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Northern Illinois University

Theses/Dissertations

2023

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Articles 1 - 30 of 49

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Cta’S ‘L’ System Visualization And Animation, Julia Finegan Dec 2023

Cta’S ‘L’ System Visualization And Animation, Julia Finegan

Honors Capstones

The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is a vital public transportation system for the city of Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, and all of its ‘L’ train data was recorded from March 2022 to February 2023 for this research. The main goal of this project was to create interactive/animated charts, graphs, and/or transit maps to present this raw data in a meaningful form that could help future researchers learn more about the CTA system, its patterns, and/or its unexplained inconsistencies/irregularities. A simple animation of the ‘L’ trains running within a specified time frame was created with the Python libraries Pandas, Shapely, …

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Creating A Three Dimensional Ngss Aligned Unit On Motion And Energy For Middle Grades Students, Spencer M. Rudie Dec 2023

Creating A Three Dimensional Ngss Aligned Unit On Motion And Energy For Middle Grades Students, Spencer M. Rudie

Honors Capstones

A study was conducted to see how the attitudes of middle school aged students would change with respect to science and engineering before and after participating in a ten-lesson unit. Students from the Barb City STEAM team (n=5) participated in the unit and attitudes assessment The unit was based on the principles of motion and energy, concluding with an engineering challenge where the students analyzed the motion and energy of a mousetrap powered car that they built from common craft materials. Their attitudes were assessed before and after the unit with seven questions using a five-point Likert scale, and the …

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Breaking The Loop: Strategies For Fighting Climate Change On U.S. Farms, Ashley Barry Nov 2023

Breaking The Loop: Strategies For Fighting Climate Change On U.S. Farms, Ashley Barry

Honors Capstones

Climate change is an increasingly urgent area of research due to the hardships it causes for lands and communities across the globe. Specifically in regard to the United States (U.S.), climate change has many concerning implications on our agricultural system. Increased weather hazards, decreased crop production, and drought are just a few of the hardships American farmers are facing in their fight to keep their farms alive and feed their communities, despite a rapidly changing climate. This study investigates how farmers can fight and prevent climate change through the use of specific mitigation and adaptation strategies on their farms. Semi- …

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Landslide Forecast In Taiwan Based On Machine Learning In The Gis Field, Yi Shen May 2023

Landslide Forecast In Taiwan Based On Machine Learning In The Gis Field, Yi Shen

Honors Capstones

Landslides can pose a significant risk to life, property, and infrastructure in mountainous regions, and can be triggered by various factors, including intense rainfall, earthquakes, and water level changes. Machine learning is commonly used to forecast landslides, based on statistical relationships between past landslides and multiple variables to create a general forecasting model. However, these models often require large amounts of data to achieve accurate results. This project aims to use only a few variables but take advantage of both their spatial distribution and temporal trends to improve the accuracy of landslide forecasts. This approach is tested in Taiwan, a …

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Paleotemperature Estimates From Diatom Morphometrics In The Amundsen Sea For Marine Isotope Stage 5, Cesar Lopez May 2023

Paleotemperature Estimates From Diatom Morphometrics In The Amundsen Sea For Marine Isotope Stage 5, Cesar Lopez

Honors Capstones

Because of ever rising temperatures driven by anthropogenic climate change, much attention has been given to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) by the scientific community. This is due to its sensitivity to global climate change and vulnerability for collapse as evidenced by Pleistocene interglacial events. Paleotemperature estimates from the Amundsen Sea are crucial for understanding how global temperature changes impacted WAIS throughout the Pleistocene. Marine Isotope Stage 5 (MIS 5) is of particular interest as it contains different substages and intervals of fluctuating temperatures. This period also is estimated to have had temperatures equal to, or slightly higher than …

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Pixel-Wise Machine Learning And Deep Learning Methods Implementation On Multi-Class Wildfire Mapping, Mingda Wu May 2023

Pixel-Wise Machine Learning And Deep Learning Methods Implementation On Multi-Class Wildfire Mapping, Mingda Wu

