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Supercapacitor Power Management Module, Michael Brooks, Anderson Fu, Brett Kehoe
Supercapacitor Power Management Module, Michael Brooks, Anderson Fu, Brett Kehoe
Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses
The purpose of this senior design project is to create a charge management and output converting power module incorporating an array of supercapacitors as the energy storage medium. Conventional energy storage components, such as lithium-ion batteries, use electrochemical reactions to store and release electrons into a system. These batteries are slow to charge, highly toxic to the environment and delicate compared too many of the systems they are used in. Supercapacitors are noticeably more rugged and last hundreds to thousands of times longer than the average chemical reaction-based batteries we are used to using while capable of charging in less …
Cubesat Electronic Power System, Benjamin Lynch, Callie Wallace
Cubesat Electronic Power System, Benjamin Lynch, Callie Wallace
Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses
Cube Satellites are small satellites used by NASA and other non-governmental space companies as a cost-effective means to get a payload into space to perform research and develop new technologies. The Robotic Systems Lab at Santa Clara University has designed and launched several Cube Satellites over the last ten years. We will be continuing the design of a 3U CubeSat began by a senior design team last year. The goal of this project is to design and build an electronic power system (EPS) for the CubeSat. The EPS must be able to power all system components, including the communication board, …
Wireless Impact Sensing Headband - W.I.S.H., Ryan Daly, Doug Furstinger, Tim Sashegyi, Nicklaus Schmidt, Mihir Shah
Wireless Impact Sensing Headband - W.I.S.H., Ryan Daly, Doug Furstinger, Tim Sashegyi, Nicklaus Schmidt, Mihir Shah
Mechanical Engineering Senior Theses
The prevalence of undiagnosed head injuries in the athletic world, and their associated health risks, is too great to ignore. This is especially true in non-helmeted sports where the availability of impact monitoring technologies is few and far between. In this paper, we discuss our wireless impact sensing headband technology that aids in the awareness and detection of potential concussions, from inception through design completion. Through the use of a custom-built validation system capable of simulating impact collisions, along with a series of experiments and revisions, our team was able to build a device that can sense and transmit data …
Distributed Smart Camera Network For Safety And Security, Nathan Fox, Matthew Kelley, Christopher Rapa, Christopher Yarp
Distributed Smart Camera Network For Safety And Security, Nathan Fox, Matthew Kelley, Christopher Rapa, Christopher Yarp
Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses
Current CCTV surveillance solutions are generally retrospective tools. Because real time use of CCTV requires human monitors to view a potentially exorbitant number of video feeds, CCTV is usually only useful after an incident has occurred. However, new technologies are making it possible for machines to perform some tasks that previously required a human monitor. The proposed project seeks to augment existing CCTV systems with behavioral analytics. The system uses a series of cameras, FPGAs, and computers to track object movement throughout a facility. This information is used to build a model of normal movement. Object movements are compared against …
Greenmission: An Off-Grid Energy System, Richard Dobbins, Andrew Izawa, Tyler Marting, John Nolan
Greenmission: An Off-Grid Energy System, Richard Dobbins, Andrew Izawa, Tyler Marting, John Nolan
Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses
In alignment with Santa Clara University's sustainability ideology, the outdoor science school WaldenWest desired to further its students' education through a greenhouse with working electricity. Following greenhouse purchase and assembly, underground wiring for AC, DC and Ethernet lines were sized and installed. A substation was then designed and built in a designated shed, integrating wind turbines and photovoltaics rom past capstone projects. New charge controllers, batteries and circuit breakers were urchased and configured for the system. Worst-case electrical load and solar shading analyses also revealed that these older energy sources were collectively inadequate, so a secondary solar array was designed …
Pb: Project Battery - A Portable In-Home Power System, Devin Blaney, Brian Fahey, Amanda Tran
Pb: Project Battery - A Portable In-Home Power System, Devin Blaney, Brian Fahey, Amanda Tran
Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses
Renewable energy resources are abundant in most developing countries. These sources include solar energy, wind power, geothermal energy, and biomass. Even though these sources are readily available, most villages in these developing countries do not have access to power in their homes because electricity grid extensions are often not affordable. This leaves the people in developing countries lacking resources that most of us take for granted here in the US. They don't have access to electrical power and light. This forces the people of these areas to use toxic kerosene lamps, which pollute the environment and increase health issues. This …
Arsenic Detection Project: Electronics, Anthony Clemetson, John Barth
Arsenic Detection Project: Electronics, Anthony Clemetson, John Barth
Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses
This project is a collaboration with a team of bioengineers to adapt the functionality of laboratory equipment onto a platform which could be used in the field to determine the concentration levels of toxins in ground water. To this end, using a set of printed electrodes, a device was designed and fabricated with the constraints of field use in mind: low power, low cost, with a mobile user interface. An Android phone served as the mobile user interface, and also as the power supply for the circuit and microcontroller that performed the test. This circuit applied a stimulus voltage across …
