Engineering Commons^™

14-08 Big Data Analytics To Aid Developing Livable Communities, Li Yang, Hyunkeun Cho, Jun-Seok Oh

Transportation Research Center Reports

In transportation, ubiquitous deployment of low-cost sensors combined with powerful computer hardware and high-speed network makes big data available. USDOT defines big data research in transportation as a number of advanced techniques applied to the capture, management and analysis of very large and diverse volumes of data. Data in transportation are usually well organized into tables and are characterized by relatively low dimensionality and yet huge numbers of records. Therefore, big data research in transportation has unique challenges on how to effectively process huge amounts of data records and data streams. The purpose of this study is to conduct research …

Implications Of Electric Vehicles On Gasoline Tax Revenues, Florida Solar Energy Center, Kevin Schleith

FSEC Energy Research Center®

This report summarizes the results of research conducted to determine if current and near future EV sales will have an impact on gasoline (gas) tax revenues as part of the Federal Highway Trust Fund (HTF). Gasoline taxes account for $31.1 billion or about 87% of the HTF. The project results were accomplished through a review of existing industry and government reports that detail fuel tax revenues and through analysis of EV sales from 2010 to 2015.

System-Wide Prediction Of General, All-Cause, Preventable Hospital Readmissions, Ken Musselman, Brandon Pope, Steve Witz, Zhiyi Tian, Lingsong Zhang, Linda Leon, Ann Davis

RCHE Publications

Existing studies of hospital readmissions typically focus on specific diagnoses, age groups, discharge dispositions, payer classes, or hospitals, and often use small samples. It is not clear how predictive models generated from such studies generalize across diseases, hospitals, or time periods. In this study, a logistic regression model of readmission risk within 30 days based on hospital administrative data was constructed and validated across hospitals and time periods. The hospitals included both general and specialty hospitals such as long-term care, women’s, and children’s hospitals. The administrative data included information on patient’s demographics, diagnoses, procedures, and discharge disposition. Derivation and validation …

Modeling And Experimental Demonstration Of A Hopfield Network Analog-To-Digital Converter With Hybrid Cmos/Memristor Circuits, Xinjie Guo, Farnood Merrikh-Bayat, Ligang Gao, Brian D. Hoskins, Fabien Alibart, Bernabe Linares-Barranco, Luke Theogarajan, Christof Teuscher, Dmitri B. Strukov

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this work was to demonstrate the feasibility of building recurrent artificial neural networks with hybrid complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)/memristor circuits. To do so, we modeled a Hopfield network implementing an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with up to 8 bits of precision. Major shortcomings affecting the ADC's precision, such as the non-ideal behavior of CMOS circuitry and the specific limitations of memristors, were investigated and an effective solution was proposed, capitalizing on the in-field programmability of memristors. The theoretical work was validated experimentally by demonstrating the successful operation of a 4-bit ADC circuit implemented with discrete Pt/TiO_{2− …}

Autonomous Pipeline Monitoring And Maintenance System: A Rfid-Based Approach, Jong-Hoon Kim, Gokarna Sharma, Noureddine Boudriga, S.S. Iyengar, Nagarajan Prabakar

School of Computing and Information Sciences

Pipeline networks are one of the key infrastructures of our modern life. Proactive monitoring and frequent inspection of pipeline networks are very important for sustaining their safe and efficient functionalities. Existing monitoring and maintenance approaches are costly and inefficient because pipelines can be installed in large scale and in an inaccessible and hazardous environment. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID)-based Autonomous Maintenance system for Pipelines, called RAMP, which combines robotic, sensing, and RFID technologies for efficient and accurate inspection, corrective reparation, and precise geo-location information. RAMP can provide not only economical and scalable remedy …

Direct Numerical Simulation Of Cylindrical Particle-Laden Gravity Currents, ‪Nadim Zgheib, Thomas Bonometti, S. Balachandar

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present results from direct numerical simulations (DNS) of cylindrical particle-laden gravity currents. We consider the case of a full depth release with monodisperse particles at a dilute concentration where particle–particle interactions may be neglected. The disperse phase is treated as a continuum and a two-fluid formulation is adopted. We present results from two simulations at Reynolds numbers of 3450 and 10,000. Our results are in good agreement with previously reported experiments and theoretical models. At early times in the simulations, we observe a set of rolled up vortices that advance at varying speeds. These Kelvin–Helmholtz (K–H) vortex tubes are …

Mechanical Engineering News, Georgia Southern University

Mechanical Engineering News (2013-2023)

