Engineering Commons^™

Pilot-Scale Test Of Water Wash Carbon Dioxide Absorption System For Purifying Landfill Gas At Jones Island Wastewater Reclamation Facility, Rebecca Schruender

Theses and Dissertations

Biogas, a product of the digestion of organic material, consists primarily of methane and carbon dioxide. By purifying raw biogas, or removing the carbon dioxide, it can be upgraded to biomethane, which can be used to generate heat and electricity or as a substitute for natural gas. An effective method of biogas purification is the water wash process, which consists of an absorption column in which a stream of biogas runs counter-current to a stream of water. The carbon dioxide dissolves in the water, increasing the methane concentration of the gas. A pilot scale system was operated at Jones Island …

A Game Modeling Of A Closed-Loop Supply Chain In A Water-Energy Nexus: Technology Advancement, Market Competition And Capacity Limit, Nabeel Hamoud

Theses and Dissertations

Water and energy are two scarce and concerning resources interconnected in the water-energy nexus. In the nexus, production of energy needs water, and production of water needs energy. For better management of these resources in the nexus, this research considers a supply chain that consists of water suppliers, power suppliers, and consumers of these commodities. In the chain, water suppliers purchase power from power suppliers, and power suppliers purchase water from water suppliers. Other consumers can also buy these resources at the water and power markets. Each firm tries to maximize its own profit. The suppliers of water and power …

Underwater Particle Image Velocimetry (Piv) Measurement Of Turbulence Over Mussel Bed In A Deepsite Of Lake Michigan, Tong Jin

Theses and Dissertations

The influence of the benthic filter feeders, such as bivalves, on ecosystem plankton, and nutrient dynamics is considered significant in shallow marine and freshwater systems. Recent indirect evidence showed that the profundal quagga mussels (Dreissena rostriformis bugensis) have fundamentally altered energy flow and dynamics of nutrients and phytoplankton in Lake Michigan and other Great Lakes. To investigate the phytoplankton grazing rate of the quagga mussel and the mussel siphon currents induced bio-mixing, a self-contained in situ Underwater Particle Image Velocimetry was developed to measure the turbulence structure and the turbulent diffusion coefficient immediately above the profundal quagga mussel covered substrate …

Application Of Survival Analysis Techniques To Probabilistic Assessment Of Fatigue In Steel Bridges, Azam Nabizadehdarabi

Theses and Dissertations

The fatigue of engineering materials under repetitive loading is a significant issue affecting the design and durability of components and systems in a variety of engineering-related applications including civil, mechanical, aerospace, automotive, and electronics. Many factors can affect the service life of a component or system under repetitive loading, such as the type of structure, loading, connection details, stress state, peak stress or stress range, surface condition, temperature, and environmental exposure. Currently, there is no comprehensive probabilistic approach that can systematically address all the factors that contribute to fatigue on a single mathematical platform. However, advanced analysis techniques developed for …

An Application Of Clustering And Cluster Update Methods To Boiler Sensor Prediction And Case-Based-Reasoning To Boiler Repair, Timothy Edward Rooney

Theses and Dissertations

Driven by demand from both consumers and manufacturers alike, Internet of Things (IoT)

capabilities are being built into more products. Consumers want more control and access to their

devices, while manufacturers can find data gathered from IoT-capable products invaluable. In

this thesis, we use data from a growing fleet of IoT-connected boilers in the residential, lightcommercial, and medium-commercial ranges to demonstrate a framework for cluster initialization

and updating. We compare two methods of dynamically updating clusters: a sequential method

inspired by sequential K-means clustering and a cohesion-based method called DYNC. A predictive

artificial neural network system demonstrates the effectiveness of …

Surface Alloying Of Mild Steel During Casting Process: Microstructural Evolution, Phase Development And Heat Treatment, Kaustubh Kishore Rane

Theses and Dissertations

Casting is one of the oldest manufacturing processes in practice and the growth of casting industry through the ages has led to scientific leaps in the field of metallurgy. As we look into the history of metal castings, it is prominent that a steady growth in the knowledge leading to rise of newer casting techniques has caused an exponential increase in the way we can use metal castings to improve our lives. The surface alloying of mild steel to compositions targeted towards stainless steel compositions was performed in this study by sand casting process. Sand casting is one of the …

