Engineering Commons^™

Introduction To Reservoir Analysis - University Of Colorado Boulder, Joseph Kasprzyk

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Introduction to reservoirs, lecture from Water Resource Systems and Management (Spring 2017), University of Colorado Boulder. By Joseph Kasprzyk. Learning goals include (i) introducing what a reservoir is, (ii) apply control volume and conservation of mass principles to analyze storage in natural lakes and reservoirs (iii) calculate required storage size for reservoirs using basic techniques (iv) define reservoir terms including safe yield and critical period (v) discuss dam building trends in the US and globally.

Case Study For Guided Project In Stochastic Hydrology, Meghna Babbar-Sebens

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Attached are two guided project activities for hydrology and climate data of Eagle Creek Watershed, Indiana, USA. The zip files have flow and precipitation datasets at daily, monthly, and annual time scales.

Gams Handout 2, Ethan Yang

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No abstract provided.

Evaluating And Redesigning The Self-Monitoring Tool, Harry Budi Santoso, Isnaeni Nurrohmah, Fadhilah Suci, Wade H. Goodridge

Engineering Education Faculty Publications

In order to facilitate self-monitoring interventions designed by the Faculty of Computer Science Universitas Indonesia a web-based self-monitoring tool was created. This paper aims to evaluate the tool regarding its usability and user-experiences prior to its wide adoption. The System Usability Scale (SUS) and the User-Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) were used to evaluate the self-monitoring tool. The tool was implemented in a Human-Computer Interaction course during odd semesters, and the evaluations were taken by the participants of the course. The evaluation results were analysed to help determine whether the tool needs to be enhanced or improved. Based on the results, a …

Mentoring Initial Research, Abigail Lisjak, Tim Leonard, Adam Foster, Patrick Gray

Sustainability and Connectivity

This document details the initial research the group gathered as the problem statement was being refined. Some of this research will be used to inform future elements of the project.

Statistical Mechanics Of Lipid-Liquid Crystal Systems: From Fundamentals To Sensing Applications, Donya Ohadi Kabir Maghsudlu

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding the thermodynamics of small systems has a well-established history. The non-intuitive behavior of the intensive properties of small systems comprised of less than a few hundred particles has important implications in many areas of engineering and materials science. Nevertheless, many open questions about the thermophysical properties of systems not in the thermodynamic limit remain unanswered. In the first part of this work, we explore the consequences of the coupling of two small subsystems that together make up a larger isolated system through the use of statistical mechanics and molecular dynamics simulations of Lennard-Jones particles in two dimensions. The results …

Characterization Of Subgrade Resilient Modulus For Mepdg And The Effects On Pavement Rutting, Md Mostaqur Rahman

Theses and Dissertations

In 2008, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) released a modified pavement design method (i.e., the Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG)) based on Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) data from all over the United States. The MEPDG default design parameters developed from the LTPP database are expected to be significantly different than those for South Carolina material, traffic and weather conditions, thus the default design parameters may not be accurate for South Carolina. Therefore, the new pavement design method should be calibrated for South Carolina conditions by performing MEPDG local calibration.

Different input variables should …

A Machine Learning Approach For Enhancing Security And Quality Of Service Of Optical Burst Switching Networks, Adel Dabash A. Rajab

Theses and Dissertations

The Optical Bust Switching (OBS) network has become one of the most promising switching technologies for building the next-generation of internet backbone infrastructure. However, OBS networks still face a number of security and Quality of Service (QoS) challenges, particularly from Burst Header Packet (BHP) flooding attacks. In OBS, a core switch handles requests, reserving one of the unoccupied channels for incoming data bursts (DB) through BHP. An attacker can exploit this fact and send malicious BHP without the corresponding DB. If unresolved, threats such as BHP flooding attacks can result in low bandwidth utilization, limited network performance, high burst loss …

Confluence Of Density Currents Produced By Lock-Exchange, Hassan Ismail

Theses and Dissertations

Density currents represent a broad classification of flows driven by the force of gravity acting on a fluid with variable density. With examples of density currents including turbidity currents, sand storms, salt wedges in tidal rivers, and oil spills, a great deal of attention has been previously given to understanding the underlying mechanisms of such flows and implications of those flows on fluid, species, and sediment transport. Although documented confluences occur naturally in terrestrial and submarine settings,little attention has been given to understanding the confluence of two density currents.

