Engineering Commons^™

Mechanics Desktop Lab Equipment, Dante Azpilcueta, Quentin F. Mormann, Arfan Ansar

Mechanical Engineering

This paper overviews the design, implementation and testing of a senior project designed to fix the issue of there being no lab equipment or space for content pertaining to mechanic of materials topics. This is of concern as Cal Poly is reorganizing content as it switches to the semester system and is in need of labs for this material. The solution found was to create a portable miniature universal test machine that could be carted into non-lab classrooms. The goal was to create a device that was low-cost, modifiable, durable, easy to manufacture and repair as these were the qualities …

Effects Of Admixes On The Compressive Strength Of Permeable Concrete, James T. Lyon

Construction Management

Compression tests were performed on three samples of permeable concrete to evaluate the effects of admixes on a conventional permeable concrete. The first mix served as the control, representing a standard permeable concrete sample. The second mix replicated the control but added a small amount of fiberglass, accounting for 0.5% of the cement's weight. The third mix again mirrored the control and incorporated the manufacturer's recommended amount of a water reducing admix known as "Reducer 555". The objective of testing the two new mixes against the control mix was to evaluate the potential increase in ultimate compressive strength. Four 6” …

An Electric Commerce Platform For Material Testing Laboratories, John Ferris Mitchener

Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of the Internet has allowed businesses to create new sales and marketing channels to provide value for their customers in the marketplace. Engineering manufacturers and suppliers have taken advantage of the internet to automate the customer service aspects of their businesses as well as to market their services in a cost-effective but widespread manner. This work aims to apply the practices and benefits of electronic commerce (e-commerce) to a material testing laboratory through the creation of a functioning website with e-commerce features. The effects of Search Engine Optimization, website accessibility issues, marketing considerations, security concerns, and common business …

Correlation Of And Development Of Procedure To Use A Resonant Plate With Mechanical Excitation For Shock Testing Small-To-Medium Size Spacecraft And Provide Aerospace Shock Analysis And Testing Guidelines, Monty Kennedy

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In the aerospace industry it is known that performing shock analysis and testing on spacecraft is difficult to do mostly because shock loads create a very short duration shock wave transient that can have high acceleration peak levels (1,000-5,000 g) and wide frequency content (100-10,000 Hz). FE (finite-element) shock analysis is difficult because implicit linear FE software commonly used for most vibration analysis in aerospace does not account for shock wave propagation, reflection, and attenuation that occurs based upon the distance from the shock source at the base of the spacecraft and the attenuations that occurs through mechanical joints. Spacecraft …

Formative Assessment In Engineering Education: Exploring Ways To Enhance Students' Learning Achievement, Assad Iqbal

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Formative assessments have been found to enhance students’ learning across a variety of disciplines, educational levels, and laboratory and classroom settings. Research attributes the positive effects of formative assessments in improving students’ learning to its (backward and forward) testing effects. Moreover, formative assessments provide an extra opportunity to students to assess their learning early in the learning process, reflect on their learning, and identify address learning gaps and misconceptions (if any) using feedback.

However, optional nature of formative assessments and having no stakes associated with them to have any bearing on final grades offers two challenges to capitalize on their …

Mitigating Popularity Bias In Recommendation With Unbalanced Interactions: A Gradient Perspective, Weijieying Ren, Lei Wang, Kunpeng Liu, Ruocheng Guo, Ee-Peng Lim, Yanjie Fu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recommender systems learn from historical user-item interactions to identify preferred items for target users. These observed interactions are usually unbalanced following a long-tailed distribution. Such long-tailed data lead to popularity bias to recommend popular but not personalized items to users. We present a gradient perspective to understand two negative impacts of popularity bias in recommendation model optimization: (i) the gradient direction of popular item embeddings is closer to that of positive interactions, and (ii) the magnitude of positive gradient for popular items are much greater than that of unpopular items. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet efficient …

Evaluating Smartrock Temperature Sensor Performance In Measuring Concrete Strength, Jack Dasch

Construction Management

Concrete testing is one of the most important parts of the concrete placement process. Traditionally, this is done through the use of 6x12 cylinders cured in a lab that are broken at various stages of the curing process. These cylinders are not necessarily representative of the in-situ concrete because of their differing curing conditions- indoors versus exposed to the elements. Wireless temperature sensors, like Giatec’s SmartRock, have the potential to determine concrete strength based off the temperature of the placed concrete over time, thus eliminating the need for cylinder breaks. Once calibrated to the specific mix design, these wireless sensors …

Physico-Mechanical Characterization Of Prototype Earth Block Material For Constitutive Modeling, Erika Lorena Rengifo-López

Theses and Dissertations

The comprehensive understanding and experimental characterization of the overall compressive behavior of earth masonry block materials, such as compressed and stabilized earth blocks (CSEBs), are essential for developing analytical and numerical tools to predict the mechanical response and designing earth masonry structures. Furthermore, advancing the understanding of the extent of the influence of testing parameters on the material's response, such as specimen geometry, is a critical step towards standardization.

