Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

A Distributed Control System For Priority-Based Site-Specific Irrigation, Fabio Rodrigues De Miranda

Doctoral Dissertations

Site-specific irrigation enables maximizing yields and water use efficiency for fields with variation in soil water availability. Distributed control for fixed irrigated systems, with controllers close to the sensors and actuators in the field, is easier to install and maintain, and less susceptible to damage by lightning strikes compared to centralized control, but is only economically viable with affordable, low-power controllers. A low cost, solar-powered, feedback irrigation controller for distributed control of fixed irrigation systems was developed and tested. The system used soil water potential measurements to control the amount of water applied to each specific zone of a field. …

Delineation Of Management Units For Site-Specific Irrigation.”, Carlos Wagner Oliveira

Doctoral Dissertations

Variability of soil properties in many fields is too great for a whole field to be effectively managed with a uniform application of irrigation water. Consequently, a decision must be made for irrigation management about which areas in the field should be treated differently or grouped. A decision-making framework was developed to determine whether site-specific irrigation management would be cost effective for selected fields. The framework is designed to find the best field layout in terms of water management, and tests the hypothesis that there is a particular field management layout that maximizes net return. As part of the framework, …

Effects Of Diabetes And Aging On Posture And Acceleration Thresholds During Lateral Translations, Samantha Jean Richerson

Doctoral Dissertations

Research objectives. One source of falls in the elderly may be an inability to sufficiently adjust to transient postural perturbations or slips. Identifying useful predictors of fall potential, as well as factors that affect the ability of an individual to detect a movement of the standing support surface may provide insight into postural stability and methods to increase stability in elders. To do this, acceleration thresholds to short, precise, lateral platform translations and the resultant psychophysical responses of adults with early Type 2 diabetes to age-matched controls and young adults were measured.

Methods. Using an innovative SLIP-FALLS platform, …