Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Simulation Of Magnetically Confined Inductively Coupled Plasma, Sina Javadpour

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this work, a new parallel coil design was presented to address the need for high density inductively coupled plasmas with enhanced properties and a more uniform and consistent distribution, suitable for large-area material processing. Fluid model simulations of 3D argon inductively coupled plasma (ICP) were performed in COMSOL for the proposed coil and a conventional single cylindrical coil with the same impedance to be used as reference, to compare and evaluate the performance of this new halftoroidal parallel coil design and study its effects on the main variables of the generated plasma. Through different comparisons of the simulations results, …

Audio-Based Productivity Forecasting Of Construction Cyclic Activities, Chris A. Sabillon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Due to its high cost, project managers must be able to monitor the performance of construction heavy equipment promptly. This cannot be achieved through traditional management techniques, which are based on direct observation or on estimations from historical data. Some manufacturers have started to integrate their proprietary technologies, but construction contractors are unlikely to have a fleet of entirely new and single manufacturer equipment for this to represent a solution. Third party automated approaches include the use of active sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, passive technologies such as computer vision and image processing, and audio signal processing. Hitherto, most …

Solar Irradiance Forecasting And Implications For Domestic Electric Water Heating, Christopher Nutter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the effects of burning fossil fuels continues to present its prevalence, the interests in alternative forms of energy is expanding. Within the home, the domestic electrical water heater accounts for approximately 17% of its energy consumption. Reducing the amount of energy required to produce hot water from this thermal system alone can have a significant effect on reducing its carbon footprint. In this presented work, a modeled domestic electrical water heater was supplied photovoltaic and on-grid electrical power to increase its energy efficiency. As photovoltaic (PV) energy is directly related to solar irradiation, it is important to receive accurate …

A Comprehensive Methodology For Design Of A Circulation Control Small-Scale Unmanned Aircraft, Konstantinos Kanistras

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly prevalent and important for a wide spectrum of civilian and military operations. When focusing on small-scale fixed-wing UAVs, payload, power and energy requirements limit considerably their utilization and flexibility allowing them to complete only those specific missions they are designed for. Circulation Control (CC) is an active flow control method used to produce increased lift over the traditional systems (flaps, slats, etc...) currently in use. This dissertation focuses on the foundations of a comprehensive methodology from design to implementation and experimental testing of Coanda-based Circulation Control Wings (CCW) for unmanned aircraft. The …

Design And Evaluation Of A Propulsion System For Small, Compact, Low-Speed Maneuvering Underwater Vehicles, Florence M. Mbithi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Underwater vehicles used to perform precision inspection and non-destructive evaluation in tightly constrained or delicate underwater environments must be small, have low-speed maneuverability and a smooth streamlined outer shape with no appendages. In this thesis, the design and analysis of a new propulsion system for such underwater vehicles is presented. It consists primarily of a syringe and a plunger driven by a linear actuator and uses different inflow and outflow nozzles to provide continuous propulsive force. A prototype of the proposed propulsion mechanism is built and tested. The practical utility and potential efficacy of the system is demonstrated and assessed …

Neuromodulation Based Control Of Autonomous Robots On A Cloud Computing Platform, Cameron Muhammad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the advancement of neurobiologically plausible models and computer networking has resulted in new ways of implementing control systems on robotic platforms. The work presents a control approach based on vertebrate neuromodulation and its implementation on autonomous robots in the open-source, open-access environment of robot operating system (ROS). A spiking neural network (SNN) is used to model the neuromodulatory function for generating context based behavioral responses of the robots to sensory input signals. The neural network incorporates three types of neurons- cholinergic and noradrenergic (ACh/NE) neurons for attention focusing and action selection, dopaminergic (DA) neurons for rewards- and …

An Efficient Navigation-Control System For Small Unmanned Aircraft, Jonathan Alejandro Girwar-Nath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been research in the past decade for a broad range of tasks and application domains such as search and rescue, reconnaissance, traffic control, pipe line inspections, surveillance, border patrol, and communication bridging.

This work describes the design and implementation of a lightweight Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) semi-autonomous Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Presented here is a methodology for System Identification utilizing the Box-Jenkins model estimator on recorded flight data to characterize the system and develop a mathematical model of the aircraft. Additionally, a novel microprocessor, the XMOS, is utilized to navigate and maneuver the aircraft utilizing a PD …