Experimental, Theoretical And Numerical Evaluation Of Wicking Models For Liquid Imbibition In Dry Porous Wicks, Mohammad Amin Faghihi Zarandi

Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays commercial wicks are utilized by consumer product companies in several important commercial applications including Tiki® Brand torches, the passive lubricants of machine gears, propellant management device, and fragrance dispersion units. Spontaneous imbibition of a liquid into porous wicks, also called wicking, is modeled using the single-phase Darcy’s law after assuming a sharp flow-front marked by full saturation behind the front. An analytical expression for the height of the wicking flow-front as a function of time is tested through comprehensive experiments using different wicks and an oil as the wicking liquid. We proposed a model based on sharp liquid-front where …

Assessment Of Sensory Abnormalities In Children With Asd Using Virtual Reality, Ankit Koirala

Theses and Dissertations

Sensory abnormality is one of the important characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD). A large number of studies suggest a strong connection between sensory abnormalities and ASD. Therefore, it is important to assess sensory abnormalities for diagnosis and intervention of ASD. In this thesis study, we aim to develop a virtual reality system that can measure sensory abnormalities in adolescents with ASD. Sensory abnormalities can affect all five senses: touch, vision, smell, taste and auditory. However, in this study, we focus on assessing sensory abnormality in vision and touch sensory processing. Twelve adolescents with ASD and 12 typically developing (TD) adolescents …

Cavity Environmental Control System Upgrade For Nasa’S Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy, Ashraf Al-Hajjeh

Theses and Dissertations

The main goal of this project is to fulfill the need of a controller upgrade for the Cavity Environmental Control System (CECS) on NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) aircraft. The preceding controller had multiple disadvantages including operating in an unpressurized region, incomplete functionality implementation, limited fault and status monitoring capability, and reduced maintainability and reliability. The new controller will go through the NASA design process to fulfill all the requirements of CECS operation including complete functionality of all devices currently installed on the aircraft, added devices to improve fault and health monitoring, and overall improvement in maintainability and …

Dynamic Vehicular Trajectory Optimization For Bottleneck Mitigation And Safety Improvement, Wenqing Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Traffic bottleneck is defined as a disruption of traffic flow through a freeway or an arterial, which can be divided as two categories: stationary bottleneck and moving bottleneck. The stationary bottleneck is mainly formed by the lane drops in the multi-lane roadways, while the moving bottleneck are due to the very slowing moving vehicles which disrupt the traffic flow. Traffic bottlenecks not only impact the mobility, but also potentially cause safety issues.

Traditional strategies for eliminating bottlenecks mainly focus on expanding supply including road widening, green interval lengthening and optimization of intersection channelization. In addition, a few macroscopic methods are …

Optimizing Hydrogen Sulfide Removal And Biogas Production Using The Water Wash Method, Brian Leightner

Theses and Dissertations

Biogas forms from decomposing organic material in agricultural digesters, landfills, and wastewater treatment plant digesters. Biogas is mostly composed of methane, and can be used as a carbon-based fuel. Microorganisms that consume organics in these waste streams also produce hydrogen sulfide (H2S) as part of the biogas, in varying trace amounts. H2S is corrosive to engines and pipes for machinery, a human health hazard when inhaled, and an aquatic hazard when dissolved in water. Water washing is an absorption process that dissolves hydrogen sulfide and other water soluble compounds in this process and carries it away from the gas, thereby …

Exploring Methods For Studying Recoverability Of Shipboard Electrical Power Distribution Systems, Jacob David Gudex

Theses and Dissertations

Advancement of the technology included on ships, is changing the nature of loads installed on ships. Not only are there more loads than installed power generation, but advanced electrically powered weapons and sensors are changing the profile of the installed loads. These are challenges for future shipboard power systems design. Challenges which must be solved with careful distribution system planning, energy storage integration, and selection of individual power electronic converters within the ship. Different topologies and distribution systems have differing fault isolation and recovery (FIR) capability sets, which affects ship survivability. Furthermore, different FIR capability sets, operate at different speeds. …

