Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

New Polyanion-Based Cathode Materials For Alkali-Ion Batteries, Hooman Yaghoobnejad Asl

Doctoral Dissertations

"A number of new materials have been discovered through exploratory synthesis with the aim to be studied as the positive electrode (cathode) in Li-ion and Na-ion batteries. The focus has been set on the ease of synthesis, cost and availability of active ingredients in the battery, and decent cycle-life performance through a combination of iron and several polyanionic ligands. An emphasis has been placed also on phosphite (HPO₃^2-) as a polyanionic ligand, mainly due to the fact that it has not been studied seriously before as a polyanion for cathode materials. The concept of mixed polyanions, for …

Assessment Of Highway Condition Using Combined Geophysical Surveys, Abdallah Alhadi Dera

Doctoral Dissertations

"Four pavement sections were investigated using ground penetrating radar (GPR) and Ultrasonic Surface Wave (USW). The objective of this research was to compare the effectiveness of two non-destructive geophysical tools, GPR and the PSPA, in assessing the condition of the pavements, composed of different construction materials. The GPR data were acquired using a 1.5 GHz antenna along five traverses spaced at two ft. intervals approximately 1000 ft. long. On the other hand, the PSPA data were acquired at the stations spaced at 1000 ft. along the five GPR traverses. Core samples were collected at each site to constrain the interpretation …

The Role Of Pre-Existing Basement Fabrics In The Initiation Of Continental Rifting: The Okavango Rift Zone, Botswana, Angelica Alvarez Naranjo

Doctoral Dissertations

"Integrated geophysical, remote sensing, and field investigations of the Okavango Rift Zone (ORZ), Botswana indicate that a feedback between optimum-oriented basement structures and fluid flow influence the nucleation and growth of continental rifts in their incipient stages. The ORZ, the youngest rift of the East African Rift System, occurs within a Proterozoic inter-cratonic suture zone - the NE-trending Precambrian Damara/Ghanzi-Chobe orogenic belts. The Pleistocene to Holocene ORZ forms a ~450 km long and ~100 km wide half-graben bounded by NE-trending normal faults. Basement units within the Damara/Ghanzi-Chobe orogenic belts exhibit a well-developed NE-trending linear fabric (045-065) defined by parallel limbs …

Characterization Of Fracture Initiation In Non-Cylindrical Buckle Folds Using 3d Finite Element Analysis, Eli Jacob Steinbeck

Masters Theses

"The spatial distribution of fracture sets associated with buckle folds has been well documented in field studies. There are difficulties, however, in placing accurate constraints on the timing of the initiation of individual fracture sets during the deformation history of the fold under in-situ conditions. This study investigates specific conditions that give rise to the initiation of various fracture sets in the hinge and limb of a pericline, based on an analysis of the effective stress evolution during the processes of buckling and erosional unloading. A 3D finite element modeling approach is used to simulate the effective stress evolution in …

Fluid Flow Through Deformation Band, Huining Zhang

Masters Theses

"Cataclastic deformation bands, which are common in porous sandstone, have the potential to restrict fluid flow. Geological studies have shown that permeability of deformation band shear zones can be one to five orders of magnitude less than for the sandstone host rock. However, recent studies based on simplified analytical estimates have shown that fluid flow in jointed deformation bands may not be retarded since joints play an important role in conducting fluids. In this study, 2 dimensional finite element analysis (FEA) is used to simulate the total discharge flow rate through jointed deformations. Variations of single planar and conjugate jointed …

Periclinal Folding In Ozark Plateau: A Record Of Local Karst Collapse Or Regional Tectonic Forces?, Chao Liu

Masters Theses

"The Ordovician Rubidoux Formation of the Ozark Plateau, Missouri is typically identified as mechanically competent sub-horizontal beds of medium grained sandstone. North of Licking, MO, the Rubidoux Formation was deformed into a series of dome-and-basin shaped buckle folds, exposed in road cuts over a distance of ~10 km. Such folds are highly unusual within the Ozark Plateau and their origin remains controversial. Three major hypotheses have been proposed based on field observations and stereographic analysis. Given the pervasive distribution of karst collapse throughout Missouri, one hypothesis to explain these folds is that the Roubidoux Formation sagged into collapsed caverns. A …