• Georgia Southern Research Focus Prompts R2 Carnegie Designation

Mapping Chemical Selection Pathways For Designing Multicomponent Alloys: An Informatics Framework For Materials Design, Srinkant Srinivasan, Scott R. Broderick, Ruifeng Zhang, Amrita Mishra, Susan B. Sinnott, Surendra Saxena, James M. Lebeau, Krishna Rajan

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering

A data driven methodology is developed for tracking the collective influence of the multiple attributes of alloying elements on both thermodynamic and mechanical properties of metal alloys. Cobalt-based superalloys are used as a template to demonstrate the approach. By mapping the high dimensional nature of the systematics of elemental data embedded in the periodic table into the form of a network graph, one can guide targeted first principles calculations that identify the influence of specific elements on phase stability, crystal structure and elastic properties. This provides a fundamentally new means to rapidly identify new stable alloy chemistries with enhanced high …

120 Seconds, Kari Sandouka

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Posting about living with impact from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/120-seconds/

Turning An Organic Semiconductor Into A Low-Resistance Material By Ion Implantation, Beatrice Fraboni, Alessandra Scidà, Piero Cosseddu, Yongqiang Wang, Michael Nastasi, Silvia Milita, Annalisa Bonfiglio

Nebraska Center for Energy Sciences Research: Publications

We report on the effects of low energy ion implantation on thin films of pentacene, carried out to investigate the efficacy of this process in the fabrication of organic electronic devices. Two different ions, Ne and N, have been implanted and compared, to assess the effects of different reactivity within the hydrocarbon matrix. Strong modification of the electrical conductivity, stable in time, is observed following ion implantation. This effect is significantly larger for N implants (up to six orders of magnitude), which are shown to introduce stable charged species within the hydrocarbon matrix, not only damage as is the case …

Development And Preliminary Evaluation Of A Spray Deposition Sensing System For Improving Pesticide Application, Melissa A. Kesterson, Joe D. Luck, Michael P. Sama

Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Faculty Publications

An electronic, resistance-based sensor array and data acquisition system was developed to measure spray deposition from hydraulic nozzles. The sensor surface consisted of several parallel tin plated copper traces of varying widths with varying gap widths. The system contained an embedded microprocessor to monitor output voltage corresponding to spray deposition every second. In addition, a wireless module was used to transmit the voltage values to a remote laptop. Tests were conducted in two stages to evaluate the performance of the sensor array in an attempt to quantify the spray deposition. Initial tests utilized manual droplet placement on the sensor surface …

Pathological Brain Detection By A Novel Image Feature—Fractional Fourier Entropy, Shuihua Wang, Yudong Zhang, Xiaojun Yang, Ping Sun, Zhengchao Dong, Aijun Lu, Ti-Fei Yuan

Publications and Research

Aim: To detect pathological brain conditions early is a core procedure for patients so as to have enough time for treatment. Traditional manual detection is either cumbersome, or expensive, or time-consuming. We aim to offer a system that can automatically identify pathological brain images in this paper.Method: We propose a novel image feature, viz., Fractional Fourier Entropy (FRFE), which is based on the combination of Fractional Fourier Transform(FRFT) and Shannon entropy. Afterwards, the Welch’s t-test (WTT) and Mahalanobis distance (MD) were harnessed to select distinguishing features. Finally, we introduced an advanced classifier: twin support vector machine (TSVM). Results: A 10 …

A Model Microfluidics-Based System For The Human And Mouse Retina., Shawn Mishra, Ankush Thakur, Stephen Redenti, Maribel Vazquez

Publications and Research

The application of microfluidics technologies to the study of retinal function and response holds great promise for development of new and improved treatments for patients with degenerative retinal diseases. Restoration of vision via retinal transplantation therapy has been severely limited by the low numbers of motile cells observed post transplantation. Using modern soft lithographic techniques, we have developed the μRetina, a novel and convenient biomimetic microfluidics device capable of examing the migratory behavior of retinal lineage cells within biomimetic geometries of the human and mouse retina. Coupled computer simulations and experimental validations were used to characterize and confirm the formation …

Electrical & Computer Engineering News, Georgia Southern University

Electrical & Computer Engineering News (2014-2023)

• Intelligent Vehicles Research Presented at 2015 GURC Conference

From Boolean Equalities To Constraints, Sergio Antoy, Michael Hanus

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although functional as well as logic languages use equality to discriminate between logically different cases, the operational meaning of equality is different in such languages. Functional languages reduce equational expressions to their Boolean values, True or False, logic languages use unification to check the validity only and fail otherwise. Consequently, the language Curry, which amalgamates functional and logic programming features, offers two kinds of equational expressions so that the programmer has to distinguish between these uses. We show that this distinction can be avoided by providing an analysis and transformation method that automatically selects the appropriate operation. Without this distinction …

