Engineering Commons^™

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2012, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Senior Design Experience

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. Working in teams, the senior design project encourages students to use everything learned in the engineering and computer design programs to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

Beyond the classroom ...

Because of the requirement to work in teams, students also build good communication skills, presentation skills and even business writing skills. They also have to …

Synthesis And Characterizations Of Pyridinium Salts Including Poly(Pyridinium Salt)S And Their Applications, Tae Soo Jo

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Pyridinium salts, both molecular and polymeric, are an interesting class of multifunctional materials that exhibit liquid-crystalline and light-emitting properties. Moreover, their properties can be easily tuned by introducing new types of anions or by modifying their chemical structures. This dissertation describes synthesis and characterization of poly(pyridinium salt)s containing macrocounterions and fluorene moieties in their backbones, synthesis and characterization of nanocomposites of poly(pyridinium salt)s with single-walled carbon nanotubes via non-covalent interactions, and synthesis and characterizations of pyridinium salts having different aliphatic linkages and their application in organic acid sensing.

First, all of these ionic polymers were prepared by either ring-transmutation or …

Image Segmentation For Quantification Of Air-Water Interface In Micro-Ct Soil Images, Kranthi Kumar Potteti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Soils are complex environments comprising various biological (roots, water, air etc) and physical constituents (minerals, aggregates, etc). Synchrotron radiation based X-ray microtomography (XMT) is widely used in extracting qualitative and quantitative information regarding spatial distribution of biological and physical soil constituents. Segmentation of these micro-CT soil images is of interest to geologists, hydrologists, civil and petroleum engineers and soil scientists. In this present work, we study and implement segmentation algorithms for microhydrology studies, specifically for soil water conductivity. Three well-known image segmentation algorithms are studied for evaluating their performance for the task. We demonstrate the problems and ways to segment …

Post Processing Of Optically Recognized Text Using First Order Hidden Markov Model, Spandana Malreddy

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this thesis, we report on our design and implementation of a post processing system for Optically Recognized text. The system is based on first order Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The Maximum Likelihood algorithm is used to train the system with over 150 thousand characters. The system is also tested on a file containing 5688 characters. The percentage of errors detected and corrected is 11.76% with a recall of 10.16% and precision of 100%

Hardware-Software Co-Design, Acceleration And Prototyping Of Control Algorithms On Reconfigurable Platforms, Desta Kumsa Edosa

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Differential equations play a significant role in many disciplines of science and engineering. Solving and implementing Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and partial Differential Equations (PDEs) effectively are very essential as most complex dynamic systems are modeled based on these equations. High Performance Computing (HPC) methodologies are required to compute and implement complex and data intensive applications modeled by differential equations at higher speed. There are, however, some challenges and limitations in implementing dynamic system, modeled by non-linear ordinary differential equations, on digital hardware. Modeling an integrator involves data approximation which results in accuracy error if data values are not considered …

Plasma Test On Industrial Diamond Powder In Hydrogen And Air For Fracture Strength Study, Rohit Asuri Sudharshana Asuri Sudharshana Chary

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Diamonds are the most precious material all over the world. Ever since their discovery, the desire for natural diamonds has been great; recently, the demand has steeply increased, leading to scarcity. For example, in 2010, diamonds worth $50 billion were marketed. This increased demand has led to discovering alternative sources to replace diamonds. The diamond, being the hardest material on earth, could be replaced with no other material except another diamond. Thus, the industrial or synthetic diamond was invented. Because of extreme hardness is one of diamond's properties, diamonds are used in cutting operations. The fracture strength of diamond is …

Investigating The Impacts Of Conventional And Advanced Treatment Technologies On Energy Consumption At Satellite Water Reuse Plants, Jonathan Roy Bailey

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With the ever increasing world population and the resulting increase in industrialization and agricultural practices, depletion of two of the world's most important natural resources, water and fossil fuels, is inevitable. Water reclamation and reuse is the key to protecting these natural resources. Water reclamation using smaller decentralized wastewater treatment plants, known as satellite water reuse plants (WRP), have become popular in the last decade. With stricter standards and regulations on effluent quality and requirements for a smaller land footprint (i.e. real estate area), additional treatment processes and advanced technologies are needed. This greatly increases the energy consumption of an …

Novel Production Techniques Of Radioisotopes Using Electron Accelerators, Daniel Robert Lowe

