Engineering Commons^™

Modifying Instruction Sets In The Gem5 Simulator To Support Fault Tolerant Designs, Chuan Zhang

Masters Theses

Traditional fault tolerant techniques such as hardware or time redundancy incur high overhead and are inefficient for checking arithmetic operations. Our objective is to study an alternative approach of adding new instructions to check arithmetic operations. These checking instructions either rely on error detecting code or calculate approximate results and consequently, consume much less execution time. To evaluate the effectiveness of such an approach we wish to modify several benchmarks to use checking instructions and run simulation experiments to find out their execution time and memory usage. However, the checking instructions are not included in the instruction set and as …

User Interface Design And Forensic Analysis For Diorama, Decision Support System For Mass Casualty Incidents, Jun Yi

Masters Theses

In this thesis we introduces the user interface design and forensic analysis tool for DIORAMA system. With an Android device, DIORAMA provides emergency personnel the ability to collect information in real time, track the resources and manage them. It allows the responders and commanders to mange multiple incidents simultaneously. This thesis also describes the implementations of commander app and responder app, as well as two different communication strategies used in DIORAMA. Several trials and simulated mass casualty incidents were conducted to test the functionalities and performance of DIORAMA system. All responders that participated in all trials were very satisfied with …

Indoor And Outdoor Real Time Information Collection In Disaster Scenario, Dongyi Yang

Masters Theses

A disaster usually severely harms human health and property. After a disaster, great amount of information of a disaster area is needed urgently. The information not only indicates the severity of the disaster, but also is crucial for an efficient search and rescue process. In order to quickly and accurately collect real time information in a disaster scenario, a mobile platform is developed for an outdoor scenario and a localization and navigation system for responders is introduced for an indoor scenario.

The mobile platform has been integrated to the DIORAMA system. It is built with a 6-wheel robot chassis along …

Towards A Semantic Knowledge Management Framework For Laminated Composites, Vivek Premkumar

Masters Theses

The engineering of laminated composite structures is a complex task for design engineers and manufacturers, requiring significant management of manufacturing process and materials information. Ontologies are becoming increasingly commonplace for semantically representing knowledge in a formal manner that facilitates sharing of rich information between people and applications. Moreover, ontologies can support first-order logic and reasoning by rule engines that enhance automation. To support the engineering of laminated composite structures, this work developed a novel Semantic LAminated Composites Knowledge management System (SLACKS) that is based on a suite of ontologies for laminated composites materials and design for manufacturing (DFM) and their …

Promoting Extracellular Matrix Crosslinking In Synthetic Hydrogels, Marcos M. Manganare

Masters Theses

The extracellular matrix (ECM) provides mechanical and biochemical support to tissues and cells. It is crucial for cell attachment, differentiation, and migration, as well as for ailment-associated processes such as angiogenesis, metastases and cancer development. An approach to study these phenomena is through emulation of the ECM by synthetic gels constructed of natural polymers, such as collagen and fibronectin, or simple but tunable materials such as poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) crosslinked with short peptide sequences susceptible to digestion by metalloproteases and cell-binding domains. Our lab uses PEG gels to study cell behavior in three dimensions (3D). Although this system fosters cell …

Evaluation Of A Training Program (Strap) Designed To Decrease Young Drivers Secondary Task Engagement In High Risk Scenarios, Akhilesh Krishnan

Masters Theses

Distracted driving involving secondary tasks is known to lead to an increased likelihood of being involved in motor vehicle crashes. Some secondary tasks are unnecessary and should never be performed. But other secondary tasks, e.g., operating the defroster, are critical to safe driving. Ideally, the driver should schedule when to perform the critical tasks such that the likelihood of a hazard materializing is relatively small during the performance of the secondary task. The current study evaluates a training program -- STRAP (Secondary Task Regulatory & Anticipatory Program) -- which is designed to make drivers aware of latent hazards …

A Real-Time Signal Control System To Minimize Emissions At Isolated Intersections, Farnoush Khalighi

Masters Theses

Continuous transportation demand growth in recent years has led to many traffic issues in urban areas. Among the most challenging ones are traffic congestion and the associated vehicular emissions. Efficient design of traffic signal control systems can be a promising approach to address these problems. This research develops a real-time signal control system, which optimizes signal timings at an under-saturated isolated intersection by minimizing total vehicular emissions. A combination of previously introduced analytical models based on traffic flow theory has been used. These models are able to estimate time spent per driving mode (i.e., time spent accelerating, decelerating, cruising, and …

Development Of Prototypes Of A Portable Road Weather Information System, Meha Kainth

