Engineering Commons^™

Development Of A High Performance Micropropulsion System For Cubesats, Christopher Lorian Biddy

Master's Theses

Picosatellites are defined as satellites with a mass between 0.1 and 1kg (Miniaturized satellite). Picosatellites are typically designed to work together or function in formations (Miniaturized satellite). A specific type of Picosatellite known as CubeSats were introduced in 1999 and since then have increased in popularity so that there are now over 80 CubeSat programs around the world. CubeSats are defined as cubic units 10cm on each side and no more than 1kg in mass. CubeSats are required to conform to the CubeSat Standard created by California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University and be compatible with Cal Poly’s P-POD …

Frp Confined Reinforced Concrete Circular Cross Section Seismic Applications, Jeffrey G. Lyon

Master's Theses

In recent earthquakes, structures have not performed as well as expected resulting in a need for better means of retrofitting and improvements in seismic design. Fiber Reinforced Polymers (FRP), as a material with potential to increase strength and ductility of columns in conjunction with capacity design methodology, has promise for seismic design. By investigating the displacement, ductility, and flexural strength properties of FRP confined reinforced concrete circular cross sections, this study analyzes the seismic applications of FRP confinement.

The study is performed by incorporating an FRP confined concrete stress-strain model into a developed Moment-Curvature and PM Interaction software. This software …

Removal Of Boron From Produced Water By Co-Precipitation / Adsorption For Reverse Osmosis Concentrate, Imran Yusuf Rahman, Yarrow Nelson, Tryg Lundquist

Master's Theses

Co-precipitation and absorption methods were investigated for removal of boron from produced water, which is groundwater brought to the surface during oil and natural gas extraction. Boron can be toxic to many crops and often needs to be controlled to low levels in irrigation water. The present research focused on synthetic reverse osmosis (RO) concentrate modeled on concentrate expected from a future treatment facility at the Arroyo Grande Oil Field on the central coast of California. The produced water at this site is brackish with a boron concentration of 8 mg/L and an expected temperature of 80°C. The future overall …

Performance Analysis And Life Prediction For Small Wind Turbine Blades: A Wood Laminate Case Study, Christopher James Nosti

Master's Theses

A detailed study of the fatigue life of wooden wind turbine blades for a new 10 kilowatt system was undertaken. A numerical model of the blades was created using the technical software package MATLAB in order to estimate the maximum stress occurring within the blade in response to changes in wind velocities based on a wind profile approximating the location where these turbines are expected to operate. The material properties of the wooden laminate were measured using an Instron tensile test machine and were found to be in line with published values. In parallel with this effort, a three dimensional …

Design And Development Of Rapid Battery Exchange Systems For Electric Vehicles To Be Used As Efficient Student Transportation, Jonathan A. Bevier

Master's Theses

Rapid battery exchange systems were built for an electric van and pedal assist electric bike as a method of eliminating the need to recharge the vehicles batteries in order to increase the feasibility of using electric propulsion as a method of efficient student transportation. After selecting proper materials it was found that the systems would need a protective coating to ensure consistent operation. 1020 cold rolled steel samples coated with multiple thicknesses of vinyl resin paint, epoxy resin paint, and powder coating were subjected to environmental wear tests in order to determine if the type and thickness of common protective …

On-Board Orbit Determination And 3-Axis Attitude Determination For Picosatellite Applications, John Arthur Bowen

Master's Theses

This thesis outlines an orbit determination and 3-axis attitude determination system for use on orbit as applicable to 1U CubeSats and other picosatellites. The constraints imposed by the CubeSat form factor led to the need for a simple configuration and relaxed accuracy requirements. To design a system within the tight mass, volume, and power constraints inherent to CubeSats, a balance between hardware complexity, software complexity and accuracy is sought. The proposed solution consists of a simple orbit propagator, magnetometers with a magnetic field look-up table, Sun sensors with an analytic Sun direction model, and the TRIAD method to combine vector …