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Non-traditional radioisotope production techniques using a compact, high power linear electron accelerator have been demonstrated and characterized for the production of 18F, 47Sc, 147Pm, and 99mTc from a variety of target candidates. These isotopes are used extensively in the medical field as diagnostic and therapy radioisotopes, as well as the space industry as RTG's. Primary focus was placed on 99mTc as it constitutes approximately 80% of all diagnostic procedures in the medical community that use radioactive tracers. It was also the prime focus due to recent events at the Chalk River nuclear reactor, which caused global shortages of this isotope …

The Impact Of Advanced Wastewater Treatment Technologies And Wastewater Strength On The Energy Consumption Of Large Wastewater Treatment Plants, Timothy Stephen Newell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Wastewater treatment is an energy intensive process often requiring the use of advanced treatment technologies. Stricter effluent standards have resulted in an increase in the number of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) with advanced treatment over time. Accordingly, associated energy consumption has also increased. Concerns about lowering operating costs for WWTPs and reducing associated greenhouse gas generation present an incentive to investigate energy use in WWTPs. This research investigated the impact of wastewater strength and the introduction of advanced treatment technologies, to replace traditional technologies on energy use to treat wastewater in WWTPs. Major unit processes were designed for a 100 …

Hybrid Plasmonic Nanoantennas: Fabrication, Characterization, And Application, Shengjie Zhai

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As optical counterpart of microwave antennas, plasmonic nanoantennas are important nanoscale devices for converting propagating optical radiation into confined/enhanced electromagnetic fields. Presently, nanoantennas, with a typical size of 200-500 nm, have found their applications in bio-sensing, bio-imaging, energy harvesting, and disease cure and prevention. With the device feature size of next generation IC goes down to 22 nm or smaller, and biological/chemical sensing reaches the Gene’s level, the sizes of the corresponding nanoantennas have to be scaled down to sub-100nm level. In the literature, these sub-100nm nanoantennas are referred as deep subwavelength nanoantennas as size of such miniaturized nanoantennas is …

Comparison And Simulation Of Salt-Ceramic Composites For Use In High Temperature Concentrated Solar Power, Lauren Michelle Fossile

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Due to the inherently intermittent nature of solar energy caused by cloud cover among other sources, thermal storage systems are needed to make solar energy more consistent. This same technology could be used to prolong the daily number of useful hours of solar energy power plants. Salt-ceramic materials are a relatively new prospect for heat storage, but have been researched mostly with magnesium oxide and several different carbonate salts. Salt ceramics are a phase change material where the salt changes phase inside the ceramic structure allowing for the system to use the sensible heat of both materials and the latent …

Hardware Implementation Of Processor Allocator For Mesh Connected Chip Multiprocessors, Rana Sangram Reddy Marri

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The advancements in the semiconductor process technology and the current demand for highly parallel computing has led to the advent of Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs). CMP is the integration of two or more independent processor cores, which can read and execute program instructions, on to a single integrated circuit die. CMPs are the main computing platforms for research and development in parallel and high performance computing environments. They offer minimum inter-core communication latencies as the processor cores are present on a single chip.

The Operating System (OS) plays a key role in using a CMP effectively. The OS should support a …

Adaptive Local And Global Synchronization And Phase Control Of Inferior Olive Neurons (Ions), Srujan Kumar Chalike

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Clusters of inferior olive neurons (IONs) in the olive-cerebellar system play an important role in providing synchronized motor control signals for the activation of large number of muscles. However, the dynamics of IONs are highly nonlinear and the system parameters are assumed to be unknowm. The IONs evolving from arbitrary initial conditions are not synchronized. However the application of IONs for control of BAUV's requires that IONs oscillate in unison. The objective is to design control laws such that the controlled ION tracks the trajectories of the reference ION. The two control laws are derived based on tuning functions adaptive …

The Design And Testing Of A Solar Autoclave With Broad Spectrum Sterilization Capabilities, Sarah S. Trabia

Honors College Theses

Energy is difficult to come by in developing countries and this interferes with the ability of doctors to provide good healthcare to their patients. Without decent sterilization, patients can become infected and diseases can spread throughout hospitals. This study involves designing a solar autoclave for developing countries that is as efficient as electrical autoclaves. The design is intended to not require any electrical input and to be affordable to those who cannot afford advanced medical equipment. Once the solar autoclave is designed, it will be tested to determine if it can sterilize equipment against a variety of different bacteria, including …