A Data-Driven Predictive Model Of Reliability Estimation Using State-Space Stochastic Degradation Model, Farhad Balali

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) provides the foundation to apply data-driven methodologies. The data-driven predictive models of reliability estimation can become a major tool in increasing the life of assets, lowering capital cost, and reducing operating and maintenance costs. Classical models of reliability assessment mainly rely on lifetime data. Failure data may not be easily obtainable for highly reliable assets. Furthermore, the collected historical lifetime data may not be able to accurately describe the behavior of the asset in a unique application or environment. Therefore, it is not an optimal approach anymore to conduct a reliability …

Vehicle Interior Access Deployable Worksurface Mechanism Concept Product Design, Premchand Gunachandran

Theses and Dissertations

by

Premchand Gunachandran

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2019

Under the Supervision of Professor Mohammad Habibur Rahman

Easy access and adjusting the vehicle interior configuration to a variety of situations and uses is the general desire for any vehicle user. To meet such desire an attempt has been made in this study to conceptualize a design to develop a new mechatronic product called re-configurable vehicle interior console mechanism to deploy a worksurface (DWS), which will provide flexible use of the vehicle’s interior of both partial and fully autonomous vehicles. This re-configurable vehicle interior console will deploy the DWS using a power …

Scatter Reduction By Exploiting Behaviour Of Convolutional Neural Networks In Frequency Domain, Carlos Ivan Jerez Gonzalez

Theses and Dissertations

In X-ray imaging, scattered radiation can produce a number of artifacts that greatly

undermine the image quality. There are hardware solutions, such as anti-scatter grids.

However, they are costly. A software-based solution is a better option because it is

cheaper and can achieve a higher scatter reduction. Most of the current software-based

approaches are model-based. The main issues with them are the lack of flexibility, expressivity, and the requirement of a model. In consideration of this, we decided to apply

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), since they do not have any of the previously

mentioned issues.

In our approach we split …

Two Essays On Distribution, Fulfillment And Pricing Decisions For Retailers With E-Commerce Channel, Khosro Pichka

Theses and Dissertations

E-commerce has grown rapidly in the past decade. In 2015, e-commerce was accounted for 7.2 percent of all retail sales in the U.S., which is massively higher than 0.2 percent in 1998 (U.S. Department of Commerce 2017). Worldwide e-commerce sales also show the same trend and reached $2.356 trillion in 2018 and are expected to grow steadily (Statista 2017). This trend has impacted major areas of operations management including supply chain management and revenue management. Today, e-commerce companies cannot satisfy their customers’ demand using traditional distribution systems. Therefore, retailers with e-commerce channels (e-tailers), cooperate with third party logistic service providers …

The Effect Of Rapid Solidification And Heat Treatment On Microstructure And Electrochemical Properties Of Advanced Biomaterial Co-Cr-Mo-C Alloy, Hamid Reza Erfanian Nazif Toosi

Theses and Dissertations

Co-Cr-Mo-C alloys have been used for implant materials for decades because of their strength, corrosion resistance, wear resistance, and biocompatibility. To develop durable low-friction joint replacement implants, it is important to understand the solidification structure and properties of these materials. While HCP phase is the thermodynamically stable phase in these alloys, they maintain their high-temperature γ-FCC matrix and coarse dendritic structure on cooling to room temperature when cast by conventional methods. In this research, a wedgeshaped copper chill mold was used to examine the effect of cooling rates from 10 K/s to 450 K/s on the microstructure, HCP fraction, and …

Advanced Metering Infrastructure Security With Software-Defined Network In Smart Grid, Yi-Chen Chung

Theses and Dissertations

The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is the most important and basic element in the Smart Grid systems. Technologies grow complicated as the world becomes more convenient. Power grid, smart building, electric vehicles, and other technology need to be managed and maintained flawlessly in case of the possibility of cyberattacks to shut down all the systems and result in huge loss economically or potentially affect people's life. It is important to use communication technologies to provide many functions including facilitate bidirectional communications and remote controls. Since AMI needs to be widely deployed to each home user, power companies are required to …

