Engineering Commons^™

Solar Powered Picnic Table For Charging Cellphones And Other Small Devices, Casey B. Potts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Solar panels are used in many different applications for generating sustainable energy. Many countries use solar power as a power generation method. It is also, an excellent option for getting power to difficult areas. There are three main systems used when generating solar power: grid-tied, battery banked, and direct driven systems. Most systems use a combination of grid-tied and battery banked so any unused power can be fed back into the main grid for compensation. The solar power application suggested in this thesis will provide USB power to a picnic table enabling students to charge cellphones and other small devices …

Shape Analysis Of The Human Brain., Matthew Joseph Nitzken 1987-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Autism is a complex developmental disability that has dramatically increased in prevalence, having a decisive impact on the health and behavior of children. Methods used to detect and recommend therapies have been much debated in the medical community because of the subjective nature of diagnosing autism. In order to provide an alternative method for understanding autism, the current work has developed a 3-dimensional state-of-the-art shape based analysis of the human brain to aid in creating more accurate diagnostic assessments and guided risk analyses for individuals with neurological conditions, such as autism. Methods: The aim of this work was to assess …

Computational Methods To Predict And Enhance Decision-Making With Biomedical Data., Behnaz Abdollahi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The proposed research applies machine learning techniques to healthcare applications. The core ideas were using intelligent techniques to find automatic methods to analyze healthcare applications. Different classification and feature extraction techniques on various clinical datasets are applied. The datasets include: brain MR images, breathing curves from vessels around tumor cells during in time, breathing curves extracted from patients with successful or rejected lung transplants, and lung cancer patients diagnosed in US from in 2004-2009 extracted from SEER database. The novel idea on brain MR images segmentation is to develop a multi-scale technique to segment blood vessel tissues from similar tissues …

3d-Reconstruction Of Human Jaw From A Single Image : Integration Between Statistical Shape From Shading And Shape From Shading., Mohamad Ghanoum 1990-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Object modeling is a fundamental problem in engineering, involving talents from computer-aided design, computational geometry, computer vision and advanced manufacturing. The process of object modeling takes three stages: sensing, representation, and analysis. Various sensors may be used to capture information about objects; optical cam- eras and laser scanners are common with rigid objects, while X-ray, CT and MRI are common with biological organs. These sensors may provide a direct or indirect inference about the object, requiring a geometric representation in the computer that is suitable for subsequent usage. Geometric representations that are compact, i.e., capture the main features of the …

Face Modeling For Face Recognition In The Wild., Eslam Abdelfattah Mostafa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Face understanding is considered one of the most important topics in computer vision field since the face is a rich source of information in social interaction. Not only does the face provide information about the identity of people, but also of their membership in broad demographic categories (including sex, race, and age), and about their current emotional state. Facial landmarks extraction is the corner stone in the success of different facial analyses and understanding applications. In this dissertation, a novel facial modeling is designed for facial landmarks detection in unconstrained real life environment from different image modalities including infra-red and …

Reducing Radio Frequency Susceptibilities In Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Camera Equipment For Use In Electromagnetic Compatibility Testing, Kevin Mainini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Technical Testing and Analysis Center (TTAC) Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory performs electromagnetic compatibility testing on various radiation detection units. These tests require remote viewing of the equipment’s display to monitor its compliance with national and international standards. The Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) camera equipment that is used to monitor the displays exhibits radio frequency susceptibilities causing issues when determining the actual susceptibilities of the device under test. In order to mitigate this issue, a COTS camera was placed in two common test positions and cycled through three angled orientations with various radio frequency shielding methods applied. The development of …

Synchrophasor Sensing And Processing Based Smart Grid Security Assessment For Renewable Energy Integration, Huaiguang Jiang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the evolution of energy and power systems, the emerging Smart Grid (SG) is mainly featured by distributed renewable energy generations, demand-response control and huge amount of heterogeneous data sources. Widely distributed synchrophasor sensors, such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) and fault disturbance recorders (FDRs), can record multi-modal signals, for power system situational awareness and renewable energy integration.

An effective and economical approach is proposed for wide-area security assessment. This approach is based on wavelet analysis for detecting and locating the short-term and long-term faults in SG, using voltage signals collected by distributed synchrophasor sensors.

