Engineering Commons^™

Investigation Of Column Packing & Flow Profiles In Packed Chromatographic Columns, Karamjit Singh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Liquid chromatography is an important downstream operation in the health care, biotechnology, biopharmaceutical, and bioprocessing industries. Its high resolving power is utilized to capture valuable materials such as therapeutic proteins, antibodies, peptides, and nucleic acids. Column chromatography relates to a separation and/or purification technique in which a stationary "bed" of a packing medium or resin is contained within a rigid tube. The column efficiency is measured in terms of Number of plates and Asymmetry. Column Efficiency loss can occur during packing, during storage and during transportation. The detailed study has been done for column sizes 2.5 cm and 5 cm …

Behaviour Of Transmission Line Conductors Under Tornadoes, Dingyu Yao

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Transmission line (TL) structure failures caused by tornadoes have been observed in multiple countries around the globe. The objective of this study is to develop an accurate load case that can simulate the critical tornado forces transmitted from the TL conductors to the towers. In order to achieve the goal, three different tornado wind fields, which were previously developed using computational fluid dynamic simulations, are considered. The tornado wind field provides the most critical forces on the TL conductors is determined and considered to obtain the critical load cases. Using the critical wind field, parametric studies are conducted to identify …

Biomechanical Analysis Of Ligament Modelling Techniques And Femoral Component Malrotation Following Tka, Liam A. Montgomery

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Previous studies have demonstrated that satisfaction and revision rates following total knee arthroplasty (TKA) are lower than those of comparable surgeries such as total hip replacements. A leading cause for these revisions is joint instability which may be due to improper ligament balancing or poorly aligned surgical implants. One of the methods used to investigate biomechanical forces and kinematics is computational modelling of the post-operative TKA knee.

A unique knee model was used to investigate the biomechanical and kinematic effects of ligament model complexity, as well as the effects of simulating ligament wrapping versus ignoring ligament wrapping. We then used …

Behaviour Of Transmission Lines Subjected To Tornadoes Through Aeroelastic Testing And Numerical Modeling, Nima Ezami

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Tornadoes, as a form of high intensity wind (HIW) events, represent major threats to transmission line systems in many regions around the globe. Transmission line systems are among the most vulnerable structures to tornadoes due to their expansion over hundreds of kilometers and, therefore, increased exposure to such localized wind events. A comprehensive research project has been developed over the past two decades at Western University to study this problem. The research conducted in this thesis provides a significant development to the advancement of knowledge in this area through achieving three main objectives. The first objective is to assess and …

Composite Compression Co-Moulding: A Warpage Reduction Investigation, David Knezevic

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

To accommodate the increasing need for vehicle emission reduction, automotive manufacturers are presently looking at the next generation of lightweight materials. Glass fibre-reinforced thermoplastic composites belong to this group and exhibit mechanical properties that resemble traditional metals but at a reduced weight and with improvements on other characteristics. Unfortunately, they are affected by processing-related warpage, especially when fabricated by means of the Long Fibre-reinforced Thermoplastics – Direct (LFT-D) manufacturing process, a technology that is valuable because of its high throughput and flow lengths. This occurs for many reasons but reinforcing LFT-D with Glass Mat Thermoplastics (GMT) – another material format …

Seizure Detection Using Deep Learning, Information Theoretic Measures And Factor Graphs, Bahareh Salafian

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder that disrupts normal electrical activity in the brain causing severe impact on patients’ daily lives. Accurate seizure detection based on long-term time-series electroencephalogram (EEG) signals has gained vital importance for epileptic seizure diagnosis. However, visual analysis of these recordings is a time-consuming task for neurologists. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to propose an automatic hybrid model-based /data-driven algorithm that exploits inter-channel and temporal correlations. Hence, we use mutual information (MI) estimator to compute correlation between EEG channels as spatial features and employ a carefully designed 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract …

Effect Of Levodopa On Eeg Connectivity In Parkinson's Patients, Sepehr Torab Parhiz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Levodopa is a dopamine replacement medication administered to patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) to alleviate their motor symptoms. However, its long-term use can cause adverse side effects, including involuntary motor movements. We studied 16 PD patients before and after taking Levodopa based on resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to determine how Levodopa affects the functional connectivity of their brain networks. We used several metrics from graph theory, in particular the minimum spanning tree (MST) metric, and analyzed how they change after subjects take Levodopa. We observed significant changes in the lower alpha band toward a more path-like and less globally efficient …

Thermochemical Conversion Of Plastic To Value Added Products, Anastasia L. Maslak

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this study, the use of pyrolytic cracking for managing non-recyclable plastic waste by conversion into value-added liquid and gaseous products was investigated. A single-stage reactor and a novel, two-stage reactor set-up were used for experiments involving polyethylene and polypropylene. Parameters including feedstock composition, feed rate, temperature and residence time were studied. The two-stage approach was investigated to overcome existing transportation limitations involved in the typical plastic waste lifecycle. Bulky plastic collected in towns and cities must be transported to industrial facilities typically located elsewhere for reprocessing. Both HDPE and LDPE showed promising results for olefin recovery with ethylene gas …

Lunar Regolith Simulant Behaviours Affected By Shock Metamorphism And Mineralogy, Xiao Chen Zhang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

There are still many gaps in improving the fidelity of lunar regolith simulants to simulate more properties. This study compares some fundamental physical and mineralogical properties of three types of lunar highland regolith simulants: LHS-1, a commercial product with high mineralogical fidelity; UWO-1G, an original simulant that is the main component of LHS-1; and UWO-1S, another original product that is attempted to produce shocked grains in lunar simulants from pulverizing and mixing impact rocks sourced from the Mistastin Crater.

Preliminary results indicated that even though all simulants are composed of mostly plagioclase minerals and have similar particle size distribution patterns, …

Seismic Response Of Driven And Helical Piles In Non-Liquefiable And Liquefiable Soils, Ahmed Fouad Hussein

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The thesis investigates the nonlinear soil-pile-structure interaction through three-dimensional nonlinear finite element models (FEM) employing the OpenSees platform. The FEMs were validated with the results of large-scale shaking table tests of model pile groups-superstructure systems in dry and saturated sand and large-scale field tests on single piles installed in cohesive soil. The numerical models correctly predicted the different pile deformation modes that were exhibited in the experiments. The results illustrated that the inertial interaction contributed to the bending moments at the pile top, while the kinematic interaction contributed to the bending moment at the layers interface. In addition, the excess …

Situation-Aware Quality Of Service Enhancement For Heterogeneous Ultra-Dense Wireless Iot Networks, Sabin Bhandari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

By engaging a massive number of heterogeneous devices, future Internet of Things (IoT) systems are expected to support diverse applications ranging from eHealthcare to industrial control. In highly-dense deployment scenarios such as Industrial IoT (IIoT) systems, meeting the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements such as low-latency and high reliability becomes challenging due to the uncertainty and dynamics within the IoT networks. To enhance the overall QoS performance, this thesis aims to address the technical challenges of IoT networks. Firstly, to enhance the network reliability, a cloud-assisted priority-based channel access and data aggregation scheme is proposed to minimize the network …

Behavior Of Wind Turbine Towers And Blades Under Tornado Wind Fields, Mohamed Abugazia

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The installation rate of wind turbines around the world is increasing significantly. Therefore, wind turbine farms are constructed in plentiful wind resources areas that put a considerable number of wind turbine towers under severe wind conditions. As a result, failures due to unexpected wind loads on either the blades or the tower are increasing. In addition, wind turbines are designed to resist synoptic wind loads as per the current guidelines, which do not consider high-intensity wind (HIW) events such as tornadoes. The built-in-house numerical code “HIW-WT” has been developed in this study to model wind turbines under three-dimensional wind fields …