Light Scattering In Diffraction Limit Infrared Imaging, Ghazal Azarfar

Theses and Dissertations

Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) microspectroscopy is a noninvasive technique for chemical imaging of micrometer size samples. Employing an infrared microscope, an infrared source and FTIR spectrometer coupled to a microscope with an array of detectors (128 x 128 detectors), enables collecting combined spectral and spatial information simultaneously. Wavelength dependent images are collected, that reveal biochemical signatures of disease pathology and cell cycle. Single cell biochemistry can be evaluated with this technique, since the wavelength of light is comparable to the size of the objects of interest, which leads to additional spectral and spatial effects disturb biological signatures and can confound …

Prototyping Elliptically Profiled Inverted Pendulum Walls In Cross-Laminated Timber (Clt) For Passive Self-Centering And Seismic Resiliency, Marco Lo Ricco

Theses and Dissertations

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) buildings garnered international attention, nearly a decade ago, for elevating wood construction to new heights on fully panelized assemblies of floors and walls. While highly regarded as a sustainable building material, use of CLT as a structural wall system depends on seismically resilient strategies like controlled rocking. This project prototyped elliptically profiled CLT panels and slotted-pin steel connections, at full-scale, to produce rolling and slip-friction inverted pendulum wall systems of one-story height and inspired by seismic isolation concepts. Digital fabrication realized elliptical profiles along the load-bearing edges of six 5-ply CLT panels and various customized slot shapes …

Sensing With Geometry-Dependent Magnetostriction Via An Embedded Fiber Bragg Grating, David Frailey

Theses and Dissertations

Fiber optic current sensors (FOCSs) have unique advantages in electromagnetic interference

immunity and direct current measurements. Here, magnetostrictive composites and

their interactions with embedded ber Bragg gratings (FBG) were explored to form novel

FOCSs with predictable and temperature-independent sensitivity. Magnetostrictive, particularly

Terfenol-D/epoxy, composites maintain the mangetostrictive expansion under an

external magnetic eld while gaining

exibility in engineering. In contrast to ordinary strain

gauges, an embedded FBG can provide an optical signal inferring simultaneously a strain

and its gradient inside a composite. In principle, the sensing of strain gradient is thermally

independent. Creating appropriate geometries for magnetostrictive composites enables the

conversion …

Energy Dissipating Connector For Precast Shear Walls In High-Seismic Areas, Mohammed Aljuboori

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

ENERGY DISSIPATING CONNECTOR FOR PRECAST SHEAR WALLS IN HIGH-SEISMIC AREAS

By

Mohammed Aljuboori

The University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, 2019

Under the Supervision of Dr. Habib Tabatabai

Precast concrete systems are widely used in a variety of structures such as parking garages, residential units, shopping centers, and transportation stations. In some cases, precast structures are preferred over conventional cast-in-place (CIP) concrete conventional structures because of ease of construction, rapid implementation, and lower levels of energy consumption. One area where precast systems have traditionally been at a disadvantage is high seismic applications. In seismic regions, precast concrete structures must have …

Equilibrium Modeling And Policy Analysis Of A Biofuel Supply Chain With A Hydroelectric Reservoir, Jinwoo Bae

Theses and Dissertations

This research proposesd a game theoretic model of a biofuel supply chain (BSC) where a utility company supplies reservoir water to two farmers, located in downstream and upstream of a hydropower dam. The decision-making process of the model is formulated as a three-stage Stackelberg game. We analyze the equilibrium of the decentralized systems and the effect of the government subsidy on energy crop (switchgrass) production for cellulosic biofuel industries, with two forms of subsidy: (1) discriminated subsidies and (2) equalized subsidies.

