Engineering Commons^™

A Collaborative Framework In Outbound Logistics For The Us Automakers, Nazmul Hassan

Wayne State University Dissertations

The competitive landscape of the U.S. automotive market has transformed from the traditional "Big Three" players to too many viable players. In 2008-2009, the harsh market conditions, excess production capacity, capital asset redundancies, and many inefficient strategies submerged as the roadblocks for the US automakers to stay competitive and profitable in the North American market. In this new competitive era, cross-company collaboration in product development, standardizing and communizing supply base, sharing flexible manufacturing platforms, using common inbound and out bound logistics service providers and warehousing etc. can play vital roles for the US automakers to reduce overall cost and return …

Remote Software Upload Techniques In Future Vehicles And Their Performance Analysis, Irina Hossain

Wayne State University Dissertations

Updating software in vehicle Electronic Control Units (ECUs) will become a mandatory requirement for a variety of reasons, for examples, to update/fix functionality of an existing system, add new functionality, remove software bugs and to cope up with ITS infrastructure. Software modules of advanced vehicles can be updated using Remote Software Upload (RSU) technique. The RSU employs infrastructure-based wireless communication technique where the software supplier sends the software to the targeted vehicle via a roadside Base Station (BS). However, security is critically important in RSU to avoid any disasters due to malfunctions of the vehicle or to protect the proprietary …

Reliability And Effect Of Partially Restrained Wood Shear Walls, John Joseph Gruber

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

RELIABILITY AND EFFECT OF PARTIALLY RESTRAINED WOOD SHEAR WALLS

by

JOHN J. GRUBER

MARCH 2012

Advisor: Dr. Gongkang Fu

Major: Civil Engineering

Degree: Doctor or Philosophy

The prescriptive design of the most widely used residential building code in the United States, the IRC, allows the use of partially restrained wood shear walls to resist wind and seismic loads. Wind load is the most common controlling lateral design load for these structures. In contrast, the complimenting building code, the IBC, requires either a restraining dead load or a mechanical hold down device to resist overturning. To prescribe a safe structure, …

Multi-Component Ab2 Metal Hydride Alloys For Nickel Metal Hydride Battery Applications, Jean Nei

Wayne State University Dissertations

Compared to the mish metal-based AB₅ MH alloy commonly used in Ni/MH batteries, the transition metal-based AB₂ MH alloy not only reduces the rare earth dependency, it also has higher specific energy. In order to further improve the performance of AB₂ MH alloy, it's crucial to full understand its multi-phase nature, which includes the main C14/C15 Laves phases and the secondary non-Laves phases.

In order to optimize the gaseous phase and electrochemical advantages of both the C14 and C15 Laves phases, a study was established to recognize the factors that affect the C14/C15 phase abundance. Average electron …

Multi-Fuel Operation Of Modern Engines; On Board Fuel Identification, Florin Mocanu

Wayne State University Dissertations

Modern engines require enhancement of electronic controls to achieve better fuel economy, higher power density and satisfactory emissions levels while operating safely.

Military vehicles should be capable to run safely and efficiently on any fuel available in the field, therefore on-board fuel identification and adaptation of engine controls to the type of fuel becomes extremely important. In these conditions, the use of an inexpensive, nonintrusive sensor is highly desirable.

The development of a technique based on the measurement of the instantaneous crankshaft speed and engine dynamics could be a convenient solution.

Several such methods have been elaborated at the Center …

An Integrated Framework For Freight Forwarders:Exploitation Of Dynamic Information For Multimodal Transportation, Farshid Azadian

Wayne State University Dissertations

Advent of real-time information broadcasting technologies, growth in demand for air-cargo, and increased congestion and variability on air-road network, are the main forces compelling today's air-freight forwarders to improve their operational decision-making to be more competitive and responsive to needs of customers. This research studies the air-cargo transportation on both road (short-haul) and air (long haul) network from the perspective of a mid-size freight forwarder.