Robust Unconstrained Face Detection And Lip Localization Using Gabor Filters, Robert E. Hursig

Master's Theses

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a well-researched field of study aimed at augmenting the man-machine interface through interpretation of the spoken word. From in-car voice recognition systems to automated telephone directories, automatic speech recognition technology is becoming increasingly abundant in today’s technological world. Nonetheless, traditional audio-only ASR system performance degrades when employed in noisy environments such as moving vehicles. To improve system performance under these conditions, visual speech information can be incorporated into the ASR system, yielding what is known as audio-video speech recognition (AVASR). A majority of AVASR research focuses on lip parameters extraction within controlled environments, but these …

The Effect Of Particle Surface Area To Volume Ratio On Ion Release From Cocr Spheres, Darin J. Grandfield

Master's Theses

In 2005, over 200,000 Americans underwent a hip arthroplasty, the replacement of a hip joint with an artificial prosthesis. Of these arthroplasties, metal-on-metal type implants represent an increasing usage percentage. Metal-on-metal implants are selected largely for their low volumetric wear rate, durability, and resistance to corrosion. In spite of these advantages, little is known concerning the long-term consequences of heavy metal alloy use in the body, although early research indicates potentially carcinogenic results. This thesis is a preliminary investigation into these long term effects and their root causes.

An improved comprehension of the corrosion kinetics and the rate of ion …

Evaluating The Electrical Response Of Polyaniline To Mechanical Strain, Matthew L. Goebel

Master's Theses

This thesis focuses on the electrical output of polyaniline films subjected to uniaxial strain in hydrochloric acid solutions. Polyaniline belongs to novel class of materials known as conducting polymers. Alternating single and double bonds in the backbone of conducting polymers allow them to transmit electric charge when they are doped with negatively charged ions. Modifying the degree of doping and other electrical/chemical treatments allow conducting polymers to exhibit conducting, semi-conducting, or insulating electrical properties. Resilient mechanical properties, good processability, and low cost make conducting polymers good candidates for applications traditionally held by metals and semi-conductors.

When tensile strain is applied …

Design, Fabrication, And Implementation Of A Single-Cell Capture Chamber For A Microfluidic Impedance Sensor, Joshua-Jed Doria Fadriquela

Master's Theses

A microfluidic device was created for single-cell capture and analysis using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) channels and a glass substrate to develop a microfluidic single-cell impedance sensor for cell diagnostics. The device was fabricated using photolithography to create a master mold which in turn will use soft lithography to create the PDMS components for constant device production. The commercial software, COMSOLTM Multiphysics, was used to quantify the fluid dynamics in shallow micro-channels.

The device will be able to capture a cell and sequester it long enough to enable measurement of the impedance spectra that can characterize cell. The proposed device will be …

Internet-Scale Reactive Routing And Mobility, Daniel B. Nelson

Master's Theses

Since its commercialization, the Internet has grown exponentially. A large variety of devices can communicate creating advanced services for a diverse ecosystem of applications. However, as the number of Internet hosts has grown, the size of routing tables required to correctly route data between them has also increased exponentially. This growth rate necessitates increasingly frequent upgrades to routing device hardware, providing them with additional memory for fast-access storage of route information. These upgrades are both physically and fiscally untenable, and a new Internet routing solution is necessary for future growth.

This research focuses around an incrementally deployable, reactive routing system …

An Approach Based On Wavelet Decomposition And Neural Network For Ecg Noise Reduction, Suranai Poungponsri

Master's Theses

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal processing has been the subject of intense research in the past years, due to its strategic place in the detection of several cardiac pathologies. However, ECG signal is frequently corrupted with different types of noises such as 60Hz power line interference, baseline drift, electrode movement and motion artifact, etc. In this thesis, a hybrid two-stage model based on the combination of wavelet decomposition and artificial neural network is proposed for ECG noise reduction based on excellent localization features: wavelet transform and the adaptive learning ability of neural network. Results from the simulations validate the effectiveness of this …

