Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Developing And Testing An Anguilliform Robot Swimming With Theoretically High Hydrodynamic Efficiency, John B. Potts Iii

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

An anguilliform swimming robot replicating an idealized motion is a complex marine vehicle necessitating both a theoretical and experimental analysis to completely understand its propulsion characteristics. The ideal anguilliform motion within is theorized to produce ``wakeless'' swimming (Vorus, 2011), a reactive swimming technique that produces thrust by accelerations of the added mass in the vicinity of the body. The net circulation for the unsteady motion is theorized to be eliminated.

The robot was designed to replicate the desired, theoretical motion by applying control theory methods. Independent joint control was used due to hardware limitations. The fluid velocity vectors in the …

The Aerodynamic And Dynamic Loading Of A Slender Structure By An Impacting Tornado-Like Vortex: The Influence Of Relative Vortex-To-Structure Size On Structural Loading, Matthew Nicholas Strasser

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Structural loading produced by an impacting vortex is a hazardous phenomenon that is encountered in numerous applications ranging from the destruction of residences by tornados to the chopping of tip vortices by rotors. Adequate design of structures to resist vortex-induced structural loading necessitates study of the phenomenon that control the structural loading produced by an impacting vortex. This body of work extends the current knowledge base of vortex-structure interaction by evaluating the influence of the relative vortex-to-structure size on the structural loading that the vortex produces. A computer model is utilized to directly simulate the two-dimensional impact of an impinging …

Application Of The Aeroacoustic Analogy To A Shrouded, Subsonic, Radial Fan., Bryan Buccieri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A study was conducted to investigate the predictive capability of computational aeroacoustics with respect to a shrouded, subsonic, radial fan. A three dimensional unsteady fluid dynamics simulation was conducted to produce aerodynamic data used as the acoustic source for an aeroacoustics simulation. Two acoustic models were developed: one modeling the forces on the rotating fan blades as a set of rotating dipoles located at the center of mass of each fan blade and one modeling the forces on the stationary fan shroud as a field of distributed stationary dipoles. Predicted acoustic response was compared to experimental data. The blade source …

Sound Attenuation Of Fiberglass Lined Ventilation Ducts, Jacob Albright

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Sound attenuation is a crucial part of designing any HVAC system. Most ventilation systems are designed to be in areas occupied by one or more persons. If these systems do not adequately attenuate the sound of the supply fan, compressor, or any other source of sound, the affected area could be subject to an array of problems ranging from an annoying hum to a deafening howl. The goals of this project are to quantify the sound attenuation properties of fiberglass duct liner and to perform a regression analysis to develop equations to predict insertion loss values for both rectangular and …

Three Degree-Of-Freedom Parallel Actuator Telescope Mount, Garrett Daniel Gudgel

Master's Theses

This thesis contains the design, implementation, and testing of an original, small-scaled two degree-of-freedom telescope mount and a medium-scaled three degree-of-freedom telescope mount inspired by the six degree-of-freedom Stewart-Gough platform telescope mount. The end product is intended to achieve research-standard resolution of targeted sky coverage for binary star research. The scaled prototype was carried through concept design, manufacturing, software development, and testing. The mount software development and electronic design is applicable to a full-scale mount as the drivers have been designed to be easily adapted to different actuator configurations. It is recommended that this design be implemented into a telescope …

Vortex-Induced Vibration Of Structures With Broken Symmetry, Banafsheh Seyedaghazadeh

Doctoral Dissertations

A bluff body, i.e., an object with a blunt cross-section immersed in cross-flow forms an unstable wake, resulting in the formation of large-scale vortical structures, which induce unsteady forces on the body. If the body is flexible or flexibly mounted, vortex-induced vibration (VIV) results, which can have significant implications for a number of physical systems, from aeolian harps to power transmission lines, towing cables, undersea pipelines, drilling risers and mooring lines used to stabilize offshore floating platforms. VIV has been a major subject of research in recent years. The majority of these studies have focused on symmetric systems in which …