We develop a routing algorithm for congestion avoidance on air-network based on historical data and introduce an innovative approach to incorporate real-time information to enable dynamic routing of cargo on a stochastic air-network. In the …

Raman Spectroscopy And Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy For Diagnosis Of Human Cancer And Acanthosis Nigricans, Suneetha Devpura

Wayne State University Dissertations

Cancer and diabetes are common chronic diseases in today's world causing numerous deaths in adults as well as children. Most common types of cancers in adults include prostate, lung, breast, colorectal and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, while among children; leukemia, and brain and central nervous system cancers are quite common. In each of these cases, early detection of the cancer or disease dramatically increases the chances of successful treatment. In recent years, there has been much interest in using Raman spectroscopy and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy as analytical optical spectroscopic methods for early diagnosis of diseases. Raman spectroscopy can …

Sampling Based Progressive Hedging Algorithms For Stochastic Programming Problems, Nezir Aydin

Wayne State University Dissertations

Many real-world optimization problems have parameter uncertainty. For instances where the uncertainties can be estimated to a certain degree, stochastic programming (SP) methodologies are used to identify robust plans. Despite advances in SP, it is still a challenge to solve real world stochastic programming problems, in part due to the exponentially increasing number of scenarios. For two-stage and multi-stage problems, the number of scenarios increases exponentially with the number of uncertain parameters, and for multi-stage problems also with the number of decision stages.

In the case of large scale mixed integer stochastic problem instances, there are usually two common approaches: …

Enhancing The Mechanical Properties Of A Hydroxyapatite-Collagen Bone Surrogate, Richard Franz Banglmaier

Wayne State University Dissertations

The synthesis of biomimetic hydroxyapatite-collagen composites is desirable from the perspective of graft elimination and load-bearing support when treating damaged or diseased bone. Bone is an organized network of carbonated hydroxyapatite mineralized collagen, whose strength and toughness is dependent on the organized array of mineralized collagen fibers that align with applied physiologic stresses. The apatitic calcium phosphate phase, hydroxyapatite, is promising for the biomimetic mineralization of collagen. Hydroxyapatite-collagen composites are osteoconductive and resorbable. However, the mechanical properties of these composites are one or more orders of magnitude less than bone. The aim of this study was to produce a bone-like …

New Precursors And Chemistry For The Growth Of Transition Metal Films By Atomic Layer Deposition, Thomas Joseph Knisley

Wayne State University Dissertations

The advancing complexity of advanced microelectronic devices is placing rigorous demands on currently used PVD and CVD deposition techniques. The ALD deposition method is proposed to meet the film thickness and conformality constraints needed by the semiconductor industry in future manufacturing processes. Unfortunately, there is a limited number of chemical precursors available that have high thermal stability, reactivity, and vapor pressure suitable for ALD film growth to occur. These properties collectively contribute to the lack of suitable transition metal precursors available for use in ALD. In this thesis, we report the discovery of a series of novel transition metal diazadienate …

A Multi-Agent Intelligent System For Detecting Unknown Adverse Drug Reactions Through Communication And Collaboration, Ayman Mohammad Mansour

Wayne State University Dissertations

Several thousands of drugs are currently available on the U.S. market. A complete understanding of the safe use of drugs is not possible at the time when drug is developed or marketed. At that time, the safety information is only obtained from a few thousand people in a typical pre-marketing clinical trial. Clinical trials are not capable of detecting rare adverse drug reactions (ADRs) because of limitations in sample size and trial duration. Early detection of unknown ADRs could save lives and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations. Current methods largely rely on spontaneous reports which suffer from serious underreporting, latency, and inconsistent …

Rethinking The Design And Implementation Of The I/O Software Stack For High-Performance Computing, Xuechen Zhang

Wayne State University Dissertations

Current I/O stack for high-performance computing is composed of multiple software layers in order to hide users from complexity of I/O performance optimization. However, the design and implementation of a specific layer is usually carried out separately with limited consideration of its impact on other layers, which could result in suboptimal I/O performance because data access locality is weakened, if not lost, on hard disk, a widely used storage medium in high-end storage systems.