This study furthers the state of knowledge on density current confluences …

Advancing Automated Methods For Microrna Profiling, Kia N. Zellars

Theses and Dissertations

The widespread influence of miRNAs in many biological processes and characteristic changes in expression profiles make them potential biomarkers for a range of diseases. With recent discoveries highlighting the enrichment of particular circulating miRNAs in plasma under pathological conditions, there has been a push for technological advances in miRNA profiling studies as a diagnostic tool. A standardized, automated, high-throughput method for miRNA isolation from human plasma samples was developed in this study. Samples were subject to full miRNome profiling utilizing RT-qPCR. These unique findings demonstrate that developing a distinct miRNA biomarker profile for heart failure patients is feasible and holds …

Blind Change Point Detection And Regime Segmentation Using Gaussian Process Regression, Sourav Das

Theses and Dissertations

Time-series analysis is used heavily in modeling and forecasting weather, economics, medical data as well as in various other fields. Change point detection (CPD) means finding abrupt changes in the time-series when the statistical property of a certain part of it starts to differ. CPD has attracted a lot of attention in the artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining communities. In this thesis, a novel CPD algorithm is introduced for segmenting multivariate time-series data. The proposed algorithm is a general pipeline to process any high dimensional multivariate time-series data using nonlinear non-parametric dynamic system. It consists of manifold learning …

Modeling Battery Performance Due To Volume Change In Porous Electrodes Due To Intercalation, Taylor R. Garrick

Theses and Dissertations

The demand for energy continues to increase as the economies of developing countries become more modern and show an increased need for a reliable energy infrastructure in order to meet the increased demand associated with a large and more mobile population. An increased demand puts a strain on all sectors, however it is specifically noticeable in the transportation sector where a significant portion of the fuel utilized for transportation comes from petroleum and other fossil fuels. Recently, using alternative forms of energy for transportation has become reality, and in turn, using electricity as a transportation fuel has gained significant momentum, …

Three Segment Adaptive Power Electronic Compensator For Non-Periodic Currents, Amin Ghaderi

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, a new technique is proposed for the compensation of nonperiodic load current. The method provides control references for three co-located devices, each corresponding to one moving calculation window and one decomposed part of the compensated current. They are slow compensator with high power rating, large calculation window, and low switching frequency; fast compensator with lower power rating, shorter calculation window, and higher switching frequency; and the reactive compensator which is an ordinary static VAR compensator (SVC). To improve the flexibility of the technique, a fuzzy based adaptive window is proposed for the slow compensator to find the …

Wideband Low Side Lobe Aperture Coupled Patch Phased Array Antennas, Dhruva Poduval

Theses and Dissertations

Low profile printed antenna arrays with wide bandwidth, high gain, and low Side Lobe Level (SLL) are in great demand for current and future commercial and military communication systems and radar. Aperture coupled patch antennas have been proposed to obtain wide impedance bandwidths in the past. Aperture coupling is preferred particularly for phased arrays because of their advantage of integration to other active devices and circuits, e.g. phase shifters, power amplifiers, low noise amplifiers, mixers etc. However, when designing such arrays, the interplay between array performance characteristics, such as gain, side lobe level, back lobe level, mutual coupling etc. must …

A Lebesgue Sampling Based Diagnosis And Prognosis Methodology With Application To Lithium-Ion Batteries, Wuzhao Yan

Theses and Dissertations

Fault diagnosis and prognosis (FDP) plays an important role in the modern complex industrial systems to maintain their reliability, safety, and availability. Diagnosis aims to monitor the fault state of the component or the system in real-time. Prognosis refers to the generation of long-term predictions that describe the evolution of a fault and the estimation of the remaining useful life (RUL) of a failing component or subsystem.

Traditional Riemann sampling-based FDP (RS-FDP) takes samples and executes algorithms in periodic time intervals and, in most cases, requires significant computational resources. This makes it difficult or even impossible to implement RS-FDP algorithms …

Atherosclerotic Plaque Adhesion Strength And Its Role In Plaque Rupture, Bilal Merei

Theses and Dissertations

Cardiovascular diseases are disorders affecting the blood vessels and the heart. According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular diseases are one of the leading causes of death worldwide. They are responsible for over 17.1 million deaths per year worldwide, representing 31.5% of deaths 1, 2. Atherosclerosis, a chronic inflammatory disorder affecting large arteries, is the underlying cause of many cardiovascular diseases. Plaque rupture is a serious complication of advanced atherosclerosis, often leading to life-threatening clinical consequences such as myocardial infarction (heart attack) or stroke. 75% of newly developed myocardial infarction cases are caused by atherosclerotic plaque rupture. It affects approximately …

