# Engineering Commons™

Articles 1 - 30 of 1588

## Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Design Wind Loads For Air-Permeable Multilayer Cladding Systems, Connell S. Miller Apr 2020

#### Design Wind Loads For Air-Permeable Multilayer Cladding Systems, Connell S. Miller

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Monetary losses from severe wind storms continue to rise despite improvements to building codes. This is because air-permeable multilayer cladding systems such as vinyl siding and roof pavers are a major component of the monetary losses in severe wind storms, but there are not legal requirements for these products. Some air-permeable multilayer products have manufacturing standards that deal with design loads by eliminating the cavity flow and applying a pressure equalization factor to account for the reduction in net load caused by this cavity flow. The objective of this thesis was to develop design guidelines for wind loads on air-permeable ...

Apr 2020

#### Water Supply Capacity Development In The Context Of Global Change, Patrick Breach

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The ANEMI model is an integrated assessment model of global change that emphasizes the role of water resources. The model is based on the principles of system dynamics simulation in order to analyze changes in the Earth system using feedback processes. Securing water resources for the future is a key issue of global change, and ties into global systems of population growth, climate change carbon cycle, hydrologic cycle, economy, energy production, land use and pollution generation.

This thesis focusses on the development of global water supplies necessary to keep pace with a growing population and global economy using an integrated ...

Apr 2020

#### Improvement Of Fluidization Ability For Group A Powders By Fine Powder Additives, Xiaowei Zhang

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Group A powders are widely utilized in the industry because of the great quality of fluidization, which can be affected by the fine content. This project investigates the feasibility that employing the fine powders (≤ 20 μm) as additives to further improve the fluidization ability of Group A powders. Three additives, Coal-15, GB-6, and SiO2-5 are added into FCC-76, based on various volume fractions. The minimum fluidization velocity (Umf), bed expansion ratio (BER), and dense phase expansion ratio (DER) are tested to evaluate the quality of fluidization. Coal-15 can slightly improve the fluidization quality. High content of GB-6 ...

Apr 2020

#### Using A Systems Approach To Analyze The Operational Safety Of Dams, Leanna M. King

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dam systems are arrangements of interacting components that store and convey water for beneficial purposes. Dam failures are associated with extreme consequences to human life, the environment and the economy. Existing techniques for dam safety analysis tend to focus on verifying system performance at the edge of the design envelope. In analyzing the events which occur within the design envelope, linear chain-of-events models are often used to analyze the potential outcomes for the system. These chain-of-events models require that combinations of conditions are identified at the outset of the analysis, which can be very cumbersome given the number of physically ...

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is focused on deep learning-based, pixel-wise classification of hyperspectral images (HSI) in remote sensing. Although presence of many spectral bands in an HSI provides a valuable source of features, dimensionality reduction is often performed in the pre-processing step to reduce the correlation between bands. Most of the deep learning-based classification algorithms use unsupervised dimensionality reduction methods such as principal component analysis (PCA).

However, in this thesis in order to take advantage of class discriminatory information in the dimensionality reduction step as well as power of deep neural network we propose a new method that combines a supervised dimensionality ...

Lower Stiffness Orthopaedic Implants For Hemiarthroplasty, Carolyn Berkmortel Mar 2020

#### Lower Stiffness Orthopaedic Implants For Hemiarthroplasty, Carolyn Berkmortel

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One of the main drawbacks of hemiarthroplasty is that it involves the articulation of a foreign material against the native cartilage, and hence the native cartilage experiences accelerated wear. It is hypothesized that lowering the stiffness of hemiarthroplasty implants will decrease contact pressure and increase contact area, thus decrease wear. Lowering the stiffness was done using finite element analysis to lower the stiffness of the implant materials, and then to change the internal structure of the implants to increase their compliance. Structural changes produced no noticeable or favourable results, whereas material produced improved results for stiffnesses below a Young’s ...