A data-driven approach for fault …

Microgrid Optimal Scheduling Considering Impact Of High Penetration Wind Generation, Abdulaziz Furreh Alanazi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this thesis is to study the impact of high penetration wind energy in economic and reliable operation of microgrids. Wind power is variable, i.e., constantly changing, and nondispatchable, i.e., cannot be controlled by the microgrid controller. Thus an accurate forecasting of wind power is an essential task in order to study its impacts in microgrid operation. Two commonly used forecasting methods including Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) have been used in this thesis to improve the wind power forecasting. The forecasting error is calculated using a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and …

Broadband Coherent Perfect Absorption In One-Dimensional Optical Systems, Massimo Maximilian Villinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Absorption plays a critical role in a variety of optical applications – sometimes it is desirable to minimize it as in optical fibers and waveguides, or to enhance it as in solar cells and photodetectors. We describe here a new optical scheme that controllably produces high optical absorption over a broad wavelength range (hundreds of nm) in systems that have low intrinsic absorption over the same range. This effect, 'coherent perfect absorption' or CPA, arises from a subtle interplay between interference and absorption of two beams incident on a weakly absorbing medium. In the first part of this study, we …

Post Conversion Correction Of Non-Linear Mismatches For Time Interleaved Analog-To-Digital Converters, Charna Parkey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Time Interleaved Analog-to-Digital Converters (TI-ADCs) utilize an architecture which enables conversion rates well beyond the capabilities of a single converter while preserving most or all of the other performance characteristics of the converters on which said architecture is based. Most of the approaches discussed here are independent of architecture; some solutions take advantage of specific architectures. Chapter 1 provides the problem formulation and reviews the errors found in ADCs as well as a brief literature review of available TI-ADC error correction solutions. Chapter 2 presents the methods and materials used in implementation as well as extend the state of the …

True Linearized Intensity Modulation For Photonic Analog To Digital Conversion Using An Injection-Locked Mode-Locked Laser, Edris Sarailou

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A true linearized interferometric intensity modulator for pulsed light has been proposed and experimentally presented in this thesis. This has been achieved by introducing a mode-locked laser into one of the arms of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and injection-locking it to the input light (which is pulsed and periodic). By modulating the injection-locked laser, and combining its output light with the light from the other arm of interferometer in quadrature, one can achieve true linearized intensity modulator. This linearity comes from the arcsine phase response of the injection-locked mode-locked laser (as suggested by steady-state solution of Adler's equation) when it is …

Liquid Crystal-Based Biosensors For The Detection Of Bile Acids, Sihui He

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bile acids are physiologically important metabolites, which are synthesized in liver as the end products of cholesterol metabolism and then secreted into intestine. They are amphiphilic molecules which play a critical role in the digestion and absorption of fats and fat-soluble vitamins through emulsification. The concentration of bile acids is an indicator for liver function. Individual suffering from liver diseases has a sharp increase in bile acid concentrations. Hence, the concentration level of bile acids has long been used as a biomarker for the early diagnosis of intestinal and liver diseases. Conventional methods of bile acid detection such as chromatography-mass …

General Vector Explicit - Impact Time And Angle Control Guidance, Loren Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis proposes and evaluates a new cooperative guidance law called General Vector Explicit - Impact Time and Angle Control Guidance (GENEX-ITACG). The motivation for GENEX-ITACG came from an explicit trajectory shaping guidance law called General Vector Explicit Guidance (GENEX). GENEX simultaneously achieves design specifications on miss distance and terminal missile approach angle while also providing a design parameter that adjusts the aggressiveness of this approach angle. Encouraged by the applicability of this user parameter, GENEX-ITACG is an extension that allows a salvo of missiles to cooperatively achieve the same objectives of GENEX against a stationary target through the incorporation …

Design, Characterization And Analysis Of Component Level Electrostatic Discharge (Esd) Protection Solutions, Sirui Luo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electrostatic Discharges (ESD) is a significant hazard to electronic components and systems. Based on a specific process technology, a given circuit application requires a customized ESD consideration that meets all the requirements such as the core circuit's operating condition, maximum accepted leakage current, breakdown conditions for the process and overall device sizes. In every several years, there will be a new process technology becomes mature, and most of those new technology requires custom design of effective ESD protection solution. And usually the design window will shrinks due to the evolving of the technology becomes smaller and smaller. The ESD related …

Modified System Design And Implementation Of An Intelligent Assistive Robotic Manipulator, Nicholas Paperno

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents three improvements to the current UCF MANUS systems. The first improvement modifies the existing fine motion controller into PI controller that has been optimized to prevent the object from leaving the view of the cameras used for visual servoing. This is achieved by adding a weight matrix to the proportional part of the controller that is constrained by an artificial ROI. When the feature points being used are approaching the boundaries of the ROI, the optimized controller weights are calculated using quadratic programming and added to the nominal proportional gain portion of the controller. The second improvement …

