Engineering Commons^™

A Simple, Realistic Walled Phantom For Intravascular And Intracardiac Applications., Hareem Nisar, John Moore, Roberta Piazza, Efthymios Maneas, Elvis C S Chen, Terry M Peters

Robarts Imaging Publications

PURPOSE: This work aims to develop a simple, anatomically and haptically realistic vascular phantom, compatible with intravascular and intracardiac ultrasound. The low-cost, dual-layered phantom bridges the gap between traditional wall-only and wall-less phantoms by showing both the vessel wall and surrounding tissue in ultrasound imaging. This phantom can better assist clinical tool training, testing of intravascular devices, blood flow studies, and validation of algorithms for intravascular and intracardiac surgical systems.

METHODS: Polyvinyl alcohol cryogel (PVA-c) incorporating a scattering agent was used to obtain vessel and tissue-mimicking materials. Our specific design targeted the inferior vena cava and renal bifurcations which were …

Cal Poly Prove Lab Endurance Car Composite Body Paneling Design, Emma Wheelock, Sarah Rutland, Noah Fisher, Brian Menard

Mechanical Engineering

The Cal Poly Prototype Vehicles Laboratory (PROVE Lab) needs a body paneling design for their Endurance Car aeroshell which optimizes strength, weight and accessibility while minimizing complexity. Additionally, a low-complexity, accurate manufacturing process for the PROVE Lab Endurance Car aeroshell needs to be developed. PROVE Lab designed the shape of the aeroshell. The aeroshell will serve to reduce the aerodynamic drag on the car at high speed, and is not a structural component of the car. Due to the high-strength and lightweight nature of composites, PROVE Lab requests the senior project team investigate using composites for automotive body paneling applications. …

Computational Sensitivity Investigation Of Hydrogel Injection Characteristics For Myocardial Support, Hua Wang, Christopher B. Rodell, Madonna E. Lee, Neville N. Dusaj, Joseph H. Gorman Iii, Jason A. Burdick, Robert C. Gorman, Jonathan F. Wenk

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications

Biomaterial injection is a potential new therapy for augmenting ventricular mechanics after myocardial infarction (MI). Recent in vivo studies have demonstrated that hydrogel injections can mitigate the adverse remodeling due to MI. More importantly, the material properties of these injections influence the efficacy of the therapy. The goal of the current study is to explore the interrelated effects of injection stiffness and injection volume on diastolic ventricular wall stress and thickness. To achieve this, finite element models were constructed with different hydrogel injection volumes (150 µL and 300 µL), where the modulus was assessed over a range of 0.1 kPa …

Synergistic Toughening Of Hard, Nacre-Mimetic Mosi2 Coatings By Self-Assembled Hierarchical Structure, Jiang Xu, Xiaoli Zhao, Paul Munroe, Zonghan Xie

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Like many other intermetallic materials, MoSi2 coatings are typically hard, but prone to catastrophic failure due to their low toughness at ambient temperature. In this paper, a self-assembled hierarchical structure that closely resembles that of nacre (i.e., mother of pearl) was developed in a MoSi2 -based coating through a simple, yet cost-effective, depostion technique. The newly formed coating is tough and can withstand multiple indentations at high loads. Key design features responsible for this remarkable outcome were identified. They include a functionally graded multilayer featuring elastic modulus oscillation, varying sublayer thickness and a columnar structure that are able to attenuate …

Material Behavior Characterization Of A Thin Film Polymer Used In Lithium-Ion Batteries, Michael James Martinsen

Theses and Dissertations

The use of lithium-ion batteries in the automotive industry has become increasingly popular. As more hybrid and electric vehicles take to the road an understanding of how these batteries will behave structurally will be of greater concern. Impact testing can give a valuable overview of the strengths and weaknesses of a battery's design, however, these tests can be time consuming, expensive, and dangerous. Finite element analysis can deliver a reliable low cost approximation of physical testing results. The accuracy of FE results depends greatly on the mathematical representation of the material properties of Li-ion battery components. In this study, the …

Development Of Concrete Qc/Qa Specifications For Highway Construction In Kentucky, Kamyar C. Mahboub, Donn E. Hancher

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

There is a growing trend toward quality-based specifications in highway construction. A large number of quality control/quality assurance (QC/QA) specifications shift the responsibility of day-to-day testing from the state DOH to the contractor. This requirement for contractor-performed quality control testing has been partly due to the fact that state agencies are operating with a smaller pool of employees compared to previous years. Another driving force has been the application of performance-based specifications and realization that the contractor and the producer need some degree of flexibility in order to be more efficient and innovative. This report presents the background information behind …

Detection And Classification Of Impact-Induced Damage In Composite Plates Using Neural Networks, Rohit Dua, Steve Eugene Watkins, Donald C. Wunsch, K. Chandrashekhara, Farhad Akhavan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Artificial neutral networks (ANN) can be used as an online health monitoring systems (involving damage assessment, fatigue monitoring and delamination detection) for composite structures owing to their inherent fast computing speeds, parallel processing and ability to learn and adapt to the experimental data. The amount of impact-induced strain on a composite structure can be found using strain sensors attached to composite structures. Prior work has shown that strain-based ANN can characterize impact energy on composite plates and that strain signatures can be associated with damage types and severity. This paper reports the extension of this approach for damage classification using …

Measurement Of The Dielectric Strength Of Titanium Dioxide Ceramics, Wayne Huebner, J. M. Lundstrom, L. F. Rinehart, R. C. Pate, T. L. Smith, Mike L. Krogh

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Titanium dioxide ceramics (TiO2) are candidate materials for high energy density pulsed power devices. Experiments to quantify the dielectric strength of TiO2 have been performed on a limited number of unoptimized samples. A high voltage test set was constructed to test the titanium dioxide. All samples had a relative dielectric constant of 100, all samples were of 3 mm nominal thickness, and all tests were performed in water dielectric to reduce the effect of the triple point field enhancement at the electrode edge. Both single layer and laminated samples were tested and the breakdown field strengths were recorded. Voltage risetimes …