Engineering Commons^™

Hybrid Photovoltaic + Battery Energy System Grid-Tied Converter Capstone Review Thesis, Archer Taylor

University Honors Theses

Hybrid power converters present an opportunity to more efficiently harness energy from renewable sources. This paper reviews an undergraduate senior capstone project with the goal of designing and verifying the benefits of a hybrid converter, combining a photovoltaic array, battery energy system and a DC-AC inverter. The author recounts their experience throughout the 6 month period, detailing the research and design process followed by the prototype testing. Additionally, they reflect on the struggles of the capstone team and how to apply the learnings in the future.

Learning Approach For Fast Approximate Matrix Factorizations, Haiyan Yu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Efficiently computing an (approximate) orthonormal basis and low-rank approximation for the input data X plays a crucial role in data analysis. One of the most efficient algorithms for such tasks is the randomized algorithm, which proceeds by computing a projection XA with a random projection matrix A of much smaller size, and then computing the orthonormal basis as well as low-rank factorizations of the tall matrix XA. While a random matrix A is the de facto choice, in this work, we improve upon its performance by utilizing a learning approach to find an adaptive projection matrix A from a set …

A Soft-Switched Three-Port Dc-Dc Converter For A Pv/ Battery System, Mohamedelfatih Dosa

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis proposed a soft-switched three-port bidirectional DC-DC converter for managing the power flow of a photovoltaic (PV) and battery system. The proposed converter consists of three ports connected to a PV panel, battery, and load. These three ports are interfaced through the high-frequency transformer and use phase-shift control to achieve soft-switching for all converter switches. Compared with the traditional multiport converters, the proposed three-port converter uses the least number of power switches, and zero-voltage switching (ZVS). Simulation and experimental results validate the design and effectiveness of soft switching and power flow control. The converter can work in different scenarios …

Design, Manufacture, And Test Of A Hybrid Aerial-Ground Robotic Platform, William Garrett Willmon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A hybrid aerial-ground robotic platform allows for enhanced functionality combining most of the operational profiles of an aerial and ground vehicle with applications to intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), infrastructure inspection, emergency response, photography, etc. Motivated by this challenge, we designed, developed, and tested a prototype hybrid aerial-ground robotic vehicle capable of guidance, navigation, and control in the air and on the ground. The thesis focus is on the system design. As such, at first, we designed and analyzed the mechanical component to ensure durability. We then designed the electrical component to reduce overall weight and maximize battery life. We developed …

Analysis Of Three-Phase Rectifier Via Three Different Control Methods And Switch Power Loss Comparison, Yichao Wang

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Traditional uncontrolled or phase-controlled rectifiers have the defects of lower power factor and nontrivial higher harmonics which causes the low efficiency of power, bad power quality, and so on. However, PWM rectifiers overcome the drawbacks mentioned above. They reduce the higher harmonics yielding better sinusoidal current on the grid side, achieve unity power factor and bidirectional power flow, and have better dynamic performance. So, it is favored more by academia and widely applied in high-performance power electronics devices. In this paper, the PWM rectifier is analyzed and a comparison of the switch loss on three-phase rectifier using three different control …

Implementation Of Model-Free Adaptive Power Flow Control For Dual-Active-Bridge-Based Ac-Dc Converters, Qinghang Shen

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

With the rising energy consumption and environment destruction problems worldwide, the development of renewable energy and energy recapture methods to improve the energy utilization rate has become more important as two of the most efficient processes to solve those problems. Bidirectional AC/DC converter and its modulation strategies are widely used as the essential part of implementing bidirectional power conversion between power grid and energy storage systems. To improve the efficiency and accuracy of the power conversion within AC/DC converters, a stable, robust power flow control system with quick response and disturbance rejection ability is desired. This thesis proposes a model-free …

Memristive Architectures And Algorithms For Approximate Graph-Based Inference, Mohammad M.A. Taha

Dissertations and Theses

The goal of this thesis is to design fast, low-power, robust graph-based inference systems. Our approach to this is by using (1) in-memory computing, (2) approximate computing principles, and (3) memristive devices.

This work is motivated by the fact that conventional von Neumann architectures are not efficient for inference applications, mainly due to the data transfer bottleneck. Adding cache memories and using GPUs is a remedy, however, does not eliminate this bottleneck. In-memory computing is an alternative approach that performs all computations inside the memory, thus eliminating the data transfer bottleneck.