Mar 2020

#### Machine Learning Towards General Medical Image Segmentation, Clara Tam

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The quality of patient care associated with diagnostic radiology is proportionate to a physician's workload. Segmentation is a fundamental limiting precursor to diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Advances in machine learning aims to increase diagnostic efficiency to replace single applications with generalized algorithms. We approached segmentation as a multitask shape regression problem, simultaneously predicting coordinates on an object's contour while jointly capturing global shape information. Shape regression models inherent point correlations to recover ambiguous boundaries not supported by clear edges and region homogeneity. Its capabilities was investigated using multi-output support vector regression (MSVR) on head and neck (HaN) CT ...

Feb 2020

#### Synchrophasor Based Islanding & Open Phase Fault Protection In Distribution Systems, Mansour Jalali

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the rapid growth of renewable energy resources, energy efficiency initiatives, electric vehicles, energy storage, etc., distribution systems are becoming more complex such that conventional protection, control, and measurement infrastructure – typically concentrated at the main substation, with little to no access to information along the feeder – cannot maintain the reliability of the system without some sort of additional protection, control and measurement functionalities. As an example, a dedicated communication channel for carrying the transfer trip signal from the substation to the Point of Common Coupling (PCC) to prevent islanding operation of alternative resources, has been a requirement for many utilities ...

Feb 2020

#### Pulmonary Imaging Of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Using Multi-Parametric Response Maps, Jonathan Macneil

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is characterized by irreversible airflow obstruction caused by airway remodelling and parenchymal destruction. Clinically, observation of COPD is performed using spirometry, but this technique only provides a global measure of lung health. To supplement these clinical measurements, thoracic computed tomography (CT) and hyperpolarized gas magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have been used to measure regional structure and function abnormalities. Although CT and MRI have been used to research COPD, combination of both modalities into an interrelated image has never been performed. Therefore, we developed an image processing pipeline to combine MRI-CT information into a multi-parametric response ...

Advanced Hardware And Software Approach To Seismic Site Response Investigations, Aleksandar Dimitrov Mihaylov Feb 2020

#### Advanced Hardware And Software Approach To Seismic Site Response Investigations, Aleksandar Dimitrov Mihaylov

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Vibration measurement is an essential aspect of modern geotechnical engineering. It is particularly vital task for measuring the dynamic soil parameters, estimating seismic hazards and evaluating influence of industrial, traffic and construction vibrations on the surrounding buildings, structures and their elements. Meanwhile, commercial exploration seismic stations and data acquisition systems require significant professional knowledge and training in geophysics or vibration measurement, as well as practical skills and experience in adjusting data acquisition parameters. Furthermore, available seismological investigation and vibrometry sensors are not universally suitable for field applications in geophysical studies, soil-structure interaction investigations or structural vibrations. The frequency range suitable ...

Geometric State Observers For Autonomous Navigation Systems, Miaomiao Wang Jan 2020

#### Geometric State Observers For Autonomous Navigation Systems, Miaomiao Wang

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The development of reliable state estimation algorithms for autonomous navigation systems is of great interest in the control and robotics communities. This thesis studies the state estimation problem for autonomous navigation systems. The first part of this thesis is devoted to the pose estimation on the Special Euclidean group $\SE(3)$. A generic globally exponentially stable hybrid estimation scheme for pose (orientation and position) and velocity-bias estimation on $\SE(3)\times \mathbb{R}^6$ is proposed. Moreover, an explicit hybrid observer, using inertial and landmark position measurements, is provided.

The second part of this thesis is devoted to the problem ...

A Visual Analytics System For Making Sense Of Real-Time Twitter Streams, Amir Haghighatimaleki Jan 2020

#### A Visual Analytics System For Making Sense Of Real-Time Twitter Streams, Amir Haghighatimaleki

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Through social media platforms, massive amounts of data are being produced. Twitter, as one such platform, enables users to post “tweets” on an unprecedented scale. Once analyzed by machine learning (ML) techniques and in aggregate, Twitter data can be an invaluable resource for gaining insight. However, when applied to real-time data streams, due to covariate shifts in the data (i.e., changes in the distributions of the inputs of ML algorithms), existing ML approaches result in different types of biases and provide uncertain outputs. This thesis describes a visual analytics system (i.e., a tool that combines data visualization, human-data ...