Analysis & Design Of Improved Multiphase Interleaving Dc-Dc Converter With Input-Output Bypass Capacitor, Rudi Rudianto

Master's Theses

As the transistor count per chip in computer microprocessors surpasses one billion, the semiconductor industry has become more and more concerned with meeting processor’s power requirements. This poses a design challenge for the power supply module, especially when the processor operates at low voltage range. For example, the electrical requirement for the newest Intel microprocessors has exceeded 100A with an input voltage of approximately 1V. To overcome this problem, multiphase DC-to-DC converters encased in a voltage regulator module (VRM) have become the standard means of supplying power to computer microprocessor.

This study proposes a new topology for the multiphase DC-to-DC …

Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Of An Extreme Aspect Ratio Hale Uav, Bryan J. Morrisey

Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of an Extreme Aspect Ratio HALE UAV

Bryan J. Morrisey

Development of High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) aircraft systems is part of a vision for a low cost communications/surveillance capability. Applications of a multi payload aircraft operating for extended periods at stratospheric altitudes span military and civil genres and support battlefield operations, communications, atmospheric or agricultural monitoring, surveillance, and other disciplines that may currently require satellite-based infrastructure. Presently, several development efforts are underway in this field, including a project sponsored by DARPA that aims at producing an aircraft that can sustain flight for multiple years and …

Development Of An Integrated Gaussian Process Metamodeling Application For Engineering Design, Collin R. Baukol

Master's Theses

As engineering technologies continue to grow and improve, the complexities in the engineering models which utilize these technologies also increase. This seemingly endless cycle of increased computational power and demand has sparked the need to create representative models, or metamodels, which accurately reflect these complex design spaces in a computationally efficient manner. As research into metamodeling and using advanced metamodeling techniques continues, it is important to remember design engineers who need to use these advancements. Even experienced engineers may not be well versed in the material and mathematical background that is currently required to generate and fully comprehend advanced complex …

Application Of Pv Panels In Large Multi-Story Buildings, Sara Kayal

Master's Theses

Application of PV Panels in Large Multi-Story Buildings Feasibility Study Sara Kayal

The awareness of global warming along with an ever increasing demand for a new source of energy has brought a strong interest in harnessing natural resources such as solar energy. This thesis evaluates the viability of applying photovoltaic (PV) panels in high-rise commercial buildings of around 20 stories. Specifically, the thesis is intended to provide a pre-planning tool during the early design stage for architects and designers who are considering the deployment of PV panels in new multi-story construction.

The first three chapters cover a comprehensive literature review …

Carbon Fiber Leaf Springs For Adaptive Cross Country Skiing, William Drew Atkinson

Master's Theses

This work describes the development of a custom sit ski for US Ski Team paralympian Greg Mallory from concept through prototype fabrication. The ski consists of a custom seat molded specifically for the athlete, carbon fiber leaf springs, and a custom binding attachment system compatible with NNN style cross country bindings. The sit ski is designed to maximize poling power through the use of an upright rather than reclined seating position, allowing for increased utilization of core muscle strength. The springs were designed based on information gathered by a custom National Instruments data acquisition system, and stiffness analysis was conducted …

Jdiet: Footprint Reduction For Memory-Constrained Systems, Michael John Huffman

Master's Theses

Main memory remains a scarce computing resource. Even though main memory is becoming more abundant, software applications are inexorably engineered to consume as much memory as is available. For example, expert systems, scientific computing, data mining, and embedded systems commonly suffer from the lack of main memory availability.