CSEBs are produced by compressing a mixture of soil, water, and a stabilizer (e.g., Portland cement). The heterogeneity of the material accrues from the variety of soil particle morphology and potential …

Application Of Tensile Testing Machine For Measurement Of Skin Friction Coefficient, Jeremy Silver-Mahr

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Traditionally fluid drag associated with skin friction is conducted by the measurement of constrained fluid flow across a textured surface. This works well for easy-to-handle fluids such as water and oil, however it is less feasible for fluids such as liquid metals. A device that measures the drag force on a surface through a static fluid would allow for different fluid types and sample geometries to be tested. A fish scale pattern consisted of overlapping repeating circular planes 3mm in diameter angled to achieve 0.14mm of depth was embossed onto a PMMA sheet. A control sample of smooth PMMA was …

Restoring An Iso:5840-Compliant Pulse Duplicator Device For Hydrodynamic Performance Characterization Of Artificial Cardiac Valves, Denver Eagar

Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

During the summer of 2021, I was employed as an intern at Dynatek Labs, an implantable prosthetics testing company located in southern Missouri. My primary project was to modernize an abandoned pulse duplicator device and protocol to allow the company to re-enter a market area which they left nearly 15 years prior: heart valve testing. The company halted this initiative due to changes in international testing standards in previous years. The International Standards Organization Cardiac Valves Working Group released the latest version of standards concerning artificial heart valve testing (ISO 5840) in January of 2021. Accordingly, my project required that …

Comparing The Friction Of Tennis Shoes, John Hale, Roger Lewis, Matt Carre

International Sports Engineering Association – Engineering of Sport

No abstract provided.

Construction Of Concrete Modular Foundations - Procurement And Quality Control, Jackson M. Runyan

Construction Management

This project details the material procurement and quality control processes throughout the construction of two concrete modular foundations. The project focused on constructing the blocks as they were designed to ensure they meet strength parameters to be used in the High Bay Lab at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) for various testing performed as part of the curriculum for the Architectural Engineering (ARCE) and Construction Management (CM) departments. The complex designs, encompassing one-hundred coupler attachments and a dense rebar cage, required extensive attention and hours of labor and quality control review. This paper will cover …

Synthesizing Maritime Interaction Scenarios For Testing Autonomy, Benjamin E. Hargis, Yiannis E. Papelis

Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference

This paper presents a method to deterministically synthesize maritime traffic interactions that can be presented to a system under test regardless of the state of the system under test. A background to the problem is given and the method is briefly outlined. Results indicate that the approach can enable more robust evaluation of maritime autonomous algorithms.

A Low-Cost And Low-Tech Solution To Test For Variations Between Multiple Offline Programming Software Packages., Steffen Wendell Bolz

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This research paper chronicles the attempt to bring forth a low-cost and low-tech testing methodology whereby multiple offline programming (OLP) software packages’ generated programs may be compared when run on industrial robots. This research was initiated by the discovery that no real research exists to test between iterations of OLP software packages and that most research for positional accuracy and/or repeatability on industrial robots is expensive and technologically intensive. Despite this, many countries’ leaders are pushing for intensive digitalization of manufacturing and Small and Mediumsized Enterprises (SMEs) are noted to be lagging in adoption of such technologies. The research consisted …

Thermal Testing And Simulation Of Lunar And Martian Isru-Based Materials, Andres Campbell

All Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Upon the eventual return of humans to the lunar surface, leveraging local resources to construct landing pads and other infrastructure is an essential component to minimize cost and risk. The inability to accurately model landing and launch scenarios to predict damage to lunar structures poses risks to astronaut and equipment safety. The following experiment is an investigation of using simulation software and temperature sensors to model lunar and Martian regolith simulant-based concrete exposed to thermal loads. The basis of this experiment is built upon standards defined by the American Society for Testing and Materials, the fundamental axioms of structural health …

Influence Of Conformal Coatings On The Emc Performance Of A Printed Circuit Board, Haran Manoharan, Ruijie He, Fuwei Ma, Daryl G. Beetner, Brian Booth, Kerry Martin