#### Using An Internal Auditory Stimulus To Activate The Developing Primary Auditory Cortex: A Fetal Fmri Study, Estee Goldberg

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Insight into the rapidly developing brain in utero is scarce. Fetal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a technique used to gain awareness into the developmental process. Previous auditory task-based fMRI studies employed an external sound stimulus directly on the maternal abdomen. However, there has since been recommendation to cease doing so. We sought to investigate a reliable paradigm to study the development of fetal brain networks and postulate that by using an internal stimulus, such as the mother singing, it would result in activation of the fetal primary auditory cortex. Volunteers carrying singleton fetuses with a gestational age of ...

#### Effects Of Drinking Water Treatment Processes On Removal Of Algal Matter And Subsequent Water Quality, Ziming Zhao

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Seasonal algal blooms in drinking water sources have increased significantly over the recent past as a result of increased temperature and nutrient loading in surface water due to agricultural and surface runoff. More than 95% of algal cells can be removed by coagulation and flocculation processes. However, algal organic matter (AOM) is not removed well during coagulation, thus causes several operational challenges in drinking water treatment. This research was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of coagulation, granular activated carbon adsorption, and filtration processes on AOM removal and to evaluate disinfection by-products formation potential with/without UV irradiation.

Initially, coagulation performance ...

Generating Energy Data For Machine Learning With Recurrent Generative Adversarial Networks, Mohammad Navid Fekri, Ananda M. Ghosh, Katarina Grolinger Dec 2019

#### Generating Energy Data For Machine Learning With Recurrent Generative Adversarial Networks, Mohammad Navid Fekri, Ananda M. Ghosh, Katarina Grolinger

##### Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The smart grid employs computing and communication technologies to embed intelligence into the power grid and, consequently, make the grid more efficient. Machine learning (ML) has been applied for tasks that are important for smart grid operation including energy consumption and generation forecasting, anomaly detection, and state estimation. These ML solutions commonly require sufficient historical data; however, this data is often not readily available because of reasons such as data collection costs and concerns regarding security and privacy. This paper introduces a recurrent generative adversarial network (R-GAN) for generating realistic energy consumption data by learning from real data. Generativea adversarial ...

Dec 2019

#### Design And Implementation Of Anomaly Detections For User Authentication Framework, Iman Abu Sulayman

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Anomaly detection is quickly becoming a very significant tool for a variety of applications such as intrusion detection, fraud detection, fault detection, system health monitoring, and event detection in IoT devices. An application that lacks a strong implementation for anomaly detection is user trait modeling for user authentication purposes. User trait models expose up-to-date representation of the user so that changes in their interests, their learning progress or interactions with the system are noticed and interpreted. The reason behind the lack of adoption in user trait modeling arises from the need of a continuous flow of high-volume data, that is ...

Partial Nitritation Anammox Process For Sidestream Wastewater Treatment In Mabr Technology, Panagiota Stamatopoulou Dec 2019

#### Partial Nitritation Anammox Process For Sidestream Wastewater Treatment In Mabr Technology, Panagiota Stamatopoulou

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

There has been an increased interest in alternative wastewater treatment systems to improve nutrients removal and energy consumptions while achieving acceptable discharge limits. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) have shifted their interest in treating the sidestream wastewater; a reject liquid post anaerobic digestion, rich in ammonium-nitrogen. A dedicated sidestream wastewater treatment unit has become an attractive option with the finding of a relatively new species of bacteria, anaerobic ammonium oxidizers (anammox), able to convert ammonium and nitrite into nitrogen gas. However, anammox bacteria are sensitive in environmental changes, and in combination with their low growth rate, it is challenging to establish ...

Dec 2019

# Through the application of a computerized model (BioWin), anaerobic co-digestion (AcoD) of source separated organics (SSO) and a high rate acidification technology (pretreatment) for a conventional wastewater treatment plant was reviewed. Through this combined approach of high rate acidification, and co-digestion techniques it was found that the experimental modeling scenarios offered increases when compared to the existing base scenario production levels. With the addition of the high rate acidification technology and application of source separated organics the maximum increases in biogas production came when an OLR of 5.24 kg-COD/m³/day and 97g COD/L/d was experimentally modeled ...