The memristor, which is a passive two-terminal device, is …

Smart Textiles As The Digital Interface Of The Future, Audra Beneux

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The growing field of smart textiles could change everyday life, adding an element of interactivity to commonly used items such as clothing and furniture. Smart textiles measure then respond to external stimuli. For scalability in the future, smart textiles must be produced using conventional textile manufacturing craftsmanship. The resulting textile must be durable and comfortable while retaining electrical capabilities. Smart textiles can be fabricating through embroidery, weaving, and knitting using conductive threads. Electronics can also be printed onto textiles. Researchers are also creating higher-order electronics, such as the transistor, on the fiber-level to make the technology in smart textiles as …

Absorptive Reflectionless Filters, Guy Barry Lemire

Dissertations and Theses

For many applications requiring some sort of signal filtering or signal conditioning, the filter requirements are usually approached with a single purpose in mind, which is to maximize both passband signal amplitude and stop band signal attenuation to the load with little to no thought given to what happens to the stop band signal energy. Many conventional filters have very poor impedance matching in the stopband resulting in reflected energy or large return loss (S₁₁). This reflected energy can then cause interactions with adjoining system components which do not in general respond well to spurious reflected energy and …

Experimental Evaluation Of Medium-Voltage Cascode Gallium Nitride (Gan) Devices For Bidirectional Dc–Dc Converters, Salah Salem H. Alharbi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaic (PV) cells and wind turbines, are rapidly implemented in DC microgrids, energy storage systems play an increasingly significant role in ensuring uninterrupted power supply and in supporting the reliability and stability of microgrid operations. Power electronics, especially bidirectional DC–DC converters, are essential parts in distributed energy storage and alternative energy systems because of their grid synchronization, DC power management, and bidirectional power flow capabilities. While there is increasing demand for more efficient, compact, and reliable power converters in numerous applications, most existing power converters are hindered by traditional silicon (Si) based semiconductors, which …

Silicon Compilation And Test For Dataflow Implementations In Gasp And Click, Swetha Mettala Gilla

Dissertations and Theses

Many modern computer systems are distributed over space. Well-known examples are the Internet of Things and IBM's TrueNorth for deep learning applications. At the Asynchronous Research Center (ARC) at Portland State University we build distributed hardware systems using self-timed computation and delay-insensitive communication. Where appropriate, self-timed hardware operations can reduce average and peak power, energy, latency, and electromagnetic interference. Alternatively, self-timed operations can increase throughput, tolerance to delay variations, scalability, and manufacturability.

The design of complex hardware systems requires design automation and support for test, debug, and product characterization.

This thesis focuses on design compilation and test support for dataflow …

Cross Calibration And Validation Of Landsat 8 Oli And Sentinel 2a Msi, M. M. Farhad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work describes a proposed radiometric cross calibration between the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Sentinel 2A Multispectral Instrument (MSI) sensors. The cross calibration procedure involves i) correction of the MSI data to account for spectral band differences with the OLI; and ii) correction of BRDF effects in the data from both sensors using a new model accounting for the view zenith/azimuth angles in addition to the solar zenith/view angles. Following application of the spectral and BRDF corrections, standard least-squares linear regression is used to determine the cross calibration gain and offset in each band. Uncertainties related to …

Development Of A Capacitive Photocurrent Scanning Microscope With Carrier Depletion Super-Resolution., Austin Levi Carver

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation discusses the development and refinement of a new two-dimensional imaging technique, funded in part through a NSF MRI equipment development grant. Capacitive-Photocurrent (CPC) spectroscopy allows for the probing of samples without the requirement of free-carrier collection. The CPC technique allows for the studying of various states within a material. With this electronic measurement technique, we developed a scanning technique, scanning-CPC, that provides two-dimensional material property images without requiring environments that must be high-vacuum, humidity-controlled, or temperature-controlled. This new technique also provides two-dimensional, electronic mapping without damaging samples. With this successful result, we then modified an existing resolution improving …

Voltage Controller For Simulating Transition Between Boost –Buck -Boost Converter, Aula Jameel Al-Kamil

Masters Theses

In the present work, a voltage tracking controller is developed for DC-DC Buck-Boost converter using software model. The software developed can track the voltage and the mode of operation (Buck or Boost), which depends on the value of the duty cycle ratio (D). The error between ��_{��������}(reference voltage) and output voltage is minimized by using step input as reference. The simulation results show that the designed software controller can successfully track the voltage with low error and with short settling time. The values for the Buck-Boost circuit components, the capacitor and the inductor, are tuned and selected so …

Solid State Drive, Shaun A. Steele

Electrical Engineering

This project documents the design and implementation of a solid state drive (SSD). SSDs are a non-volatile memory storage device that competes with hard disk drives. SSDs rely on flash memory, a type of non-volatile memory that is electrically erased and programmed. The appeal of SSDs lies in the fact that they allow a fast, reliable, and durable memory storage device. The goal of this project is to have a working external SSD built from scratch.

