Engineering Commons^™

Load And Resistance Factor Design (Lrfd) Resistance Factors For Tip Grouted Drilled Shafts, Anhar Sarsour

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pressure grouting beneath the tip of drilled shafts, also known as postgrouting, has been used for more than fifty years throughout the world and has shown to be an effective means to enhance both the usable and ultimate end bearing resistance. In short, postgrouting is a form of compaction grouting beneath the shaft tip (performed after concrete has cured) that can improve the soil strength and increase the axial shaft stiffness. Until 2006, there was no published design methodology and hence the anticipated performance was speculated to be a function of injected grout volume, shaft uplift and/or the achieved grout …

Neroimaging Of Brain Activaion Using Diffuse Optical Tomography, Jingyu Huang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research has two parts. The first part focuses on the use of non-invasive imaging technique, diffuse optical tomography (DOT), to study the brain activation during the stimulation in the clinical room. It further extends the application of DOT by using it to monitor the hemodynamic response during the TMS stimulation in different parameters. Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is based on NIR light that exploits the relative transparency of biological tissue. The part two and three extends the application in the hospital for delirium patient study and arm muscle dystrophy by adding the sources and detectors to monitor the brain …

Biochar Amended Biological Systems For Enhanced Landfill Leachate And Lignocellulosic Banana Waste Treatment, Xia Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Biochar is an inexpensive and environmentally friendly carbonaceous pyrolysis byproduct with a high surface area, pore volume, and adsorption capacities for inorganic and organic compounds. The goal of this dissertation is to evaluate the feasibility of biochar application in biological treatment systems for enhanced waste management. Three major objectives guided this research to provide a compressive understanding of biochar enhancement effects on biological treatment systems for contaminant removal, energy recovery, and environmental impacts as well as essential factors influencing biochar production and properties.

In Objective 1 a low-cost hybrid Constructed Wetland (CW) system modified with biochar/zeolite was developed for enhanced …

Data-Driven State Estimation For Improved Wide Area Situational Awareness In Smart Grids, Md Jakir Hossain

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Wide area situational awareness (WASA) in smart grids includes automatic monitoring, perception and detection of anomalies in these systems. The goal of WASA is to make smart grids aware of their physical and operational state for more effective operational decisions and control. As such, tracking the system's state or state estimation is one of the key objectives of WASA. The extensive integration of cyber elements into smart grids, such as large deployment of various monitoring and measurement devices, provides new opportunities to improve WASA. However, the tight coupling of power grids with cyber components introduces vulnerabilities to cyber and physical …

Quantifying A 21-Year Surface Water And Groundwater Interaction In A Ridge And Valley Lake Environment Using A Highly Constrained Modeling Approach, Richard T. Bowers Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Karst lakes are ubiquitous in ridge terrain settings in limestone aquifer coastal plain environments. In west-central Florida, these lakes are frequently connected to the Upper Floridan aquifer and have unique aquifer recharge characteristics. They have been selectively studied because they commonly have no or very limited surface water discharge and limited drainage areas, have appreciable surface water and groundwater interaction and leak to the deep aquifer. An innovative modeling approach was developed to collectively understand and more precisely quantify this vertical leakage, both from a lake-specific and regional water budget standpoint, for a 21-year study period (2000-2020). A unique, calibrated …

Stochastic Models For Resilience Assessment And Improvement, Weimar Ardila Rueda

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Resilience refers to the ability of a system to absorb and mitigate the impact of potential disruptions and return to normal operational conditions. The above notion of resilience allows us to distinguish two stages in a system's post-disruption response, the absorptive dimension and the recovery dimension. The absorptive dimension is related to a system's robustness and capacity to mitigate initial loss posterior to a disruption. Meanwhile, the recovery dimension is the system's rapidity to return and reach an acceptable level of functionality after the disruption occurrence.

A social-physical (SP) system's post-disruption response is related to its resilience capacity so building …

Corrosion Performance Of Carbon And Galvanized Steel In Calcium Silicate Cement, Maria Cardoso

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The concrete manufacturing industry has faced challenges with reducing carbon dioxide emissions as it currently produces about 8% of the world’s anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. With global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations being higher than ever, the solution is urgent. Due to this, a more sustainable type of concrete has been proposed.Calcium silicate cement (CSC) composed of essentially the same raw materials as ordinary portland cement (OPC) cures through the consumption of carbon dioxide rather than hydration like OPC. CSC is being explored as a potential alternative to OPC, however, there is little to no information on its corrosion related durability. …

