Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Effect Of Total Awake Time On Drivers' Performance And Evaluation Of Training Intervention To Mitigate Effects Of Total Awake Time On Drivers' Performance, Abd Malek Abdul Hamid

Open Access Dissertations

Driving while sleepy, drowsy or fatigued are leading contributors to road crashes. Sleepiness, drowsiness and fatigue usually occur at the end of a prolonged period of time during which an individual has been awake. Although these factors have been heavily researched, it is not clear how one of their primary causes, a prolonged total awake time (TAT), might affect driving skills such as hazard anticipation, hazard mitigation and attention maintenance, three skills that are crucial for safe driving.

The first experiment investigated how these three driving skills are affected by prolonged TAT, and if so to what extent. Forty-eight participants …

Techno-Economic Feasibility Study Of Ammonia Plants Powered By Offshore Wind, Eric R. Morgan

Open Access Dissertations

Ammonia production with offshore wind power has the potential to transform energy and fertilizer markets within the United States. The vast offshore wind resource can be converted directly into liquid ammonia using existing technologies. The liquid ammonia can then be transported around the country via rail, truck, barge or pipeline and used as either a fertilizer or a fuel. This thesis reviews the technologies required for all-electric, wind-powered ammonia production and offers a simple design of such a system. Cost models based on the physical equipment necessary to produce ammonia with wind power are developed; offshore wind farm cost models …

Acceleration Of Cfd And Data Analysis Using Graphics Processors, Ali Khajeh Saeed

Open Access Dissertations

Graphics processing units function well as high performance computing devices for scientific computing. The non-standard processor architecture and high memory bandwidth allow graphics processing units (GPUs) to provide some of the best performance in terms of FLOPS per dollar. Recently these capabilities became accessible for general purpose computations with the CUDA programming environment on NVIDIA GPUs and ATI Stream Computing environment on ATI GPUs. Many applications in computational science are constrained by memory access speeds and can be accelerated significantly by using GPUs as the compute engine. Using graphics processing units as a compute engine gives the personal desktop computer …

The Aerodynamics And Near Wake Of An Offshore Floating Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine, Thomas Sebastian

Open Access Dissertations

Offshore floating wind turbines represent the future of wind energy. However, significant challenges must be overcome before these systems can be widely used. Because of the dynamics of offshore floating wind turbines -- surge, sway, heave, roll, pitch, and yaw -- and the resulting interactions between the rotor and generated wake, the aerodynamic analysis methods and design codes that have found wide use throughout the wind energy industry may be inadequate. Application of these techniques to offshore floating wind turbine aerodynamics may result in off-optimal designs, effectively handicapping these next-generation systems, thereby minimizing their full potential. This dissertation will demonstrate …

A Numerical Study Of Droplet Formation And Behavior Using Interface Tracking Methods, Sandeep Menon

Open Access Dissertations

An adaptive remeshing algorithm has been developed for multiphase flow simulations using the moving-mesh interface tracking (MMIT) technique. The edge-swapping algorithm uses the Delaunay criterion (in 2D) and a dynamic programming technique (in 3D) to maximize the quality of mesh primitives surrounding edges in the mesh, and performs local remeshing to minimize interpolation errors. Edge bisection and contraction operations are also performed to adjust the mesh resolution around important features like fluid-interfaces, driven by a local length scale estimation algorithm that is efficient and easily parallelized. Flow-field interpolation after reconnection is achieved using a conservative, second-order accurate remapping scheme that …