Engineering Commons^™

Simulation, And Overload And Stability Analysis Of Continuous Time Sigma Delta Modulator, Kyung Kang

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The ever increasing demand for faster and more powerful digital applications requires high speed, high resolution ADCs. Currently, sigma delta modulators ADCs are extensively used in broadband telecommunication systems because they are an effective solution for high data-rate wireless communication systems that require low power consumption, high speed, high resolution, and large signal bandwidths.

Because mixed-signal integrated circuits such as Continuous Time sigma delta modulators contain both analog and digital circuits, mixed signal circuits are not as simple to model and simulate as all discrete or all analog systems. In this dissertation, the delta transform is used to simulate CT …

Induction Of Differentiation Of Dental Pulp-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells (Dpsc), Aubrey Young

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Mesenchymal stem cells are derived from a variety of human tissues and are being bioengineered and studied for possible uses in the advancement of medicine. Recent efforts are being focused on Dental Pulp Stem Cells (DPSC's) due to the accessibility of this tissue. Many factors influence DPSC quality and quantity, including the specific methods used to isolate, collect, concentrate, and store these isolates once they are removed. Ancillary factors, such as the choice of media, the selection of early versus late passage cells, and cryopreservation techniques may also influence the differentiation potential and proliferative capacity of DPSC isolates.

The objective …

Remote Sensing Based On Hyperspectral Data Analysis, Ershad Sharifahmadian

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In remote sensing, accurate identification of far objects, especially concealed objects is difficult. In this study, to improve object detection from a distance, the hyperspecral imaging and wideband technology are employed with the emphasis on wideband radar. As the wideband data includes a broad range of frequencies, it can reveal information about both the surface of the object and its content. Two main contributions are made in this study:

1) Developing concept of return loss for target detection: Unlike typical radar detection methods which uses radar cross section to detect an object, it is possible to enhance the process of …

Design And Implementation Of An Instruction Set Architecture And An Instruction Execution Unit For The Rez9 Coprocessor System, Daniel Spencer Anderson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While the use of RNS has provided groundbreaking theory and progress in this field, the applications still lack viable testing platforms to test and verify the theory. This Thesis outlines the processing of developing an instruction set architecture (ISA) and an instruction execution unit (IEU) to help make the first residue based general processor a viable testing platform to address the mentioned problems.

Consider a 32-bit ripple adder. The delay on this device will be 32N where N is the delay for each adder to complete its operation. The delay of this process is due to the need to propagate …

Non-Learning Semantic Analysis For Context Discovery And Sentiment Estimation: Transportation Application, Himanshu Verma

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With enormous amount of linguistic data present on web, text analysis has become one of the major fields of interest today. This field includes sentiment analysis, information retrieval, text document classification, knowledge based modeling, content similarity measure, data clustering, words prediction/correction, decision making etc. Managing and processing such data has vital importance. The field being quite broad, our focus is mainly on transportation related social media(Twitter) data extraction, text categorization/classification which can be further sub-divided into concept discovery, word sense disambiguation and sentiment analysis to analyze performance of existing transportation system worldwide. Concept discovery is the method of extracting the …

Cfd Simulation Of The Thermal Performance Of A Parallel Counter-Parallel Flow Heat Exchanger For The Treatment Of Hypothermia, Alex Heller

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Hypothermia is a life-threatening condition. Currently, active warming methods are the most effective treatment for dysthermic patients. The aim of this study is to investigate the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in evaluating the thermal performance of a parallel/counter-parallel flow heat exchanger used as part of a fluid warmer to treat Hypothermia. The 3D model of the heat exchanger is divided into three regions; Infusate (fluid to be heated), Hot Water (heating fluid), and a Solid Region (wall). At the end of the heat exchanger, an elbow section is used to create the counter-parallel flow arrangement specific to this …

A Novel Multimodal Image Fusion Method Using Hybrid Wavelet-Based Contourlet Transform, Yoonsuk Choi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Various image fusion techniques have been studied to meet the requirements of different applications such as concealed weapon detection, remote sensing, urban mapping, surveillance and medical imaging. Combining two or more images of the same scene or object produces a better application-wise visible image. The conventional wavelet transform (WT) has been widely used in the field of image fusion due to its advantages, including multi-scale framework and capability of isolating discontinuities at object edges. However, the contourlet transform (CT) has been recently adopted and applied to the image fusion process to overcome the drawbacks of WT with its own advantages. …

Development Of A Black-Box Transient Thermal Model For Residential Buildings, Andrew Cross

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Heavily populated metropolitan areas located in cooling-dominated climates, as are found in the Desert Southwest, pose a challenge to electrical utilities that service these areas. During the late afternoons of the summer months, residents of these metropolitan areas require larger than normal amounts of power to run their homes' air conditioning systems, at significant expense to the utilities. In the study reported here, interior temperature and power consumption data, accumulated over the course of a year and a half from seven houses within a Las Vegas neighborhood, are used to develop a predictive black-box statistical model for residential thermal transience. …

Power Optimization, Diagnostic Monitoring, And Modeling Of Photovoltaic System, Khalid Hurayb

