hands-free, wearable underwater propulsion device. The target consumer is leisure divers, so managing cost was important. Current products on the market do not allow divers to be hands-free while diving and are very expensive. The design process began with an interview with Josh An, a Masters Degree candidate at Washington University in St. Louis. Josh is an avid diver and wanted to see if it was possible to develop a cheap underwater jet pack for leisure diving. After multiple design concepts and mock up prototypes, our team decided on …

Sweet Spot Demonstration, Andrew Amend, Mitchell Smith, Ian Fish, Curtis Hoffman

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Our goal was to design and build an exhibit for the St. Louis Science Center to serve as a teaching tool to help explain the unintuitive concept of a baseball bat’s sweet spot to a typical children museum’s visitor, a 5th grade student, in an interesting and visually pleasing way. The sweet spot of the bat is colloquially known as the place that makes the best contact with the ball, and it is determined by a combination of the center of percussion and location of vibrational nodes. We focused on showing how the location of bat-ball impact affects the vibration …

Sweet Spot Demonstration, Keval Amin, Beau Allen, Kieran Lenssen, Ricardo Del Olmo Parrado

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The purpose of this project was to create a sweet spot exhibit for the St. Louis Science Center to demonstrate the basic dynamic and vibrational theory behind the game of baseball. This demonstration focuses on the dynamics of batting and the effects that induced bat vibrations have on the energy transfer from the bat to the ball. Through this demonstration, the vibrational nodes within a baseball bat can be measured based on the ball’s contact with the ”sweet spot,” or the area on the barrel of the bat that induces the least amount of bat vibration. The project went through …

Polyvinylpyrrolidone - Reduced Graphene Oxide - Pd Nanoparticles As An Efficient Nanocomposite For Catalysis Applications In Cross-Coupling Reactions, Hany A. Elazab, Tamer T. El-Idreesy

Chemical Engineering

This paper reported a scientific approach adopting microwave-assisted synthesis as a synthetic route for preparing highly active palladium nanoparticles stabilized by polyvinylpyrrolidone (Pd/PVP) and supported on reduced Gra-phene oxide (rGO) as a highly active catalyst used for Suzuki, Heck, and Sonogashira cross coupling reactions with remarkable turnover number (6500) and turnover frequency of 78000 h-1. Pd/PVP nanoparticles supported on re-duced Graphene oxide nanosheets (Pd-PVP/rGO) showed an outstanding performance through high catalytic activ-ity towards cross coupling reactions. A simple, reproducible, and reliable method was used to prepare this efficient catalyst using microwave irradiation synthetic conditions. The synthesis approach requires simultaneous reduc-tion …

Automated Whiteboard Eraser, Trent Houpt, Tyler Polasek, Kenny Huang, Rocky Luo

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Automated Whiteboard Eraser is a product designed to erase whiteboards with the touch of a button. With this product students and teachers will be able to save time and energy as they can continue to work without having to stop and erase. From our research others have attempted to construct similar products. We intend to improve these thoughts and designs in order to build a better and more efficient product.

Jet Beluga: Diver Propulsion Wearable, Jacob Graham, Bernardo Amaral Neves, Ethan Genter

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Scuba diving is a physically and mentally challenging task performed in both recreational and professional settings. Recreational divers seek to experience the marine world for extended periods of time without buoyant resistance. Rescue divers, military personnel, and underwater construction workers train to execute complicated tasks in a limited time period. Diver propulsion vehicles can improve the quality of recreational diving as well as the effectiveness of diving as performed in professional settings. The following report describes the design and motivations for a wearable diver propulsion device that provides the benefits of increased speed and mobility while limiting the amount of …

Violin Prosthetic, Justin Kransdorf, Julia Rifkin, Hayden Reynolds, Payal Hukeri

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Sam, an 11-year-old violin player was born without fingers or a thumb on his right hand. In order to learn the basics of violin, he currently uses a custom made prosthetic that allows him to hold a violin bow. However, his current prosthetic does not allow for the bow angle to change relative to his wrist, and thus, he cannot perform many techniques that are important to him furthering his violin skills. Specifically, his prosthetic allows Sam to use only a small percentage of the bow. For this project, a prosthetic was designed for Sam with the goal being to …