Precision Grasp Planning For Integrated Arm-Hand Systems, Shuwei Qiu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The demographic shift has caused labor shortages across the world, and it seems inevitable to rely on robots more than ever to fill the widening gap in the workforce. The robotic replacement of human workers necessitates the ability of autonomous grasping as the most natural but rather a vital part of almost all activities. Among different types of grasping, fingertip grasping attracts much attention because of its superior performance for dexterous manipulation. This thesis contributes to autonomous fingertip grasping in four areas including hand-eye calibration, grasp quality evaluation, inverse kinematics (IK) solution of robotic arm-hand systems, and simultaneous achievement of …

Effect Of Pretreatment Of Resin Acids On Anaerobic Digestibility Of Pulp And Paper Mill's Primary Sludge, Sreejon Das

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Pulp and paper (P&P) mills’ wastewater contain high concentrations of resin acids (10–10,000 mg/L) which are toxic to aquatic organisms. In mill’s primary and waste activated sludge treatments reduced concentrations of resin acids in effluent; however, most of the resin acids are ultimately ended up in sludge after primary and secondary clarification due to their extreme hydrophobic nature (log K_ow 6.0). Nevertheless, adsorbed resin acids on the surfaces of anaerobes and substrates affect anaerobic digestion (AD) process negatively. The objective of the present work was to determine the effect of pretreatment of thermomechanical pulping mill’s primary sludge (TMP-PS) on …

Characterization Of Material For Composite Automotive Components, Thomas J. Chang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A composite had been widely used for the lightweighting purpose amid increasing environmental concerns. Among composite manufacturing processes, compression molding is widely used for automotive parts. During compression molding, the mold geometry and molding process conditions significantly influence the fiber configuration and the mechanical performance.

Hence, this thesis aims to characterize the microstructural and mechanical properties of the complex shaped composite automotive components: outer seatback and inner seatback. Both parts were compression molded using commercial glass mat thermoplastic sheet with long glass fibers (30mm-50mm) embedded in the polyamide resin. The microstructural characterization results showed that the microstructural properties are influenced …

Overcoming Technological Challenges For The Commercialization Of The Circulating Fluidized Bed Bioreactor For Municipal Wastewater Treatment, Michael J. Nelson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The fluidized bed bioreactor as an attached growth wastewater treatment process has demonstrated advantages over suspended growth processes for municipal wastewater treatment applications. However, previous studies have also demonstrated potentially serious disadvantages in terms of energy consumption and maximum reactor size of high flow applications.

In this work, a cost analysis using the CapdetWorks, supplemented by calibrated model data taken from GPS-X was performed to determine the cost effectiveness of the circulating fluidized bed bioreactor (CFBBR). This study demonstrated that the CFBBR is most cost competitive at low flow below 5 MGD. A 10%-20% reduction in net present values on …

Treatability Of Micropollutants And Microplastics Using Selected Wastewater Treatment Processes, Juan Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Micropollutants and microplastics are ubiquitously detected in environment, which are directly linked to human health and ecosystems safety. Conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are regarded as a major source for discharging these contaminants into environment. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the behavior of these pollutants and their removal potential in WWTPs. This work investigated specific treatment processes to determine their efficiency in removing target micropollutants and microplastics.

Primary treatments in WWTPs are first step to removal solid particle and other floated materials from the water stream. Therefore, the process is important for microplastics particles. The behavior of …

The Use Of Ct To Assess Shoulder Kinematics And Measure Glenohumeral Arthrokinematics, Baraa Daher

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recently, studies have started employing dynamic four-dimensional computed tomography (4DCT) imaging as a biomechanical assessment tool. These studies would benefit from the valuable work that has been done in the past using three-dimensional computed tomography (3DCT). Thus, a structured review was conducted to examine the extent and range of methods employing CT imaging to measure shoulder kinematics. The findings of the review were utilized to conduct a study that employed 4DCT imaging to measure glenohumeral joint congruency and arthrokinematics during internal rotation to the back in a population of healthy individuals. The results of this work show the importance of …

Smart Chatbot For User Authentication, Peter Voege

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The field of authentication has a lot of room to develop in the age of big data and machine learning. Conventional high-accessibility authentication mechanisms including passwords or security questions struggle with critical vulnerabilities, creating a need for alternative authentication mechanisms able to cover said weaknesses.

