Engineering Commons^™

Operation And Process Control Development For A Pilot-Scale Leaching And Solvent Extraction Circuit Recovering Rare Earth Elements From Coal-Based Sources, Douglas Kweku Addo

Theses and Dissertations--Mining Engineering

The US Department of Energy in 2010 has identified several rare earth elements as critical materials to enable clean technologies. As part of ongoing research in REEs (rare earth elements) recovery from coal sources, the University of Kentucky has designed, developed and is demonstrating a ¼ ton/hour pilot-scale processing plant to produce high-grade REEs from coal sources. Due to the need to control critical variables (e.g. pH, tank level, etc.), process control is required. To ensure adequate process control, a study was conducted on leaching and solvent extraction control to evaluate the potential of achieving low-cost REE recovery in addition …

Study Of Factors Affecting Distribution System Pv Hosting Capacity, Fanxun Li

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

As renewable energy plays an increasingly important role in the power system, the addition of PV systems to the distribution network has become a major trend in the current power system development. However, if a PV system with excessive capacity is added to the distribution network, voltage problems may occur in the system. Hence, it is important to determine the capacity of the PV system that can be added at the distribution system.

The thesis aims to identify the major factors that affect the PV hosting capacity of distribution systems. The thesis studies various scenarios for the IEEE-123 test network …

Advanced Fault Area Identification And Fault Location For Transmission And Distribution Systems, Wen Fan

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Fault location reveals the exact information needed for utility crews to timely and promptly perform maintenance and system restoration. Therefore, accurate fault location is a key function in reducing outage time and enhancing power system reliability.

Modern power systems are witnessing a trend of integrating more distributed generations (DG) into the grid. DG power outputs may be intermittent and can no longer be treated as constants in fault location method development. DG modeling is also difficult for fault location purpose. Moreover, most existing fault location methods are not applicable to simultaneous faults. To solve the challenges, this dissertation proposes three …

Effects Of The America Invents Act And Recent Supreme Court Decisions On Patent Law, Bridgett Roal

Honors Theses

Due to an interest in pursuing a career in patent law with an electrical engineering background, this thesis describes the 2012 America Invents Act (AIA), which made major changes to patent law in the United States including the switch from “first-to-invent” to “first-to-file” and the creation of the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB), as well as several relevant key Supreme Court decisions, and explains the impact that these events have caused. Through interviews with attorneys and others in the patent law community, personal research and investigation, and data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), it has …

Experimental Characterization Of Common-Mode Sources For Prediction Of System Level Common-Mode Current On Cable Harnesses, Sameer Sudha Arun Walunj

Masters Theses

"Common-mode current on cable harnesses is often the primary source of radiated emissions below several hundred megahertz. It is difficult, however, to estimate common-mode currents that will occur in a system from component level tests because the common-mode impedances are different in the system. Research presents two methods for using simple component level tests to estimate equivalent common-mode source voltages and source impedances responsible for generating common-mode current. Key to these methods is assuming the harness can be represented with two transmission lines, one terminated with a short and one with an open. Equivalent sources are predicted for those circuits …

Development And Demonstration Of A Processing And Assembly Pathway For A 3d-Synchronous Field Programmable Gate Array, Robert Carroll

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are integrated circuits which can implement virtually any digital function and can be configured by a designer after manufacturing. This is beneficial when dedicated application specific runs are not time or cost effective; however, this flexibility comes at the cost of a substantially higher interconnect overhead. Three-dimensional (3D) integration can offer significant improvements in the FPGA architecture by stacking multiple device layers and interconnecting them in the third or vertical dimension, through the substrate, where path lengths are greatly reduced. This will allow for a higher density of devices and improvements in power consumption, signal …

Microwave Detection Of Surface Breaking Cracks In Metallic Structures Under Heavy Corrosion And Paint, John Robert Gallion

