Computer Engineering Commons^™

The Effects Of Engineering Summer Camps On Middle And High School Students’ Engineering Interest And Identity Formation: A Multi-Methods Study, Timothy Robinson, Adam Kirn, Jenny Amos, Indira Chatterjee

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

This multi-methods study explores changes in engineering interest and identity of middle and high school students (n = 79) attending introductory-level engineering summer camps at a large western land grant university. Middle school is a critical time when student interest, identity, and subsequently career choice begin to emerge and hence it is important that at this age students are given accurate information about engineering majors in college and future career opportunities in engineering. Data were collected over a period of two years in six summer camps. Three separate populations of middle and high school students participated in the summer …

Bim For Bridges And Structures Pooled Fund Initiative, Julie Rivera, Connor Christian

Purdue Road School

The BIM for Bridges and Structures initiative, also known as TPF-5(372), is a transportation pooled fund project that is a collaborative effort of 20 states, FHWA, and the AASHTO Committee on Bridges and Structures. The pooled fund objective is to develop an open, national standard for exchanging information necessary for the design, fabrication, and construction of bridges and structures in the United States. The presentation will provide an overview of the project and explain ways in which stakeholders can get involved.

Wireless Underground Communications In Sewer And Stormwater Overflow Monitoring: Radio Waves Through Soil And Asphalt Medium, Usman Raza, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

Storm drains and sanitary sewers are prone to backups and overflows due to extra amount wastewater entering the pipes. To prevent that, it is imperative to efficiently monitor the urban underground infrastructure. The combination of sensors system and wireless underground communication system can be used to realize urban underground IoT applications, e.g., storm water and wastewater overflow monitoring systems. The aim of this article is to establish a feasibility of the use of wireless underground communications techniques, and wave propagation through the subsurface soil and asphalt layers, in an underground pavement system for storm water and sewer overflow monitoring application. …

Internet Of Things For Sustainable Mining, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

The sustainable mining Internet of Things deals with the applications of IoT technology to the coupled needs of sustainable recovery of metals and a healthy environment for a thriving planet. In this chapter, the IoT architecture and technology is presented to support development of a digital mining platform emphasizing the exploration of rock–fluid–environment interactions to develop extraction methods with maximum economic benefit, while maintaining and preserving both water quantity and quality, soil, and, ultimately, human health. New perspectives are provided for IoT applications in developing new mineral resources, improved management of tailings, monitoring and mitigating contamination from mining. Moreover, tools …

Urban Underground Infrastructure Monitoring Iot: The Path Loss Analysis, Abdul Salam, Syed Shah

Faculty Publications

The extra quantities of wastewater entering the pipes can cause backups that result in sanitary sewer overflows. Urban underground infrastructure monitoring is important for controlling the flow of extraneous water into the pipelines. By combining the wireless underground communications and sensor solutions, the urban underground IoT applications such as real time wastewater and storm water overflow monitoring can be developed. In this paper, the path loss analysis of wireless underground communications in urban underground IoT for wastewater monitoring has been presented. It has been shown that the communication range of up to 4 kilometers can be achieved from an underground …

An Underground Radio Wave Propagation Prediction Model For Digital Agriculture, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

Underground sensing and propagation of Signals in the Soil (SitS) medium is an electromagnetic issue. The path loss prediction with higher accuracy is an open research subject in digital agriculture monitoring applications for sensing and communications. The statistical data are predominantly derived from site-specific empirical measurements, which is considered an impediment to universal application. Nevertheless, in the existing literature, statistical approaches have been applied to the SitS channel modeling, where impulse response analysis and the Friis open space transmission formula are employed as the channel modeling tool in different soil types under varying soil moisture conditions at diverse communication distances …

Purdue Air Sense: A Methodology For Improving The Accuracy Of Ambient Aerosol Mass Concentration And Size Distribution Measurement With Low-Cost Optical Sensing Techniques, Rishabh Ramsisaria, Satya Sundar Patra, Brandon Emil Boor

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

There is a global lack of a means for monitoring air pollutant levels at a local level due to expensive and bulky instrument requirements. It is important to monitor toxic gas levels, as well as particulate matter levels, in the atmosphere to study their effects on human health and to further develop city- and community-level air pollution solutions. In this study, with the means of a Raspberry Pi, low-cost Alphasense Optical Particle Counter and gas sensors, and methodical calibration techniques, we built a portable 3-D printed module powered by clean electricity generated by an on-board Voltaic solar cell that measures …

Real-Time Non-Contact Road Defect Detection Using Inexpensive Sensors, Zhao Xing Lim, Mohammad Jahanshahi, Tarutal Ghosh Mondal, Da Cheng, Shutao Wang, Mohammad K. Sweidan, Aanis Ahmad, Omar Hesham Abouhussein, Xi Chen

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Road defects such as potholes, humps, and road cracks have become one of the main concerns for road and traffic safety worldwide. Pavement defect detection is crucial to ensure road safety. However, current solutions to this problem are either too time-consuming or too expensive to be employed large-scale. We propose a novel approach which has the ability to autonomously detect potholes in real-time using cost-effective sensors. Inexpensive sensors are mounted on a vehicle and a deep learning algorithm is used to identify road defects. The detection system is paired with a GPS and positional sensors to map the location of …

Development Of A New Nanohub Simulation Tool: Coarse Graining Of Crystalline Nano-Cellulose., Kuo Tian, Mehdi Shishehbor, Pablo Zavattieri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Crystalline Nano-cellulose (CNC) is a general molecular structure obtained from acid hydrolysis of native fiber. They are often very short (100 to 1000 manometers) and the mechanical properties of CNC varies depend on length scale. Due to defect formation of the structure, the mechanical properties of the material composed of such CNC may vary drastically. This study was to provide a numerical tool to integrate a few valid modules and to better understand the mechanical properties of CNC and the overall performance of the bio-inspired material composed of CNC. Our focus is mainly on two type of composite structure [1] …

Algorithms For Lidar Based Traffic Tracking: Development And Demonstration, Vamsi K. Bandaru

Open Access Theses

The current state of the art of traffic tracking is based on the use of video, and requires extensive manual intervention for it to work, including hours of painstaking human examination of videos frame by frame which also make the acquisition of data extremely expensive. Fundamentally, this is because we do not have observability of the actual scene from a camera which captures a 2D projection of the 3D world. Even if video were to be automated, it would involve such algorithms as RANSACK for outlier elimination while matching features across frames or across multiple cameras. This results in algorithms …

Stochastic Modeling And Dem Simulation Of Granular Media Subsidence Due To Underground Activity, Rodrigo Borela Valente

Open Access Theses

Many communities around the world have been established in areas of ongoing, as well as ceased, underground mining activity. Ground movements induced by ore extraction methods and the collapse of abandoned cavities have long been recognized as a hazard to surface structures. A number of approaches have been proposed for the prediction of subsidence in underground mining regions, and their integration to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can produce a powerful risk management tool. Nevertheless, this application is often limited by either a lack of generality or excessive computational cost of the methods available.

In this work, the stochastic subsidence model …

Absorption Simulation ( Absim ) Software Development, Vipul Vishnu Bhat, Ming Qu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Researchers working on air conditioning systems currently use a software called ABSIM ( Absorption Simulation ) to evaluate current absorption systems or simulate new system designs. ABSIM was developed at Oak Ridge National Labs in the 1980s and the latest platform it is compatible with is Windows XP. ABSIM is not compatible on newer platforms and is not very user friendly. A lot of the actions involved in using ABSIM aren’t very intuitive. The goal is to develop a more user friendly simulation program that is based off of ABSIM and see to it that the program can be deployed …