Modeling Of Tow Wrinkling In Automated Fiber Placement Based On Geometrical Considerations, Roudy Wehbe

Theses and Dissertations

Automated manufacturing of fiber reinforced composite structures via numerically controlled hardware yields parts with increased accuracy and repeatability as compared to hand-layup parts. Automated fiber placement (AFP) is one such process in which structures or parts are built by adding bands of prescribed number of tows or slit-tape with prescribed width using robotic machine heads over 3D surfaces following prescribed paths. Despite the improved accuracy, different types of defects or manufacturing features arise during fabrication. These defects can be due to geometrical features, materials, and process planning parameters and are detected in the form of wrinkling, tow twist, tow folding, …

Fiber Optic Guided Wave Sensors For Structural Health Monitoring, Erik Frankforter

Theses and Dissertations

Risks and costs associated with aging infrastructure have been mounting, presenting a clear need for innovative damage monitoring solutions. One of the more powerful damage monitoring approaches involves using ultrasonic guided waves which propagate through a structure and carry damage-related information to permanently bonded sensors. Ultrasonic fiber-optic sensors are one of the most promising technologies for this application: they are immune to electromagnetic interference, present no ignition hazard, and transmit their data over tens of kilometers. However, before they can be widely employed, several limitations need to be overcome: poor sensitivity, unidirectional sensing, and loss of ultrasonic functionality due to …

Clustering Opportunistic Ant-Based Routing Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks, Xinlu Li, Brian Keegan, Fredrick Mtenzi

Conference papers

The wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have a wide range of applications in many ereas, including many kinds of uses such as environmental monitoring and chemical detection. Due to the restriction of energy supply, the improvement of routing performance is the major motivation in WSNs. We present a Clustering Opportunistic Ant-based Routing protocol (COAR), which comprises the following main contributions to achieve high energy efficient and well load-balance: (i) in the clustering algorithm, we caculate the theoretical value of energy dissipation, which will make the number of clusters fluctuate around the expected value, (ii) define novel heuristic function and pheromone update …

Bootstrapping Labelled Dataset Construction For Cow Tracking And Behavior Analysis, Aram Ter-Sarkisov, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper introduces a new approach to the longterm tracking of an object in a challenging environment. The object is a cow and the environment is an enclosure in a cowshed. Some of the key challenges in this domain are a cluttered background, low contrast and high similarity between moving objects – which greatly reduces the efficiency of most existing approaches, including those based on background subtraction. Our approach is split into object localization, instance segmentation, learning and tracking stages. Our solution is benchmarked against a range of semi-supervised object tracking algorithms and we show that the performance is strong …

Assessing The Usefulness Of Different Feature Sets For Predicting The Comprehension Difficulty Of Text, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher, Noel Fitzpatrick

Conference papers

Within English second language acquisition there is an enthusiasm for using authentic text as learning materials in classroom and online settings. This enthusiasm, however, is tempered by the difficulty in finding authentic texts at suitable levels of comprehension difficulty for specific groups of learners. An automated way to rate the comprehension difficulty of a text would make finding suitable texts a much more manageable task. While readability metrics have been in use for over 50 years now they only capture a small amount of what constitutes comprehension difficulty. In this paper we examine other features of texts that are related …

Analysing The Behaviour Of Online Investors In Times Of Geopolitical Distress: A Case Study On War Stocks, James Usher, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

In this paper we analyse how the behavior of an online financial community in time of geopolitical crises. In particular, we studied the behaviour, composition and communication patterns of online investors before and after a military geopolitical event. We selected a set of 23 key-events belonging to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring and the first period of the Ukraine crisis. We restricted our study to a set of eight so called military stocks, which are US-manufacturing companies active in the defence sector. We studied the resilience of the community to information shocks by comparing the community …

Strategies For Improving Labor Productivity In Construction Companies, Lakew G. Buli

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Even with advanced technology and new project management methodologies, construction company leaders continue to face challenges to improve labor productivity. This multiple case study was an exploration of the strategies that construction company leaders use to improve labor productivity in Doha, Qatar. The case population consisted of 6 construction company leaders operating in Doha, Qatar, who successfully identified and implemented strategies to improve labor productivity. The conceptual framework for this study was the expectancy theory. The data collection process included semistructured interviews and company documentation. Data were compiled and organized, disassembled into fragments, reassembled into a sequence of groups, and …

Experiences Of Public Agency Managers When Making Outsourcing Decisions, Shakeel Baig