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Conformal coatings are often applied to printed circuit boards to protect the board and its components from environmental factors like moisture, chemicals, and vibration. The impact of a conformal coating on crosstalk and radiated emissions was studied in the following paper. Two coating materials were characterized in terms of their permittivity and permeability. The impact of the conformal coating was evaluated based on the crosstalk between microstrip traces, the radiated emissions from a switch-mode power supply (SMPS), and on coupling from an EMI filter to nearby components. The coatings increased crosstalk between microstrip traces by up to 5 ~ 6 …

Adjust-A-Ramp, Taylor Sharrits, Courtney Banks, Emily Beck, Jazmin Buenrostro

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Adjust-A-Ramp is a portable ramp designed to ensure the safety of consumers and prevention of damage to cars, specifically towards low profile cars. A low-profile vehicle includes any vehicle that has a clearance off the ground of 6.5 inches or less. Advantages of low-profile vehicles include improved handling, better braking, increased fuel efficiency, increased stability, and an overall luxury aesthetic. The reduced tire size increases grip on smooth surfaces with better wheel response, creating a fast, more efficient ride. The simple tire tread patterns and the stiff sidewalls allow for lower rolling resistance which increases fuel economy. The Adjust-A-Ramp can …

Statistical And Variational Modeling And Analysis Of Passive Integrated Photonic Devices, Norbert Dinyi Agbodo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The success of Si as a platform for photonic devices and the associated availabilityof wafer-scale, ultra-high resolution lithography for Si CMOS has helped lead to the rapid advance of Si-based integrated photonics manufacturing over the past decade. This evolution is nearing the point of integration of Si-based photonics together with Si-CMOS for compact, high speed, high bandwidth, and cost-effective devices. However, due to the sensitive nature of passive and active photonic devices, variations inherent in wafer-based fabrication processes can lead to unacceptable levels of performance variation both within a give die and across a given wafer. Fully understanding the role …

Automated Scenario Generation Using Halton Sequences For The Verification Of Autonomous Vehicle Behavior In Simulation, Andrew Ferree

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

As autonomous vehicles continue to develop, verifying their safety remains a large hurdle to mass adoption. One component of this is testing, however it has been shown that it is impractical to statistically prove an autonomous vehicle’s safety using real-world testing alone. Therefore, simulation tools and other virtual testing methods are being employed to assist with the verification process. Testing in simulation still faces some of the challenges of the real world, such as the difficulty in exhaustively testing the system in all scenarios it will encounter. Manual scenario creation is time consuming and does not guarantee scenario coverage. Pseudo-random …

Thermal Conductivity Measuring Device, Kyle Saalfeld

All Undergraduate Projects

The thermal conductivity measuring device is used to measure thermal conductivity of solids, liquids, and food products. Thermal conductivity is a material property that determines the rate at which heat disperses through a material. This determines how well insulation works, what materials are used as heat sinks, refrigeration, and how thoroughly food is cooked. The device measures thermal conductivity by heating up a thermistor bead using a high magnitude current for a measured duration and allowing the given heat to disperse; meeting the goal of designing a device that can easily measure the conductivity. Additional requirements of this device include …

Liquid Rocket Engine And Test System, Ronnie Wallingford, Grace Ann Phillips, Blake Bowser, Jack Dalton

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The goal of this project is to design the University of Akron’s first design team built liquid propulsion rocket engine and testing system. The creation of this engine and testing system will create new opportunities for the Akronauts Rocket Design Team moving forward, allowing the team to enter more prestigious competitions, and will also enable students to better pursue opportunities in the space and defense industry by exposing them to more relevant industry experiences.

The liquid rocket engine designed by the team will utilize ethanol and liquid nitrous oxide to generate approximately 500 lbf of thrust. An accompanying test system …

Tabletop Dome Tester, Dylan Davis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The project for the dome tester stand is a continuation from a group of four that worked on the stand in Spring of 2020. The project itself is based around the Erichsen Cupping test to test the material properties, in our application specifically, observing the forming limits of strain in deep drawing applications of sheet metal. Testing pieces in varying lengths from 4” x 4” squares to 4” x 0.5” strips to the depth that necking begins on the piece to determine the limit before cracks appear using a hemispherical punch to draw the material sample clamped between two dies. …

Testing And Validation Framework For Autonomous Aerial Vehicles, Mustafa I. Akbas

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAV) have the potential to have market disruptions for various industries such as ground delivery and aerial transportation. Hence, the USAF has called for increased level of autonomy. There has been a significant progress in artificial intelligence engines, complex and non-deterministic system components, which are at the core of the autonomous aerial platforms. Traditional testing and validation methods fall short of satisfying the requirement of testing such complex systems. Therefore, to achieve highly or fully autonomous capabilities, a major leap forward in the validation is required. The key challenges are the localization of problems, development of object …