Design Of High-Efficiency Rare-Earth Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor And Drive System, Hanzhou Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Utilization of renewable energy has become the future trend in the trucking industry. Electrical power generated from renewable energy can replace part of the fuel usage. There is usually limited space for storing on-board battery. Thus, to better utilize the battery power, it becomes critical to have an efficient energy conversion device that can transfer energy from battery to amenities such as air conditioner, microwave, TV, mini refrigerator, etc. In this dissertation, a designed permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) can be such energy conversion device for an electric Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) application, which will have a desired output power …

High Efficiency And Wide Color Gamut Liquid Crystal Displays, Zhenyue Luo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Liquid crystal display (LCD) has become ubiquitous and indispensable in our daily life. Recently, it faces strong competition from organic light emitting diode (OLED). In order to maintain a strong leader position, LCD camp has an urgent need to enrich the color performance and reduce the power consumption. This dissertation focuses on solving these two emerging and important challenges. In the first part of the dissertation we investigate the quantum dot (QD) technology to improve the both the color gamut and the light efficiency of LCD. QD emits saturated color and grants LCD the capability to reproduce color vivid images. …

Compressive Sensing And Recovery Of Structured Sparse Signals, Behzad Shahrasbi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the recent years, numerous disciplines including telecommunications, medical imaging, computational biology, and neuroscience benefited from increasing applications of high dimensional datasets. This calls for efficient ways of data capturing and data processing. Compressive sensing (CS), which is introduced as an efficient sampling (data capturing) method, is addressing this need. It is well-known that the signals, which belong to an ambient high-dimensional space, have much smaller dimensionality in an appropriate domain. CS taps into this principle and dramatically reduces the number of samples that is required to be captured to avoid any distortion in the information content of the data. …

Entanglement And Coherence In Classical And Quantum Optics, Kumel Kagalwala

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We explore the concepts of coherence and entanglement as they apply to both the classical and quantum natures of light. In the classical domain, we take inspiration from the tools and concepts developed in foundational quantum mechanics and quantum information science to gain a better understanding of classical coherence theory of light with multiple degrees of freedom (DoFs). First, we use polarization and spatial parity DoFs to demonstrate the notion of classical entanglement, and show that Bell's measure can serve as a useful tool in distinguishing between classical optical coherence theory. Second, we establish a methodical yet versatile approach called …

Band To Band Calibration And Relative Gain Analysis Of Satellite Sensors Using Deep Convective Clouds, Suman Bhatta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Two calibration techniques were developed in this research. First, a calibration technique, in which calibration was transferred to cirrus band and coastal aerosol band from well calibrated reflective bands of Landsat 8 using SCIAMACHY Deep Convective Cloud (DCC) spectra. Second, a novel method to derive relative gains using DCCs and improve the image quality of cirrus band scenes was developed. DCCs are very cold, bright clouds located in the tropopause layer. At small sun elevation and sensor viewing angles, they act as near Lambertian solar reflectors. They have very high signal to noise ratio and can easily be detected using …

Conservation Laws And Electromagnetic Interactions, Veerachart Kajorndejnukul

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Aside from energy, light carries linear and angular momenta that can be transferred to matter. The interaction between light and matter is governed by conservation laws that can manifest themselves as mechanical effects acting on both matter and light waves. This interaction permits remote, precise, and noninvasive manipulation and sensing at microscopic levels. In this dissertation, we demonstrated for the first time a complete set of opto-mechanical effects that are based on nonconservative forces and act at the interface between dielectric media. Without structuring the light field, forward action is provided by the conventional radiation pressure while a backward movement …

Performance Optimization Of Lateral-Mode Thin-Film Piezoelectric-On-Substrate Resonant Systems, Hedy Fatemi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The main focus of this dissertation is to characterize and improve the performance of thin-film piezoelectric-on-substrate (TPoS) lateral-mode resonators and filters. TPoS is a class of piezoelectric MEMS devices which benefits from the high coupling coefficient of the piezoelectric transduction mechanism while taking advantage of superior acoustic properties of a substrate. The use of lateral-mode TPoS designs allows for fabrication of dispersed-frequency filters on a single substrate, thus significantly reducing the size and manufacturing cost of devices. TPoS filters also offer a lower temperature coefficient of frequency, and better power handling capability compared to rival technologies all in a very …

Nanoscale Control Of Gap-Plasmon Enhanced Optical Processes, Chatdanai Lumdee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Surface plasmon resonances of metal nanostructures have been studied intensely in recent years. The strong plasmon-mediated electric field enhancement and field confinement well beyond the diffraction limit has been demonstrated to improve the performance of optical devices including ultrasensitive sensors, light emitters, and optical absorbers. A plasmon resonance mode of particular recent interest is the gap plasmon resonance that occurs on closely spaced metallic structures. In contrast to plasmon resonances supported by isolated metal nanostructures, coupled nanostructures provide additional spectral and spatial control over the plasmon resonance response. For example, the resonance frequencies of metal nanoparticle dimers depend strongly on …