Masters Theses

Weather conditions have significant impact on road safety and roadway maintenance operations. Road Weather Information Systems (RWIS) play a significant role in providing weather and surface conditions to transportation agencies to monitor weather events. Fixed installations of RWIS are used for weather and pavement surface monitoring. However, permanent fixture installations may not be feasible due to reasons such as cost, accessibility to the site, siting concerns, and terrain. Portable RWIS provide a cost-effective solution in areas where permanent weather station installation is not possible. This study discusses use and benefits of the portable RWIS and outlines the issues involved in …

Design And Implementation Of A High Performance Network Processor With Dynamic Workload Management, Padmaja Duggisetty

Masters Theses

Internet plays a crucial part in today's world. Be it personal communication, business transactions or social networking, internet is used everywhere and hence the speed of the communication infrastructure plays an important role. As the number of users increase the network usage increases i.e., the network data rates ramped up from a few Mb/s to Gb/s in less than a decade. Hence the network infrastructure needed a major upgrade to be able to support such high data rates. Technological advancements have enabled the communication links like optical fibres to support these high bandwidths, but the processing speed at the nodes …

A Continous Rotary Actuation Mechanism For A Powered Hip Exoskeleton, Matthew C. Ryder

Masters Theses

This thesis presents a new mechanical design for an exoskeleton actuator to power the sagittal plane motion in the human hip. The device uses a DC motor to drive a Scotch yoke mechanism and series elasticity to take advantage of the cyclic nature of human gait and to reduce the maximum power and control requirements of the exoskeleton. The Scotch yoke actuator creates a position-dependent transmission that varies between 4:1 and infinity, with the peak transmission ratio aligned to the peak torque periods of the human gait cycle. Simulation results show that both the peak and average motor torque can …

Function Verification Of Combinational Arithmetic Circuits, Duo Liu

Masters Theses

Hardware design verification is the most challenging part in overall hardware design process. It is because design size and complexity are growing very fast while the requirement for performance is ever higher. Conventional simulation-based verification method cannot keep up with the rapid increase in the design size, since it is impossible to exhaustively test all input vectors of a complex design. An important part of hardware verification is combinational arithmetic circuit verification. It draws a lot of attention because flattening the design into bit-level, known as the bit-blasting problem, hinders the efficiency of many current formal techniques. The goal of …

Thermodynamic Analysis Of The Application Of Thermal Energy Storage To A Combined Heat And Power Plant, Benjamin Mcdaniel

Masters Theses

The main objective of this paper is to show the economic and environmental benefits that can be attained through the coupling of borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) and combined heat and power (CHP). The subject of this investigation is the University of Massachusetts CHP District Heating System. Energy prices are significantly higher during the winter months due to the limited supply of natural gas. This dearth not only increases operating costs but also emissions, due to the need to burn ultra low sulfur diesel (ULSD). The application of a TES system to a CHP plant allows the plant to deviate …

Creating A New Model To Predict Cooling Tower Performance And Determining Energy Saving Opportunities Through Economizer Operation, Pranav Yedatore Venkatesh

Masters Theses

Cooling towers form an important part of chilled water systems and perform the function of rejecting the heat to the atmosphere. These systems are often not operated optimally, and cooling towers being an integral part of the system present a significant area to study and determine possible energy saving measures. Operation of cooling towers in economizer mode in winter and variable frequency drives (VFDs) on cooling tower fans are measures that can provide considerable energy savings. The chilled water system analysis tool (CWSAT) software is developed as a primary screening tool for energy evaluation for chilled water systems and quantifies …

Design And Implementation Of Digital Information Security For Physical Documents, Pengcheng Wang

Masters Theses

The objective of this thesis is to improve the security for physical paper documents. Providing information security has been difficult in environments that rely on physical paper documents to implement business processes. Our work presents the design of a digital information security system for paper documents, called "CryptoPaper", that uses 2-dimensional codes to represent data and its security properties on paper. A special scanner system is designed for "CryptoPaper" which uses image recognition techniques and cloud-based access control to display plaintext of encrypted and encoded data to authorized users.

Bonded Anchors In Concrete Under Sustained Loading, Douglas Droesch

Masters Theses

Post installed anchors come in either mechanical anchors that develop their strength purely through mechanical interlock with the base concrete, or bonded anchors that develop their strength by bonding anchor rod to the base concrete. Bonded anchors are either grouted, typically cementitious material, or adhesive, typically a chemical material. This thesis presents a current literature review of post-installed bonded anchors, preliminary testing of adhesive bonded anchors, and details of short term and long term test setups for future testing. The purpose of this thesis was to develop the test setups that will be used for future testing on anchors.