Metrological Certification And Test Conditions For Verification Equipment, A Turgunbaev, H Usmanova, O Abdurakhmanov

Technical science and innovation

The article analyzes the metrological certification and test conditions for verification equipment. The main tasks of metrological certification, test conditions, accuracy characteristics of verification equipment, primary, repeated and periodic, expert and inspection certification of verification equipment are considered in the article. Besides, the major tasks of the testing equipment certification are considered as well. They are: establishing the current testing equipment eligibility in accordance with its purpose, establishing the actual reproducibility values of test conditions implemented by testing equipment and assessing the technical characteristics compliance of testing equipment with the safety, hygienic and other special requirements

Tanzanian Concrete Masonry Walls, Edward J. Kaminski

Architectural Engineering

Walls that replicate masonry walls used in Tanzania are constructed and tested. The results from testing was compared with the respective predictions made using code guidelines from ASCE 7 and TMS 402.

Testing Of Two 10-Inch Insertion Propeller Flow Meters, Stuart Styles, Sierra Layous, Jack Evans

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

With funding from the US Bureau of Reclamation, California – Great Basin Region (Region 10), the Cal Poly Irrigation Training & Research Center (ITRC) conducted flow measurement accuracy testing on two 10-inch insertion (strap-on saddle) McCrometer Water Specialties propeller flow meters. Both meters were new and recently purchased by Westlands Water District. One of the meters is shown in Figure 1. Testing was performed at the ITRC Water Resources Facility (WRF) using the ITRC volumetric tank as the standard flow rate measurement for all tests. The ITRC volumetric tank was calibrated with the NIST¹-traceable ITRC gravimetric tank using …

Magnetic Flow Meter Testing, Stuart Styles, Sierra Layous, Jack Evans

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

With funding from the US Bureau of Reclamation, California – Great Basin Region (Region 10) and the California Department of Water Resources (Agreement No. 4600011908), the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Irrigation Training & Research Center (ITRC) conducted testing on 4-inch and 10-inch spool-type magnetic flow meters ( also known as mag meters and electromagnetic flow meters) from six manufacturers (12 meters total). The testing was performed to assess the effects of various hydraulic conditions on meter accuracy.

Testing Of Two 10-Inch Insertion Magnetic Flow Meters, Stuart Styles, Sierra Layous, Jack Evans

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

With funding from the US Bureau of Reclamation, California – Great Basin Region (Region 10), the Cal Poly Irrigation Training & Research Center (ITRC) conducted flow measurement accuracy testing on two 10-inch insertion (saddle-mount) McCrometer Mc Mag3000 magnetic flow meters. The meters were two of 360 new meters that were purchased by Westlands Water District. One of the meters is shown in Figure 1. Testing was performed at the ITRC Water Resources Facility (WRF) using the ITRC gravimetric (weigh) tank as the standard flow rate measurement for all tests. The ITRC gravimetric tank has a NIST¹-traceable uncertainty of …

Testing Of Two 30-Inch Magnetic Flow Meters, Stuart Styles, Jack Evans, Sierra Layous, Chad Tenbrink

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

With funding from the US Bureau of Reclamation, California – Great Basin Region (Region 10), the Cal Poly Irrigation Training & Research Center (ITRC) conducted flow measurement testing on two (2×) 30inch spool-type magnetic flow meters in March of 2020. Figure 1 shows the meters installed at the testing facility. The testing determined the accuracy for each test meter in a straight pipe configuration across a range of typical water velocities (0.4 to 3.8 feet per second). Testing was performed at the ITRC Water Resources Facility (WRF) using the ITRC volumetric tank as the standard flow rate measurement for all …

Testing Of A 10 To 48-Inch Insertion Magnetic Flow Meter, Stuart Styles, Jack Evans, Sierra Layous, Chad Tenbrink

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

With funding from the US Bureau of Reclamation, California – Great Basin Region (Region 10), the Cal Poly Irrigation Training & Research Center (ITRC) conducted flow measurement testing on one (1×) 10 to 48-inch Seametrics EX21x insertion magnetic meter (“Seametrics”, “test meter”) in April 2020. Figure 1 shows the meter installed at the testing facility. The testing determined the accuracy of the test meter in a straight pipe configuration across a range of typical water velocities (0.5 to 5.8 feet per second). Testing was performed at the ITRC Water Resources Facility (WRF) using calibrated measurements from a 30-inch Krohne Enviromag …