Algorithms Leveraging Smartphone Sensing For Analyzing Explosion Events, Srinivas Chakravarthi Thandu

Doctoral Dissertations

"The increasing frequency of explosive disasters throughout the world in recent years have created a clear need for the systems to monitor for them continuously to improve the post-disaster emergency events such as rescue and recovery operations. Disasters both man-made and natural are unfortunate and not preferred, however monitoring them may be a lifesaving phenomenon in emergency scenarios. Dedicated sensors deployed in the public places and their associated networks to monitor such events may be inadequate and must be complemented for making the monitoring more pervasive and effective. In the recent past, modern smartphones with significant processing, networking and storage …

Liposomal Delivery Of Pde5 Inhibitors And Ut-15c To Human Erythrocytes, Elizabeth Anne Bowles

Doctoral Dissertations

"Previous studies have shown that the controlled release of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from human erythrocytes is an important mechanism for the regulation of vascular caliber. However, erythrocytes from patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) fail to release ATP in response to the physiological stimuli of exposure to low oxygen tension or mechanical deformation of a magnitude these cells would encounter in the pulmonary circulation. This defect could be a significant contributor to the increased pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR) that is the cause of the pathological increase in vascular pressures in humans with PAH.

One important approach to the treatment of …

Phytoforensics Tools: The Degradation And Detection Of Chlorinated Solvents In Integrated Systems, Tommy J. Goodwin Jr.

Masters Theses

"Due to decades of mismanaged pollutants entering groundwater, subsurface pollution of various compounds has become a widespread challenge. Chlorinated solvents are the most common groundwater contaminants that persist in aquifers, and remediation of these wide-spread plumes is difficult. Bioremediation, permeable reactive barriers, and phytoremediation are remedial technologies that have been developed and applied to chlorinated solvents in groundwater systems. This study integrates these technologies in different combinations to demonstrate the remediation potential of this approach. Zerovalent iron (ZVI) and bioaugmentation with a Dehalococcoides sp. (DHC) culture were applied separately and in combination for degradation of perchloroethene (PCE). Salix pentandra were …

3d Seismic Structural And Stratigraphic Interpretation Of The Tui-3d Field, Taranaki Basin, New Zealand, Gorkem Yagci

Masters Theses

"Identifying seismic structures and stratigraphy are important for exploration of hydrocarbons. The purpose of this study is to discover seismic structural and stratigraphic features and to utilize the results for interpreting depositional environments. A 3D seismic dataset from the Tui-3D Field, the Taranaki Basin, New Zealand with well data were used to visualize structures, to detect stratigraphic features, to identify main lithology, to understand depositional environment, and to describe seismic facies and reflection patterns of the target horizons. The major formations are in the Kapuni Group.

Seismic structural interpretation indicates thirty-two minor faults, which may play an important role in …

Single Particle-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry Technology Development For Metallic Nanoparticle Characterization In Complex Matrices, Yongbo Dan

Doctoral Dissertations

"As the rapid growing of nanotechnology, the release of engineered nanoparticles (ENPs) into the environment is inevitable. After entering the real environment, ENPs tend to react with different components of the ecosystem (e.g. water, soil, air, plants) and make their characterization difficult. Analyzing ENPs in these complex matrices still remains as a grand challenge. ENPs characterization is normally the first step of risk assessment. Current analytical techniques have shown some limitations in revealing the unique characteristics of ENPs in complex matrices and reliable analytical techniques are in urgent need. Single particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (SP-ICP-MS) is an emerging …

Bioactivity/Cytotoxicity Of Micro-/Nano-Materials And Novel Development Of Fiber-Optic Probes For Single Cell Monitoring, Qingbo Yang

