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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Generalized Techniques For Using System Execution Traces To Support Software Performance Analysis, Thelge Manjula Peiris
Generalized Techniques For Using System Execution Traces To Support Software Performance Analysis, Thelge Manjula Peiris
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation proposes generalized techniques to support software performance analysis using system execution traces in the absence of software development artifacts such as source code. The proposed techniques do not require modifications to the source code, or to the software binaries, for the purpose of software analysis (non-intrusive). The proposed techniques are also not tightly coupled to the architecture specific details of the system being analyzed. This dissertation extends the current techniques of using system execution traces to evaluate software performance properties, such as response times, service times. The dissertation also proposes a novel technique to auto-construct a dataflow model …
Estimating The Water Quality Condition Of River And Lake Water In The Midwestern United States From Its Spectral Characteristics, Jing Tan
Open Access Dissertations
This study focuses on developing/calibrating remote sensing algorithms for water quality retrieval in Midwestern rivers and lakes. In the first part of this study, the spectral measurements collected using a hand-held spectrometer as well as water quality observations for the Wabash River and its tributary the Tippecanoe River in Indiana were used to develop empirical models for the retrieval of chlorophyll (chl) and total suspended solids (TSS). A method for removing sky and sun glint from field spectra for turbid inland waters was developed and tested. Empirical models were then developed using a subset of the field measurements with the …
Architectural Techniques To Extend Multi-Core Performance Scaling, Hamza Bin Sohail
Architectural Techniques To Extend Multi-Core Performance Scaling, Hamza Bin Sohail
Open Access Dissertations
Multi-cores have successfully delivered performance improvements over the past decade; however, they now face problems on two fronts: power and off-chip memory bandwidth. Dennard's scaling is effectively coming to an end which has lead to a gradual increase in chip power dissipation. In addition, sustaining off-chip memory bandwidth has become harder due to the limited space for pins on the die and greater current needed to drive the increasing load . My thesis focuses on techniques to address the power and off-chip memory bandwidth challenges in order to avoid the premature end of the multi-core era. ^ In the first …
Effect Of Maleic Acid On The Selectivity Of Glucose And Fructose Dehydration And Degradation, Ximing Zhang
Effect Of Maleic Acid On The Selectivity Of Glucose And Fructose Dehydration And Degradation, Ximing Zhang
Open Access Dissertations
5-Hydroxymethyfurfural (HMF), a platform chemical can upgrade to a variety of fuels and polymers, can be manufactured from lignocellulose. This study focuses on the Lewis and Brønsted acid effect on hexose dehydration for HMF production. We report the positive effect of maleic acid, a dicarboxylic acid used as Brønsted acid, on the selectivity of hexose dehydration to 5-hydroxymethyfurfural (HMF), and subsequent hydrolysis to levulinic and formic acids. We also describe the kinetic analysis of a Lewis acid (AlCl 3) alone and in combination with HCl or maleic acid to catalyze the isomerization of glucose to fructose, dehydration of fructose …
Modular Approach To Spintronics, Kerem Yunus Camsari
Modular Approach To Spintronics, Kerem Yunus Camsari
Open Access Dissertations
There has been enormous progress in the last two decades, effectively combining spintronics and magnetics into a powerful force that is shaping the field of memory devices. New materials and phenomena continue to be discovered at an impressive rate, providing an ever-increasing set of building blocks that could be exploited in designing transistor-like functional devices of the future. The objective of this thesis is to provide a quantitative foundation for this building block approach, so that new discoveries can be integrated into functional device concepts, quickly analyzed and critically evaluated. Through careful benchmarking against available theory and experiments we establish …
Experimental Constraints On Exotic Spin-Dependent Interactions Using Specialized Materials, Rakshya Khatiwada
Experimental Constraints On Exotic Spin-Dependent Interactions Using Specialized Materials, Rakshya Khatiwada
Open Access Dissertations