Ice Cream Dispensing Machine, Katie Bahnck, Rachel Lockwood, Marie White, Simone Raeth

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Each August, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) welcomes hundreds of new engineering students to its McKelvey School of Engineering. Historically, during orientation activities, WashU’s Engineering Student Services (ESS) serves dessert bars to the new students, where they must line up and make their own desserts manually. To make the dessert bar more interactive and give students a primer for what their engineering studies hold, we would like to introduce an ice cream sundae making machine to the spread. A semi-automated ice cream machine would allow students to customize their ice cream sundae while observing the everyday mechanics required to …

Asme 2020 Design Challenge, Anthony Acosta, Justine Alandy-Dy, Michael Lorberg, Nathan Vaska

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Our project was to build a machine that would fulfill the requirements for the ASME 2020 design challenge, which was called, ”Building to the Sky.” The rules of the challenge were to build a machine that would take ordinary 8.5” x 11” sheets of paper and stack them into a tower. To accomplish this task, we decided to make our paper tower out of accordion-shaped folds that would be placed on top of each other, alternating in 90 degree orientations. Our device is divided into various sub-components, each which manipulate the paper in various ways. We first have a mechanism …

3d Chocolate Printer Dropper, Jessica Jimenez, Jacqueline Pielli, Shuhan Zhang

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Mechanical Engineering Department at Washington University in St. Louis is working to stimulate interest in the fields of fluid dynamics and thermal sciences, as students are not typically exposed to these topics within the first two years of school. Dr. Okamoto, Jeff Krampf, and Dr. Weisensee of the Mechanical Engineering Department would like to remedy this situation by developing a laboratory experiment for first year students that utilizes a 3D chocolate printer to teach thermal-fluid concepts in a fun and engaging manner. The goal of this project is to build a chocolate droplet dispensing system, which is a part …

Board Erasing Device, Mark Fernandez, Christopher Sheffels, Joshua Miller

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Board Erasing Device is a portable automatic device designed to streamline a university lecturer’s board writing process by automatically erasing whiteboards while they are writing notes on adjacent boards. Our goal during this project was to design, build, and test a portable, automatic, and aesthetically pleasing device compatible with most standard whiteboards on Washington University in St. Louis’ Danforth campus. To that end, with a budget of $400, we created a prototype device to accomplish just that. Our prototype includes a felt eraser, pressed into the whiteboard via magnets. The eraser piece spans all eight feet of width on …

Lidar Assessment To Monitor Bridge Response Under Live And Dead Loads, Daniel Watson

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Understanding how a bridge structure responds to various loads in a time and resource-efficient approach is vital in characterizing bridge health. Bridge health monitoring is an evaluation of the structural condition and performance, which optimizes limited transportation budgets by prioritizing the bridges that are in the most need for retrofit or replacement. Identifying and remedying issues will mitigate long-term problems and ensure that the bridge remains open to service for all legal loads. In contrast, health monitoring and load rating will determine if a bridge can only carry traffic up to a certain weight or speed, requiring a bridge load …

Diver Propulsion Wearable, Joseph Lucca Paletta, Andrew Kessler, Andrew Beukelman, Nico Topulos

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This project was proposed by Jin Hwan (Josh) An, a current undergraduate student in the Olin Business School at Washington University in St Louis. Given his interest in diving and his experience with current diver propulsion vehicles, Josh has challenged us to design a hands-free diver propulsion wearable (DPW). While Josh has left the project rather open-ended for the engineers, the main challenge is to create a design that can propel the diver using a hands-free control system. Having a hands-free controller will allow the user to engage in other tasks while gliding underwater. Ideally, this design would be useful …

Investigation Of Retrieved Cardiac Devices, Anmar Salih, Iosif Papadakis Ktistakis, Spyridon Manganas, Abdul Wase, Tarun Goswami

Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering Faculty Publications

Damage assessment of lead and pulse generator with various exposure times is important in the development of cardiac devices. Approximately, 92.1 million patients in the US suffer from cardiovascular diseases with an estimated healthcare cost of over $300 billion and at least one million with implantable cardiac devices. These devices are complex and composed on multiple levels and present challenges while assessing the damage. However, the study on the analysis of cardiac devices may lend insight into common damage patterns and improve future cardiac devices design. The objective of this work is to perform a thorough in vivo damage assessment …