We sought to create an authentication mechanism that creates dynamic, ever-changing security questions only the user can answer while remaining intuitive to use and as accessible as typical security questions by creating an authentication chatbot that leverages big data and natural language processing to pose dynamic authentication challenges.

We tested the components of our design …

Static Liquefaction Of Oil Sand Tailings: An Experimental Investigation Into The Effect Of Saturation And Fines Content, Farshad Zehforoosh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The main goals of this research are to explore the influence of partial saturation and fine content on the shear response of oil sand tailings, to identify the liquefaction susceptibility under different initial states. Monotonic triaxial compression tests were carried out to understand the mechanical behavior of the saturated oil sand tailings with varying void ratios. Then the effect of fine content on the yield and critical shear strength, critical state line, and instability line was evaluated by increasing the fine content up to 50%. The experimental results revealed that the shear strength of the oil sand increases with fine …

Edge Intelligence Enabled Distributed And Collaborative Authentication In Uav Swarms, Huanchi Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely deployed in various fields with many benefits such as cost reduction, safety improvement and service coverage enhancement. Unlike the other mobile ad hoc networks, the UAV swarm, which is a flying ad hoc network, may operate in a hostile environment or experience rapid network topology change which brings high vulnerability by using cloud-based centralized security provisioning techniques. Hence, securing the UAV networks with the on-site authentication resources becomes a vital aspect to accomplish the mission. The on-site authentication resources, such as the cross-layer attributes, can be utilized to form a unique characteristic of …

Effects Of The Soil Spatial Variability On Pipelines, Jose Luis Espinosa Mendez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Pipelines are the safest and most efficient way to transport large volumes of oil and gas from extraction fields, to refineries, industry and home consumption. Extensively used to transport fluids over long distances, pipelines may pass through terrain features exposed to geohazards. The performance of buried pipelines in areas subjected to ground displacements constitute a criterion for design, assessment and management of gas pipelines, to ensure public, environment and property safety in a cost-effective manner. Modern surveying and sampling techniques allow for better geotechnical characterization of ground movements and the variability of the soil properties with confidence. The statistical data …

Guidelines For Designing The Overhead Transmission Tower Foundations Adjacent To Cohesionless Slopes, Meshel Q. Alkahtani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Foundations supporting electrical transmission line towers are subjected to oblique loading due to tower own weight along with wind loading. Due to land limitation and linear alignment of transmission lines, many power transmission towers are situated in sand near sloping grounds and proper evaluation of their foundation performance is essential for the safety and reliability of the critical power transmission lines. There is currently no guidance available on the behaviour of transmission towers foundations constructed near slopes. Thus, the primary objectives of this study are to evaluate the response of transmission tower foundations in cohesionless sloping grounds and investigate the …

A Novel Submerged Photocatalytic Oscillatory Membrane Reactor For Effluent Water Polishing, Siddharth Gupta

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With water scarcity being identified as a serious challenge around the world, wastewater recycling is paramount for effective water management. To achieve effective water reuse while maintaining low treatment cost, process-intensification (PI) of tertiary treatment technologies is imperative.

In this research, multilayer process-intensification approaches are investigated for effluent water polishing. Initially, the performance of a hybrid submerged photocatalytic membrane reactor (SPMR) was investigated. In a SPMR, both pollutant degradation and catalyst separation (from the permeate) occur in a single modular unit.