Various theories predict the possible existence of symmetry violating forces with mesoscopic range interactions from mm-m [1]. These forces can arise from the coupling of a spin 0 boson to spin 1/2 fermions through scalar (gs) and pseudoscalar (gp) couplings. We discuss two experiments that can investigate these interactions using nucleon rich, impressively low magnetic susceptibility (5-100 times lower than pure water) test masses and electron-spin rich, polarized test masses (spin density: 10^20 h/cm3 ). The first experiment looks for a P-odd, T-odd interaction potential proportional to (S.r) where S is the spin of one particle and r is the …
Transport Studies In Graphene-Based Materials And Structures, Jiuning Hu
Transport Studies In Graphene-Based Materials And Structures, Jiuning Hu
Open Access Dissertations
Graphene, a single atomic layer of graphite, has emerged as one of the most attractive materials in recent years for its many unique and excellent properties, inviting a broad area of fundamental studies and applications. In this thesis, we present some theoretical/experimental studies about the thermal, electronic and thermoelectric transport properties in graphene-based systems. We employ the molecular dynamic simulations to study the thermal transport in graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) exhibiting various properties, including chirality dependent thermal conductivity, thermal rectification in asymmetric GNRs, defects and isotopic engineering of the thermal conductivity and negative differential thermal conductance (NDTC) at large temperature biases. …
Computational Optical Imaging: Applications In Synthetic Aperture Imaging, Phase Retrieval, And Digital Holography, Dennis Joseph Lee
Computational Optical Imaging: Applications In Synthetic Aperture Imaging, Phase Retrieval, And Digital Holography, Dennis Joseph Lee
Open Access Dissertations
Computational imaging has become an important field, as a merger of both algorithms and physical experiments. In the realm of microscopy and optical imaging, an important application is the problem of improving resolution, which is bounded by wavelength and numerical aperture according to the classic diffraction limit. We will investigate the resolution enhancement of phase objects such as transparent biological cells. One key challenge is how to measure phase experimentally. Standard interferometric techniques have the drawback of being sensitive to environmental vibrations and temperature fluctuations, and they use a reference arm which requires more space and cost. Non-holographic methods provide …
Circular Bessel Field Statistics And The Pursuit Of Far-Subwavelength Resolution, Yulu Chen
Circular Bessel Field Statistics And The Pursuit Of Far-Subwavelength Resolution, Yulu Chen
Open Access Dissertations
The statistical description of wave propagation in random media is important for many applications. While polarized light in systems with weakly interacting scatterers and sufficient overall scatter has zero-mean circular Gaussian statistics, the underlying assumptions break down in the Anderson localization and weakly scattering regimes. Although probability density functions for wave intensity and amplitude exist beyond Gaussian statistics, suitable statistical descriptions for the field with strong and weak random scatter were unknown. The first analytical probability density function for the field that is effective in both the Anderson localization regime and the weakly scattering regime is derived by modeling the …
International Water And Food Security Development: Performance Evaluation And Assessment Of Research Needs At Multiple Scales, Caitlin Anne Grady
International Water And Food Security Development: Performance Evaluation And Assessment Of Research Needs At Multiple Scales, Caitlin Anne Grady
Open Access Dissertations
Water and food security remain the top development challenges of the decade, and perhaps the century. Since the Millennium Development Goals were established in 2000, billions of people have obtained access to more food, better nutrition, improved water, and basic sanitation facilities worldwide. This progress has been accomplished through the dedication of international organizations, non-governmental organizations, country-level governments, private corporations, and individuals at international, regional, and local scales. Truly tremendous strides have been made in water and food provisioning for humans worldwide. These past two decades have also seen the largest population growth on record, the highest rates of childhood …
Fully Electronic Method Of Measuring Post-Release Gap And Gradient/Residual Stress Of A Mems Cantilever, Andrew Stephen Kovacs
Fully Electronic Method Of Measuring Post-Release Gap And Gradient/Residual Stress Of A Mems Cantilever, Andrew Stephen Kovacs
Open Access Dissertations
