Engineering Commons^™

Lithium As A Possible Therapeutic Drug In Posttraumatic Brain Injury, Tulika Das

Theses

Lithium, a popular drug for treating mental health disorder has shown promising effect in recent research on traumatic brain injury (TBI). The mechanism of lithium for treating bipolar mood disorder is still not properly understood, but recent studies showed that lithium is neuroprotective in TBI. In my thesis, the neuroprotective effects of lithium were examined in primary neuronal culture and mild blunt injury using rodent model of Lateral Fluid Percussion Injury (LFPI). At first determination of the neuroprotective/toxicity effects of lithium in neuronal culture was done and observed that 0.5 - 1.0 mM concentrations were found to be neuroprotective as …

Micro Pipes – A Portable Integrated Platform For Electrochemical Sensing Using Essence Architecture, Hansin Kim

Theses

The field of microfluidics and lab-on-chip (LOC) technology has the potential to have a truly transformative effect in biological engineering. This includes areas such as single-cell analysis, environmental monitoring, regenerative medicine, and point-of-care diagnostics. Yet despite being the subject of intense research over the past two decades, LOC devices have not been widely adopted. It is increasingly evident that there is a need for an effective and adaptable integration strategy to realize the potential of this technology.

Presented in this thesis is a design for a chip-to-world interface that aims to improve integration while maintaining cost-efficiency and ease of fabrication. …

Study And Modelling Of Lithium Ion Cell With Accurate Soc Measurement Algorithm Using Kalman Filter For Electric Vehicles, Kasthuriramanan Mahendravadi Sivaguru

Theses

Lithium Ion cells are preferred over lead acid cells for electric vehicles due to their energy density, higher discharge current and size. The cost of lithium ion cells is scaling down compared to ten years earlier, but as their performance characteristics increase, the need for safety and accurate modelling also increases.

The absence of a generic cell model is associated to the different makes of cells and different chemistries of Lithium ion cells behave differently under the testing conditions required for every unique application. The focus of this thesis will be on how to provide intelligence to the battery management …

Magnetic Field Effects On Lithium Ion Batteries, Kevin Mahon

Theses

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019 was just recently awarded to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino for the development of lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries have seen use in many different industries and applications such as in portable devices, power grids, and electric vehicles. As lithium-ion batteries become more commonplace they will need to be modeled more extensively. The magnetic field effect on lithium-ion batteries has not been studied significantly since they were first discovered.

Modeling these batteries is still difficult because of the many complexities of the operation of a battery. Lithium-ion batteries are commonly modeled …

Impact Of Stirrer Speed And Media Type-Loading On The Breakage Kinetics During Wet Stirred Media Milling Of Griseofulvin, Nathaniel Parker

Theses

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of stirrer speed (2000-4000 rpm) and bead loading (~20-60%) on the breakage kinetics-energy consumption during milling of griseofulvin, a poorly soluble drug, and compare the performance of crosslinked polystyrene (CPS) beads with that of yttrium-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) beads. Laser diffraction, SEM, viscometry, and XRPD were used for characterization. A microhydrodynamic model was used to interpret the breakage kinetics. An increase in stirrer speed led to faster breakage due to more frequent and forceful CPS bead-bead collisions. Despite causing slight decrease in maximum contact pressure, an increase in CPS bead loading …

Effect Of 3d Printed Tablet Shape On Drug Release Profile, Christina Gedeon

Theses

There is a growing interest in utilizing additive manufacturing (AM) as a manufacturing tool to develop oral tablets for personalized medicine. This ultimate goal in mind, this study explores the feasibility of extrusion-based fused deposition modeling (FDM) to 3D print oral tablets with tunable design to control drug release profile. Tablets are printed using poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) loaded with model drugs: acetaminophen and caffeine. Hot melt extrusion (HME) is used to fabricate PVA filaments loaded with acetaminophen and caffeine. These filaments are used to fabricate a range of tablets with varying designs to prepare immediate and delayed release tablets. Thermal …

Glass Transition Temperature Of Particles For Drug Delivery, Yiqing Yang

Theses

Drug delivery plays an important role in targeted therapies and nanoparticles which can be used as drug carriers and it’s a frequently researched topic. Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA), a highly biocompatible polymer, has been used as a drug delivery vehicle in many studies. One of the challenges facing drug delivery particles is the problem of burst release which is when a large amount of the drug is suddenly released from the particle once it is placed in the body. This is generally undesirable as usually a slow and controlled release is preferred. The glass transition temperature has an effect on drug …

