Engineering Commons^™

Geochemistry And Inorganic Carbon Transport Of A Glacial Till Drumlin At A Road Salt Facility, Houbao Li

Open Access Dissertations

Investigations were conducted at a salt/premix storage facility lying on top of a glacial drumlin near the coastline in eastern Massachusetts, to characterize salt contaminated groundwater. Groundwater hydrogeochemical variations at different depths were determined based on ten years of monthly or quarterly water quality data from 54 monitoring wells. Groundwater was grouped in three water categories – shallow, middle and deep. Hydrogeochemical characterization indicates that the dominant water types are Na-Cl, Na-Ca-Cl and Ca-HCO3 from the shallow to deep water group. Rock weathering is the dominant hydrogeochemical process for deep water group, whereas salt water percolation and cation exchange control …

Semantically Grounded Learning From Unstructured Demonstrations, Scott D. Niekum

Open Access Dissertations

Robots exhibit flexible behavior largely in proportion to their degree of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge is often meticulously hand-coded for a narrow class of tasks, limiting the scope of possible robot competencies. Thus, the primary limiting factor of robot capabilities is often not the physical attributes of the robot, but the limited time and skill of expert programmers. One way to deal with the vast number of situations and environments that robots face outside the laboratory is to provide users with simple methods for programming robots that do not require the skill of an expert.

For this …

Reconfigurable Technologies For Next Generation Internet And Cluster Computing, Deepak C. Unnikrishnan

Open Access Dissertations

Modern web applications are marked by distinct networking and computing characteristics. As applications evolve, they continue to operate over a large monolithic framework of networking and computing equipment built from general-purpose microprocessors and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that offers few architectural choices. This dissertation presents techniques to diversify the next-generation Internet infrastructure by integrating Field-programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a class of reconfigurable integrated circuits, with general-purpose microprocessor-based techniques. Specifically, our solutions are demonstrated in the context of two applications - network virtualization and distributed cluster computing.

Network virtualization enables the physical network infrastructure to be shared among several …

Organic Materials As Templates For The Formation Of Mesoporous Inorganic Materials And Ordered Inorganic Nanocomposites, Christopher Ryan Ziegler

Open Access Dissertations

Hierarchically structured inorganic materials are everywhere in nature. From unicellular aquatic algae such as diatoms to the bones and/or cartilage that comprise the skeletal systems of vertebrates. Complex mechanisms involving site-specific chemistries and precision kinetics are responsible for the formation of such structures. In the synthetic realm, reproduction of even the most basic hierarchical structure effortlessly produced in nature is difficult. However, through the utilization of self-assembling structures or "templates", such as polymers or amphiphilic surfactants, combined with some favorable interaction between a chosen inorganic, the potential exists to imprint an inorganic material with a morphology dictated via synthetic molecular …

Design Of Hybrid Conjugated Polymer Materials: 1) Novel Inorganic/Organic Hybrid Semiconductors And 2) Surface Modification Via Grafting Approaches, Joseph J. Peterson

Open Access Dissertations

The research presented in this dissertation focuses on the design and synthesis of novel hybrid conjugated polymer materials using two different approaches: 1) inorganic/organic hybrid semiconductors through the incorporation of carboranes into the polymer structure and 2) the modification of surfaces with conjugated polymers via grafting approaches. Hybrid conjugated polymeric materials, which are materials or systems in which conjugated polymers are chemically integrated with non-traditional structures or surfaces, have the potential to harness useful properties from both components of the material to help overcome hurdles in their practical realization in polymer-based devices. This work is centered around the synthetic challenges …