Heuristic Algorithms For Optimization Of Task Allocation And Result Distribution In Peer-To-Peer Computing Systems, Grzegorz Chmaj, Krzysztof Walkowiak, Michal Tarnawski, Michal Kucharzak

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

Recently, distributed computing system have been gaining much attention due to a growing demand for various kinds of effective computations in both industry and academia. In this paper, we focus on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing systems, also called public-resource computing systems or global computing systems. P2P computing systems, contrary to grids, use personal computers and other relatively simple electronic equipment (e.g., the PlayStation console) to process sophisticated computational projects. A significant example of the P2P computing idea is the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project. To improve the performance of the computing system, we propose to use the P2P …

Effects Of Moisture Augmentation Of Municipal Solid Waste Through Addition Of Food Waste Or Wastewater Treatment Biosolids On Bio-Gas Formation For Power Generation, Jared Michael Gore

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An investigation into the effect of moisture augmentation by manipulation of food waste proportion or wastewater treatment plant biosolids proportion was undertaken to determine the effects on production of methane and other biogases from municipal solid waste (MSW). Laboratory microcosm experiments were performed to determine the effect of various proportions of influent waste streams on the production of biogas. Results indicated that moisture augmentation through the addition of food waste to MSW increases the overall bio-gas and hydrogen gas formed during fermentation. Moisture augmentation through addition of wastewater treatment bio-solids lead to inconclusive results. Addition of food waste to MSW …

Non-Blocking Concurrent Operations On Heap, Mahesh Acharya

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We present a non-blocking implementation for the concurrent Heap data structure in the asynchronous shared memory system. The system may be a traditional one with a single processor with multiple threads, or it may be the one with multiple processors each possibly with multiple threads. Our implementation supports readMin, deleteMin, and insert operations on the heap. The deleteMin and insert operations are non-blocking operations, whereas the readMin is wait-free. One easy approach of using a heap in multi-threading environment could be by locking the entire heap before performing any operation. This would make the implementation very slow to have any …

Wavelets In Intelligent Transportation Systems: Data Compression And Incident Detection, Shaurya Agarwal

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Research show that wavelets can be used efficiently in denoising and feature extraction of a given signal. This thesis discusses about intelligent transportation systems(ITS), its requirement and benefits. We explore use of wavelets in intelligent transportation systems for knowledge discovery, compression and incident detection. In the first section of thesis, we focus on the following problems related to traffic matrix: data compression, retrieval and visualization. We propose a methodology using wavelet transform for data visualization and compression of traffic data. Aim is to research on the wavelet compression technique for the traffic data, come up with the performance of various …

Node Filtering And Face Routing For Sensor Network, Umang Amatya

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Greedy forward routing and face routing algorithms have been extensively used for sending messages in sensor networks. In this thesis, we consider the problem of filtering redundant nodes in a sensor network as a pre-processing step for face routing. We propose two algorithms for identifying redundant nodes. We test the performance of proposed filtering algorithms on generated networks. The prototype algorithm for testing the proposed algorithms has been implemented in the Java programming language. Experimental investigation shows that the proposed filtering algorithms are effective in removing redundant nodes without compromising the network connectivity.

Basic Research On The Characteristics Of A Constricted Pulsed Glow Discharge, Sean Daniel Andersen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In certain plasma discharge experiments, it has been observed that under specific conditions a plasma glow discharge column tends to seek the central location of the discharge electrodes away from the electrode edges and chamber walls. Further, the column appears to have the properties of a stabilized equilibrium plasma pinch in a glow (non-arc-like) state. This is unusual since, normally field enhancements occur on edges resulting in arc-like discharge breakdown. Also, the column of plasma that protrudes from the anode emits highly intense, non-uniform light that is uncharacteristically bright for a glow discharge.

The main purpose of this thesis is …

Impact Of Secondary Treatment Types And Sludge Handling Processes On Estrogen Concentration In Wastewater Sludge, Erica J. Marti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs), such as estrogen, are known to be present in the aquatic environment at concentrations that negatively affect fish and other wildlife. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are major contributors of EDCs into the environment. EDCs are released via effluent discharge and land application of biosolids. Estrogen removal in WWTPs has been studied in the aqueous phase; however, few researchers have determined estrogen concentration in sludge. This study focuses on estrogen concentration in wastewater sludge as a result of secondary treatment types and sludge handling processes. Grab samples were collected before and after multiple treatment steps at two WWTPs …