Development Of An Automated Platform For Sensing And Differentiating Vapor-Phase Btex Constituents, Jonathan Samuelson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Light aromatic hydrocarbons are an inevitable byproduct of fossil fuel extraction, refinement, distribution, and use. The four lightest and most prevalent of these are benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene, which are known collectively as BTEX. In spite of their chemical similarity these species have markedly different effects on human health and substantially different concentrations are permitted by OSHA in workplaces and by the EPA in ambient air and groundwater. Real-time detection, identification, and quantification of these species is therefore of great importance wherever they see industrial use.This work represents the continuation and advancement of a line of research in which …

An Anthropology With Human Waste Management: Non-Humans, The State, And Matters Of Care On The Placencia Peninsula, Belize, William Alex Webb

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The management of human waste is a seldom studied phenomenon in anthropology. Yet across the globe, in countries both rich and poor, it presents pervasive and difficult to tame problems. This dissertation draws on complimentary theories of management and entanglements to explore the practices and processes of organizing human waste on the Placencia Peninsula, Belize. The results illustrate how problems are conditioned and defined by messy relations between institutions, people, technologies, materials, and ecological life.

Fieldwork and analysis for this work was a culmination of years of interdisciplinary collaboration between other anthropologists and engineers at the University of South Florida. …

Towards More Task-Generalized And Explainable Ai Through Psychometrics, Alec Braynen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this work, we propose that adopting the methods, principles, and guidelines of the field of psychometrics can help the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community to build more task-generalizable and explainable AI. Three arguments are presented and explored. These arguments are that psychometrics can help by providing 1) a framework for formulating better datasets, 2) psychometric AI data that can lead to models of generalization in AI, and 3) explainable AI through more informative evaluations.

A review of psychometrics and psychological generalization is performed, along with an overview of evaluation, generalization, and explainability in AI. Various ideas are presented throughout for …

Comparison Study Of Consumer’S Perception Toward Urban Air Mobility In The United States And Rest Of The World Using Social Media Information, S M Toki Tahmid

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a wide concept that will enable access to on-demand air mobility, cargo delivery, medical applications, and emergency services that is run through a connected and integrated transportation system. This study aims to investigate social media data to compare the major topics discussed in the United States and rest of the world and perform a sentiment analysis to see if the comments are positive, negative, or neutral. Twitter was the primary source of information that was used in this thesis, as it is a place where people interact, create, and share information and ideas online. In …

Generative Spatio-Temporal And Multimodal Analysis Of Neonatal Pain, Md Sirajus Salekin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Neonates can not express their pain like an adult person. Due to the lacking of proper muscle growth and inability to express non-verbally, it is difficult to understand their emotional status. In addition, if the neonates are under any treatment or left monitored after any major surgeries (post-operative), it is more difficult to understand their pain due to the side effect of medications and the caring system (i.e. intubated, masked face, covered body with blanket, etc.). In a clinical environment, usually, bedside nurses routinely observe the neonate and measure the pain status following any standard clinical pain scale. But current …

Health Effects Of Oil Spills And Dispersal Of Oil Droplets And Zooplankton By Langmuir Cells, Sanjib Gurung

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This Ph.D. dissertation deals with the study of the health effects of crude oil vapors from oil spills, the effect of Langmuir circulation on the dispersion of oil droplets during oil spill events, and the biological significance of Langmuir circulation. The introduction to areas of three major research projects undertaken during my Ph.D. is included in chapter 1 and the relevant literature review is included in chapter 2. The first research project described in chapter 3 involves the quantification of health effects on embryonic Gulf killifish due to exposure to crude oil vapors. The second research project described in chapter …

Preventing Variadic Function Attacks Through Argument Width Counting, Brennan Ward

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Format String attacks, first noted in June 2000 [1], are a type of attack in which anadversary has control of the string argument (the format string) passed to a string format function (such as printf). Such control allows the attacker to read and write arbitrary program memory. To prevent these attacks, various methodologies have been proposed, each with their own costs and benefits. I present a novel solution to this problem through argument width counting, ensuring that such format functions cannot access stack memory beyond the space where arguments were placed. Additionally, I show how this approach can be expanded …

A Study Of Deep Learning Silhouette Extractors For Gait Recognition, Sneha Oladhri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Gait recognition has gained importance in biometrics for identifying a person. It is performed by analyzing the gait features extracted from a video of a walking person. Gait features can be represented using silhouettes, pose elements, 3d human body features, or the combination of any of the above features. Most gait recognition algorithms use silhouette data for modeling. Therefore the quality of the silhouettes is crucial for achieving better recognition results. Many previous works have used the silhouettes given with the dataset for developing a gait model. In this work, we will test the performance of different background subtraction algorithms …

