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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Moisture Characterization Of Thermoplastics And Thermosets For Use As Matrices In Fiber Reinforced Composites, Kieran Hook, Ray Hsu Jun 2019

Moisture Characterization Of Thermoplastics And Thermosets For Use As Matrices In Fiber Reinforced Composites, Kieran Hook, Ray Hsu

Materials Engineering

Epoxy matrix composites are widely used in aerospace industry for lighter aircraft while thermoplastic-matrix composites have traditionally been underutilized despite their excellent fracture resistance, impact strength, and the ability to be recycled. Toray Advanced Composites (Morgan Hill, CA) wants to investigate the structural integrity of thermoplastic matrices in common aircraft operating environments. An experiment was conducted to observe the effect of moisture absorption on thermoplastic composites’ mechanical strength. PEEK, PPS, and PEI matrices were compared to an epoxy matrix in this experiment. Samples were submerged in 160ºF distilled water to accelerate moisture absorption. For two months, the changes in mass …


Modeling The Peak Absorption Of Meh-Ppv In Various Solvents Using Density Functional Theory, Corell H. Moore Jan 2019

Modeling The Peak Absorption Of Meh-Ppv In Various Solvents Using Density Functional Theory, Corell H. Moore

Theses and Dissertations

Density Functional Theory (DFT) and time-dependent Density Functional Theory (TD-DFT) are powerful tools for modeling orbital energy in conjugated molecules and have been useful tools for research in organic photovoltaics. In this work, DFT is first used to explain the red shift in the absorption spectrum and increased absorption observed in MEH-PPV. Initially, the modeling of the red-shift in the absorption peak of MEH-PPV is studied using Gaussian 03 software with the global hybrid functional B3LYP for exchange-correlation and the 6-31G basis set. DFT and TD-DFT are used to separately study the effects of polymer chain length, carbon-carbon double-bond stretching, …


Prevention Of Harmful Algal Blooms By The Mitigation Of Phosphorus Nutrient Loading Via Filtration By Steel Wool And Activated Carbon, Ronald Simpson, Sara Kidd, Samantha Zidd Jan 2019

Prevention Of Harmful Algal Blooms By The Mitigation Of Phosphorus Nutrient Loading Via Filtration By Steel Wool And Activated Carbon, Ronald Simpson, Sara Kidd, Samantha Zidd

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) are a devastating ecological and economic consequence of the abundance of nutrient-rich agricultural runoff entering aquatic ecosystems (Baker et al. 2014). Bio-available phosphorus from synthetic fertilizers is one of the major nutrients contributing to this global issue. Previous studies indicated that dissolved phosphorus can be removed from an aqueous environment when passed through a composite mixture of granular steel wool particles and activated carbon (Erickson, Gulliver, and Weiss, 2007). In this project, we conducted experiments using higher quality concentration measurements to determine what grades of steel wool (SW-0000, SW-000, SW-00) and types of activated carbon (granulated …