In Vivo Mechanics Of Cam-Post Engagement In Fixed And Mobile Bearing Tka And Vibroarthrography Of The Knee Joint, Sumesh M. Zingde

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation was to determine the mechanics of the cam-post mechanism for subjects implanted with a Rotating Platform (RP) PS TKA, Fixed Bearing (FB) PS TKA or FB Bi-Cruciate Stabilized (BCS) TKA. Additionally, a secondary goal of this dissertation was to investigate the feasibility of vibroarthrography in correlating in-vivo vibrations with features exhibited in native, arthritic and implanted knees. In-vivo, 3D kinematics were determined for subjects implanted with nine knees with a RP-PS TKA, five knees with a FB-PS TKA, and 10 knees with a FB-BCS TKA, while performing a deep knee bend. Distance between the cam-post …

Text-Independent Speaker Identification Using Statistical Learning, Alli Ayoola Ojutiku

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of voice-activated devices and systems and over-the-phone bank transactions has made our daily affairs much easier in recent times. The ease that these systems offer also call for a need for them to be fail-safe against impersonators. Due to the sensitive information that might be shred on these systems, it is imperative that security be an utmost concern during the development stages. Vital systems like these should incorporate a functionality of discriminating between the actual speaker and impersonators. That functionality is the focus of this thesis.

Several methods have been proposed to be used to achieve this system …

Deltronic Solutions Delta 3d Printer, Ramon Santos, Justin James, Taylor Chris, Stephen Marshall, Paul Maalouf

Mechanical Engineering

The Delta 3D Printer project is a 2014-2015 Cal Poly ME senior project sponsored by Dr. Jose Macedo, Professor and Department Chair of the Cal Poly IME Department; Yaskawa America, Inc., industry-leading producer of high-quality electronic drives and motors; and Bell-Everman, Inc., producer of high-precision embedded motion systems. The Delta 3D Printer project was conceived by Dr. Macedo as a collaboration between Cal Poly engineering and Yaskawa America. The majority of delta 3d printers on the market utilize stepper motors to control the print head motion. The 3D printer for this project was designed to use servo motors instead of …

The Development And Evaluation Of A Method For Understanding The Impact Of Transmission Loss On The Overall Noise Attenuation Of Finite Barriers, Ashwin Arvind Upasani

Graduate Theses - Mechanical Engineering

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of transmission loss on the overall noise reduction obtained from finite barriers. The noise attenuation ability of barriers is understood to be a consequence of sound waves diffracting around their edges. Although the presence of transmission loss is acknowledged, its significance in affecting noise attenuation is usually not considered a priority in barrier design. This study incorporates the Fresnel Number concept for predicting theoretical insertion loss of a finite barrier and compares these predictions to experimental observations. The experiments performed in this study offer a method to isolate the transmission …

Phase Dynamics Of Locset Control Methodology, Brendan Neschke

Masters Theses

Single-mode fiber amplifiers produce diffraction-limited beams very efficiently. Maximum beam intensity requires that an array of these amplifiers have their beams coherently combined at the target. Optical path differences and noise adversely affect beam quality. An existing closed loop phase control methodology, called the locking of optical coherence by single-detector electronic-frequency tagging (LOCSET), corrects phase errors in real time by electronically detecting path length differences and sending signals to lithium niobate phase adjusters. Broadening the line-width using “jitter” of the input signal can increase the output power of an individual amplifier by suppressing nonlinearity. The system dynamics of LOCSET are …

Noise Control By Structure And Material, Brian Tarling

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

An acoustic impedance testing tube is designed and constructed to test noise absorption properties of selected materials. The structure will be made to be convenient for demonstration purposes and real testing procedures while following ASTM E1050 standards as closely as possible. An engineering drawing as well as a 3D-­‐CAD model of the structure is developed. Testing is conducted on selected materials; mainly ones that will allow obtained results to be compared to results found by other parties. Various sounds will be generated using Mathematical programming; the types of sound will include single frequency, wide band and narrow band noises. Microphones …