#### Biomechanical Analysis Of Open-Skull High-Rate Traumatic Brain Injury Using Finite Element Mouse Brain Model, Lihong Lu

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

To better understand traumatic brain injury (TBI), it is necessary to correlate with injuries, which are observed from in vivo laboratory experiments, to brain mechanical responses, which can so far be best predicted by finite element (FE) models. Firstly, a previously validated FE model was improved to investigate the effect of repeated impacts and lateral movements on brain responses to ensure the accuracy and reproducibility of controlled cortical impact (CCI) across different labs. Then, a new FE mouse brain model with the detailed three-dimensional (3D), non-linear vasculature was developed to study how the vasculature affected brain response in CCI and ...

Dec 2019

#### Energy Modelling To Evaluate The Thermal Regulation Of Aquaculture Raceways Using Geothermal Heat Exchange, Mitchell H. Kuska

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Raceways are used in the aquaculture industry to farm fish species that swim against an upstream current. Raceways often draw water from a large waterbody and hence, their temperature changes due to seasonal variation, which directly affect the production yield. This study investigates a novel approach to regulate the raceway water temperature in a sustainable way by utilizing geothermal energy exchange. Energy models were developed to simulate heat transfer in a geothermal borehole heat exchange system and in the raceway system. The two models were then coupled to simulate the thermal regulation of the raceway water via borehole heat exchangers ...

#### The Co-Delivery Of Syngeneic Adipose-Derived Stromal Cells And Macrophages On Decellularized Adipose Tissue Bioscaffolds For In Vivo Soft Tissue Regeneration, Hisham A. Kamoun

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Decellularized adipose tissue (DAT) bioscaffolds are a promising platform for the delivery of pro-regenerative cell populations with the goal of promoting adipose tissue regeneration. The current study investigated the effects of seeding DAT bioscaffolds with syngeneic bone marrow-derived macrophages and/or adipose-derived stromal cells (ASCs) on in vivo soft tissue regeneration. Methods were established to derive the macrophages from MacGreen mice, which were dynamically seeded onto the DAT scaffolds alone or in combination with ASCs. Seeded and unseeded scaffolds were implanted subcutaneously into C57Bl/6 mice. At 2 and 4 weeks, cell infiltration, angiogenesis, and adipogenesis were analyzed through histology ...

#### Numerical And Semi-Analytical Estimation Of Convective Heat Transfer Coefficient For Buildings In An Urban-Like Setting, Anwar Demsis Awol

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Urban building arrangements such as packing density, orientation and size are known to influence the microclimate surrounding each building. Studies on the impact of urban microclimatic changes on convective heat transfer coefficient (CHTC) from a stock of buildings, however, have been rare in surveyed literature. The present study focuses on numerical and analytical investigation of CHTC from building-like models with homogeneous set of equal and unequal planar and frontal densities. Consequently, the study discusses the CHTC response in relation to broader changes in the urban surface form. Part of the process involves the development of a simplified one-dimensional semi-analytical CHTC ...

Dec 2019

#### Cluster-Based Chained Transfer Learning For Energy Forecasting With Big Data, Yifang Tian

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Smart meter popularity has resulted in the ability to collect big energy data and has created opportunities for large-scale energy forecasting. Machine Learning (ML) techniques commonly used for forecasting, such as neural networks, involve computationally intensive training typically with data from a single building/group to predict future consumption for that same building/group. With hundreds of thousands of smart meters, it becomes impractical or even infeasible to individually train a model for each meter. Consequently, this paper proposes Cluster-Based Chained Transfer Learning (CBCTL), an approach for building neural network-based models for many meters by taking advantage of already trained ...

Dec 2019

#### Application Of Bayesian Networks To Integrity Management Of Energy Pipelines, Wei Xiang

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Metal-loss corrosion and third-party damage (TPD) are the leading threats to the integrity of buried oil and natural gas pipelines. This thesis employs Bayesian networks (BNs) and non-parametric Bayesian networks (NPBNs) to deal with four issues with regard to the reliability-based management program of corrosion and TPD. The first study integrates the quantification of measurement errors of the ILI tools, corrosion growth modeling and reliability analysis in a single dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) model, and employs the parameter learning technique to learn the parameters of the DBN model from the ILI-reported and filed-measured corrosion depths. The second study develops the ...

