Engineering Commons^™

Exploring The Cause Of Injury Or Death In Grain Entrapment, Engulfment And Extrication, Salah F. Issa

Open Access Dissertations

Grain entrapments and engulfments are one of most common hazards associated with grain storage facilities. Since the 1970’s over 1,880 incidents have been documented in agricultural confined spaces of which 65% of all recorded incidents were grain entrapments and engulfments. There have been several studies conducted on the contributing factors behind these incidents; however, there have been very few attempts to understand the environmental, physiological or psychological factors the victims experience while entrapped, engulfed, or extricated. This includes understanding how secondary injuries are caused by grain or during extrication by first responders. The research effort was divided into three segments. …

Optical Dosimetry Tools And Monte Carlo Based Methods For Applications In Image Guided Optical Therapy In The Brain, Akshay N Prabhu Verleker

Open Access Dissertations

Purpose: The long-term goal of this research is to determine the feasibility of using near infra-red light to stimulate drug release in metastatic lesions within the brain. In this work, we focused on developing the tools needed to quantify and verify photon fluence distribution in biological tissue. To accomplish this task, an optical dosimetry probe and Monte Carlo based simulation code were fabricated, calibrated and developed to predict light transport in heterogeneous tissue phantoms of the skull and brain. Empirical model (EM) of photon transport using CT images as input were devised to provide real-time calculations capable of being translated …

Modeling Picking On Pharmaceutical Tablets, Shrikant Swaminathan

Open Access Dissertations

Tablets are the most popular solid dosage form in the pharmaceutical industry because they are cheap to manufacture, chemically and mechanically stable and easy to transport and fairly easy to control dosage. Pharmaceutical tableting operations have been around for decades however the process is still not well understood. One of the common problems faced during the production of pharmaceutical tablets by powder compaction is sticking of powder to the punch face, This is known as 'sticking'. A more specialized case of sticking is picking when the powder is pulled away form the compact in the vicinity of debossed features. In …

Influence Of The 3d Microenvironment On Glioblastoma Migration And Drug Response, Ruth Marisol Herrera Perez

Open Access Dissertations

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a highly invasive brain cancer characterized by poor prognosis. Despite significant efforts by the basic and clinical research community our understanding of GBM progression and recurrence has been incremental. Improvements in therapeutic response have been dismal, and GBM continues to be the deadliest tumor of the central nervous system, with patient average survival rate of 12 months. Synergistic relationships that the tumor cells establish with the brain microenvironment have been proven fundamental for successful tumor progression and maintenance. Yet, many in vitro GBM studies are performed in formats that fail to recapitulate the most essential component of …

Effects Of Hearing Aid Amplification On Robust Neural Coding Of Speech, Jonathan Daniel Boley

Open Access Dissertations

Hearing aids are able to restore some hearing abilities for people with auditory impairments, but background noise remains a significant problem. Unfortunately, we know very little about how speech is encoded in the auditory system, particularly in impaired systems with prosthetic amplifiers. There is growing evidence that relative timing in the neural signals (known as spatiotemporal coding) is important for speech perception, but there is little research that relates spatiotemporal coding and hearing aid amplification.

This research uses a combination of computational modeling and physiological experiments to characterize how hearing aids affect vowel coding in noise at the level of …