Biogeography-Based Optimization For Combinatorial Problems And Complex Systems, Dawei Du
Biogeography-Based Optimization For Combinatorial Problems And Complex Systems, Dawei Du
ETD Archive
Biogeography-based optimization (BBO) is a heuristic evolutionary algorithm that has shown good performance on many problems. In this dissertation, three problem1s 1 are researched for BBO: convergence speed and optimal solution convergence of BBO,1 1BBO application to combinatorial problems, and BBO application to complex systems. The first problem is to analyze BBO from two perspectives: how the components of BBO affect its convergence speed and the reason that BBO converges to the optimal solution. For the first perspective, which is convergence speed, we analyze the two essential components of BBO -- population construction and information sharing. For the second perspective, …
Hysteretic Controlled Dc-Dc Converters, Shweta Chauhan
Hysteretic Controlled Dc-Dc Converters, Shweta Chauhan
Browse all Theses and Dissertations
Switched-mode DC-DC converters are widely used in applications requiring step-up and step-down of DC voltages or currents. These converters find their use in portable applications such as laptops and smart phones, radio-frequency power amplifiers, as light emitting diode (LED) drivers, etc. The power converters consist of a switching network, energy storage elements such as inductors and capacitors, and a load resistor. Transformers are used in converters, which require isolation. The switching network comprises of MOSFETs and diodes. With improvement in the VLSI technology, smaller MOSFETs with increased power handling capability are pushing the speed of operation of these power converters …
16-Bit Digital Adder Design In 250nm And 64-Bit Digital Comparator Design In 90nm Cmos Technologies, Naga Venkata Vijaya Krishna Boppana
16-Bit Digital Adder Design In 250nm And 64-Bit Digital Comparator Design In 90nm Cmos Technologies, Naga Venkata Vijaya Krishna Boppana
Browse all Theses and Dissertations
High speed, low power, and area efficient adders and comparators continue to play a key role in hardware implementation of digital signal processing applications. Adders based on Complimentary Pass Transistor Logic (CPL) are power and area efficient, but are slower compared to Square Root Carry Select (SQRT-CS) based adders. This thesis demonstrates a unique custom designed 16-bit adder in 250-nm CMOS technology to obtain fast and power/area efficient features by combining CPL and CS logic. Comparing the results obtained for proposed 16-bit Linear CPL/CS adder with the BEC (Binary Excess-1 Code) based low power SQRT-CS adder, the delay is reduced …
6 Ghz Rf Cmos Active Inductor Band Pass Filter Design And Process Variation Detection, Shuo Li
6 Ghz Rf Cmos Active Inductor Band Pass Filter Design And Process Variation Detection, Shuo Li
Browse all Theses and Dissertations
A 90nm CMOS active inductor band pass filter with automatic peak detection is demonstrated in this thesis. The active inductor band pass filter has a better performance than the passive band pass filter in on-chip circuit design, due to small area, larger gain and tunable frequency. However, process variation makes the active inductor band pass filter hard to be used widely in many applications. To settle this issue, an automatic voltage peak detector is introduced to detect the process variation direction and hope to be used to control the active inductor band pass filter center frequency and gain. The designed …
Multi-Finger Mosfet Low Noise Amplifier Performance Analysis, Xiaomeng Zhang
Multi-Finger Mosfet Low Noise Amplifier Performance Analysis, Xiaomeng Zhang
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Multi-finger layout technique has been extensively used in Nano-scale CMOS circuit design due to the increased circuit performance compared to a single finger layout. However choosing a finger width (W_f) and number of fingers (N_f) to optimize circuit performance is a challenging problem. In this thesis, the performances of 2.4GHz and 6.0GHz single ended low noise amplifiers (LNA) with fixed total transistor widths in 90nm CMOS technology are analyzed as function of number of fingers, bias voltage (V_bias) and channel length (L). The results show that the drain to source current, transconductance and effective gate capacitance increase with increasing number …
Impact Of Sar Image Formation Quality On Target Separability, Cody A. Lawyer
Impact Of Sar Image Formation Quality On Target Separability, Cody A. Lawyer
Browse all Theses and Dissertations
The polar format algorithm (PFA) allows the use of computationally efficient fast Fourier transforms in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image formation, but introduces phase errors when making the far-field approximations that facilitate this approach. The phase errors cause spatially variant distortion and defocus in the formed image. These effects may complicate target recognition applications. To limit the impact of defocus, scene size is usually limited such that the maximum quadratic phase error within an image falls below some threshold. This thesis looks at how distortion and defocus affects the classification of targets, with the hope of developing an application-driven scene …
Adaptive I/Q Mismatch Compensation For Wideband Receiver, Linda Zhu
Adaptive I/Q Mismatch Compensation For Wideband Receiver, Linda Zhu
Browse all Theses and Dissertations
Wide working bandwidth is one of the main concerns in digital wideband receiver. The traditional digital receiver covers only one Nyquist zone, which bandwidth range is from DC to half of the sampling frequency. By utilizing in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) channels, wideband receiver is able to double the working bandwidth, which covers from DC to half of the sampling frequency and also from negative half of the sampling frequency to DC. However, I/Q mismatch in reality introduces unwanted signals, which significantly reduce the system performance and the quality of the received signals. In this thesis, an adaptive I/Q mismatch compensation technique is …