Doctoral Dissertations

"Manufactured nano-/micro-materials (MNMs) have been widely used and their interactions with niche biological environment are highly concerned for both of their biohazardous and bioactive effects, whereas no available comprehensive evaluations or regulations have been provided yet. This dissertation thus focuses on three major aspects: 1) fundamental toxicity understandings of a typical MNMs (zinc oxide nanoparticles), 2) bioactivity evaluations of representative bioactive MNMs, and 3) development of novel micro-probes for high spatial resolution monitoring. Firstly, the NP's concentration, irradiation, hydrodynamic size, and the localized pH, ionic strength, NP zeta-potential as well as dissolved oxygen levels were found correlated with the production …

Care-Chair: Opportunistic Health Assessment With Smart Sensing On Chair Backrest, Rakesh Kumar

Masters Theses

"A vast majority of the population spend most of their time in a sedentary position, which potentially makes a chair a huge source of information about a person's daily activity. This information, which often gets ignored, can reveal important health data but the overhead and the time consumption needed to track the daily activity of a person is a major hurdle. Considering this, a simple and cost-efficient sensory system, named Care-Chair, with four square force sensitive resistors on the backrest of a chair has been designed to collect the activity details and breathing rate of the users. The Care-Chair system …

A Feasibility Study Of A Nuclear Power Plant With No Moving Parts, Jonathan Mark Schattke

Masters Theses

"In a nuclear reactor design, every moving part in a system is considered a failure point. In this study, a proposal is made for designing a nuclear reactor that has no moving parts by coupling an accelerator driven core (removing control system moving parts) to a magnetohydrodynamic generator (removing power generation moving parts) using mercury coolant (removing pumping system moving parts). Further safety is realized by using a subcritical core, where the core is never able to sustain a chain reaction on its own, obviating many safety systems. The design is verified with a Monte Carlo simulation "--Abstract, page iii.

Functional Nanoporous Polyamide Aerogels, Malik Adnan Saeed

Doctoral Dissertations

"Aerogels are low-density materials consisting of 3D assemblies of nanoparticles with high open porosities and surface areas. Inspired by the extraordinary mechanical strength of polymer crosslinked aerogels, our recent attention is focused on inexpensive multifunctional isocyanates reacting with a variety of aromatic, organometallic and inorganic monomers. Three such systems discussed here are:

(A) Polymeric aerogels synthesized via a room temperature reaction of an aromatic triisocyanate with pyromellitic acid. Using solid-state CPMAS ¹³C and ¹⁵N NMR, it was found that the skeletal framework was a statistical co-polymer of polyamide, polyurea and polyimide. Stepwise pyrolytic decomposition followed by reactive etching …

On The Double Chain Ladder For Reserve Estimation With Bootstrap Applications, Larissa Schoepf

Masters Theses

"To avoid insolvency, insurance companies must have enough reserves to fulfill their present and future commitment-refer to in this thesis as outstanding claims towards policyholders. This entails having an accurate and reliable estimate of funds necessary to cover those claims as they are presented. One of the major techniques used by practitioners and researchers is the single chain ladder method. However, though most popular and widely used, the method does not offer a good understanding of the distributional properties of the way claims evolve. In a series of recent papers, researchers have focused on two potential components of outstanding claims, …

Reprocessing And Structural Interpretation Of Multichannel Seismic Reflection Data From Penobscot, Nova Scotia, Fulya Gizem Yagci

Masters Theses

"Penobscot area is located in the Scotian Basin, which was occurred as a result of extension in the eastern North America border. 2-D data set that was utilized for the study consists of three multichannel seismic profiles that were collected from Penobscot Parcel 8. The main purpose of the study was to enhance signal-to-noise ratio of the seismic reflection sections suppressing high frequency noise and multiples, and removing diffractions. In addition, while the resolution of the sections were enhanced, determining the correct processing techniques and parameters for better results was the another important criteria.