Computational Valve Plate Design, Paul K. Kalbfleisch

Open Access Theses

Axial piston machines are widely used in many industries for their designs compactness, flexibility in power transfer, variable flow rate, and high efficiencies as compared to their manufacturing costs. One important component of all axial piston machines that is a very influential on the performance of the unit is the valve plate. The aim of this research is to develop a design methodology that is general enough to design all types of valve plates and the simple enough not to require advanced technical knowledge from the user. A new style of valve plate designs has been developed that comprehensively considers …

Vibration-Based Health Monitoring Of Rotating Systems With Gyroscopic Effect, Nenad Gavrilovic

Master's Theses

This thesis focuses on the simulation of the gyroscopic effect using the software MSC Adams. A simple shaft-disk system was created and parameter of the sys-tem were changed in order to study the influence of the gyroscopic effect. It was shown that an increasing bearing stiffness reduces the precession motion. Fur-thermore, it was shown that the gyroscopic effect vanishes if the disk of system is placed symmetrically on the shaft, which reduces the system to a Jeffcott-Ro-tor. The second objective of this study was to analyze different defects in a simple fixed axis gear set. In particular, a cracked shaft, …

Estimation Of Outer-Middle Ear Transmission Using Dpoaes And Fractional-Order Modeling Of Human Middle Ear, Maryam Naghibolhosseini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Our ability to hear depends primarily on sound waves traveling through the outer and middle ear toward the inner ear. Hence, the characteristics of the outer and middle ear affect sound transmission to/from the inner ear. The role of the middle and outer ear in sound transmission is particularly important for otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), which are sound signals generated in a healthy cochlea, and recorded by a sensitive microphone placed in the ear canal. OAEs are used to evaluate the health and function of the cochlea; however, they are also affected by outer and middle ear characteristics. To …

Helmholtz Equation Least Squares Based Near-Field Acoustic Holography With Laser, Wu Zhu

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation presents the HELS based NAH with laser and use normal surface velocity as input in near-field acoustic holography. The conventional HELS based NAH uses acoustic pressure as input to reconstruct sound field quantities, while this modified HELS based NAH with laser utilizes the normal surface velocities measured by LDV to reconstruct the acoustic quantities at interested positions. Theoretical principles of the HELS based NAH with laser have been fully developed and the method has been verified in theoretical perspective. Two theoretical examples verify that HELS based NAH with laser can obtain exactly the same results as analytic solution. …

Monitor: Automation Tools For Landscape-Scale Acoustic Monitoring, Jonathan Edward Katz

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Climate change coupled with land-use change will likely alter habitats and affect state parameters of the animal populations that dwell in them. Affected parameters are anticipated to include site occupancy and abundance, population range, and phenophase cycles (e.g., arrival dates on breeding grounds for migrant bird species). Detecting these changes will require monitoring many sites for many years, a process that is well suited for an automated system. We developed and tested monitoR, an R package that is designed for long-term, multi-taxa automated passive acoustic monitoring programs. monitoR correctly identified presence for black-throated green warbler and ovenbird in 64% and …

Temperature Dependence Of Shear Speed In Micellar Fluid, E.G. Sunethra Kumari Dayavansha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Wormlike micellar (WM) fluids are viscoelastic and can support shear waves. Phase transitions of the micellar aggregates are temperature dependent and can manifest as sharp changes in the shear wave speed as a function of temperature. Thus, shear waves provide a good tool for detecting the existence of phase transitions. In this work, the variation of shear speed with temperature of 200mM CTAB/NaSal micellar fluid in a 5:3 ratio was studied. The dependence of shear wave speed on time between fluid synthesis and measurement was also investigated. Shear wave propagation through the fluid was observed as a time varying birefringence …

A Subsystem Identification Approach To Modeling Human Control Behavior And Studying Human Learning, Xingye Zhang

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Humans learn to interact with many complex dynamic systems such as helicopters, bicycles, and automobiles. This dissertation develops a subsystem identification method to model the control strategies that human subjects use in experiments where they interact with dynamic systems. This work provides new results on the control strategies that humans learn.

