Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Engineering Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Performance Enhancement And Characterization Of An Electromagnetic Railgun, Paul M. Gilles Dec 2019

Performance Enhancement And Characterization Of An Electromagnetic Railgun, Paul M. Gilles

Master's Theses

Collision with orbital debris poses a serious threat to spacecraft and astronauts. Hypervelocity impacts resulting from collisions mean that objects with a mass less than 1g can cause mission-ending damage to spacecraft. A means of shielding spacecraft against collisions is necessary. A means of testing candidate shielding methods for their efficacy in mitigating hypervelocity impacts is therefore also necessary. Cal Poly’s Electromagnetic Railgun was designed with the goal of creating a laboratory system capable of simulating hypervelocity (≥ 3 km/s) impacts. Due to several factors, the system was not previously capable of high-velocity (≥ 1 km/s) tests. A deficient projectile …


Dc-Dc Converter For Electric Vehicle, Jason Y. Zhou, Nicholas James Mah Jun 2019

Dc-Dc Converter For Electric Vehicle, Jason Y. Zhou, Nicholas James Mah

Electrical Engineering

In this work, a DC-DC converter is designed for an electric vehicle. The DC-DC converter is designed to provide 500W with a 200-400V input and a 12-15V adjustable output. Electric vehicle sales are beginning to increase in popularity and the need for DC-DC converters to siphon power from the tractive system is not yet fully satisfied, especially for single-seater class vehicles. Additionally, improving performance in efficiency without sacrificing wide input voltage range can benefit future DC-DC converter designs. In the end, a forward active clamp DC-DC converter is designed and tested. Additionally, spreadsheet calculators, LTSpice simulations, and Matlab scripts were …


Designing A Simulator For An Electrically-Pumped Organic Laser Diode, Robert Hulbert Jun 2019

Designing A Simulator For An Electrically-Pumped Organic Laser Diode, Robert Hulbert

Master's Theses

Organic semiconductors provide an alternative set of basis materials to fabricate electronic devices like PN Junctions, LEDs, and FETs. These materials have several benefits over traditional inorganic semiconductors including their mechanical flexibility, reliance on renewable resources, and inexpensive large-scale manufacturability. Despite the contemporary device implementations with organic semiconductors, a solid-state electrically-pumped organic laser diode does not exist. However, organically-based lasers do exist by utilizing the organic material strictly for optical gain. The challenge occurs when charge carriers appear in the organic material. The charge carriers must reach a concentration such that population inversion occurs producing optical gain. However, between the …


Experimental Optical Pulse Picker For Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Alexander Thomas Wargo Mar 2019

Experimental Optical Pulse Picker For Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Alexander Thomas Wargo

Master's Theses

Proprietary.