Tomato Puree Convective Heat Transfer Simulation Using Boussinesq Approximation, Matteo Fabbri

Theses

With the advance of new technologies, the food industries are requiring systems that allow to produce the desired products with faster rates at cheaper costs. In this case, the study was initiated with the purpose to better understand what happens inside a package containing tomato puree when this is heated above 343 K in a tunnel pasteurizer. If the fluid must reach the thermal and microbiological condition of “pasteurization”, the system must guarantee that the temperature (around 343° Kelvin) is kept for a certain time allowing to pasteurize even the cooler package’s fluid-particle. The faster the system can heat the …

Blind Source Separation Using Dictionary Learning Over Time-Varying Channels, Anushreya Ghosh

Theses

Distributed sensors observe radio frequency (RF) sources over flat-fading channels. The activity pattern is sparse and intermittent in the sense that while the number of latent sources may be larger than the number of sensors, only a few of them may be active at any particular time instant. It is further assumed that the source activity is modeled by a Hidden Markov Model. In previous work, the Blind Source Separation (BSS) problem solved for stationary channels using Dictionary Learning (DL). This thesis studies the effect of time-varying channels on the performance of DL algorithms. The performance metric is the probability …

An Electrical Matlab Model Of Plasma Electrolytic Oxidation, Huize Xue

Theses

Plasma Electrolytic Oxidation (PEO), a part of Plasma electrolytic Deposition (PED), has been developing for surface modification of metallic materials in the past 20 years. During PEO process, sample always connect with anode of DC power source, under high temperature, accelerating process of oxidation reaction to from an average and dense oxidation film. A general passage, Plasma electrolysis for surface engineering, written by A.L. Yerokhin, X. Nie gives us a trend of what happened during PEO process but did not determine specific material and value. Linxin Zhu’s Development of PEO invent a new boiling system and investigated relationship between surface …

Design And Implementation Of An Automated Oil Distribution System For A Homogenizer Machine In Gea Mechanical Equipment – Niro Soavi, Luca Gandolfi

Theses

This thesis shows the steps that have been followed and done in order to improve a critical operation of a technological process of the GEA Mechanical Equipment. The critical operation was the filling with different types of oils the homogenizing machine because it was characterized by a lot of inefficiencies and, in particular, by huge risks for job security. These critical issues gave the opportunity and the chance to realize a project in order to give a process optimization and security improvement.

After having faced all the aspects and steps needed for this project, it has been realized a system …

Mechanics Of Binder-Particle Interactions In Composite Battery Electrodes, Richard Johnson

Theses

A study into the particle level mechanics of polymer binder and active material used in composite lithium-ion batteries (LIB) has been conducted. Silicon is highly sought after material that can be used as an active material in a composite anode. Its high theoretical capacity can result in batteries that can store more energy than current LIBs, but high volume expansion of Si during charge/discharge cycles leads to rapid capacity fade and poor cyclic life. Understanding the stress that is generated in the binder and the active material due to the volume expansion has not been fully understood. In this study …

Multiframe Coded Computation For Distributed Uplink Channel Decoding, Brinell F. Monteiro

Theses

The latest 5G technology in wireless communication has led to an increasing demand for higher data rates and low latencies. The overall latency of the system in a cloud radio access network is greatly affected by the decoding latency in the uplink channel. Various proposed solutions suggest using network function virtualization (NFV). NFV is the process of decoupling the network functions from hardware appliances. This provides the exibility to implement distributed computing and network coding to effectively reduce the decoding latency and improve the reliability of the system. To ensure the system is cost effective, commercial off the shelf (COTS) …

Vergence Eye Movement Parameters For Pre/Post-Obvat And Sham Therapy On Binocularly Normal Controls, Joel V. Rajah

Theses

Vergence is the disjunctive movement of the eyes to maintain single binocular vision. Vergence eye movements are necessary to maintain the object of interest on the fovea of each eye as an individual looks from one object to another. Recent studies show that office based vergence/accommodative therapy (OBVAT) is an effective treatment for the binocular dysfunction known as convergence insufficiency. This study was performed to investigate the changes in oculomotor parameters parameter data for pre- and post-therapy subjects who are binocularly normal controls. A haploscope was used to collect eye movement data pre- and post-therapy. The analysis of the eye …