Honors Capstones

Wildfires are destructive natural hazards. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a trendy topic in recent years due to its powerful applicability. This study focuses on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in hazard management, specifically in the field of wildfire mapping. Machine learning and Deep learning are two subsets of AI. This study applied pixel-wise machine learning and deep learning methods to do multi-class mapping on two wildfire events in California, USA. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the usefulness and advantages of using AI in the field of hazard management. The machine learning methods selected are Random …

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Improving The Adelic Version Of The Minkowski-Hlawka Theorem, Fatmah Alnaser Jan 2023

Improving The Adelic Version Of The Minkowski-Hlawka Theorem, Fatmah Alnaser

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation we take a method developed by Schmidt to improve the classical version of the Minkowski-Hlawka Theorem and extend that to certain number fields. This leads to an analogous improvement to the adelic Minkowski-Hlawka Theorem in certain cases. We also demonstrate that the adelic version, even in the case where the number field is the field of rational numbers, is more general than the classical version.

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Dynamic Overnight Effect On Next Day Stock Market Forecasting, Thomas J. Lee Jan 2023

Dynamic Overnight Effect On Next Day Stock Market Forecasting, Thomas J. Lee

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Using a cross section of stocks that have high frequency trading data from 2007 to 2018, we document whether various intraday momentum patterns found in the financial literature over the years continue to hold over time. The first half hour return on the market is often seen as having predictive power over the last half hour of trading, or overnight returns are thought to reverse in the next day's first half hour of trading. We find that while there is some evidence for these patterns, especially in the earlier years, these patterns tend to weaken over time as investors take …

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Coulomb Blockade-Mediated Field Emission Sources Using Ultra-Nanocrystalline Diamond, Jevin Jensen Jan 2023

Coulomb Blockade-Mediated Field Emission Sources Using Ultra-Nanocrystalline Diamond, Jevin Jensen

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Coulomb Blockade effects in field emission provide interesting means of achieving brighter electron sources for numerous applications, ranging from vacuum electronics to the next generation of electron beam technology. Microelectronics cleanroom methods are presented in this thesis for production of field emission sources moderated by the Coulomb Blockade. The use of common processes is an essential step toward widespread experimentation with Coulomb Blockade-mediated field emission apparatuses. The main feature to be explored is the use of nano-diamond films for their potential applicability for this desired outcome. Ultra-Nanocrystalline Diamond is used in two different ways to achieve this, both as a …

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Design And Cold Test Of A Metamaterial Accelerating Structure For Two-Beam Acceleration, Dillon Christopher Merenich Jan 2023

Design And Cold Test Of A Metamaterial Accelerating Structure For Two-Beam Acceleration, Dillon Christopher Merenich

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Structure-based wakefield acceleration (SWFA) is an advanced accelerator concept that can achieve higher accelerating gradients than conventional accelerators. Advanced structures are required for SWFA, with metamaterial (MTM) structures as a promising candidate. MTMs are periodic sub-wavelength structures engineered to exhibit exotic electromagnetic properties, such as simultaneously negative permittivity and permeability. Because of their unique electromagnetic properties, MTMs are particularly interesting to SWFA. Previous studies at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator have demonstrated efficient wakefield power extraction using MTM structures. This thesis presents the design, fabrication, and cold test of an X-band MTM accelerating structure for two-beam acceleration. An MTM structure was …

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Convection Allowing Simulations Of Hail In Historical And Future Climate Epochs, Jillian Rose Goodin Jan 2023

Convection Allowing Simulations Of Hail In Historical And Future Climate Epochs, Jillian Rose Goodin

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis investigates the potential impact of anthropogenic climate change on hail frequency and intensity, which poses a significant threat to life and property, accounting for annual insured losses of around $30 billion in the U.S. This approach uses convection-allowing dynamically-downscaled regional climate simulations using input data from NCAR's bias-corrected Community Earth System Model to simulate historical and projected future climate regimes under two greenhouse gas emission scenarios. A column maximum diameter hail diagnostic is simulated by the Weather Research and Forecasting regional climate model to identify instances of hail days and size to quantify changes in large hail frequency …