In this dissertation, we experimentally demonstrated such issues in four different layers, including operating system process management layer and MPI-IO middleware layer on compute server side, …

Decision Support Models For The External Variety Of Configurable Products, Erkan Isikli

Wayne State University Dissertations

The decision of what configurations of a product to offer is a difficult one for marketing and sales departments. In this study, we developed decision support models that can help decision makers when using operational models to manage external variety of configurable products. Our main objective is to reduce the number of product variants offered in a proper way so that inventory and demand models do not suffer from the curse of dimension. Due to its ability and flexibility, our framework can be employed under various marketing actions. We applied our framework to both qualitative and quantitative data.

An Integrated Framework For Configurable Product Assortment Planning, Seyed Ali Taghavi Behbahani

Wayne State University Dissertations

A manufacturer's assortment is the set of products or product configurations that the company builds and offers to its customers. While the literature on assortment planning is growing in recent years, it is primarily aimed at non-durable retail and grocery products. In this study, we develop an integrated framework for strategic assortment planning of configurable products, with a focus on the highly complex automotive industry. The facts that automobiles are highly configurable (with the number of buildable configurations running into thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions) with relatively low sales volumes and the stock-out rates at individual dealerships (even …

3-Dimensional Intracortical Neural Interface For The Study Of Epilepsy, Jessin Koshy John

Wayne State University Dissertations

Epilepsy is a chronic disease characterized by recurrent, unprovoked seizures, where seizures are described as storms of uncontrollable neuro-electrical activity within the brain. Seizures are therefore identified by observation of electrical spiking observed through electrical contacts (electrodes) placed on the scalp or the cortex above the epileptic regions. Current epilepsy research is identifying several specific molecular markers that appear at specific layers of the epilepsy-affected cortex. However, technology is limited in allowing for live observation of electrical spiking across these layers. The underlying hypothesis of this project is that electrical interictal activity is generated in a layer- and lateral-specific pattern. …

Football Helmet Fitment And Its Effect On Helmet Performance, Ron Jadischke

Wayne State University Theses

A method and system to objectively quantify helmet fitment was designed and developed. It measures the pressure between the energy-absorbing material in the helmet and the athlete's head. This system is also capable of measuring surface pressure during impact events. A volunteer-based field study was conducted to quantify how helmets were fitting athletes in a real-life setting. The helmets fit athletes in varying degrees of tightness and evenness. Most athletes (59%) had the highest pressures in the frontal area and 29% had the highest pressure in the occipital area. A large-sized helmet on the Hybrid III headform represented how most …

An Apparatus For Verification Of Absolute Calibration Of Quantum Effiency For Charge-Coupled Devices, Rebecca Ann Coles

Wayne State University Theses

The LBNL Microsystems Laboratory produces backside illuminated, high resistivity, p-channel, charge-coupled devices (CCDs). A system was developed to test the quantum efficiency (QE) of the CCDs; the percentage of electrons that are emitted from the CCD surface per amount of light that it's exposed to.

The QE system was designed and constructed to test CCDs of a much smaller size then what is currently produced. To continue testing, I redesigned the QE apparatus to make room for the new, larger size, CCDs while still preserving measurement accuracy. I removed the photodiode that formally sat alongside the CCD in the Dewar, …

Contact Pressure Distribution Of Osteochondral Defects Of The Knee: Effects Of Non-Vertical Walls, Scott Ensminger

Wayne State University Theses

Purpose: To examine the relationship between well-shouldered osteochondral defects and

defects of different geometries by studying their effects on rim stress concentration and

load redistribution in the human knee.

Methods: Ten fresh-frozen cadaveric knees were mounted at 30° of flexion in a materials

testing machine. Digital electronic pressure sensors were placed in the medial and lateral

compartments of the knee. Dynamic pressure readings were recorded throughout the

loading and holding phases as each knee was loaded to 700N and held for 5 seconds.