Smartphones and other wireless devices have become ubiquitous over the past decade, and the RF front-end inside of them has become more complex and disproportionately consumes more power compared to other components. Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) have a huge potential to reduce these problems while simultaneously offering superior performance compared to current leading-edge technology. However, MEMS technology has difficulty transitioning from the lab to large-scale manufacturing due to the unpredictability of device lifetime and manufacturability issues. This can be mitigated by investigating how critical material or physical parameters (gap, stress, Young's modulus, material thickness, etc.) vary from manufacturing uncertainties and how …
Improving Capacity-Performance Tradeoffs In The Storage Tier, Eric P. Villasenor
Improving Capacity-Performance Tradeoffs In The Storage Tier, Eric P. Villasenor
Open Access Dissertations
Data-set sizes are growing. New techniques are emerging to organize and analyze these data-sets. There is a key access pattern emerging with these new techniques, large sequential file accesses. The trend toward bigger files exists to help amortize the cost of data accesses from the storage layer, as many workloads are recognized to be I/O bound. The storage layer is widely recognized as the slowest layer in the system. This work focuses on the tradeoff one can make with that storage capacity to improve system performance. ^ Capacity can be leveraged for improved availability or improved performance. This tradeoff is …
Spatial Analysis Of Passenger Vehicle Use And Ownership And Its Impact On The Sustainability Of Highway Infrastructure Funding, Matthew Volovski
Spatial Analysis Of Passenger Vehicle Use And Ownership And Its Impact On The Sustainability Of Highway Infrastructure Funding, Matthew Volovski
Open Access Dissertations
Across the United States, the sustainability of highway funding is at risk due to increasing need and uncertainty in the factors that drive revenue. Past studies on highway funding sustainability have identified that the root cause of changing highway revenue are the shifts in social demographics and economic characteristics. Unfortunately, from the revenue perspective (the focus of this dissertation), the ability of previous research to account for these factors has been rather limited in two ways; first, the inability to accurately assess current regional vehicle use (a typical prerequisite for statistical modeling of highway revenues) due to difficulties associated with …
Assessment Of High-Fidelity Collision Models In The Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method, Andrew Brian Weaver
Assessment Of High-Fidelity Collision Models In The Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method, Andrew Brian Weaver
Open Access Dissertations
Advances in computer technology over the decades has allowed for more complex physics to be modeled in the DSMC method. Beginning with the first paper on DSMC in 1963, 30,000 collision events per hour were simulated using a simple hard sphere model. Today, more than 10 billion collision events can be simulated per hour for the same problem. Many new and more physically realistic collision models such as the Lennard-Jones potential and the forced harmonic oscillator model have been introduced into DSMC. However, the fact that computer resources are more readily available and higher-fidelity models have been developed does not …
Growth Of Low Disorder Gaas/Algaas Heterostructures By Molecular Beam Epitaxy For The Study Of Correlated Electron Phases In Two Dimensions, John D. Watson
Growth Of Low Disorder Gaas/Algaas Heterostructures By Molecular Beam Epitaxy For The Study Of Correlated Electron Phases In Two Dimensions, John D. Watson
Open Access Dissertations
The unparalleled quality of GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures grown by molecular beam epitaxy has enabled a wide range of experiments probing interaction effects in two-dimensional electron and hole gases. This dissertation presents work aimed at further understanding the key material-related issues currently limiting the quality of these 2D systems, particularly in relation to the fractional quantum Hall effect in the 2nd Landau level and spin-based implementations of quantum computation.^ The manuscript begins with a theoretical introduction to the quantum Hall effect which outlines the experimental conditions necessary to study the physics of interest and motivates the use of the semiconductor growth …
Modeling, Optimization, And Sensitivity Analysis Of A Continuous Multi-Segment Crystallizer For Production Of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, Bradley James Ridder
Modeling, Optimization, And Sensitivity Analysis Of A Continuous Multi-Segment Crystallizer For Production Of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, Bradley James Ridder
Open Access Dissertations