Introducing Phonetic Information To Speaker Embedding For Speaker Verification, Yi Liu, Liang He, Michael T. Johnson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Phonetic information is one of the most essential components of a speech signal, playing an important role for many speech processing tasks. However, it is difficult to integrate phonetic information into speaker verification systems since it occurs primarily at the frame level while speaker characteristics typically reside at the segment level. In deep neural network-based speaker verification, existing methods only apply phonetic information to the frame-wise trained speaker embeddings. To improve this weakness, this paper proposes phonetic adaptation and hybrid multi-task learning and further combines these into c-vector and simplified c-vector architectures. Experiments on National Institute of Standards and Technology …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2019, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Proactive Energy Optimization In Residential Buildings With Weather And Market Forecasts, Cody Simmons, Joshua Arment, Kody M. Powell, John Hedengren

Faculty Publications

This work explores the development of a home energy management system (HEMS) that uses weather and market forecasts to optimize the usage of home appliances and to manage battery usage and solar power production. A Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) application is used to find the unknown home model parameters. These parameters are then updated in a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) which optimizes and balances competing comfort and economic objectives. Combining MHE and MPC applications alleviates model complexity commonly seen in HEMS by using a lumped parameter model that is adapted to fit a high-fidelity model. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning …

Hardware Implementation Of Assistive Technology Robot, Joycephine Li

Publications and Research

SuperHERO is an on-going research project in Computer Engineering Technology department which involves upgrading Heathkit Education Robot (HERO) hardware circuits and features by using modern hardware devices and sensors. The current phase of the project will focus on upgrading the motor drive system hardware as well as implementation and testing of features such as mobile robot obstacle detection and other assistive technologies to help people with disabilities. This involves the reattachment of the robot arm after repairing and updating with 3D printing and using modern hardware and software technology. We observed that the robotic arm has rotary and translation movements …

Optimal Allocation Of Energy Storage And Wind Generation In Power Distribution Systems, Carlos Mendoza

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The advent of energy storage technologies applications for the electric power system gives new tools for planners to cope with the operation challenges that come from the integration of renewable generation in medium voltage networks. This work proposes and implements an optimization model for Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) and distributed generation allocation in radial distribution networks. The formulation aims to assist distribution system operators in the task of making decisions on energy storage investment, BESSs' operation, and distributed generation penetration's level to minimize electricity costs. The BESSs are required to participate in energy arbitrage and voltage control. In addition, …

Amodal Instance Segmentation And Multi-Object Tracking With Deep Pixel Embedding, Yanfeng Liu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis extends upon the representational output of semantic instance segmentation by explicitly including both visible and occluded parts. A fully convolutional network is trained to produce consistent pixel-level embedding across two layers such that, when clustered, the results convey the full spatial extent and depth ordering of each instance. Results demonstrate that the network can accurately estimate complete masks in the presence of occlusion and outperform leading top-down bounding-box approaches.

The model is further extended to produce consistent pixel-level embeddings across two consecutive image frames from a video to simultaneously perform amodal instance segmentation and multi-object tracking. No post-processing …

Numerical Simulations Of The Hall–Petch Relationship In Aluminium Using Gradient-Enhanced Plasticity Model, Yooseob Song, Jaeheum Yeon, Byoungjoon Na

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

+e Hall-Petch relation in aluminium is discussed based on the strain gradient plasticity framework. +e thermodynamically consistent gradient-enhanced flow rules for bulk and grain boundaries are developed using the concepts of thermal activation energy and dislocation interaction mechanisms. It is assumed that the thermodynamic microstresses for bulk and grain boundaries have dissipative and energetic contributions, and in turn, both dissipative and energetic material length scale parameters are existent. Accordingly, two-dimensional finite element simulations are performed to analyse characteristics of the Hall–Petch strengthening and the Hall–Petch constants. +e proposed flow rules for the grain boundary are validated using the existing experimental …