Statistical Analysis Of A Vehicle Miles Travled Fee For Nevada, Andrew Nordland

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Increases in the number of electric, hybrid-electric, and other alternative fuel vehicles, combined with increasing vehicle fuel efficiency present problems with the ability of the fuel tax to collect sufficient revenue. A Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) Fee is being considered as an option to replace the existing fuel tax for the collection of revenue for road maintenance, reconstruction and expansion. This study provides an analysis about costs, preference of a potential billing cycle, level of comfort with a mileage collection device, potential changes in transit use, and the effectiveness of a VMT Fee for Nevada. Multinomial logit models are developed …

Cpu Scheduling For Power/Energy Management On Heterogeneous Multicore Processors, Rajesh Patel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Power and energy have become increasingly important concerns in the design and implementation of today's multicore/manycore chips. Many methods have been proposed to reduce a microprocessor's power usage and associated heat dissipation, including scaling a core's operating frequency. However, these techniques do not consider the dynamic performance characteristics of an executing process at runtime, the execution characteristics of the entire task to which this process belongs, the process's priority, the process's cache miss/cache reference ratio, the number of context switches and CPU migrations generated by the process, nor the system load. Also, many of the techniques that employ dynamic frequency …

Estimating Annual Precipitation For The Colorado River Basin Using Oceanic-Atmospheric Oscillations, Ajay Kalra, Sajjad Ahmad

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

Estimating long-lead time precipitation under the stress of increased climatic variability is a challenging task in the field of hydrology. A modified Support Vector Machine (SVM) based framework is proposed to estimate annual precipitation using oceanic-atmospheric oscillations. Oceanic-atmospheric oscillations, consisting of Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) for a period of 1900–2008, are used to generate annual precipitation estimates with a 1 year lead time. The SVM model is applied to 17 climate divisions encompassing the Colorado River Basin in the western United States. The overall results revealed that …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2012, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Senior Design Experience

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. Working in teams, the senior design project encourages students to use everything learned in the engineering and computer design programs to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

Beyond the classroom...

Because of the requirement to work in teams, students also build good communication skills, presentation skills and even business writing skills. They also have to source …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2018, 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 …

Heat, Mass And Force Flows In Supersonic Shockwave Interactions, John Michael Dixon

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There is no cost effective way to deliver a payload to space and, with rising fuel prices, currently the price to travel commercially is also becoming more prohibitive to the public. During supersonic flight, compressive shock waves form around the craft which could be harnessed to deliver an additional lift on the craft. Using a series of hanging plates below a lifting wing design, the total lift generated can be increased above conventional values, while still maintaining a similar lift-to-drag ratio. Here, we study some of the flows involved in supersonic shockwave interaction. This analysis uses ANSYS Fluent Computational Fluid …

Upgrading Unlv's Astm E477 Test Facility To Meet The Current Standards Of Astm E477, Ronn Fojas

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A by-product of Heating, Ventilation, and Air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is noise that is produced by fans, compressors, and other related equipments and the noises from the turbulence that is created by moving air. Sometimes, it is impractical to modify the sources of the noise, which requires designers to modify the path of the noise, the duct system. These modifications might include installing an in-duct silencer or acoustical lining on the inside walls of the ducts. The testing and the precise quantification of the performance of these silencers and duct linings are necessary for any designer to be able to make …

Buffering Pv Output During Cloud Transients With Energy Storage, Yacouba Moumouni

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Consideration of the use of the major types of energy storage is attempted in this thesis in order to mitigate the effects of power output transients associated with grid-tied CPV systems due to fast-moving cloud coverage. The approach presented here is to buffer intermittency of CPV output power with an energy storage device (used batteries) purchased cheaply from EV owners or battery leasers. When the CPV is connected to the grid with the proper energy storage, the main goal is to smooth out the intermittent solar power and fluctuant load of the grid with a convenient control strategy. This thesis …

A Refreshable And Portable E-Braille System For The Blind And Visually Impaired, Mohammad Yousef Saadeh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The objective of this research is to design an affordable Braille tactile display that is wearable, refreshable, and portable. The device is intended to be used as an output device that can playback stored media. It can be also incorporated with current Braille reading technologies. The device will control both the electrical and mechanical stimulations to optimize the sensation and ensure extended use of the device. This work is concerned mainly with the mechanical aspects of the design.

This research proposed the development of a finger-wearable, scanning-style electric stimulation based (electrotactile) Braille display with sensing and adaptive rendering/actuation functions for …