The processing steps included deconvolution, minimum …

Structural Analysis And Fluid Flow Modeling Of The Kapuni Field, New Zealand, Jarret Taylor Baldwin

Masters Theses

"The Taranaki Basin is the largest hydrocarbon producing basin in New Zealand. A total area of over 330,000 km

Attenuation Properties Of Cement Composites: Experimental Measurements And Monte Carlo Calculations, Raul Florez

Masters Theses

"Developing new cement based materials with excellent mechanical and attenuation properties is critically important for both medical and nuclear power industries. Concrete continues to be the primary choice material for the shielding of gamma and neutron radiation in facilities such as nuclear reactors, nuclear waste repositories, spent nuclear fuel pools, heavy particle radiotherapy rooms, particles accelerators, among others. The purpose of this research was to manufacture cement pastes modified with magnetite and samarium oxide and evaluate the feasibility of utilizing them for shielding of gamma and neutron radiation. Two different experiments were conducted to accomplish these goals. In the first …

Intensity Control Of Dielectric Barrier Discharge Filaments, Matthew Crawford Paliwoda

Masters Theses

"When operated in a filamentary mode, a volume dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) is known to produce patterned plasma structures. These structures are currently being explored for reconfigurable metamaterial applications. In this work the presence and intensity of a single filament, within an array of filaments, was controlled by adjusting the voltage to that filament's individual needle electrode. The current, voltage, and time-averaged normalized light intensity were measured while varying the voltage of the needle through a self-biasing resistance. For a 7.5 kV, 3.2 kHz DBD in air, the needle-controlled filament intensity varies from that of the surrounding filaments to zero …

Composite Model Representation For Computer Aided Design Of Functionally Gradient Materials, Fangquan Wang

Masters Theses

"Functionally Gradient Materials (FGMs) feature smooth transition from one material to another within a single object. FGMs modeling is considered to be one of the new challenges in Computer Aided Design (CAD) area. To overcome this challenge, this thesis presents a composite approach to model FGMs. The input in STL format can be meshed and voxelized in FGMs modeling system. The material composition in each voxel can be generated from multiple different types of control features. And LTI filters including Gaussian Filter and Average Filter are applied to blur default material features in order to generate FGMs inside models. The …

A Linear Matrix Inequality-Based Approach For The Computation Of Actuator Bandwidth Limits In Adaptive Control, Daniel Robert Wagner

Masters Theses

"Linear matrix inequalities and convex optimization techniques have become popular tools to solve nontrivial problems in the field of adaptive control. Specifically, the stability of adaptive control laws in the presence of actuator dynamics remains as an important open control problem. In this thesis, we present a linear matrix inequalities-based hedging approach and evaluate it for model reference adaptive control of an uncertain dynamical system in the presence of actuator dynamics. The ideal reference dynamics are modified such that the hedging approach allows the correct adaptation without being hindered by the presence of actuator dynamics. The hedging approach is first …

Provenance And Depositional Environments Of Fluvial-Lacustrine Sandstones Of Lower Permian Lucaogou Low-Order Cycle, Bogda Mountains, Nw China, Xiaowei Peng

Masters Theses

"Compositional and textural maturity of sandstones may reflect provenance lithology and sediment transport distance, which are useful for paleogeographic reconstruction. 37 sandstones in six outcrop stratigraphic sections in Tarlong-Taodonggou and Zhaobishan areas in the greater Turpan-Junggar rift basin were studied to investigate the fluvial-lacustrine sandstone provenance in lower Permian Lucaogou (LCG) low-order cycle, Bogda Mountains, NW China. 400 points were counted in each thin section. All the samples are classified into lithic arenites, subarenites, wackes, and mudrocks. Three Petrofacies are defined. Petrofacies A is characterized by a high lithic content which is dominantly basaltic lithics with minor sedimentary lithics and …

Models Of Leader Elections And Their Applications, Stephen Curtis Jackson

Doctoral Dissertations

"New research about cyber-physical systems is rapidly changing the way we think about critical infrastructures such as the power grid. Changing requirements for the generation, storage, and availability of power are all driving the development of the smart-grid. Many smart-grid projects disperse power generation across a wide area and control devices with a distributed system. However, in a distributed system, the state of processes is hard to determine due to isolation of memory. By using information flow security models, we reason about a process's beliefs of the system state in a distributed system. Information flow analysis aided in the creation …