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Vanadium Partitioning Between Magnetite, Hematite, And A Hydrothermal Fluid: Implications For Iocg And Ioa Deposits, Jeremy Raymond Nederbo Jan 2023

Vanadium Partitioning Between Magnetite, Hematite, And A Hydrothermal Fluid: Implications For Iocg And Ioa Deposits, Jeremy Raymond Nederbo

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Iron oxide-copper-gold (IOCG) and iron oxide-apatite (IOA) deposits are major sources of iron contained within magnetite and/or hematite as well as copper contained within copper-iron sulfides and gold as a native metal. Their formations have been attributed to magmatic, hydrothermal, or a mixture of magmatic-hydrothermal processes. Vanadium can readily substitute into magnetite via ion exchange due to similar atomic radii and charges as iron and has thus been hypothesized to be an effective tracer of hydrothermal or magmatic inputs. To evaluate the mobility of vanadium in a magnetite-hematite-fluid system, experiments on the partitioning of vanadium between magnetite, hematite and a …

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Computational Studies Of The Effects Of Substitutions On Silatranes And Ring Strain Energies, As Well As Determination Of Aromaticity And Complexation In Polypnictogen Analogues Of The Cyclooctatetraenyl Dianion, Alexander Stuart Pixler Jan 2023

Computational Studies Of The Effects Of Substitutions On Silatranes And Ring Strain Energies, As Well As Determination Of Aromaticity And Complexation In Polypnictogen Analogues Of The Cyclooctatetraenyl Dianion, Alexander Stuart Pixler

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The work in this dissertation computationally examines four areas involving variations on archetype molecules and how they affect reactivity and physical properties. Studies in Chapters 2 and 3 assess substituent effects on cyclic systems, while those in Chapters 4 and 5 explore both partial and complete substitution of ring component atoms as well as the chemical implications of the substitution.The effect of substituents on molecular reactivity is a critical concept that affects every branch of chemistry. Previous work within our group showed that 1-hydridosilatrane was an effective and selective reducing agent for a variety of compounds. Fully 3,3,7,7,10,10-substituted silatranes have …

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Investigating Changes In Permeability Caused By The Transport And Retention Of Microplastics In Saturated Sand Columns, Iliansherry Santiago Jan 2023

Investigating Changes In Permeability Caused By The Transport And Retention Of Microplastics In Saturated Sand Columns, Iliansherry Santiago

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Microplastics (MPs), plastic particles present and continuously moving in our environment, represent a contaminant of global concern to the scientific community and society. MPs are particles less than 5 mm and are ubiquitous in our surroundings and the environment. MPs have been detected in oceans, soils, freshwater, drinking water and groundwater. MPs are considered contaminants of emerging concern (CEC), as they contain toxic components and serve as carriers for other contaminants that may affect the ecology and human health. Limited laboratory and field experiments demonstrate that MPs are transported and retained in porous media of a groundwater aquifer. A research …

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An Experimental Investigation Of Gold Incorporated Into Bornite, Intermediate Solid Solution (Iss), And Pyrrhotite: Implications For Porphyry Ore Deposits, Carli Lynn Schmidt Jan 2023

An Experimental Investigation Of Gold Incorporated Into Bornite, Intermediate Solid Solution (Iss), And Pyrrhotite: Implications For Porphyry Ore Deposits, Carli Lynn Schmidt

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Magmatic-hydrothermal ore deposits contain metals sourced from a melt and transported to shallower levels by a magmatic volatile phase (MVP) where they can be deposited as native elements or structurally bound in sulfide or oxide minerals. Porphyry ore deposits are a major subclass of such and contain plentiful concentrations of societally significant metals including copper and gold. These deposits include the Grasberg porphyry Cu-Au-(Mo) deposit in Indonesia, the Bingham Canyon porphyry Cu-Mo-Au deposit in Utah, USA, and the Far Southeast porphyry Cu-Au deposit in the Philippines. In these systems gold is often found associated with bornite, intermediate solid solution (ISS, …

