Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Umass Amherst Green Building Guidelines 2013, Ludmilla Pavlova-Gillham, Ted Mendoza, Ezra Small, Patricia O'Flaherty, Nariman Mostafavi, Mohamed Farzinmoghadam, Somayeh Tabatabaee Pozveh

Ludmilla D Pavlova

Facilities & Campus Services, Sustainable UMass and Campus Planning support sustainability and energy conservation initiatives by providing in-house resources to campus staff as well as designers and contractors working with the University. The UMass Amherst Green Building Guidelines provide a framework for approaching new construction and major renovation projects at UMass Amherst that are undergoing LEED certification by focusing the conversation on green building aspects that are most important to the campus. They are intended to be the beginning of a dynamic conversation between designers, environmental consultants and constructors, university stakeholders, and users of new high performance buildings.

Umass Amherst Building Measurement, Verification, Coordination And Template Plan, Nariman Mostafavi, Ted Mendoza, Jeffrey G. Quackenbush, Sandy J. Beauregard, Jason J. Burbank, Mohamad Farzinmoghadam, Ludmilla Pavlova-Gillham, Kylie A. Landrey, Patricia O'Flaherty

Ludmilla D Pavlova

Facilities & Campus Services, Sustainable UMass and Campus Planning support sustainability and energy conservation initiatives by providing in-house resources to campus staff as well as designers and contractors working with the University. The UMass Amherst Building Measurement, Verification, Coordination and Template Plan was begun in 2013 and finalized in 2015 as a resource to project teams that undertake the measurement and verification of building systems during the first year of occupancy of a new building and renovation project, particularly projects undergoing LEED certification.

Development Of A Novel Handheld Device For Active Compensation Of Physiological Tremor, Abhijit Saxena

Abhijit Saxena

In microsurgery, the human hand imposes certain limitations in accurately positioning the tip of a device such as scalpel. Any errors in the motion of the hand make microsurgical procedures difficult and involuntary motions such as hand tremors can make some procedures significantly difficult to perform. This is particularly true in the case of vitreoretinal microsurgery. The most familiar source of involuntary motion is physiological tremor. Real-time compensation of tremor is, therefore, necessary to assist surgeons to precisely position and manipulate the tool-tip to accurately perform a microsurgery. In this thesis, a novel handheld device (AID) is described for compensation …

Green Scheduling For Radiant Systems In Buildings, Truong X. Nghiem, Madhur Behl, George J. Pappas, Rahul Mangharam

Truong X Nghiem

In this report we look at the problem of peak power reduction for buildings with electric radiant floor heating systems. Uncoordinated operation of a multi-zone radiant floor heating system can result in temporally correlated electricity demand surges or peaks in the building’s electricity consumption. As peak power prices are 200-400 times that of the nominal rate, this uncoordinated activity can result in high electricity costs and expensive system operation. We have previously presented green scheduling as an approach for reducing the aggregate peak power consumption in buildings while ensuring that indoor thermal comfort is always maintained. This report extends the …

Stochastic Optimal Control In Nonlinear Systems, Celestin Nkundineza

Celestin Nkundineza

Stochastic control is an important area of research in engineering systems that undergo disturbances. Controlling individual states in such systems is critical. The present investigation is concerned with the application of the stochastic optimal control strategy developed by To (2010) and its implementation as well as providing computed results of linear and nonlinear systems under stationary and nonstationary random excitations. In the strategy the feedback matrix is designed based on the achievement of the objectives for individual states in the system through the application of the Lyapunov equation for the system. Each diagonal element in the gain or associated gain …

Green Scheduling For Radiant Systems In Buildings, Truong X. Nghiem, Madhur Behl, George J. Pappas, Rahul Mangharam

Madhur Behl

In this report we look at the problem of peak power reduction for buildings with electric radiant floor heating systems. Uncoordinated operation of a multi-zone radiant floor heating system can result in temporally correlated electricity demand surges or peaks in the building’s electricity consumption. As peak power prices are 200-400 times that of the nominal rate, this uncoordinated activity can result in high electricity costs and expensive system operation. We have previously presented green scheduling as an approach for reducing the aggregate peak power consumption in buildings while ensuring that indoor thermal comfort is always maintained. This report extends the …

Green Scheduling For Radiant Systems In Buildings, Truong Nghiem, Madhur Behl, George Pappas, Rahul Mangharam

Rahul Mangharam

In this report we look at the problem of peak power reduction for buildings with electric radiant floor heating systems. Uncoordinated operation of a multi-zone radiant floor heating system can result in temporally correlated electricity demand surges or peaks in the building’s electricity consumption. As peak power prices are 200-400 times that of the nominal rate, this uncoordinated activity can result in high electricity costs and expensive system operation. We have previously presented green scheduling as an approach for reducing the aggregate peak power consumption in buildings while ensuring that indoor thermal comfort is always maintained. This report extends the …

Sprawl Angle In Simplified Models Of Vertical Climbing: Implications For Robots And Roaches, Goran A. Lynch, Lawrence Rome, Daniel E. Koditschek

Daniel E Koditschek

Empirical data taken from fast climbing sprawled posture animals reveals the presence of strong lateral forces with significant pendulous swaying of the mass center trajectory in a manner captured by a recently proposed dynamical template. In this simulation study we explore the potential benefits of pendulous dynamical climbing in animals and in robots by examining the stability and power advantages of variously more and less sprawled limb morphologies when driven by conventional motors in contrast with animal-like muscles. For open loop models of gait generation inspired by the neural-deprived regimes of high stride-frequency animal climbing, our results corroborate earlier hypotheses …

The Carillon And Its Haptic Signature : Modeling The Changing Force-Feedback Constraints Of A Musical Instrument For Haptic Display, Mark Havryliv, F. Geiger, M. Gurtler, Fazel Naghdy, Greg Schiemer

Greg Schiemer

The carillon is one of the few instruments that elicits sophisticated haptic interaction from amateur and professional players alike. Like the piano keyboard, the velocity of a player’s impact on each carillon key, or baton, affects the quality of the resultant tone; unlike the piano, each carillon baton returns a different force-feedback. Force-feedback varies widely from one baton to the next across the entire range of the instrument and with further idiosyncratic variation from one instrument to another. This makes the carillon an ideal candidate for haptic simulation. The application of synthesized forcefeedback based on an analysis of forces operating …

Derivation And Application Of A Conserved Orbital Energy For The Inverted Pendulum Bipedal Walking Model, Jerry E. Pratt, Sergey V. Drakunov

Sergey V. Drakunov