The results show that both forms of subsidy improve social welfare in the BSC unless the amount of subsidy …

Multi-Tap Extended Kalman Filter For A Periodic Waveform With Uncertain Frequency And Waveform Shape, And Data Dropouts, Justin Saboury

Theses and Dissertations

Gait analysis presents the challenge of detecting a periodic waveform in the presence of time varying frequency, amplitude, DC offset, and waveform shape, with acquisition gaps from partial occlusions. The combination of all of these components presents a formidable challenge. The Extended Kalman Filter for this system model has six states, which makes it weakly identifiable within the standard Extended Kalman Filter network. In this work, a novel robust Extended Kalman Filter-based approach is presented and evaluated for clinical use in gait analysis. The novel aspect of the proposed method is that at each sample, the present and several past …

Response Transmissibility For Load Identification Improved By Optimal Sensor Locations, Hanaa M. Alqam

Theses and Dissertations

A knowledge of loads acting on a structure is important for analysis and design. There are many applications in which it is difficult to measure directly the dynamic loads acting on a component. In such situations, it may be possible to estimate the imposed loads through a measurement of the system output response. Load identification through output response measurement is an inverse problem that is not only ill-conditioned, but in general leads to multiple solutions. Therefore, additional information, such as number and locations of the imposed loads must be provided ahead of time in order to allow for a unique …

Financially Motivated Lmp Manipulation By Aggregators In Power Markets, Chaoyi Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Renewable energy accounts for a sizeable share within modern power systems and aggregators of renewable generators play an important role in the electricity market. However, because renewable generators produce power intermittently, it is hard to monitor and supervise the behavior of the aggregators. There is a chance for aggregators to manipulate the locational marginal prices (LMPs) in the power market by curtailing generation in order to increase their profits.

In this thesis we propose a tri-level model that can quantify aggregators’ potential profits. This model is based on both a real-time optimal dispatch and an LMP clearing procedure. With this …

Investigation Of Dielectrophoretic Microfluidic Trap System For Separation And Parallel Analysis Of Single Particles, Tae Joon Kwak

Theses and Dissertations

Separation and identification of single molecules and particles based on their chemical, biochemical and physical properties are critical in wide range of biomedical applications. Manipulating a single biomolecule requires sensitive approaches to avoid damage to the molecule. Recent progress in micro- and nano-technology enabled the development of various novel methods and devices to trap, separate, and characterize micro- and nano-particles. In this dissertation, a microfluidic particle trap system to electrically separate particles at the single particle level was developed through particle manipulation methods using dielectrophoresis. The research in this dissertation will explain the operation strategy and setup of the novel …

Optimizing Self-Healing Wind Turbine Blades Utilizing Dicyclopentadiene Infused Vascular Networks, Giovanni Lewinski

Theses and Dissertations

Self-healing wind turbine blades can reduce costs associated with maintenance, repair, and energy compensation. Self-healing is the ability to sustain and recover from damage autonomously. The self-healing presented in this paper uses the reaction of two agents Dicyclopentadiene, DCPD, and Grubbs’ first-generation catalyst, henceforward known as a catalyst to fuel this recovery. DCPD is housed as a liquid isolated from the catalyst until a damaging event occurs, causing the two agents to mix and solidify to form the thermoset Polydicyclopentadiene, PDCPD. We discuss the efforts made to optimize the self-healing properties of wind turbine blades and provide new systems to …

Model Augmented Deep Neural Networks For Medical Image Reconstruction Problems, Hongquan Zuo

Theses and Dissertations

Solving an ill-posed inverse problem is difficult because it doesn't have a unique solution. In practice, for some important inverse problems, the conventional methods, e.g. ordinary least squares and iterative methods, cannot provide a good estimate. For example, for single image super-resolution and CT reconstruction, the results of these conventional methods cannot satisfy the requirements of these applications. While having more computational resources and high-quality data, researchers try to use machine-learning-based methods, especially deep learning to solve these ill-posed problems. In this dissertation, a model augmented recursive neural network is proposed as a general inverse problem method to solve these …

Study Of The Long-Term Shaft Resistance Of Energy Piles In Saturated Clays, Saeed Yazdani Kachooie

Theses and Dissertations

This research aims to qualitatively/quantitively assess the effect of temperature variation on the energy pile shaft resistance. The important mechanisms by which heating can change the shear strength of clay and clay-concrete interface are evaluated using experimental and numerical methods. As for experimental method, temperature-controlled triaxial tests, constant normal load (CNL) direct shear tests and small-scale pile tests were conducted. As for numerical approach, a fully coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) analysis was performed to simulate the experimental test results so that the capability of such analysis to predict thermo-mechanical behavior of energy piles is evaluated. Reconstituted (HC-77) kaolin clay, one-dimensionally consolidated …