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Diagram Affordances And Their Impact On Students’ Answers About Rivers And Groundwater, Daniel R. Curtis Jan 2023

Diagram Affordances And Their Impact On Students’ Answers About Rivers And Groundwater, Daniel R. Curtis

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Diagrams are important tools for conveying information in geoscience education. Choosing what imagery to use and assessing its effectiveness is not straightforward. A diagram needs sufficient affordances (i.e., details, dimension) for the viewers to comprehend the intended message without adding too many details that will confuse and distract the viewer. Prior research suggests that the viewer’s knowledge and experience impact how diagram affordances are interpreted. Understanding this interaction between knowledge, context, and diagram affordance is critical for education and assessment.To investigate how changes in affordances affect student interpretation of images, we surveyed undergraduate students (N = 201) in introductory Earth …

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Structural Analysis Of Polar Aggregates And Inter-Ionic Distances In Room Temperature Ionic Liquids, Emily Elizabeth Dalbey Jan 2023

Structural Analysis Of Polar Aggregates And Inter-Ionic Distances In Room Temperature Ionic Liquids, Emily Elizabeth Dalbey

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Ionic liquids have a wide variety of applications in chemistry due to their unique properties such as low flammability, low volatility, and high thermal and chemical stability. These properties make them great solvents, electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries, and more. Ionic liquids are salts whose components are mis-matched in size and shape leading to low melting points. To design an ionic liquid with a desired property it is key to first understand their structure. Lineshape analysis of the charge alternation peak from the experimentally measured or computationally calculated X-ray scattering data can give information about the size of the polar aggregates …

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Materials And Electrochemical Interfaces For High Energy Density Sodium Metal Batteries, Olusola John Dahunsi Jan 2023

Materials And Electrochemical Interfaces For High Energy Density Sodium Metal Batteries, Olusola John Dahunsi

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Batteries with low-cost, high energy and safe features density are now widely demanded.This dissertation systematically and comprehensively studies the materials and electrochemical interfaces of sodium (Na) metallic anodes and metal-free anodes for high energy density sodium metal batteries (SMB) to meet energy storage demands. This dissertation is divided into two sections, with the first section focusing on the modifications made to pristine metallic sodium anodes using 1.6 at % tin (Sn) to create Na-Sn alloy anodes. The results confirm that the Na-Sn anode features interconnected Na15Sn4 backbones that support sodium structurally, enhance Na+/Na redox kinetics, and facilitate dendrite-free Na plating …

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Systematic Study Of Projection Biases In Weak Lensing Analysis, Prudhvi Raj Varma Chintalapati Jan 2023

Systematic Study Of Projection Biases In Weak Lensing Analysis, Prudhvi Raj Varma Chintalapati

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The nature of Dark Energy is possibly one of the most fundamental questions in Physicstoday. Comprising 70% of the energy density of the Universe, and being responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe, this mysterious form of energy with negative pressure is challenging our current understanding of the fundamental laws of nature. Cosmological parameters like total relative matter Density Ωm, the normalization of power spectrum σ8 and their combination S8 = σ8 (Ωm/0.3)**0.5 are used to quantify our understanding of the evolution of the large-scale structure in the Universe and shed light on the accelerated expansion, caused by the …

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Grey To Green: The Impact Of Environmental Policy On Us Crime Rates, Kassandra Gonzalez Jan 2023

Grey To Green: The Impact Of Environmental Policy On Us Crime Rates, Kassandra Gonzalez

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study explores the social implications of climate change and environmental degradation on deviant and criminal behavior. This study employs general strain theory to examine the effectiveness of city-level climate change mitigation actions in reducing crime rates. Through a systematic approach, this study reviews literature on environmental harms and community strain and explores the impact of local pro-environmental policies on crime reduction. Focusing on the United States, UCR crime rate reports and UN-guided Sustainable Development Goal data are analyzed at the US county level. The findings suggest that sustainable practices, especially those related to local infrastructure and community engagement, could …