Diffusion And Uniformity Of Recycled Asphalt In Pavements, Baoshan Huang

Abbett Distinguished Seminar Series

Asphalt pavements covers over 93 percent of the paved roads in the United States. The use of recycled asphalt into pavement maintenance and construction has been a common practice. However the lack of understanding of the interaction between recycled and virgin asphalt poses a change on the efficient use of recycled asphalt, and often causes pavement premature failures. The present study addressed some fundamental aspects associated with the beneficial use of recycled asphalt into asphalt paving mixtures: 1) how much recycled asphalt can be mobilized into a uniform asphalt coating in the mixture? and 2) will the mobilized old asphalt …

Simulation Training And Route Optimization For Bridge Inspection, Sushil Louis

INSPIRE Archived Webinars

Since the 1970s, simulation training has developed opera­tional trainers for a variety of complex systems from pilot flight simulations to cultural awareness training simulations. When connected to the real world, such simulation training interfaces can drive real vehicles and systems. We have been building a Simulation Training And Control System (STACS) for autonomous bridge inspection that uses a simulated world to train inspectors to control a heterogeneous group of robots. The objective is that, once trained, inspectors can use the same STACS interface used in training to control multiple real robots simultaneously during a bridge inspection task. We first built …

Investigation Of A Neuro-Stimulator Retrieved Posthumously, Megan Markl, Rodney J. Gutherie, Tarun Goswami

Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering Faculty Publications

A neurostimulator was investigated in this paper posthumously. Device was presented to our anatomical gift program. Investigation was multi-fold and contained visual inspection, using an optical microscope, and mechanical and electrical testing of leads and its insulator. It was concluded that the device could have been damaged during implantation, in vivo, during removal, and/or during transportation to author’s laboratories. The damage observed on the lead insulation is similar to that which can occur due to anchoring of the lead and hardening due to oxidation. Insulation stiffness was determined to be 1/10 of new insulator. The results reported here on the …

Aluminum/Carbon Composites Materials Fabricated By The Powder Metallurgy Process, Amélie Veillère, Hiroki Kurita, Akira Kawasaki, Yongfeng Lu, Jean-Marc Heintz, Jean-François Silvain

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Aluminum matrix composites reinforced with carbon fibers or diamond particles have been fabricated by a powder metallurgy process and characterized for thermal management applications. Al/C composite is a nonreactive system (absence of chemical reaction between the metallic matrix and the ceramic reinforcement) due to the presence of an alumina layer on the surface of the aluminum powder particles. In order to achieve fully dense materials and to enhance the thermo-mechanical properties of the Al/C composite materials, a semi-liquid method has been carried out with the addition of a small amount of Al-Si alloys in the Al matrix. Thermal conductivity and …

How Degrees Of Freedom Affects Sense Of Agency, Akima Connelly, Jungsu Pak, Tian Lan, Uri Maoz

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Can the rubber-hand illusion be extended to a moving robotic arm in different degrees of freedom (DOF), inducing sense of ownership & agency over the arm? We hypothesize that DOF closer to what humans possess will result in a stronger sense of ownership and agency.

Voice Controlled Augmented Reality: A Comparison Of Speech-Recognition Tools For Ar Applications, Juan Estrella

Publications and Research

Augmented Reality (AR) refers to the technologies that enhance the version of the physical environment with computer-generated sensory input such as sound and graphics overlaid on top of the user’s view of the real world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) studies how to make computer programs and machines "smart" and take decisions. Our research project focuses on exploring the Integration of AI in AR applications. Specifically, on using Speech Recognition or Natural Language Processing for controlling virtual AR objects and enhancing the human-computer interaction. It is obvious that integration of AI and AR is of great value. However, for developers, it is …

Static Taint Analysis Of Binary Executables Using Architecture-Neutral Intermediate Representation, Elaine Cole

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Ghidra, National Security Agency’s powerful reverse engineering framework, was recently released open-source in April 2019 and is capable of lifting instructions from a wide variety of processor architectures into its own register transfer language called p-code. In this project, we present a new tool which leverages Ghidra’s specific architecture-neutral intermediate representation to construct a control flow graph modeling all program executions of a given binary and apply static taint analysis. This technique is capable of identifying the information flow of malicious input from untrusted sources that may interact with key sinks or parts of the system without needing access to …