Evaluation Of Two-Dimensional Codes For Digital Information Security In Physical Documents, Shuai Chen

Masters Theses

Nowadays, paper documents are still frequently used and exchanged in our daily life. To safely manage confidential paper information such as medical and financial records has increasingly become a challenge. If a patient's medical diagnosis get stolen or dumped without shredding, his or her private information would be leaked. Some companies and organizations do not pay enough attention to the problem, letting their customers suffer the loss. In the thesis, I designed a hybrid system to solve this problem effectively and economically. This hybrid system integrates physical document properties with digital security technology, which brings in a revolutionary idea for …

Reliabilibity Aware Thermal Management Of Real-Time Multi-Core Systems, Shikang Xu

Masters Theses

Continued scaling of CMOS technology has led to increasing working temperature of VLSI circuits. High temperature brings a greater probability of permanent errors (failure) in VLSI circuits, which is a critical threat for real-time systems. As the multi-core architecture is gaining in popularity, this research proposes an adaptive workload assignment approach for multi-core real-time systems to balance thermal stress among cores. While previously developed scheduling algorithms use temperature as the criterion, the proposed algorithm uses reliability of each core in the system to dynamically assign tasks to cores. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm gains as large as …

Resilience Of Transportation Infrastructure Systems To Climatic Extreme Events, Alexandra C. Testa

Masters Theses

A topology-based approach has been used to measure the resilience of a highway network to climatic events. Civil infrastructure systems are inarguably critical to the everyday functions of society. Because such systems are regionally distributed, their components undergo a wide range of hazard intensities, often dependent on their relative locations. The ability of an infrastructure system to withstand, adapt to, and rapidly recover from extreme events is paramount to its ability to continuously serve users. The topological properties of a network can provide a good means to assess the resilience of the system which is adequate to comprehend the preparedness …

Architecting Np-Dynamic Skybridge, Jiajun Shi

Masters Theses

With the scaling of technology nodes, modern CMOS integrated circuits face severe fundamental challenges that stem from device scaling limitations, interconnection bottlenecks and increasing manufacturing complexities. These challenges drive researchers to look for revolutionary technologies beyond the end of CMOS roadmap. Towards this end, a new nanoscale 3-D computing fabric for future integrated circuits, Skybridge, has been proposed [1]. In this new fabric, core aspects from device to circuit style, connectivity, thermal management and manufacturing pathway are co-architected in a 3-D fabric-centric manner.

However, the Skybridge fabric uses only n-type transistors in a dynamic circuit style for logic and memory …

Structural Vulnerability Assessment Of Bridge Piers In The Event Of Barge Collision, David A. Ribbans

Masters Theses

The inland waterway system in the United States is fundamental to the transportation system as a whole and the success of the nation’s economy. Barge transportation in these waterways levitates congestion on the highway system and is beneficial when comparing barge transportation to other modes of freight transportation in measures of capacity, congestion, emissions, and safety. Unavoidably, the highway system intersects with the waterways, resulting in the risk of vessels collision into bridge structures. Particularly for barge impact, the literature is questioning the accuracy and oversimplification of the current design specifications.

The impact problem was investigated in this research using …

Thermo-Responsive Poly(N-Isopropylacrylamide) And Its Critical Solution Temperature Type Behavior In Presence Of Hydrophilic Ionic Liquids, Purnendu K. Nayak

Masters Theses

Thermo-responsive homopolymer poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), is a widely studied and used polymer. Our recent observations on thermal behavior of aqueous solutions of this polymer requires a short overview of existing results in order to understand the formation of different phases, both stable and unstable with the addition of hydrophilic Ionic liquids (ILs) 1-Butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate ([BMIM][BF₄]), 1-Butyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate ([BMIM][OAc]) and 1-Butyl-3-methylimidazolium thiocyanate ([BMIM][SCN]) to the system. PNIPAM is soluble in cold water due to its inter- and intramolecular hydrogen bonding but phase separates upon heating at T > 32 , which is its lower critical solution temperature (LCST). PNIPAM exists in an …

Energy Agile Cluster Communication, Muhammad Zain Mustafa

Masters Theses

Computing researchers have long focused on improving energy-efficiency?the amount of computation per joule? under the implicit assumption that all energy is created equal. Energy however is not created equal: its cost and carbon footprint fluctuates over time due to a variety of factors. These fluctuations are expected to in- tensify as renewable penetration increases. Thus in my work I introduce energy-agility a design concept for a platform?s ability to rapidly and efficiently adapt to such power fluctuations. I then introduce a representative application to assess energy-agility for the type of long-running, parallel, data-intensive tasks that are both common in data …

Energy Efficiency Exploration Of Coarse-Grain Reconfigurable Architecture With Emerging Nonvolatile Memory, Xiaobin Liu

Masters Theses

With the rapid growth in consumer electronics, people expect thin, smart and powerful devices, e.g. Google Glass and other wearable devices. However, as portable electronic products become smaller, energy consumption becomes an issue that limits the development of portable systems due to battery lifetime. In general, simply reducing device size cannot fully address the energy issue.