This thesis introduces JDiet, an innovative memory management system for Java applications. The goal of JDiet is to provide the developer with a highly configurable framework to reduce the memory footprint of a memory-constrained system, enabling it to operate on much larger working sets. Inspired by buffer management techniques common in modern …

Do Canines Experience The Effects Of Heart Rate Turbulence?, Melanie Ann Gurunathan

Master's Theses

Background

The canine cardiac system has been the model against which many Class III cardiac devices are validated. Thus, it is expected that the canine heart has very similar electrical model to that found in humans. In 1999, the absence of Heart Rate Turbulence (HRT) after a single Pre-Ventricular Contraction (PVC) was linked to high-risk patient after acute myocardial infarction. Studies of HRT were performed on high-risk patients with Holter-Monitors as were most subsequent HRT studies. If HRT could potentially be used as a risk factor of heart disease, it is interesting to study whether HRT is present following a …

A System For Natural Language Unmarked Clausal Transformations In Text-To-Text Applications, Daniel Miller

Master's Theses

A system is proposed which separates clauses from complex sentences into simpler stand-alone sentences. This is useful as an initial step on raw text, where the resulting processed text may be fed into text-to-text applications such as Automatic Summarization, Question Answering, and Machine Translation, where complex sentences are difficult to process. Grammatical natural language transformations provide a possible method to simplify complex sentences to enhance the results of text-to-text applications. Using shallow parsing, this system improves the performance of existing systems to identify and separate marked and unmarked embedded clauses in complex sentence structure resulting in syntactically simplified source for …

Preparation And Characterization Of Electrospun Poly(D, L-Lactide-Co-Glycolide) Scaffolds For Vascular Tissue Engineering And The Advancement Of An In Vitro Blood Vessel Mimic, Tiffany Richelle Pena

Master's Theses

PREPARATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF ELECTROSPUN POLY(D,L-LACTIDE-CO-GLYCOLIDE) SCAFFFOLDS FOR VASCULAR TISSUE ENGINEERING AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF AN IN VITRO BLOOD VESSEL MIMIC

Tiffany Richelle Peña

Currently, an estimated 1 in every 3 adult Americans are affected by one or more cardiovascular complications. The most common complication is coronary artery disease, specifically atherosclerosis. Outcomes of balloon angioplasty treatments have been significantly improved with the addition of drug eluting stents to the process. Although both bare metal and drug eluting stents have greatly increased the effectiveness of angioplasty and decreased the occurrence of restenosis, several complications still exist. For this reason, the stent …

Non-Linear Contact Analysis Of Meshing Gears, Chun Hung Lee

Master's Theses

Gear transmission systems are considered one of the critical aspects of vibration analysis, and it contains various potential faults such as misalignment, cracks, and noise. Therefore, it requires vibration monitoring to ensure the system is operating properly. Case mounted accelerometers are frequently used to monitor frequencies in a system. However, it is not a simple task to identify and interpret the acceleration data since there are many gear mesh frequencies present. One of the approaches utilized by researchers to perform gear diagnostic is Finite Element Modeling. This study focuses on stiffness cycle and meshing stiffness of non-linear quasi-static finite element …

A Study Of Dempster-Shafer's Theory Of Evidence In Comparison To Classical Probability Combination, Scott J. Seims

Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

A Study of Dempster-Shafer’s Theory of Evidence in Comparison to Classical Probability Combination

Scott J. Seims

This thesis is an assessment on the effectiveness of Dempster-Shafer’s Theory of Evidence in comparison to Classical Probabilistic Combination as it applies to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR). A three feature based classifier (peaks, corners and edges) ATR system is presented. These classifiers are assumed to be independent. The results of both the weight-based Maximum Likelihood and Dempster-Shafer’s Theory of Evidence data fusion techniques are presented.