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Historical And Potential Future Climate Of Extreme Daily Precipitation Over The Contiguous United States Using Convection-Permitting Simulations, Sylvia Stinnett Jan 2023

Historical And Potential Future Climate Of Extreme Daily Precipitation Over The Contiguous United States Using Convection-Permitting Simulations, Sylvia Stinnett

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The impacts of anthropogenic climate change will be felt most strongly through changes in hazards such as extreme precipitation. The potential for extreme precipitation changes—both increases and decreases—may have significant societal impacts (e.g., agriculture production, loss of life and property). However, limited research has quantified future projected changes in extreme precipitation due to computational limitations and considerable time expenditure for convection-permitting simulations of substantial duration.This project sought to analyze changes in extreme daily precipitation—defined as the 99th percentile daily accumulated value—due to climate change in the contiguous United States (CONUS) using a dynamically downscaled and convection-permitting regional climate modeling framework. …

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Alignment And Range Verification In Proton Therapy Using Proton Radiography And Proton Ct, Joseph Piet Jan 2023

Alignment And Range Verification In Proton Therapy Using Proton Radiography And Proton Ct, Joseph Piet

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Protons are used in radiation therapy to lower doses to healthy tissues by utilizing their Bragg peak. Protons can be used both in imaging and treatment. One of the uses of protons in imaging we tested is its use to align patients using a single beam's eye proton radiograph (pRad). By using a beam's eye pRad, and comparing the water equivalent thickness (WET) to proton digitally reconstructed radiographs (pDRRs), we show that we can measure the best alignment on six axes, three translational and three rotational. This is done by defining a cost function, chi squared, which quantifies the misalignment …

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Applications For Functional Data Analysis, Kacy D. Kane Jan 2023

Applications For Functional Data Analysis, Kacy D. Kane

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Functional Data Analysis is often used in the study of data that exists over a continuum, such as time. There are two datasets that will be considered here. For the first study we have a dataset on the efficacy of a lobectomy in reduction or elimination of epileptic seizures in patients. After an initial analysis of the dataset from a multinomial model perspective, we found that there were outliers in our dataset. From there, we considered a Multinomial Mixture Model to aid in the detection of outliers. In our second dataset we are considering a social robotics dataset where the …

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Should Academia Thrive For Research Citation In Policy? A Case Study On Five Universities In Illinois., Minhaz Suleman Ibrahim Patel Jan 2023

Should Academia Thrive For Research Citation In Policy? A Case Study On Five Universities In Illinois., Minhaz Suleman Ibrahim Patel

CURE Proceedings

Academics and policymakers are seen as operating separately, which limits the potential impact of research on society. The influence of university research on policy documents is frequently underestimated, given that cutting-edge research is being conducted at universities. Therefore, it is crucial to unveil the role of academic research in fostering evidence-driven policymaking across various public service domains. In this study, we conducted an in-depth exploratory data analysis and statistical summarization to comprehensively understand the level of academic research present in policy documents. We chose five public universities from the state of Illinois and collected research and policy citation data for …

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Using Machine Learning To Search For Vector Boson Scattering At The Cms Detector During Run 2, Mark Mekosh Jan 2023

Using Machine Learning To Search For Vector Boson Scattering At The Cms Detector During Run 2, Mark Mekosh

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This work reports on the use of different machine learning (ML) techniques in the search for vector boson scattering (VBS) events in the semileptonic $WV$ channel. VBS is an important process for studying electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB), the Higgs mechanism, as well as for probing beyond the standard model physics. Boosted decision trees as well as deep neural networks were trained on Monte Carlo simulation samples and applied to 137 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data taken from 2016 to 2018 by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with a center of mass energy $\sqrt{s} …

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Computational Modeling, Simulation, And Potential Applications Of Optical Stochastic Cooling, Austin J. Dick Jan 2023