The design was enhanced by imparting periodic shear at the membrane surface via membrane oscillation acting as a second …

Experimental Simulation Of Tornado-Like Vortices And Their Impact On High-Rise Buildings, Arash Ashrafi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One of the most crucial research areas in wind engineering is tornadoes due to the widespread damages to infrastructure and the environment in North America and other parts of the world. The proper scaling of tornadoes in experimental facilities, generating tornado-like vortices (TLVs) is, therefore, an essential part of evaluating tornado-indued damages on engineered buildings. The capability of producing TLVs of length scales in the range between 1:300 and 1:150 inside the Wind Engineering, Energy and Environment (WindEEE) Dome at Western University has already been demonstrated using only one mode of the full potential of this simulator. A new mode …

Significance Of The Vehicle Front Design And Gait Postures On Traumatic Brain Injuries Sustained By Different Pedestrian Populations During Car-To-Pedestrian Collisions (Cpcs) - A Computational Approach, Thava Kalishwara Kumar Gunasekaran

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the increasing prevalence of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) in road traffic accidents (RTAs), it was identified that the shape of the vehicle's front end and pedestrian postures prior to impact significantly influence pedestrian head injuries. However, the effect of vehicle front shape parameters and gait postures on TBIs sustained in car-to-pedestrian collisions (CPCs) has yet to be quantified. This study used a computational approach to analyze the effect of vehicle shape parameters and pedestrian gait postures on pedestrian TBI risks across a diverse pedestrian population with varying body sizes. Our findings indicate that vehicle shape parameter such as BLEH …

Active Fluids: Rheological Properties And Response To Light Of Suspensions Of Synechocystis Sp. Cpcc 534, Zahra Habibi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Despite our current understanding of active fluid mechanics, more knowledge is required to fully understand their rheological properties, response to light, and details of the interactions between cells in diluted suspensions.

The focus of this thesis is on investigating the rheological properties of suspensions of cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. CPCC 534 under shear, induced by stirring. Experiments were conducted at different stirring rates and results are compared with the stationary condition. A notable increase in growth and biomass of Synechocystis sp. under various shear conditions was observed and the yield was nearly doubled. Besides, the data showed Newtonian behavior for suspensions …

Crack Self-Healing In Alkali-Activated Materials: From Mechanisms To Strategies For Enhancing The Healing Efficiency, Lei Zhang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The increasing concern for decarbonizing concrete manufacturing is calling for sustainable construction materials since portland cement production contributes about 8% of global anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Alkali-activated materials (AAMs) have emerged as promising alternative binders to curb carbon dioxide emissions from portland cement production and allow more sustainable construction. In addition, AAMs have desirable mechanical properties and high resistance to acidic and sulphate attacks.

Like conventional concrete, AAMs are quasi-brittle materials with low tensile strength, demonstrating susceptibility to cracking. Cracking-initiated deteriorations such as reinforcing steel corrosion, sulphate attack, and freeze-thaw damage, pose severe threats to the service life of concrete …

Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Biomaterials For Bone Tissue Engineering And Drug Delivery, Neda Aslankoohi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Bone biomaterials prepared from a combination of biodegradable polymers and bioactive glasses offer several advantages, including favorable cell interactions, selective gene expression, and delivery of biomolecules. Furthermore, the interaction of the organic and inorganic phases at the molecular level results in a single-phase hybrid material possessing synergistic properties.

This research aimed to design bone biomaterials from α-amino acid-based poly(ester amide) (PEA) and tertiary bioactive glasses using a sol-gel process. Since incorporating calcium into the bioactive glass network is challenging at sol-gel reaction temperatures, calcium ethoxide and calcium chloride were studied as precursors, and the optimum reaction conditions were identified. Mesoporous …

Estimation Of Tropical Cyclone Rain Hazard For Sites In Coastal Region Of Mainland China, Jiyang Gu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

China experiences heavy national-wide rainfall events with distinct regional and seasonal characteristics. The tropical cyclones (TCs) originating from the Pacific ocean could cause intense rainfall along the coastal region of mainland China. Besides the severe rainfall, tropical cyclones could also cause high winds, storm surges, and large waves. Increasing direct economic loss is always caused by these tropical cyclones.

The mapping of TC wind hazard for the coastal region in mainland China could be carried out using the wind field model and empirical TC track model. The commonly used TC wind field models employed in TC wind hazard assessment are …