Artificial defects were created in each knee to simulate well-shouldered defects and

beveled-defects. Loading was repeated for …

Neurophysiological Changes In Spinal Nerve Roots Subjected To Tensile Loading At Several Strain Rates, Gurjiwan Singh Virk

Wayne State University Theses

ABSTRACT:

Spinal nerve roots have been implicated in many types of traumatic injuries such as motor vehicle accidents, falls, and sports injury, causing damage to brachial plexus and lumbosacral plexus. They have also been involved in lower back pain, disc herniation or protrusions, sciatica, and traumatic birth delivers such as shoulder dystocia. These roots undergo tension, resulting in traumatic axonal injury (TAI), which is also one of the consequences of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Every year about 2 million cases of TBI are reported nationwide with variable neurological deficits. Thus, it is important to understand the neurophysiological response and injury …

Free Vibration Analyses Of Abs (Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene) Rectangular Plates With Completely Free Boundary Conditions, Mehmet Akif Dundar

Wayne State University Theses

Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene (ABS) represents a family of engineering thermoplastics with a wide field of performance characteristics. ABS materials have been receiving a great deal of attention because of their unique properties, such as outstanding formability, high tensile strength and stiffness, very high impact strength, excellent ductility, excellent high and low temperature performance, and resistant to many chemicals and plasticizers. Particularly, ABS exhibits really high impact strength; therefore, it is used in industry products which require high impact strength materials, such as military helmets and construction safety helmets. The vibration analyses of ABS rectangular plates are incredibly significant for design in military …

Timing Of Residential Electric Loads To Reduce Air Emissions From Power Generation, Michelle Marinich Rogers

Wayne State University Theses

Over the course of a day, power utilities must respond to changing demand by dispatching or shedding output from different generators. Each generator is associated with a unique profile of air emissions, based on the type of fuel consumed, installed pollution controls, and the generator's efficiency. The aim of this study is to determine whether shifting electric demand to times when cleaner generation sources are available would result in overall emissions reduction.

Dynamic wholesale pricing in the electric power market, specifically the Locational Marginal Price (LMP), provides a means to estimate the marginal generator fuel type. This knowledge was used …

Intricate Dynamics And Hydrodynamic Frictional Losses Of The Piston-Ring Assembly In Internal Combustion Engines, Mohannad Hakeem

Wayne State University Dissertations

Frictional losses in internal combustion engines approximately account for 10% of the expended fuel energy. Moreover, forty percent of these losses are attributed to the reciprocating motion of the piston-assembly. Besides the adverse effect of friction on fuel economy, the intricate dynamics of the piston-assembly tend to significantly influence the thermal efficiency through blow-by, the engine durability through wear, and the engine noise through piston-slap. Moreover, 40 to 80% of the lubricant oil consumption has been attributed to the ring-pack dynamics.

In this dissertation, a reliable tool has been developed using MATLAB/SIMULINK and embedded C-S Functions that predicts the intricate …

Polymeric Nanocarriers For The Regional And Systemic Delivery Of Therapeutics To And Through The Lungs, Balaji Bharatwaj

Wayne State University Dissertations

The lungs are considered as one of the fastest portals of entry to the bloodstream and oral inhalation (OI) has long been accepted as the preferred mode of administration of therapeutics to the respiratory tract. However, despite its advantages, the lungs have been largely underutilized to target ailments not only of systemic relevance but also several other grave conditions including lung cancer and tuberculosis. Polymeric nanocarriers (PNCs) have several advantages over other drug delivery vehicles including sustained release of moieties, ease of cellular internalization and improved targeting, and hence hold the promise to greatly augment the potential of OI therapies. …

Sustainable Design Of Complex Industrial And Energy Systems Under Uncertainty, Zheng Liu

Wayne State University Dissertations

Depletion of natural resources, environmental pressure, economic globalization, etc., demand seriously industrial organizations to ensure that their manufacturing be sustainable. On the other hand, the efforts of pursing sustainability also give raise to potential opportunities for improvements and collaborations among various types of industries.