A General-Purpose Multiphase/Multispecies Model To Predict The Spread, Percutaneous Hazard, And Contact Dynamics For Nonporous And Porous Substrates And Membranes, Homayun K. Navaz, Ali R. Zand, Amir Gat, Theresa S. Atkinson

Mechanical Engineering Publications

A computational model to solve the coupled transport equations with chemical reaction and phase change for a liquid sessile droplet or the contact and spread of a sessile droplet between two approaching porous or non-porous surfaces, is developed. The model is general therefore it can be applied to toxic chemicals (contact hazard), drug delivery through porous organs and membranes, combustion processes within porous material, and liquid movements in the ground. The equation of motion and the spread of the incompressible liquid available on the primary surface for transfer into the contacting surface while reacting with other chemicals (or water) and/or …

Novel Iron-Based Ternary Amorphous Oxide Semiconductor With Very High Transparency, Electronic Conductivity, And Mobility, A. Malasi, H. Taz, M. Patel, B. Lawrie, R. Pooser, A. Baddorf, G. Duscher, Ramki Kalyanaraman

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Materials Science & Engineering

Here we report that ternary metal oxides of type (Me)2O3 with the primary metal (Me) constituent being Fe (66 atomic (at.) %) along with the two Lanthanide elements Tb (10 at.%) and Dy (24 at.%) can show excellent semiconducting transport properties. Thin films prepared by pulsed laser deposition at room temperature followed by ambient oxidation showed very high electronic conductivity (>5 × 104 S/m) and Hall mobility (>30 cm2/V-s). These films had an amorphous microstructure which was stable to at least 500 °C and large optical transparency with a direct band gap of 2.85 ± 0.14 eV. This …

Evaluation Of Viirs Land Surface Temperature Using Crest-Safe Air, Snow Surface, And Soil Temperature Data, Carlos L. Pérez Díaz, Tarendra Lakhankar, Peter Romanov, Reza Khanbilvardi, Yunyue Yu

Publications and Research

In this study, the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Land Surface Temperature (LST) Environmental Data Record (EDR) was evaluated against snow surface (T-skin) and near-surface air temperature (T-air) ground observations recorded at the Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Center—Snow Analysis and Field Experiment (CREST-SAFE), located in Caribou, ME, USA during the winters of 2013 and 2014. The satellite LST corroboration of snow-covered areas is imperative because high-latitude regions are often physically inaccessible and there is a need to complement the data from the existing meteorological station networks. T-skin is not a standard meteorological parameter commonly observed at synoptic …

Ergonomic Analysis Of Mobile Cart–Assisted Stocking Activities Using Electromyography, Sohyung Cho

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Workers in grocery stores are exposed to numerous musculoskeletal risks that can be reduced using assistive devices while performing stocking tasks. A regional grocery store has recently deployed a mobile cart without comprehension of its ergonomic impact on workers, which this article investigates using normalized electromyography data (%MVC). This article studies not only ergonomic impact based on %MVC values but also work performance represented by a muscle force metric (MFM). The results from this study showed highest muscle groups in %MVC and MFM were the erector spinae and triceps. Interestingly, muscle activations on erector spinae were reduced when mobile cart …

Electronic Musical Instrument To Generate Musical Tones To Imitate A Stringed Instrument, Mizuki Nakagawa, Ikuo Tanaka, Shun Takai

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Provided are an electronic musical instrument, computer storage device, and method for generating tone. A sound source in an electronic musical instrument generates a first tone at a first pitch in response to a first tone generation instruction received by an input device of the electronic musical instrument. A second tone generation instruction is received to generate a second tone at a second pitch while generating the first tone at the sound source. A determination is made of a pitch difference of the first and the second pitches. The sound source is controlled to generate the second tone and to …

Multi-Criteria Evaluation Of Cmip5 Gcms For Climate Change Impact Analysis, Ali Ahmadalipour, Arun Rana, Hamid Moradkhani, Ashish Sharma

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Climate change is expected to have severe impacts on global hydrological cycle along with food-water-energy nexus. Currently, there are many climate models used in predicting important climatic variables. Though there have been advances in the field, there are still many problems to be resolved related to reliability, uncertainty, and computing needs, among many others. In the present work, we have analyzed performance of 20 different global climate models (GCMs) from Climate Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) dataset over the Columbia River Basin (CRB) in the Pacific Northwest USA. We demonstrate a statistical multicriteria approach, using univariate and multivariate techniques, …

High Capacity Silicon Electrodes With Nafion As Binders For Lithium-Ion Batteries, Jiagang Xu, Qinglin Zhang, Yang-Tse Cheng