We have investigated the simulation-based, steady-state optimization of a new type of crystallizer for the production of pharmaceuticals. The multi-segment, multi-addition plug-flow crystallizer (MSMA-PFC) offers better control over supersaturation in one dimension compared to a batch or stirred-tank crystallizer. Through use of a population balance framework, we have written the governing model equations of population balance and mass balance on the crystallizer segments. The solution of these equations was accomplished through either the method of moments or the finite volume method. The goal was to optimize the performance of the crystallizer with respect to certain quantities, such as maximizing the …
Structure-Activity Relationships For The Water-Gas Shift Reaction Over Supported Metal Catalysts, Kaiwalya D. Sabnis
Structure-Activity Relationships For The Water-Gas Shift Reaction Over Supported Metal Catalysts, Kaiwalya D. Sabnis
Open Access Dissertations
The Water-Gas Shift (WGS) reaction (CO + H2O → CO2 + H2) is an important chemical process for industrial hydrogen production. The overall goal of this project is to use kinetic experiments and in situ characterization techniques in tandem, in order to derive structure-activity relationships for various catalytic systems. These relationships facilitate the rational catalyst design by identification of catalyst descriptors. In order to establish such relationships, various studies were undertaken, such as (i) effect of transition admetals on the WGS catalysis by molybdenum carbide (ii) effect of residual oxygen content on the performance of …
Advanced Wireless Communications Using Large Numbers Of Transmit Antennas And Receive Nodes, Junil Choi
Advanced Wireless Communications Using Large Numbers Of Transmit Antennas And Receive Nodes, Junil Choi
Open Access Dissertations
The concept of deploying a large number of antennas at the base station, often called massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), has drawn considerable interest because of its potential ability to revolutionize current wireless communication systems. Most literature on massive MIMO systems assumes time division duplexing (TDD), although frequency division duplexing (FDD) dominates current cellular systems. Due to the large number of transmit antennas at the base station, currently standardized approaches would require a large percentage of the precious downlink and uplink resources in FDD massive MIMO be used for training signal transmissions and channel state information (CSI) feedback. First, we propose …
Instrumentation And Development Of A Mass Spectrometry System For The Study Of Gas-Phase Biomolecular Ion Reactions, Ziqing Lin
Open Access Dissertations
Gas-phase reactions of biomolecular ions are highly relevant to the understanding of structures and functions of the biomolecules. Mass spectrometry is a powerful tool in investigating gas-phase ion chemistry. Various mass spectrometers have been developed to explore ion/molecule reactions, ion/ion reactions, ion/photon reactions, ion/radical reactions etc., both at atmospheric pressure and in vacuum. In-vacuum reactions have an advantage of involving pre-selecting the ions for the reactions using a mass analyzer. Over the decades, a variety of mass analyzers have been employed in the research of ion chemistry. Hybrid configurations, such as quadrupole ion trap with a time-of-flight and or a …
Calculus For Decision Systems, Jorge Antonio Samayoa Ranero
Calculus For Decision Systems, Jorge Antonio Samayoa Ranero
Open Access Dissertations
The conceptualization of the term "system" has become highly dependent on the application domain. What a physicist means by the term system might be different than what a sociologist means by the same term. In 1956, Bertalanffy [1] defined a system as " a set of units with relationships among them". This and many other definitions of system share the idea of a system as a black box that has parts or elements interacting between each other. This means that at some level of abstraction all systems are similar, what eventually differentiates one system from another is the set of …
Novel Techniques For Quasi Three-Dimensional Nanofabrication Of Transformation Optics Devices, Paul R. West
Novel Techniques For Quasi Three-Dimensional Nanofabrication Of Transformation Optics Devices, Paul R. West
Open Access Dissertations
Current nanofabrication is almost exclusively limited to top-down, two-dimensional techniques. As technology moves more deeply into the nano-scale regime, fabrication of new devices with quasi three-dimensional geometries shows great potential. One excellent example of an emerging field that requires this type of non-conformal 3D fabrication technique is the field of Transformation Optics. This field involves transforming and manipulating the optical space through which light propagates. Arbitrarily manipulating the optical space requires advanced fabrication techniques, which are not possible with current two-dimensional fabrication technologies. One step toward quasi three-dimensional nanofabrication involves employing angled deposition allowing new growth mechanisms, and enabling a …