Development Of An Oxygen Saturation Monitoring System By Embedded Electronics, Manikandan Venkatesan Gomathy

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Measuring Oxygenation of blood (SaO2) plays a vital role in patient’s health monitoring. This is often measured by pulse oximeter, which is standard measure during anesthesia, asthma, operative and post-operative recoveries. Despite all, monitoring Oxygen level is necessary for infants with respiratory problems, old people, and pregnant women and in other critical situations.

This paper discusses the process of calculating the level of oxygen in blood and heart-rate detection using a non-invasive photo plethysmography also called as pulsoximeter using the MSP430FG437 microcontroller (MCU). The probe uses infrared lights to measure and should be in physical contact with any peripheral points …

Design And Demonstration Of A Physical, Multi-Agent Autonomous Controller Testbed, Eric A. Nees

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Navigation and control algorithms are often tested in a simulated environment before being deployed in physical systems. Although simulated environments provide a controlled setting to carefully evaluate performance, the designed scenarios are sometimes unrealistically ideal and may unintentionally omit circumstances or unmodeled interactions. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and practical demonstration of a physical testbed that enables the testing of multi-agent autonomous strategies in hardware on a small scale. Testing the algorithms at scale allows real-time exploration of the interaction and performance of both human and autonomous algorithms under non-ideal conditions while avoiding the costs and risks of full-scale, …

Effects Of The Kinematic Model On Forward-Model Based Spotlight Sar Ecm, David T. Pyles

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides a high-resolution remote image formation capability for airborne platforms. SAR image formation processes exploit the amplitude, time, and frequency shifts that occur in the transmitted waveform due to electromagnetic propagation and scattering. These shifts are predictable through the SAR forward model which is dependent on the waveform parameters and emitter flight path. The approach to develop an electronic countermeasure (ECM) system that is founded on the SAR forward model implies that the ECM system should alter the radar's waveform in a manner that produces the same amplitude, time, and frequency shifts that a real …

Layout Implementation Of A 10-Bit 1.2 Gs/S Digital-To-Analog Converter In 90nm Cmos, Vinay Kumar Chunchu

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Digital-to-analog converters are the interface circuits between digital and analog domains. They are used in data communication applications and different sorts of applications where transformation amongst digital and analog signals is needed. High-speed data converters are needed to match the bandwidth demands of the present-day communication systems. This thesis presents the layout implementation of a 10-bit current steering DAC with a sampling rate of about 1.2 GS/s using CMOS 90 nm technology. Current steering DAC topology is used in high-speed applications. The DAC in this thesis is designed using a segmented architecture in which 4 LSB current cells are binary …

Design Of An 8-Bit Successive Approximation Pipelined Analog To Digital Converter (Sap-Adc) In 90 Nm Cmos, Vivek Kotti

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Analog to Digital Converters bridge the gap between physical world and digital signal processing. Most times analog signals received from the real world needs to be amplified and converted to digital to impart various signal enhancements to the received signal. The digital signal is much suitable to operate on with less noise and well defined logic levels when compared to continuously varying analog signal. Communication systems demand ever-increasing bandwidth which unfortunately has been a huge limitation for present day ADCs. Hence, an architecture which combines the accuracy of a SAR -ADC with the concept of pipelining to increase the bandwidth …

A 13t Single-Ended Low Power Sram Using Schmitt-Trigger And Write-Assist, Praneeth Namala

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

SRAMs are widely used in application based systems like medical instruments, portable electronic devices from caches to registers. Technology scaling of transistor into nanometer regime has substantially increased memory density that occupies large silicon area in today's IC's and consumes significant amount of active and leakage power. So, design requirements and challenges such as memory write and read speed, leakage power, noise margin and process-voltage-temperature (PVT) variations also significantly increase. In this thesis, a 13T single-ended low power SRAM using Schmitt-Trigger and write-assist technique is presented. It enhances read static noise margin, write-1 and read-0 access time, specifically at low …

Conceptual Understanding Of Threshold Concepts Of Electrical Phenomena: Mental Models Of Senior Undergraduates In Electrical Engineering, Mark T. Carnes