Assessment And Prevention Of Bacterial Regrowth In Stored Household Water In Eastern Coastal Madagascar, Lauren Judah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As of 2020, diarrheal diseases were the leading cause of death in Madagascar. A major cause of diarrheal illness is contaminated water, and one crucial aspect of preventing contaminated water is safe household storage. Bacterial regrowth between point-of-collection and household storage has been well established in literature. A frequently implicated source of regrowth is the storage container’s biofilm, which is a community of varying bacteria enclosed in a “slimy” extracellular polymeric substance that forms on surfaces in wet environments and anchors bacteria to those surfaces. The overall goal of this thesis was to quantify and control bacterial regrowth in household …

Accelerating Multiparametric Mri For Adaptive Radiotherapy, Shraddha Pandey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

MR guided Radiotherapy (MRgRT) marks an important paradigm shift in the field of radiotherapy. Superior tissue contrast of MRI offers better visualization of the abnormal lesions, as a result precise radiation dose delivery is possible. In case of online treatment planning, MRgRT offers better control of intratumoral motion and quick adaptation to changes in the gross tumor volume. Nonetheless, the MRgRT process flow does suffer from some challenges that limit its clinical usability. The primary aspects of MRgRT workflow are MRI acquisition, tumor delineation, dose map prediction and administering treatment. It is estimated that the acquisition of MRI takes around …

Adaptive Multi-Scale Place Cell Representations And Replay For Spatial Navigation And Learning In Autonomous Robots, Pablo Scleidorovich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Place cells are one of the most widely studied neurons thought to play a vital role in spatial cognition. Extensive studies show that their activity in the rodent hippocampus is highly correlated with the animal’s spatial location, forming “place fields” of smaller sizes near the dorsal pole and larger sizes near the ventral pole. Despite advances, it is yet unclear how this multi-scale representation enables navigation in complex environments.

In this dissertation, we analyze the place cell representation from a computational point of view, evaluating how multi-scale place fields impact navigation in large and cluttered environments. The objectives are to …

Improving Wireless Networking From The Learning And Security Perspectives, Zhe Qu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Due to the high development of wireless networking and artificial intelligence, most of the data are generated from mobile devices, which distribute in different environments. As such, how to improve the performance of machine learning-based networking and its security should be carefully considered. To reduce the communication burden and protect private information from users, Federated Learning (FL) is a possible solution for learning-based wireless networking. Although FL achieves much success until now, it also remains some specific issues to be solved. In this dissertation, we propose two FL wireless networking frameworks and discuss two potential security issues.

In the FL …

Healthcare Iot System And Network Design, Halil Ibrahim Deniz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The developing IoT concept offers many opportunities to service providers in the medical field. However, the functionality of the developed systems is increasing day by day, and it brings many different problems. One of the most important problems is the transmission of biomedical data of real-time monitoring systems to the medical server with the least delay. Network architectures are changing to meet the changing needs of densely connected devices, and “computing at the edge” is the new architectural approach emerging in IoT networks. This architecture is more dynamic than computation in the cloud because it enables data processing at each …

Stability And Interaction Analysis Of Inverter-Based Resources In Power Grids, Li Bao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The increasing penetration of inverter-based resources (IBRs) introduces some unexpected dynamic issues, including low-frequency oscillations. To investigate these phenomenon, a laboratory-scale grid-following voltage-source converter (VSC) system is implemented to demonstrate weak grid oscillations. Grid-following control is applied in VSC to provide active power, reactive power or ac voltage control. The test bed is also replicated in electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation environment (MATLAB/SimPowerSystems) for benchmark purpose. Case studies are carried out to demonstrate low-frequency oscillations under real power/ac voltage or real power/reactive power control. An analytical model is carried out to examine the stability condition and compared with EMT or hardware …

Deep Learning And Feature Engineering For Human Activity Recognition: Exploiting Novel Rich Learning Representations And Sub-Transfer Learning To Boost Practical Performance, Ria Kanjilal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A significant gap exists in our knowledge of how domain-specific feature extraction compares to unsupervised feature learning in the latent space of a deep neural network for a range of temporal applications including human activity recognition. This dissertation aims to address this gap specifically for human activity recognition using acceleration data. To ensure reproducibility, we use two publicly available datasets, UniMiB-SHAR and ExtraSensory, with a well-established history in the human activity recognition literature. We methodically analyze the performance of 64 different combinations of i) learning representations (in the form of raw temporal data or extracted features), ii) traditional and modern …

Aqueous Humor Dynamics And Compound Action Potentials In The Anesthetized And Conscious Freely Moving Rat, Youssef Mohamed

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Vision is dependent on the proper functioning of many intricate components of the eye. Aqueous humor dynamics function to keep the eye inflated at the right pressures and nourish avascular tissue in the eye while properties of the corneoscleral shell dictate how dynamic changes in volume and pressure affect tissue at the optic nerve head. Retinal ganglion cells exit the globe at the optic nerve head and carry all of the visual information to the brain for perception of visual stimulus. In this dissertation, we aim to present a lumped parameter model of the eye that can accurately describe the …