Chemical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications

Silicon is capable of delivering a high theoretical specific capacity of 3579 mAh g⁻¹ which is about 10 times higher than that of the state-of-the-art graphite based negative electrodes for lithium-ion batteries. However, the poor cycle life of silicon electrodes, caused by the large volumetric strain during cycling, limits the commercialization of silicon electrodes. As one of the essential components, the polymeric binder is critical to the performance and durability of lithium-ion batteries as it keeps the integrity of electrodes, maintains conductive path and must be stable in the electrolyte. In this work, we demonstrate that electrodes consisting of …

Evolution Of Non-Metallic Inclusions In Foundry Steel Casting Processes, Marc Harris, Von Richards, Ronald J. O'Malley, Semen Naumovich Lekakh

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The evolution of nonmetallic inclusions was examined for 4320 steel at an industrial steel foundry. The steel was followed from electric arc furnace melting through ladle refining to final casting. Timed sampling was performed at all stages of the process. Samples were analyzed using an automated SEM/EDS system. The overall evolution of oxide inclusions in terms of nucleation, growth, and flotation during liquid processing was studied using area fraction and average diameter. Chemical composition evolution was observed using a joint ternary plotting tool developed under this program. It was found that the use of zirconium as an addition for nitrogen/oxygen …

Gpu Accelerated On-The-Fly Reachability Checking, Zhimin Wu, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jianqi Shi, Shengchao Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking suffers from the infamous state space explosion problem. In this paper, we propose an approach, named GPURC, to utilize the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to speed up the reachability verification. The key idea is to achieve a dynamic load balancing so that the many cores in GPUs are fully utilized during the state space exploration.To this end, we firstly construct a compact data encoding of the input transition systems to reduce the memory cost and fit the calculation in GPUs. To support a large number of concurrent components, we propose a multi-integer encoding with conflict-release accessing approach. We …

All Your Sessions Are Belong To Us: Investigating Authenticator Leakage Through Backup Channels On Android, Guangdong Bai, Jun Sun, Jianliang Wu, Quanqi Ye, Li Li, Jin Song Dong, Shanqing Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Security of authentication protocols heavily relies on the confidentiality of credentials (or authenticators) like passwords and session IDs. However, unlike browser-based web applications for which highly evolved browsers manage the authenticators, Android apps have to construct their own management. We find that most apps simply locate their authenticators into the persistent storage and entrust underlying Android OS for mediation. Consequently, these authenticators can be leaked through compromised backup channels. In this work, we conduct the first systematic investigation on this previously overlooked attack vector. We find that nearly all backup apps on Google Play inadvertently expose backup data to any …

Information Technology News, Georgia Southern University

Information Technology News (2012-2023)

• IT Students Win 1st Place & Best in Show in Mobile App Competition

Digital Energy Networks: A Post Occupancy Evaluation And Appraisal Of An Intelligent Low Energy Lighting System, Anthony Colohan, Joseph Teehan, Keith Sunderland, Martin Barrett, James Preston

Conference Papers

The reduction in the electrical power requirements of LED lighting and the coinciding advancements in digital technology have now enabled luminaires to be powered and controlled exclusively over safety extra low voltage (SELV) wiring systems. The implementation of LED luminaires powered via a centralised 48 Volt DC low-latency communication network, with the capability to gather real-time data, has provided the potential to yield considerable electrical energy savings within a building. This paper will present an appraisal of this technology and will examine the technologies potential to make electrical energy savings, improve the quality of lighting and achieve cost savings on …

College Of Engineering News, Georgia Southern University

Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering & Computing News (2012-2023)

• IT Students Win Best in Show
• Eagle Motorsports Baja 1000 Results

57th Conference On Senior Engineering Design, College Of Engineering And Applied Sciences

Senior Engineering Design Conference

The 57th Conference on Senior Engineering Design Projects was held from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Tuesday, December 8th at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences on the Parkview Campus of Western Michigan University. The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences sponsored the conference to showcase the work of its graduating seniors, who were required to complete a capstone project that puts into practice what they have learned. Many of the projects were sponsored by business and industry.

Egf As A New Therapeutic Target For Medulloblastoma Metastasis, Jennifer Rico-Varela, Tanya Singh, Sean Mccutcheon, Maribel Vazquez

Publications and Research

Medulloblastoma (MB) is a malignant pediatric brain tumor known for its aggressive metastatic potential. Despite the well-documented migration of MB cells to other parts of the brain and spinal column, MB chemotaxis is poorly understood. Herein, we examined the in vitro migratory and cellular responses of MB-derived cells to external signaling of Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF), hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF-BB), and the stromal cellderived factors 1-alpha (SDF-1). Experiments utilized transwell assays and immunocytochemistry to identify receptor activation in MB migration, and used a microfluidic platform to examine directionality, trajectory, and gradient-dependence of motile cells. Data illustrates …