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Managers in state transportation agencies in the United States must frequently choose between using the talents and abilities of in-house staff or outsourcing for road and bridge design projects. Budgetary crises have strongly affected funding for transportation infrastructure. Facing budgetary pressures to suppress costs, managers must frequently make the choice of outsourcing a project or performing it in-house. Yet, decision-making models for these decisions are inadequate. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore and describe the lived experiences of public agency managers when making decisions to outsource the core government functions such as road and bridge design projects. …

Marketing Strategies To Enhance Profitability Among International Oil And Gas Service Companies, Hesameddin Zafari

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

A significant drop in oil price in 2014 resulted in enormous pressure on marketing managers of international oilfield service companies to address new market expectations. In such competitive conditions, some marketing managers lack strategies to leverage profitability during downturns. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies that senior marketing managers of international oilfield service companies in the Middle East successfully used to enhance sales performance, revenues, and profits during periods of declining oil prices. Theory of market segmentation, targeting, and positioning formed the conceptual framework for this study. Data were collected through semistructured interviews of 5 …

Transitioning Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder From School To Society, Charla Brenta Spurlin Deleo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

High school administrators in a rural school district were providing transition planning to students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in order to meet postschool transition goals. Despite these efforts, few students with ASD were employed or enrolled in postsecondary training, and parents reported that they were dissatisfied with the postschool transition process. The purpose of this collective case study was to explore parental and staff perceptions of the postschool transition processes of students with ASD to increase the understanding of the practice related to postschool transitions. Guided by Tinto and Pusser's institutional framework, research questions were focused on the experiences …

Evaluating Intention To Use Remote Robotics Experimentation In Programming Courses, Pericles Leng Cheng

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The Digital Agenda for Europe (2015) states that there will be 825,000 unfilled vacancies for Information and Communications Technology by 2020. This lack of IT professionals stems from the small number of students graduating in computer science. To retain more students in the field, teachers can use remote robotic experiments to explain difficult concepts. This correlational study used the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to examine if performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions can predict the intention of high school computer science teachers in Cyprus, to use remote robotic experiments in their classes. …

State-Led Approaches To Electronic Waste Management In The U.S.: A Study Of Stakeholder Involvement In Take-Back Legislation Efficiency, Ashley Elizabeth Westgate

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

Information technology has proliferated over the past two decades, and waste from electronics represents the fastest growing waste stream in the world. The production and disposal of electronics, from cradle to grave, pose critical threats to human health and the environment. The management of electronic, or e-waste, streams poses a particular set of challenges for solid waste management, hazardous waste management, and economic development in the United States. As e-waste accumulates, state governments, municipalities and private landfills are refusing to accept the responsibility for its disposal. To address this problem, the federal and state governments must find a safe and …

Correction: Messer, T.L.; Burchell, M.R.; Birgand, F. Comparison Of Four Nitrate Removal Kinetic Models In Two Distinct Wetland Restoration Mesocosm Systems. Water 2017, 9, 517, Tiffany L. Messer, Michael R. Burchell, François Birgand

Biological Systems Engineering: Papers and Publications

The authors wish to make the following corrections to this paper [1]:

(1): The author name “François Bírgand” should be François Birgand.

(2): Reference 38 should be the following:

Birgand, F.; Aveni-Deforge, K.; Smith, B.; Maxwell, B.M.; Horstman, M.; Gerling, A.B.; Carey, C.C. First report of a novel multiplexer pumping system coupled to a water quality probe to collect high temporal frequency in situ water chemistry measurements at multiple sites. Limnol. Oceanogr. Methods 2016, 14, 767–783, doi:10.1002/lom3.10122.

(3): Reference 49 should be the following:

Christensen, P.B.; Nielsen, L.P.; Sørensen, J.; Revsbech, N.P. Denitrification in Nitrate-Rich Streams: Diurnal and Seasonal Variation …

An Analysis Of Harmonic Heating In Smart Buildings And Distribution Network Implications With Increasing Non-Linear (Domestic) Load And Embedded Generation, Chittesth Veni Chandran, Keith Sunderland, Malabika Basu

Articles

Harmonic distortion is generally not taken into account within domestic installations and the associated wiring systems, as its potential is considered sufficiently small to be neglected. Standards to limit harmonic manifestations in the low voltage (LV) network are available, but these can be breached as a consequence of advancements in power electronics in some modern household devices contributing higher levels of harmonic distortion than permitted. While these devices individually might not be considered serious in terms of system level harmonic distortion manifestations, electrical equipment failures and insulation failures - increasingly being derived from harmonic cable heating - suggest a different …