To tackle this problem, we propose an on-chip interconnect infrastructure and pro- gram storage structure for a coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA) with emerging non-volatile embedded memory (MRAM). The interconnect is composed of a matrix of time-multiplexed switchboxes which can be dynamically reconfigured with the …

Architecting Skybridge-Cmos, Mingyu Li

Masters Theses

As the scaling of CMOS approaches fundamental limits, revolutionary technology beyond the end of CMOS roadmap is essential to continue the progress and miniaturization of integrated circuits. Recent research efforts in 3-D circuit integration explore pathways of continuing the scaling by co-designing for device, circuit, connectivity, heat and manufacturing challenges in a 3-D fabric-centric manner. SkyBridge fabric is one such approach that addresses fine-grained integration in 3-D, achieves orders of magnitude benefits over projected scaled 2-D CMOS, and provides a pathway for continuing scaling beyond 2-D CMOS.

However, SkyBridge fabric utilizes only single type transistors in order to reduce manufacture …

Driver Behavior Evaluation Of Variable Speed Limits And A Conceptual Framework For Optimal Vsl Location Identification, Curt P. Harrington

Masters Theses

Static speed limits are the norm across the world’s roadway networks. However, advances in technology and increased applications in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) provide a mechanism for upgrading traditional speed limits into an active traffic management system. More specifically, variable speed limits (VSLs) can be used in high crash severity locations and in real-time congestion and weather events to increase traffic safety and operations. Much of the available literature on VSLs focuses upon crash prediction algorithms for VSLs, simulations, and effectiveness of real-world VSL implementations. One noticeable gap in the existing literature is related to driver compliance under varied configurations …

Nano-Scale Investigation Of Mechanical Characteristics Of Main Phases Of Hydrated Cement Paste, Shahin Hajilar

Masters Theses

Hydrated cement paste (HCP), which is present in various cement-based materials, includes a number of constituents with distinct nano-structures. The elastic properties of the HCP crystals are calculated using molecular dynamics (MD) methods. The accuracy of estimated values is verified by comparing them with the results from experimental tests and other atomistic simulation methods. The outcome of MD simulations is then extended to predict the elastic properties of the C-S-H gel by rescaling the values calculated for the individual crystals. To take into account the contribution of porosity, a detailed microporomechanics study is conducted on low- and high-density types of …

Development Of Infrared And Terahertz Bolometers Based On Palladium And Carbon Nanotubes Using Roll To Roll Process, Amulya Gullapalli

Masters Theses

Terahertz region in the electromagnetic spectrum is the region between Infrared and Microwave. As the Terahertz region has both wave and particle nature, it is difficult to make a room temperature, fast, and sensitive detector in this region. In this work, we fabricated a Palladium based IR detector and a CNT based THz bolometer.

In Chapter 1, I give a brief introduction of the Terahertz region, the detectors already available in the market and different techniques I can use to test my detector. In Chapter 2, I explain about the Palladium IR bolometer, the fabrication technique I have used, and …

Measuring The Resilience Of Transportation Networks Subject To Seismic Risk, Mark N. Furtado

Masters Theses

Transportation networks are critical to the function of modern society but they are vulnerable to extreme events such as earthquakes. Damaged bridges can cost millions of dollars to repair and congestion and detours due to bridge closures leads to indirect costs that are even greater than the cost of repair of damaged bridges. A resilient network however should be able to limit the damage caused by earthquakes and recover in a timely fashion. Resilience of networks has been studying in length from a conceptual standpoint but as quantitative measure, the field has been lacking. This study sets forth to quantify …

Wavelet-Based Non-Homogeneous Hidden Markov Chain Model For Hyperspectral Signature Classification, Siwei Feng

Masters Theses

Hyperspectral signature classification is a kind of quantitative analysis approach for hyperspectral imagery which performs detection and classification of the constituent materials at pixel level in the scene. The classification procedure can be operated directly on hyperspectral data or performed by using some features extracted from corresponding hyperspectral signatures containing information like signature energy or shape. In this paper, we describe a technique that applies non-homogeneous hidden Markov chain (NHMC) models to hyperspectral signature classification. The basic idea is to use statistical models (NHMC models) to characterize wavelet coefficients which capture the spectrum structural information at multiple levels. Experimental results …

An Observational Evaluation Of Safety Resulting From Driver Distraction, Christina M. Dube

Masters Theses

Distracted driving is a dangerous activity that continues to claim lives on roadways throughout the United States. A goal of this research was to collect distracted driving behavior data through observation in the field. A methodological approach was devised to keep data collection consistent across the observation periods. Analysis of the data provided information regarding trends in distraction type or driving behavior while engaging in a secondary activity. In combination with the observational portion of this research, another key component to understanding distracted driving was the crash report narrative key word search. By searching through the crash reports, it was …