The Use Of Electrical Resistance Tomography To Determine The Minimum Agitation Speed For Solids Suspension In Stirred Tank Reactors, Baran Teoman

Theses

Njs, the minimum agitation speed needed to just suspend all the solid particles in a solid-liquid mixture stirred in an agitated vessel, is a critical parameter to properly operate industrial tanks in a large number of industrial operations. As a result, a significant literature on Njs is available. The oldest and the most common method to measure Njs experimentally is that of Zwietering’s (Chem. Eng. Sci., 1958, 8, 244-253), where Njs can be visually obtained by determining when the solids stay at the bottom of the tank for no more than 1-2 seconds before being swept away. Although this has …

Effect Of Turbostratic Orientations And Confined Fluid On Mechanical Strength Of Bi-Layer Graphene: A Molecular Dynamics Study, Nil B. Dhankecha

Theses

The rise of graphene as a reinforcement material in the last decade has been exponential owing to its superior mechanical properties. This one atom thick 2D material is applicable in many industries related to nanomechanical, nanoelectronics and optical devices. Despite its strength and superior properties, single-layer graphene tends to be unstable in a free-standing form. This led to active use of bi-layer and multilayered graphene in many of the above-stated applications. Though properties of single-layer graphene have been extensively investigated both computationally as well as experimentally for over a decade, bilayer graphene and its turbostratic form are still under research. …

Assignment Of E-Commerce Orders To Fulfillment Warehouses, Ahmad Basem Zamka

Theses

For large e-commerce companies such as Amazon, when an order comes, this order might be available at more than one fulfillment centers. Therefore, the question of which fulfillment center this order should be fulfilled from would arise.

In a typical situation, customer demand is fulfilled from the closest fulfillment center. However, this approach does not always provide the optimal solution since there are so many factors that could be involved in making such a decision. These factors might include inventory balance, product correlations, and future demand.

Our decision model focuses on putting future orders in consideration while assigning orders to …

Mechanical Design Automation: A Case Study On Plastic Extrusion Die Tooling, Allen Prasad Varghese

Theses

The Skills Gap in Mechanical Engineering (ME) Design has been widening with the increasing number of baby boomers retiring (Silver Tsunami) and the lack of a new generation to acquire, practice and perfect their knowledge base. This growing problem has been addressed with several initiatives focused on attracting and retaining young talent; however, these types of initiatives may not be timely for this new group to be trained by an established Subject Matter Expert (SME) group. Automated Engineering Design provides a potential pathway to address not only the Skills Gap but also the transfer of information from SMEs to a …

Experimentally Linking Head Kinematics To Brain Deformation, Imouline Algharbi

Theses

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) research is used to study the effects of brain injuries and the rehabilitations for them. TBI contributes to major cause of disability and deaths quantifying up to 30% of all the head injuries. To mimic real world impact to understand the mechanism of injury head-surrogate models are used. This thesis describes a method to record head kinematics from acceleration and angular rate sensors of head-brain surrogate model for blast and blunt injury. This methodology is validated through experimental testing. To get a better insight of the head kinematics experienced by a real skull a drop tower …

Longitudinal Investigation Of Disparity Vergence In Young Adult Convergence Insufficiency Patients, Patrick C. Crincoli

Theses

Vergence is a form of eye movement in which the eyes move in opposite directions to minimize retinal disparity. It allows an object at different distances from a viewer to appear single during binocular vision by centering the image on the fovea of each retina. Convergence insufficiency (CI) is a binocular disfunction in which blurry and double vision is a symptom. Office-based Vergence/Accommodative Therapy (OBVAT) has been shown to be effective in treating CI. A randomized clinical trial was designed to study fifty participants with CI before and after therapy using randomized therapy treatment (active and placebo), standardized clinical definitions, …

Optical Properties Of Polymers And Their Applications, Samiha Hossain

Theses

The last decade has witnessed explosive growth in the world of photoactive polymers for a variety of applications in several sectors of the global economy. The need for efficient, reliable, and low-cost data acquisition, storage, processing, transmission, and display technologies has made it necessary for research aimed at addressing these needs. Recent accomplishments in this materials area represent exciting opportunities for major innovations in various fields. However, further work needs to be done to transfer the technology from fundamental R&D to manufacturing. The goal of this study is to provide a better understanding of the optical properties of polymers and …