A Protein-Based Therapeutic Combination For The Treatment Of Hard-To-Heal Wounds, Graham L. Strauss

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chronic wounds present many clinical challenges in relation to the successful treatment and closure of the damaged tissue. Most current treatment methods focused on one or two aspects to drive wound closure, while most chronic wounds are multifactorial environments with many of those dependencies relying on the termination of one another to effectively gain tissue construction, closure, and full skin thickness and composition. Natural wound healing processes allude to potential biologics that can impede the chronic breakdown of tissue, while restoring deposition of new tissue, and effectively leading to a healed wound. Proteases secreted by the body’s immune system lay …

A Convergent Approach To Aqueous Lead (Pb) Mitigation Of A Supplemental Self-Supply Shallow Groundwater Source Accessed By Handpumps In Madagascar, Adaline Marie Buerck

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The World Health Organization (WHO) has consistently listed lead (Pb) as one of the ten chemicals of major public health concern. Though the toxic nature of lead has been known since the 20th century it is still utilized in a wide variety of products due to its favorable properties. Exposure to lead still accounts for approximately 900,000 deaths annually and disproportionately impacts those in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) due to a variety of reasons such as poverty, malnutrition, and lack of knowledge on the toxic nature of lead. Lead exposure routes include air, soil, dust, diet, and water. Though …

Modified Biosand Filtration Using Aluminum Hydroxide Filter Media To Enhance Fluoride Removal, Joshelyn Guimaray

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are over 20 countries whose citizens consume groundwater containing high levels of fluoride, including Nigeria, Mexico, India, China, and Ghana, which all have major health crises when it comes to the safety of their drinking water. Minerals like fluorite contain fluoride which is often found in groundwater aquifers. The minerals release fluoride into the groundwater. Per the World Health Organization (WHO) standard, the maximum contaminant limit for fluoride consumption should be less than 1.5 mg/L. Chronic exposure of elevated levels of fluoride can cause people to suffer debilitating health effects, such as dental and skeletal fluorosis. Dental fluorosis causes …

Passive Radiative Cooling By Spectrally Selective Nanoparticles In Thick Film Nanocomposites, David Allen Young

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Passive cooling of buildings is a benefit to society since no energy input is required for space cooling which reduces electricity consumption, fossil fuel burning, and greenhouse gas emissions. When a passive cooling technology radiates heat from the earth through the atmospheric windows to space higher levels of cooling power are possible -- this phenomenon is classified as passive “radiative” cooling. Spectrally selective surface coatings provide radiative cooling to lower surface temperatures by reflecting most solar radiation, while emitting infrared radiation at wavelengths between 8-13 μm through the primary atmospheric window to the cold of space. Multiple applications of radiative …

Evaluation Of Aluminum Dissolution, Current Density, And Pitting Patterns During Electrocoagulation, Monica Castro Carias

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Electrocoagulation (EC) is a sustainable water treatment process involving the generation of coagulants on-site through the application of a voltage on metal (usually aluminum or iron alloys). The factors that impact EC system performance have been well researched, however further research is needed on the factors that impact anodic dissolution of aluminum electrodes, especially when the technology is transferred to full-scale applications. Electrode fouling is one of the factors that can impact dissolution of the anode during EC due to the formation of a protective oxide/hydroxide layer on the electrode surface. Previous studies have addressed electrode fouling by reversing polarity, …

Simulating Flood Control In Progress Village, Florida Using Storm Water Management Model (Swmm), Azize Minaz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Flooding is a natural event caused by heavy rains, melting snow, high tides, and anthropogenic impacts such as channel clogging, improper land use, and deforestation. In this study, the strategies for controlling flooding seek to establish flood prevention systems by implementing grey infrastructure and green infrastructure practices. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the study area, Progress Village Neighborhood in Delaney Creek Watershed, regarding flood risk and flood mitigation techniques. The analysis was performed using EPA SWMM 5.1 and Arcmap 10.7.1. The study used design storms,10-years 24 hours and 25-years 24 hours, to analyze flood risk in …

Hybrid Rans-Les Hemolytic Power Law Modeling Of The Fda Blood Pump, Joseph Tarriela

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study applies the SBES and IDDES hybrid RANS-LES turbulence models along with the K-ω SST model to four flow conditions of the FDA blood pump. Validation of all three turbulence models show good agreement with experimental pressure and velocity fields. Evaluation of turbulent kinetic energy fields for the hybrid models show 80-90+% of kinetic energy is resolved in the rotor and diffuser regions of the pump. Hemolysis power law models were evaluated using the commonly used von Mises stress and additional energy dissipation stress (EDS). Results show viscous and Reynolds stresses computed with the K-ω SST under predict and …