#### A Wearable Mechatronic Device For Hand Tremor Monitoring And Suppression: Development And Evaluation, Yue Zhou

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Tremor, one of the most disabling symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), significantly affects the quality of life of the individuals who suffer from it. These people live with difficulties with fine motor tasks, such as eating and writing, and suffer from social embarrassment. Traditional medicines are often ineffective, and surgery is highly invasive and risky. The emergence of wearable technology facilitates an externally worn mechatronic tremor suppression device as a potential alternative approach for tremor management. However, no device has been developed for the suppression of finger tremor that has been validated on a human.

It has been reported ...

#### Blockchain-Based Distributed Network Architecture For Internet Of Things, Min Li

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

IoT networks have already been widely deployed due to their convenience and low-cost advantage. However, due to the lack of strong self-protection mechanisms and the imperfect network architectures, many IoT devices are vulnerable to malicious cyber-attacks, which will further threaten the availability and security of IoT applications. Therefore, securing the network infrastructure while protecting data from malicious or unauthorized devices/users become a vital aspect of IoT network design. In the thesis, two types of IoT security mechanisms are mainly investigated, namely, IoT routing protection and smart community device authentication.

By adopting the distributed consensus mechanism, we propose a blockchain-based ...

#### Exploitation Of Robust Aoa Estimation And Low Overhead Beamforming In Mmwave Mimo System, Yuyan Zhao

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The limited spectral resource for wireless communications and dramatic proliferation of new applications and services directly necessitate the exploitation of millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. One critical enabling technology for mmWave communications is multi-input multi-output (MIMO), which enables other important physical layer techniques, specifically beamforming and antenna array based angle of arrival (AoA) estimation. Deployment of beamforming and AoA estimation has many challenges. Significant training and feedback overhead is required for beamforming, while conventional AoA estimation methods are not fast or robust. Thus, in this thesis, new algorithms are designed for low overhead beamforming, and robust AoA estimation with significantly reduced ...

#### Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer (Bret) - Based Nanostructured Biosensor For Detection Of Glucose, Eugene Hwang

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) is a distance dependent, non-radiative energy transfer, which uses a bioluminescent protein to excite an acceptor through resonance energy transfer. In this thesis, BRET technology is incorporated into a sensor comprised of a recombinant protein and quantum dots. The recombinant protein, which includes the bioluminescent protein, Renilla luciferase (Rluc), is used as the donor molecule and cadmium tellurium quantum dots as the acceptor molecules. Separating the donor-acceptor pair is a recombinant protein, glucose binding protein, which changes conformation upon binding glucose and brings the pair closer together, thus allowing BRET to occur. Optimization of the ...

Micromechanics Of Plasticity Of Zr-2.5%Nb Alloy, Md Imran Khan Nov 2019

#### Micromechanics Of Plasticity Of Zr-2.5%Nb Alloy, Md Imran Khan

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Zirconium alloys are used in many thermal neutron fission reactors because of their very low neutron interaction cross-sections along with their excellent mechanical strength and corrosion resistance. Numerous experiments have been conducted on these alloys at the bulk scale to determine their mechanical properties. Recent advancements in micro-mechanical testing make it easier to study site-specific mechanical properties for micron or submicron-sized samples. Understanding the mechanical response of such small volumes of material is extremely important for developing accurate models to predict the ductile fracture toughness of these in-reactor materials. Pressure tubes made of Zr-2.5%Nb alloys are an integral ...

#### Comparative Assessment Of Downscaling Methods And Application Towards Analysis Of Climate Change Impact On Urban Regions, Markus Eichenbaum

##### Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Global climate models (GCM) are sophisticated numerical models used to make long term climate projections. However, the resolution of their output is too coarse for climate change related local impact studies on urban regional scales. Downscaling efforts are taken to address this and increase GCM projection resolution. Physical Scaling (SP) downscaling methodology attempts to incorporate the physical basis of dynamical downscaling efforts with the computational efficiency of statistical methods. In this study, North American Regional Reanalysis surface skin temperature and precipitation data for a 1°x1° region centered on Houston, TX are downscaled to a resolution of 500m via SP ...