We present a novel subsystem identification algorithm, which can identify unknown linear time-invariant feedback and feedforward subsystems interconnected with a known linear time-invariant subsystem. These subsystem identification algorithms are analyzed in the cases of noiseless and noisy data.

We present results from human-in-the-loop experiments, where human subjects in- teract …

Increasing Efficiency Of Thermal Desalination, Jarrod A. Edwards, Mackinzie Washington, Chan Jung, Ben Garrison

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Vibration Of Steel-Framed Floors Supporting Sensitive Equipment In Hospitals, Research Facilities, And Manufacturing Facilities, Di Liu

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Floors have traditionally been designed only for strength and deflection serviceability. As technological advances have been made in medical, scientific and micro-electronics manufacturing, many types of equipment have become sensitive to vibration of the supporting floor. Thus, vibration serviceability has become a routinely evaluated limit state for floors supporting sensitive equipment. Equipment vibration tolerance limits are sometimes expressed as waveform peak acceleration, and are more often expressed as narrowband spectral acceleration, or one-third octave spectral velocity.

Current floor vibration prediction methods, such as those found in the American Institute of Steel Construction Design Guide 11, Floor Vibrations Due to Human …

The University Of Akron 2015 Sae Zips Baja Off-Road Racing Team 2015 Suspension System Design, Ryan W. Timura

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Baja SAE has been an important part of the University of Akron for the last 20 years. In the early stages, Zips Baja won many races and was one of the best Baja teams around. In more recent years, the teams have not been able to keep up the high place finishes. The 2015 Baja team aims to start a new trend of high place finishes for the years to come. With many design leaders returning from the previous year, passed down knowledge, and experience from last year, it should be an attainable goal.

Networked Heterogeneous Systems In A Ros-Enabled Cloud Environment, Christopher Reid

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is important in the development of cloud robotics that the challenges presented by transferring computational loads to networked resources are properly addressed. The challenges include network latency, data integrity, security, and privacy. The objective of the present work is to investigate the issues of latency and data integrity in a representative cloud robotics environment. The present work involves setting up a cloud robotics network in an open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) framework and carrying out investigations on the levels of latency and reduction in data integrity as utilization of the network increases. In this study, a virtual datacenter has …

Airborne Path Frequency Based Substructuring Method And Its Applications, Rui He

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Frequency based substructuring (FBS) is routinely used to model structural dynamics. It provides a framework for connecting structural subsystems together, assessing path contributions, determining the effect of mount modification, and identifying inverse forces. In this work, FBS methods are extended to include acoustic subsystems and connecting pipes and ducts. Connecting pipes or ducts are modeled using the transfer matrix approach which is commonly used for modeling mufflers and silencers below the plane wave cutoff frequency. The suggested approach is validated using boundary element method (BEM) simulation. Applications of the procedure include determining airborne path contributions, the effect of treating ducts …

Development And Validation Of Finite Element Approaches To Determine The Insertion Loss Of Louvered Terminations Including Parametric Investigations, Huangxing Chen

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Louvers are employed at the ends of HVAC ducts to direct airflow, provide weather protection, and attenuate noise. This details two finite element approaches that can be used to assess the acoustic attenuation from a louvered termination. In the first approach, plane wave propagation is assumed inside of a duct with a non-reflective source. On the receiver side, a baffled termination is assumed and the radiation condition is simulated using a non-reflective boundary condition called an automatically matched layer. In the second approach, a short aperture is placed between two infinite acoustic spaces. On the source side, a diffuse acoustic …

Determination Of Isolator Transfer Matrix And Insertion Loss With Application To Spring Mounts, Shishuo Sun

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Transmissibility is the most common metric used for isolator characterization. However, engineers are becoming increasingly concerned about energy transmission through an isolator at high frequencies and how the compliance of the machine and foundation factor into the performance. In this study, the transfer matrix approach for isolator characterization is first reviewed. Two methods are detailed for determining the transfer matrix of an isolator using finite element simulation. This is accomplished by determining either the mobility or impedance matrix for the isolator and then converting to a transfer matrix. One of the more useful metrics to characterize the high frequency performance …