Methodology Investigations For Shear Wave Splitting Analysis, Fansheng Kong

Doctoral Dissertations

"Over the past several decades, shear wave splitting analyses have been increasingly utilized to delineate mantle structure and probe mantle dynamics. However, the reported splitting parameters (fast polarization orientations and splitting times) are frequently inconsistent among different studies, partially due to the different techniques used to estimate the splitting parameters. Here the study conduct research on methodology investigations for shear wave splitting analysis, which are composed of two sub-topics, i.e., a systematic comparison of the transverse minimization (TM) and the splitting intensity (SI) techniques and applicability of the multiple-event stacking technique (MES). Numerical experiments are conducted using both synthetic and …

Pointwise And Uniform Convergence Of Fourier Series On Su(2), Donald Forrest Myers

Doctoral Dissertations

"Let f be a Lipschitz function on the special unitary group SU (2). We prove that the Fourier partial sums of f converge to f uniformly on SU (2), thereby extending theorems of Caccioppoli, Mayer, and a special case of Ragozin. Pointwise convergence theorems for the Fourier series of functions on SU (2), due to Liu and Qian, were obtained by Clifford algebra techniques. We obtain similar versions of these theorems using simpler proof techniques: classical harmonic analysis and group theory"--Abstract, page iii.

Dft Investigations Of Hydrogen Storage Materials, Gang Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

"Hydrogen serves as a promising new energy source having no pollution and abundant on earth. However the most difficult problem of applying hydrogen is to store it effectively and safely, which is smartly resolved by attempting to keep hydrogen in some metal hydrides to reach a high hydrogen density in a safe way. There are several promising metal hydrides, the thermodynamic and chemical properties of which are to be investigated in this dissertation.

Sodium alanate (NaAlH₄) is one of the promising metal hydrides with high hydrogen storage capacity around 7.4 wt. % and relatively low decomposition temperature of …

Polyacrylamide And Its Derivatives For Oil Recovery, Zun Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

"Polyacrylamide is an umbrella term used to describe the homo-polymer of acrylamide and the copolymer of acrylamide with a small amount of other monomers. Owing to their superior property on increasing viscosity and gelling ability in the presence of crosslinkers, polyacrylamides has become the primarily selection for polymer flooding and gel treatment agent in enhanced oil recovery. Recent developments, performance, applications and limitations of polyacrylamides and its derivatives, including copolymers and hydrogels for enhancing oil recovery are reviewed.

A water-free suspension system was developed to synthesize PAMs and PAMs-microgel. Products are dry particle powder and ready to disperse in water. …

Palynological Studies Of Holocene Lake Sediments In The Missouri Ozarks, Robert D. Haselwander

Doctoral Dissertations

"Five small lakes in southeast Missouri (Frisco, Pine Forest, and Bray Area lakes [Phelps County], and Cypress and Blue ponds [Bollinger County]) were cored for paleolimnological studies. Cores were evaluated for their sedimentology, palynology, and geochemistry. In two of these lakes (Bray Area and Pine Forest lakes) the planktonic algae were also studied in the water column, along with ecological parameters. Algae in the sediments were compared to algae in the water to understand the resistance of different species to decay, and a suggested methodology for this work is described. Reconstructions of the past environments around each lake were created …

Properties Of Amorphous Transparent Conducting And Semiconducting Oxides From First Principles, Rabi Khanal

Doctoral Dissertations

"Amorphous transparent conducting and semiconducting oxides possess properties superior or comparable to their crystalline counterparts. The structure-property relationship in amorphous oxides is not nearly as well understood as in the case of the crystalline transparent conducting oxides. We have employedab initio molecular dynamics and a liquid quench approach to simulate amorphous oxide structures and performed density functional-based calculations to study the electronic properties of several amorphous conducting and semiconducting oxides with various cation compositions.

The effect of amorphization in oxides was investigated by taking indium oxide as a progenitor of the system. From the thorough study it was confirmed …