Design Of Novel Devices And Circuits For Electrostatic Discharge Protection Applications In Advanced Semiconductor Technologies, Zhixin Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electrostatic Discharge (ESD), as a subset of Electrical Overstress (EOS), was reported to be in charge of more than 35% of failure in integrated circuits (ICs). Especially in the manufacturing process, the silicon wafer turns out to be a functional ICs after numerous physical, chemical and mechanical processes, each of which expose the sensitive and fragile ICs to ESD environment. In normal end-user applications, ESD from human and machine handling, surge and spike signals in the power supply, and wrong supplying signals, will probably cause severe damage to the ICs and even the whole systems. Generally, ESD protections are evaluated …

Characterization Of A Spiking Neuron Model Via A Linear Approach, Amirhossein Jabalameli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the past decade, characterizing spiking neuron models has been extensively researched as an essential issue in computational neuroscience. In this thesis, we examine the estimation problem of two different neuron models. In Chapter 2, We propose a modified Izhikevich model with an adaptive threshold. In our two-stage estimation approach, a linear least squares method and a linear model of the threshold are derived to predict the location of neuronal spikes. However, desired results are not obtained and the predicted model is unsuccessful in duplicating the spike locations. Chapter 3 is focused on the parameter estimation problem of a multi-timescale …

Photon Statistics In Disordered Lattices, Hasan Kondakci

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Propagation of coherent waves through disordered media, whether optical, acoustic, or radio waves, results in a spatially redistributed random intensity pattern known as speckle -- a statistical phenomenon. The subject of this dissertation is the statistics of monochromatic coherent light traversing disordered photonic lattices and its dependence on the disorder class, the level of disorder and the excitation configuration at the input. Throughout the dissertation, two disorder classes are considered, namely, diagonal and off-diagonal disorders. The latter exhibits disorder-immune chiral symmetry -- the appearance of the eigenmodes in skew-symmetric pairs and the corresponding eigenvalues in opposite signs. When a disordered …

Beam-Steerable And Reconfigurable Reflectarray Antennas For High Gain Space Applications, Kalyan Karnati

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reflectarray antennas uniquely combine the advantages of parabolic reflectors and phased array antennas. Comprised of planar structures similar to phased arrays and utilizing quasi-optical excitation similar to parabolic reflectors, reflectarray antennas provide beam steering without the need of complex and lossy feed networks. Chapter 1 discusses the basic theory of reflectarray and its design. A brief summary of previous work and current research status is also presented. The inherent advantages and drawbacks of the reflectarray are discussed. In chapter 2, a novel theoretical approach to extract the reflection coefficient of reflectarray unit cells is developed. The approach is applied to …

Nonlinear Optical Response Of Simple Molecules And Two-Photon Semiconductor Lasers, Matthew Reichert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates two long standing issues in nonlinear optics: complete characterization of the ultrafast dynamics of simple molecules, and the potential of a two-photon laser using a bulk semiconductor gain medium. Within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, nonlinear refraction in molecular liquids and gases can arise from both bound-electronic and nuclear origins. Knowledge of the magnitudes, temporal dynamics, polarization and spectral dependences of each of these mechanisms is important for many applications including filamentation, white-light continuum generation, all-optical switching, and nonlinear spectroscopy. In this work the nonlinear dynamics of molecules are investigated in both liquid and gas phase with the recently …

Towards Improving Human-Robot Interaction For Social Robots, Saad Khan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous robots interacting with humans in a social setting must consider the social-cultural environment when pursuing their objectives. Thus the social robot must perceive and understand the social cultural environment in order to be able to explain and predict the actions of its human interaction partners. This dissertation contributes to the emerging field of human-robot interaction for social robots in the following ways: 1. We used the social calculus technique based on culture sanctioned social metrics (CSSMs) to quantify, analyze and predict the behavior of the robot, human soldiers and the public perception in the Market Patrol peacekeeping scenario. 2. …

Resource Allocation And Load-Shedding Policies Based On Markov Decision Processes For Renewable Energy Generation And Storage, Edwards Jimenez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In modern power systems, renewable energy has become an increasingly popular form of energy generation as a result of all the rules and regulations that are being implemented towards achieving clean energy worldwide. However, clean energy can have drawbacks in several forms. Wind energy, for example can introduce intermittency. In this thesis, we discuss a method to deal with this intermittency. In particular, by shedding some specific amount of load we can avoid a total system breakdown of the entire power plant. The load shedding method discussed in this thesis utilizes a Markov Decision Process with backward policy iteration. This …