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Photovoltaic (PV) solar energy has been sustaining a major growth rate over the last decade in many parts of the world. This steep growth has been driven by concern about climate change, the adoption of renewable portfolio standards, government incentives, and reduction in PV system costs. Recently, however, such large PV penetration into the electrical grid is cause a concern that might curb such a growth; namely, the incontrollable intermittency of power generated on cloudy days. Furthermore, conventional PV system configurations often do not harness the maximum power that is available under partial shading caused by clouds or shadows of …

Modeling And Development Of Human Interface For Pedestrian Simulator, Romesh Khaddar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

According to Traveler opinion and perception survey of 2005, 107.4 million Americans use walking as regular mode of travel, which amounts to 51% of American population. In 2009, 4092 pedestrian fatalities have been reported nationwide with a fatality rate of 1.33 which totals 59,000 crashes. Also, pedestrians are over represented in crash data by accounting more than 12% of fatalities but on 10.9% of trips. This makes a perfect case for understanding the causes behind such statistics, calling for a continuous research on pedestrians walking behavior and their interactions with surroundings.

Current research in pedestrian simulation focuses on surveys and …

An Energy-Efficient, Time-Constrained Scheduling Scheme In Local Mobile Cloud, Ting Shi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Mobile devices have limited resource, such as computation performance and battery life. Mobile cloud computing is gaining popularity as a solution to overcome these resource limitations by sending heavy computation to resourceful servers and receiving the results from these servers. Local mobile clouds comprised of nearby mobile devices are proposed as a better solution to support real-time applications. Since network bandwidth and computational resource is shared among all the mobile devices, a scheduling scheme is needed to ensure that multiple mobile devices can efficiently offload tasks to local mobile clouds, satisfying the tasks' time constraint while keeping low-energy consumption. Two …

Simulation Of Thermal Transit-Time Flow Meter For High Temperature, Corrosive And Irradiation Environment, Elaheh Alidoosti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In the environments of high temperature (300o C - 1000o C), corrosive and even irradiation application, the challenges of providing reliable and accurate flow rate measurement is significant. In comparing with many other existing technologies for normal operation environments, correlated thermal transit-time flow meter show its advantages of resolving the challenges encountered in those harsh conditions. The correlated thermal signals can be detected by two separated thermal sensors (for example, thermocouples) in series alignment along the pipe, and derive the flow rate. It was evaluated to have accurate measurement for small pipe at slow fluid speed. In the higher flow …

Observability In Traffic Modeling: Eulerian And Lagrangian Coordinates, Sergio Contreras

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Traditionally, one of the ways traffic flow has been studied is by using the kinematic wave model. This model is studied in the Eulerian framework. Recently, the kinematic wave model has been transformed into Lagrangian coordinates. This model of traffic flow together with the concept of observability for linear time invariant discrete time systems is applied to study the observability of four sections of a freeway in both Eulerian and Lagrangian coordinates. A system with densities in four sections of a freeway is designed, and the observability of the system is studied with different situations for sensors. When the system …

Evaluation Of Conservation Voltage Reduction As A Tool For Demand Side Management, Ali Dorrody

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

To ensure stability of the power grid, electricity supply and demand must remain in balance in real time. Traditionally utilities, call upon peaking power plants to increase power generation to meet the peak demand during the afternoons of the hot summer months. Demand-side management (DSM), which includes energy efficiency and demand response (DR), works from the other side of the equation - instead of adding more generation to the system, it pays energy users to reduce consumption as it is cheaper and easier to procure than traditional generation. As a consequence, demand-side management allows utility customers to act as a …

Co-Emulation Of Scan-Chain Based Designs Utilizing Sce-Mi Infrastructure, Bill Jason Pidlaoan Tomas

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Simulation times of complex System-on-Chips (SoC) have grown exponentially as designs reach the multi-million ASIC gate range. Verification teams have adopted emulation as a prominent methodology, incorporating high-level testbenches and FPGA/ASIC hardware for system-level testing (SLT). In addition to SLT, emulation enables software teams to incorporate software applications with cycle-accurate hardware early on in the design cycle. The Standard for Co-Emulation Modeling Interface (SCE-MI) developed by the Accelera Initiative, is a widely used communication protocol for emulation which has been accepted by major electronic design automation (EDA) companies.

Scan-chain is a design-for-test (DFT) methodology used for testing digital circuits. To …

Simulations Of Interfacial Electrokinetics With Applications To Microfluidic Systems, Sebastian Uppapalli

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Electrokinetics plays an important role in facilitating fluid transport and particle manipulation in microfluidic systems. This dissertation studies the mechanics of electrokinetic phenomena for microscale particles and drops. The work aims to increase the understanding of complex electrokinetic phenomena for applications in Lab-on-Chip technology, assembly of colloidal particles and two-phase flow sensing. The standard model consisting of the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations is used to study the electric double layer polarization of charged dielectric particles and channel wall which plays a major role in control and manipulation of colloidal particles and understanding of electrohydrodynamic flow field.

The cases of polarization of "soft" …