Open Access Dissertations

Every field of study has a set of domain-specific concepts that anyone who desires to work in that field must know and understand. Most students who pursue university degrees in engineering trust that their education is designed to provide them with this knowledge. But does it? In electrical engineering (EE), conceptual understanding of electrical phenomena has rarely been addressed. Even though the presumed goal of instructors and students alike is to learn the concepts of electrical phenomena well enough to be able to use the concepts to design useful things, it is difficult to determine whether this goal is being …

Neurosim: Naturally Extensible, Unique Risc Operation Simulator, David Eric Mcneil

Graduate Theses - Electrical and Computer Engineering

The NEUROSim framework consists of a compiler, assembler, and cycle-accurate processor simulator to facilitate computer architecture research. This framework provides a core instruction set common to many applications and a simulated datapath capable of executing these instructions. However, the core contribution of NEUROSim is its exible and extensible design allowing for the addition of instructions and architecture changes which target aspecic application. The NEUROSim framework is presented through the analysis of many system design decisions including execution forwarding, control change detection, FPU configuration, loop unrolling, recursive functions, self modifying code, branch predictors, and cache architectures. To demonstrate its exible nature, …

A Wavelet Transform Module For A Speech Recognition Virtual Machine, Euisung Kim

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This work explores the trade-offs between time and frequency information during the feature extraction process of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system using wavelet transform (WT) features instead of Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and the benefits of combining the WTs and the MFCCs as inputs to an ASR system. A virtual machine from the Speech Recognition Virtual Kitchen resource (www.speechkitchen.org) is used as the context for implementing a wavelet signal processing module in a speech recognition system. Contributions include a comparison of MFCCs and WT features on small and large vocabulary tasks, application of combined MFCC and WT features on …

Hand Pattern Recognition Using Smart Band, Theerth Raj Munusamy

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Importance of gesture recognition has widely spread around the world. Many research strategies have been proposed to study and recognize gestures, especially facial and hand gestures. Distinguishing and recognizing hand gestures is vital in hotspot fields such as bionic parts, powered exoskeleton, diagnosing muscle disorders, etc. Recognizing such gesture patterns can also create a stress-free and fancy user interface for mobile phones, gaming consoles and other such devices.

The objective is to design a simple yet efficient wearable hand gesture recognizing system. This thesis also shows that by taking both EMG and accelerometer data into account, can improve the …

High Speed Clock Glitching, Santosh Desiraju

ETD Archive

In recent times, hardware security has drawn a lot of interest in the research community. With physical proximity to the target devices, various fault injection hardware attack methods have been proposed and tested to alter their functionality and trigger behavior not intended by the design. There are various types of faults that can be injected depending on the parameters being used and the level at which the device is tampered with. The literature describes various fault models to inject faults in clock of the target but there are no publications on overclocking circuits for fault injection. The proposed method bridges …

Monitoring System For Electric Motors, Sean Waples

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Induction motors are key to many applications and are one of the most commonly used electric devices. Currently, induction motor fault detection schemes are limited in features and computational power. With current technology, fault detection algorithms are operating in embedded systems and run on embedded processors. These processors do not have the computation power and functionality that more advanced computer systems have, which is the source of the issue. With the recent rise in cloud computing and connected devices, it is possible to build an induction motor monitoring system with a much greater set of features and possibilities.

Wirelesseeg: Data Aquisition + Handheld Device, Michael Dylan Snowden, Madeline Threatt, Brent Mcferrin, David Platillero, Karsten Solies, Lindsey Hopf

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Electrostatically Controlled Enzymatic Reaction, Metabolic Processes And Microbial Generation Of Electric Power, Yang Song

ETD Archive

This thesis shows that electric fields can be used to control electron transport in biological systems and improve the performance of biological devices using an external gating voltage. It has recently been shown that an ultrasensitive detection method based on electric field effect can be used to control the kinetics of enzymatic conversion of glucose. The first part of the thesis is a mechanistic study of the enzyme catalyzed conversion of glucose to gluconolactone using the field effect enzymatic detection (FEED) technique. Use of a voltage controlled enzymatic system decreased electrons tunnel between electrode and active center of glucose oxidase …

Bio-Inspired Optimization Of Ultra-Wideband Patch Antennas Using Graphics Processing Unit Acceleration, Brian Vyhnalek

ETD Archive

Ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless systems have recently gained considerable attention as effective communications platforms with the properties of low power and high data rates. Applications of UWB such as wireless USB put size constraints on the antenna, however, which can be very dicult to meet using typical narrow band antenna designs. The aim of this thesis is to show how bio-inspired evolutionary optimization algorithms, in particular genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and biogeography-based optimization (BBO) can produce novel UWB planar patch antenna designs that meet a size constraint of a 10 mm 10 mm patch. Each potential antenna design …