Engineering Commons^™

Pressure Retarded Osmosis: A Potential Technology For Seawater Desalination Energy Recovery And Concentrate Management, Joshua Benjamin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Currently, a significant challenge with reverse osmosis-based desalination is reducing the energy consumption and environmental impacts of the process. This project analyzed the viability of using pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) for energy recovery in seawater desalination facilities using brine concentrate (the draw solution) and other water sources (the feed solution) such as wastewater effluent. The primary goal of this project is to decrease the cost and overall energy consumption of seawater desalination through PRO-based energy recovery. Process modeling, statistical and sensitivity analysis, energy and cost analysis, geospatial and GIS analysis, laboratory-scale testing, water quality analysis, SEM-EDS microscopy, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), …

Constructing Frameworks For Task-Optimized Visualizations, Ghulam Jilani Abdul Rahim Quadri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Visualization is crucial in today’s data-driven world to augment and enhance human understanding and decision-making. Effective visualizations must support accuracy in visual task performance and expressive data communication. Effective visualization design depends on the visual channels used, chart types, or visual tasks. However, design choices and visual judgment are co-related, and effectiveness is not one-dimensional, leading to a significant need to understand the intersection of these factors to create optimized visualizations. Hence, constructing frameworks that consider both design decisions and the task being performed enables optimizing visualization design to maximize efficacy. This dissertation describes experiments, techniques, and user studies to …

A Decision-Making Framework For Hybrid Resource Recovery Oriented Wastewater Systems, Nader Rezaei

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Water shortage, water contamination, and the emerging challenges in sustainable water resources management (e.g., the likely impacts of climate change and population growth) necessitate adopting a reverse logistics approach, which is the process of moving wastewater from its typical final destination back to the water supply chain for reuse purposes. This practice not only reduces the negative impacts of wastewater on the environment, but also provides an alternative to withdrawal from natural water resources, forming a closed-loop water supply chain. However, the design of such a supply chain requires an appropriate sustainability assessment, which simultaneously accounts for economic, environmental, and …

A Cost Benefit Analysis Of Using A Battery Energy Storage System (Bess) Represented By A Unit Commitment Model, Nemanja Mihailovic

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to provide a general overview of a cost and benefit analysis of incorporating a battery energy storage system within unit commitment model.

The deregulation of the electricity market in the U.S. has only been around for the last two decades. With renewable energy and energy storage systems becoming less expensive, a decentralized market scheme is becoming more popular and plausible. The scope of this work is to provide a fundamental understanding of unit commitment and a cost analysis of applying a battery energy storage system to an already established power system.

A battery energy storage system (BESS) …

Improved 2d And 3d Resistivity Surveys Using Buried Electrodes And Optimized Arrays: The Multi-Electrode Resistivity Implant Technique (Merit), Henok Gidey Kiflu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a novel resistivity method called Multi-Electrode resistivity technique (MERIT) that is used for high resolution imaging of complex geologic features at depth and near the edges of survey lines. The MERIT electrodes are especially shaped and designed to be self-driven using a robust-direct push technique. Measurements are taken using optimized arrays that are generated using a modified version of the “Compare-R” optimization algorithm. This work focused on both two-dimensional (MERIT2D) and three-dimensional (MERIT3D) applications of the buried array and show the relevance of the additional information gained by the addition of deep electrodes especially in sites with …

Kinematic Control Of Redundant Mobile Manipulators, Mustafa Mashali

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A mobile manipulator is a robotic arm mounted on a robotic mobile platform. In such a system, the degrees of freedom of the mobile platform are combined with that of the manipulator. As a result, the workspace of the manipulator is substantially extended. A mobile manipulator has two trajectories: the end-effector trajectory and the mobile platform trajectory. Typically, the mobile platform trajectory is not defined and is determined through inverse kinematics. But in some applications it is important to follow a specified mobile platform trajectory. The main focus of this work is to determine the inverse kinematics of a mobile …

Analysis Of Advanced Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Power Cycles For Concentrated Solar Power Applications, Saeb Mostaghim Besarati

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Solar power tower technology can achieve higher temperatures than the most common commercial technology using parabolic troughs. In order to take advantage of higher temperatures, new power cycles are needed for generating power at higher efficiencies. Supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO₂) power cycle is one of the alternatives that have been proposed for the future concentrated solar power (CSP) plants due to its high efficiency. On the other hand, carbon dioxide can also be a replacement for current heat transfer fluids (HTFs), i.e. oil, molten salt, and steam. The main disadvantages of the current HTFs are maximum operating temperature …

Investigation Of Enhanced Titanium And Zinc Oxide Semiconductors For The Photodegradation Of Aqueous Organic Compounds, Innocent Udom

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Growing demand and shortages of potable water sources due to industrialization have become a great concern worldwide. Various approaches and solutions have been adopted to provide cleaner and quality water. In a preliminary study, a method of treating wastewater was investigated in which algae were used to remove nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous) from wastewater and then the algae were harvested for use as a biofuel. The results from this investigation are included in the Appendix B. Employing traditional oxidants, such as hydrogen peroxide, chlorine, and ozone, for treatment of recalcitrant organic compounds have achieved less promising results. However, photocatalysis, an …

Environmental Implications Of Pavements: A Life Cycle View, Bin Yu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Environmental aspect of pavement, unlike its economic counterpart, is seldom considered in the theoretical study and field practices. As a highly energy and material intensive infrastructure, pavement has great potential to contribute to the environment protection, which, in root, depends on the in-depth understanding of the environmental impacts, holistically and specifically. A life cycle assessment (LCA) model is used to fulfill the goal.

This research firstly carried out extensive literature review of LCA studies on pavement to identify the major research gaps, including: incompleteness of the methodology, controversy of the functional unit, and unawareness of feedstock energy of asphalt, etc. …

Control Of Smart Building Using Advanced Scada, Vivin Thomas Samuel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

For complete control of the building, a proper SCADA implementation and the optimization strategy has to be build. For better communication and efficiency a proper channel between the Communication protocol and SCADA has to be designed.

This paper concentrate mainly between the communication protocol, and the SCADA implementation, for a better optimization and energy savings is derived to large scale industrial buildings. The communication channel used in order to completely control the building remotely from a distant place. For an efficient result we consider the temperature values and the power ratings of the equipment so that while controlling the …

The Conversion Of Low-Grade Heat Into Power Using Supercritical Rankine Cycles, Huijuan Chen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Low-grade heat sources, here defined as below 300 ºC, are abundantly available as industrial waste heat, solar thermal, and geothermal, to name a few. However, they are under-exploited for conversion to power because of the low efficiency of conversion. The utilization of low-grade heat is advantageous for many reasons. Technologies that allow the efficient conversion of low-grade heat into mechanical or electrical power are very important to develop.

This work investigates the potential of supercritical Rankine cycles in the conversion of low-grade heat into power. The performance of supercritical Rankine cycles is studied using ChemCAD linked with customized excel macros …