Computational Modeling, Simulation, And Potential Applications Of Optical Stochastic Cooling, Austin J. Dick

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

With the rising demand for intense particles beams, much research is being conducted in the area of particle beam cooling. One of these methods, called Stochastic Cooling (SC) (developed at CERN in the 1970's), delivered a feedback method to improve the quality and lifetime of circulating proton beams by reducing their 6D phase-space and has been widely implemented in a number of hadron machines. However, traditional stochastic cooling schemes are limited by the bandwidth of microwave frequency systems. Optical Stochastic Cooling (OSC) is a promising extension of the stochastic cooling beam cooling technique. OSC instead uses optical wavelengths which allows …

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Simulations Of Electro-Optically Sampled Arbitrarily Shaped Electron Bunches For Wakefield Acceleratiors, Spencer Joseph Kelham Jan 2023

Simulations Of Electro-Optically Sampled Arbitrarily Shaped Electron Bunches For Wakefield Acceleratiors, Spencer Joseph Kelham

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The measurement and recording of terahertz (THz) electric fields is of specialinterest to particle-accelerator science, as the electric fields of temporally short rela- tivistic electron bunches have frequency components that extend into the THz range. A single-shot, non-destructive measurement of such fields can be made using THz time-domain spectroscopy and electro-optic sampling. At the Argonne Wakefield Ac- celerator, arbitrary electron-bunch shapes are being explored to enhance the efficiency of advanced wakefield-accelerator schemes. In this report, we develop a framework for numerically modeling an implementation of electro-optical sampling – dubbed phase-diversity electro-optic sampling [1] – and apply the model to understand …

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Mechanical Behavior Of Metallic Core-Shell Nanoparticles Under Compressive Loading, Phillip Tomich Jan 2023

Mechanical Behavior Of Metallic Core-Shell Nanoparticles Under Compressive Loading, Phillip Tomich

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Core/shell metallic nanoparticles have been shown to be a promising material type for additive manufacturing in the aerospace and automotive fields. Within additive manufacturing they will be used to accurately make an array of nanoparticles within the grains of metal matrix composites. This in turn will help to strengthen the material while remaining ductility and light weight. In this study, copper/aluminum core/shell nanoparticles are compressed under [100], [110], [111], and [112] directions to showcase their anisotropic material properties. Models of their individual counterparts were also investigated. There are no previous works showing the deformation mechanisms of copper/aluminum core/shell nanoparticles. Molecular …

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The Standard Model Precision Parameters At 200 Gev, Zamiul Alam Jan 2023

The Standard Model Precision Parameters At 200 Gev, Zamiul Alam

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The Standard Model can be defined quantitatively by running parameters in a mass-independent renormalization scheme at a fixed reference scale. We provide a set of simple interpolation formulas that give the fundamental Lagrangian parameters in the MS-bar scheme at a renormalization scale of 200 GeV, safely above the top-quark mass and suitable for matching to candidate new physics models at very high mass scales using renormalization group equations. These interpolation formulas take as inputs the on-shell experimental quantities and use the best available calculations in the pure MS-bar scheme. They also serve as an accounting of the parametric uncertainties for …

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Climatology Of The Elevated Mixed Layer Over The Contiguous United States And Northern Mexico: 1979–2021, Margo Siciliano Andrews Jan 2023

Climatology Of The Elevated Mixed Layer Over The Contiguous United States And Northern Mexico: 1979–2021, Margo Siciliano Andrews

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Elevated mixed layers (EMLs) are an important influence on the severe convective storm climatology in the contiguous United States (CONUS), playing a role in storm generation, sustenance, and suppression. A function of the topography in the western CONUS and northern Mexico, EMLs are elevated layers of nearly dry adiabatic lapse rates and high potential temperature, typically with a capping inversion at their base. Although it is well-established that EMLs are primarily a warm-season phenomenon most frequent in the Great Plains, no research to date has examined their variability in-depth, or whether they have changed through time. This study creates an …

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