Owing to inherent complexity and uncertainty, however, sustainability problems of industrial and energy systems are always very difficult to deal with, which has made industrial practice mostly experience based. For existing research efforts on the study of industrial sustainability, although systems approaches have been applied in dealing with the challenge of system complexity, most of them …

Linear And Non-Linear Deformations Of A Wind Turbine Blade Considering Warping And All Aeroelastic Load Couplings, Fouad Mohammad Mohammad

Wayne State University Dissertations

The structural dynamics behavior of the blade of a horizontal axis wind turbine that reacts to the different components of the aerodynamic loading were studied by many researchers using different approaches and assumptions. In the present research, the author considered all the extensional, torsional and flexural loadings acting on the blade with their couplings, variable airfoil cross sections with warping effects, shear deflection, rotary inertia and with or without blade's pretwist for both the linear small deformation case and the nonlinear large deformation case. To the best knowledge of the author the simultaneous inclusion of all these factors has not …

A Framework For Personalized Dynamic Cross-Selling In E-Commerce Retailing, Arun K. Timalsina

Wayne State University Dissertations

Cross-selling and product bundling are prevalent strategies in the retail sector. Instead of static bundling offers, i.e. giving the same offer to everyone, personalized dynamic cross-selling generates targeted bundle offers and can help maximize revenues and profits. In resolving the two basic problems of dynamic cross-selling, which involves selecting the right complementary products and optimizing the discount, the issue of computational complexity becomes central as the customer base and length of the product list grows. Traditional recommender systems are built upon simple collaborative filtering techniques, which exploit the informational cues gained from users in the form of product ratings and …

Optical Investigation Of Ethanol And N-Heptane Dual-Fuel Partially Premixed Combution In S Reciprocating Engine, Radu Catalin Florea

Wayne State University Dissertations

The details of the dual-fuel combustion of n-heptane and ethanol were investigated in an optically accessible engine representative of light-duty applications. Experimental work involved the application of optical diagnostics such as high-speed imaging of combustion chemiluminescence and soot radiation, spectral measurements and laser induced fluorescence. At the same time, the experimental conditions have been replicated using numerical simulation of chemically reactive in-cylinder flow.

The numerical simulation results, which showed good agreement with the experimental data across several validation approaches, provided an improved understanding of the mechanism responsible for the control of the rate of combustion for dual-fuel operation. The comparison …

Analysis And Modeling Of Roofer And Steel Worker Fall Accidents, Hulya Cakan

Wayne State University Dissertations

" ABSTRACT "

" ANALYSIS AND MODELING OF"

" ROOFER AND STEEL WORKER FALL ACCIDENTS"

by

" Hulya Cakan"

" August 2012"

" Advisor: " Dr. Mumtaz Usmen

" Major: " Civil and Environmental Engineering

" Degree: " Doctor of Philosophy

There are more than nine million construction workers in the US. Roofers and steel workers are the highest risk construction trades according to BLS, and fall from elevation accounts for a large percentage of fatalities and injuries among the construction trades.

In this study, 2114 OSHA accident case reports involving roofers and steel workers were …

Investigation And Improvment Of Noise, Vibration And Harshness(Nvh) Properties Of Automotive Panels, Mohammad Al Zubi

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

INVESTIGATION AND IMPROVEMENT OF NOISE, VIBRATION AND HARSHNESS (NVH) PROPERTIES OF AUTOMOTIVE PANELS

by

MOHAMMAD AL-ZUBI

July 2012

Advisor: Dr. Emmanuel Ayorinde

Major: Mechanical Engineering

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

The reduction of noise and vibration in and across several components and modules of the automotive, such as the panels, doors, engine covers, seats, and others, is of primary importance. The NVH performance may be a crucial factor in the purchase decisions of numerous buyers. This work investigates through experimental, analytical and computational methods, six groups of sample materials - fabric, foam, honeycomb, monolithic and sandwich, periodic cellular material structures …

Rfid-Based Business Process And Workflow Management In Healthcare:Design And Implementation, Xiaoyu Ma

Wayne State University Dissertations

The healthcare system in the United States is considered one of the most complex systems and has encountered challenges related to patient safety concerns, escalating costs, and unpredictable outcomes. Many of these problems share a common cause - a lack of efficient business process management and visibility into the real-time location, status, and condition of medical resources. The goal of this research is to propose a newly integrated system to model, automate, and monitor healthcare business processes using an automatic data collection technology to record the timing and location of activities and identify their various resources.

This dissertation makes several …