Masters Theses

"We live in the world of "aging infrastructures". In this environment, critical and heavily utilized infrastructure, i.e. ships, planes, bridges, etc., are operating at or beyond their designed age. Replacement is no longer an option and "retirement for cause" is the current approach to maintenance and replacement. Consequently, there is an ever-increasing demand for efficient and robust nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods that can determine the physical health of these structures. Large structures, which are primarily made of metals, either steel or aluminum, are susceptible to high-stress cracking and corrosion. Stress-induced cracks in heavily corroded steel, used in bridges, railroads, storage …

Radiation Immunity In Cable Harnesses And Differential P/N Skew In Pcb, David Nozadze

Masters Theses

"We develop an efficient method to model RF immunity of multiwire cable harnesses and study differential P/N skew effects on channels, channel performance and specifically on the eye diagrams at the SerDes receiver.

External radiation can induce unwanted signals in transmission lines. For example, external radiation from an antenna induces common-mode currents on the outer surface of cable shields. This common-mode signal makes its way through the shied due to its imperfections, inducing the inner common mode. When twisted pairs inside the cable are not balanced, inner common mode is in turn converted to the differential mode, which might compromise …

Emi Design Of Flyover Qsfp (Fqsfp) Connector For 56+ Gbps Applications, System Level Modelling Of The Z-Directed Component (Zdc), Pranay Kumar Vuppunutala

Masters Theses

"This thesis comprises of two parts. Firstly, the Flyover Quad Small Form Pluggable (FQSFP) approach for 56+ Gbps applications is introduced to overcome the limitations from a large loss on typical QSFP ports with surface mount to Printed Circuit Board (PCB) traces. By replacing the PCB traces to the twinax cables, it is possible to achieve around 7 dB lower insertion loss at 40 GHz for the 12-inch path from the switch IC to connector than that of PCB trace with a low loss substrate. Also, to investigate electromagnetic interference (EMI) aspect of FQSFP approach, a simulation model of FQSFP …

Practical Methods For Source Separation In Emc Measurements, Yuanzhuo Liu

Masters Theses

"Electromagnetic emission is critical in the electronic industry with the rapid growth of the development of the electronic device. To identify the emission from the multipule sources, two methods are proposed in the near field scan and total radiated power measurement respectively.

The first method can be applied in the measurement of the field generated by multiple non-correlated sources. The contribution of each source is determined using a blind source separation (BSS) technique. The measurements are performed using one scanning probe and stationary reference probes, avoiding the need to measure the spatial correlations of the random field. The resolving result …

Near-Field Scanning Based Shielding Effectiveness Extraction For Board Level Shielding Cans, Harsh Shrivastav

Masters Theses

"The conventional definition of shielding effectiveness is well suited for calculating electromagnetic shielding in the far-field. However, in the near field, shielding effectiveness calculation is not so straight forward. In radio frequency interference problems, most of the field coupling occurs in near field. Having a well-defined method to calculate near-field shielding effectiveness is important for estimating the suppression of radio frequency interference using the shield cans. In this research, a method to extract the shielding effectiveness of board level shielding cans using near field scanning is developed. Shielding effectiveness is defined by modelling the shielded noise source as equivalent dipole …

Multi-Column Neural Networks And Sparse Coding Novel Techniques In Machine Learning, Ammar O. Hoori

Theses and Dissertations

Accurate and fast machine learning (ML) algorithms are highly vital in artificial intelligence (AI) applications. In complex dataset problems, traditional ML methods such as radial basis function neural network (RBFN), sparse coding (SC) using dictionary learning, and particle swarm optimization (PSO) provide trivial results, large structure, slow training, and/or slow testing. This dissertation introduces four novel ML techniques: the multi-column RBFN network (MCRN), the projected dictionary learning algorithm (PDL) and the multi-column adaptive and non-adaptive particle swarm optimization techniques (MC-APSO and MC-PSO). These novel techniques provide efficient alternatives for traditional ML techniques. Compared to traditional ML techniques, the novel ML …