Using Dempster-Shafer an accuracy of 77.50 percent is obtained, which is less than the …

Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging Simulated In Matlab, Matthew Schlutz

Master's Theses

This thesis further develops a method from ongoing thesis projects with the goal of generating images using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulations coded in MATLAB. The project is supervised by Dr. John Saghri and sponsored by Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems. SAR is a type of imaging radar in which the relative movement of the antenna with respect to the target is utilized. Through the simultaneous processing of the radar reflections over the movement of the antenna via the range Doppler algorithm (RDA), the superior resolution of a theoretical wider antenna, termed synthetic aperture, is obtained. The long term goal …

General Direction Routing Protocol, Sean Michael Lydon

Master's Theses

The General Direction Routing Protocol (GDRP) is a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

multi-path routing protocol which abstracts localization information (commonly GPS

coordinates) into relative direction information in order to perform routing decisions. By

generating relative direction information GDRP is able to operate with fewer precision

requirements than other protocols. This abstraction also allows the integration of other emerging

hardware-based localization techniques, for example, Beamforming Sensor Arrays.

GDRP does not specifically address the next hop a packet should take, but instead specifies a

direction it should travel. This direction abstraction allows for multiple paths to be taken through

the network thus …

Mechanical Simulation Of Articular Cartilage Based On Experimental Results, Kevin Matthew Stewart

Master's Theses

Recently, a constituent based cartilage growth finite element model (CGFEM) was developed in order to predict articular cartilage (AC) biomechanical properties before and after growth. Previous research has noted limitations in the CGFEM such as model convergence with growth periods greater than 12 days. The main aims of this work were to address these limitations through (1) implementation of an exact material Jacobian matrix definition using the Jaumann-Kirchhoff (J-K) method and (2) quantification of elastic material parameters based upon research findings of the Cal Poly Cartilage Biomechanics Group (CPGBG). The J-K method was successfully implemented into the CGFEM and exceeded …

Store And Forward Routing For Sparse Pico-Satellite Sensor Networks With Data-Mules, Trevor Joseph Koritza

Master's Theses

Satellites are playing an increasingly important role in collecting scientific information, providing communication services, and revolutionizing navigation. Until recently satellites were large and very expensive, creating a high barrier to entry that only large corporations and government agencies could overcome. In the past few years the CubeSat project at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) has worked to refine the design and launching of small, lightweight, and less expensive satellites called pico-satellites, opening space up to a wider audience. Now that Cal Poly has the launch logistics and hardware under control, a new problem has arisen. These …

Affine Region Tracking And Augmentation Using Mser And Adaptive Sift Model Generation, Matthew James Marano

Master's Theses

Relatively complex Augmented Reality (AR) algorithms are becoming widely available due to advancements in affordable mobile computer hardware. To take advantage of this a new method is developed for tracking 2D regions without a prior knowledge of an environment and without developing a computationally expensive world model. In the method of this paper, affinely invariant planar regions in a scene are found using the Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) detector. A region is selected by the user to define a search space, and then the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is used to detect affine invariant keypoints in the region. …

Attitude Determination Of A Student Satellite Using On-Orbit Magnetometer And Temperature Data, Jacob Daniel Dimiceli

Master's Theses

An extended Kalman filter is modified to support only magnetometer data as a measurement for spacecraft attitude information. Actual on-orbit data from a student satellite is used in the filter from three different time periods and varying data frequencies. The extended Kalman filter has a thermal model that utilizes external temperature data as a verification tool for filter convergence and for parameter tuning. It can capture the frequency of temperature changes and the correct side panel being lit by the sun as long as the filter converges properly, but not the magnitude of the temperature at a specific time. A …

Novel Current-Fed Boundary-Mode Parallel-Resonant Push-Pull Converter, Jonathan David Paolucci

Master's Theses

The inherent difficulty in designing high voltage power supplies is often compounded by demands of high reliability, high performance, and safe functionality. A proposed high step-up ratio DC-DC converter meets the exacting requirements of applications such as uninterruptible power systems, radar, and pulsed power systems. The proposed DC-DC converter topology combines a multi-phase buck input stage with a novel self-tracking zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) resonant output stage. Traditionally, the inclusion of multiple power processing stages within a power supply topology severely degrades the overall converter efficiency. Due to the inherent high efficiency per stage, however, this effect is minimized. The self-tracking switching …