Engineering Commons^™

Low Cost And Reliable Wireless Sensor Networks For Environmental Monitoring, Sonia Naderi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis utilizes wireless sensor network systems to learn of changes in wireless network performance and environment, establishing power efficient systems that are low cost and are able to perform large scale monitoring. The proposed system was built at the University of Maine’s Wireless Sensor Networks (WiSe-Net) laboratory in collaboration with University of New Hampshire and University of Vermont researchers. The system was configured to perform soil moisture measurement with provision to include other sensor types at later stages in collaboration with Alabama A & M University. In the research associated with this thesis, a general relay energy assisted scenario …

Reduced Fuel Emissions Through Connected Vehicles And Truck Platooning, Paul D. Brummitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication enable the sharing, in real time, of vehicular locations and speeds with other vehicles, traffic signals, and traffic control centers. This shared information can help traffic to better traverse intersections, road segments, and congested neighborhoods, thereby reducing travel times, increasing driver safety, generating data for traffic planning, and reducing vehicular pollution. This study, which focuses on vehicular pollution, used an analysis of data from NREL, BTS, and the EPA to determine that the widespread use of V2V-based truck platooning—the convoying of trucks in close proximity to one another so as to reduce air drag …

Design, Implementation, And Test Of Spacecraft Antennae And A Ground Station For Mesat1, Travis Russell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

MESAT1 is a CubeSat that was proposed by the University of Maine in response to NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative, and in early 2020 was selected by NASA to be launched into a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in June of 2022. The satellite will carry four low-cost complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) cameras which serve as sensing instruments for three science missions proposed by K-12 schools in Maine. The cameras will periodically take pictures of Earth to analyze water turbidity, identify urban heat islands, and predict harmful algal blooms. The multi-spectral image data is packed into frames and downlinked as Binary Phase-Shift Keying …

Data-Enabled Distribution Grid Management, Zohreh Sadat Hosseini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 2020, U.S. electric utilities installed more than 94 million advanced meters, which brought the percentage of residential customers equipped with smart meters to 75%. This significant investment allows collecting extensive customer data at the distribution level, however, the data are not currently leveraged effectively to help with system operations. This dissertation aims to use the smart meters’ data to improve the grid’s reliability, stability, and controllability by solving two of the most challenging problems at the distribution level, namely distribution network phase identification and outage identification.

Distribution networks have typically been the least observable and most dynamic and locally …