Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Mechanical Engineering Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Mechanical Engineering

Enhancing Bifacial Pv Efficiency With The Addition Of A Rear Side Reflector, Neila Watson Jun 2022

Enhancing Bifacial Pv Efficiency With The Addition Of A Rear Side Reflector, Neila Watson

Honors Theses

Bifacial photovoltaics are an expanding sector of solar electricity production, collecting solar energy on the front, back, and sides of the module. This increases the efficiency by around 10% to 30% over a typical mono facial cell, which only collects sunlight on the front. However, the performance of bifacial PV arrays depends on a variety of factors, including temperature, shadows, solar insolation, and set-up geometry. The geometry is affected by the tilt angle, the azimuth angle, the height from the ground to the panel, and the reflectance from the ground surface. The addition of a reflector, usually white in color …


Developing New Crutch Tip Design For Overall Increased Stability And Improved Movement On Different Terrains, Lauren Skinner May 2022

Developing New Crutch Tip Design For Overall Increased Stability And Improved Movement On Different Terrains, Lauren Skinner

Honors Theses

Crutches are a mobility assistive device that are often used in various situations, such as post- surgical rehabilitation and recovery after injury. The current crutch tip design that is used on today’s crutches are often unstable and do not provide quality movement on different terrains, such as snow, ice, mud, and wet surfaces. These problems would be solved with a new tip design that could be attached to existing crutches or manufactured with the crutch itself. The team’s solution to this problem is a crutch tip with modular parts. The tip would attach to the shaft of the crutch like …


A Computer Vision-Based Method For Bolt Loosening Detection, Savannah Burdette Apr 2022

A Computer Vision-Based Method For Bolt Loosening Detection, Savannah Burdette

Honors Theses

Routine bolt-loosening inspection plays an essential role in managing and preventing the degradation of our nation’s highway bridges over time. Neglecting to perform these inspections could result in public safety concerns. The study of this thesis develops a cost-effective method of bolt-loosening detection based on computer vision. To this end, two input images of the bolted connections are collected at two different inspection times. The feature points are then identified from the input images, based on which a geometric transformation matrix is applied to correct any perspective differences between the two images. Next, we select the image patches of the …