Electrical and Electronics Commons^™

Design Of Inexpensive And Easy To Use Diy Internet Of Things Platform, Samuel R. Jaffe

Master's Theses

This thesis focuses on the design and implementation of a new, inexpensive, and less complex system for a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Internet of Things (IoT) platform. The hardware aspects focus on a new chip called the ESP8266 which contains both microcontroller and WiFi connectivity capabilities in an extremely affordable package. The system uses the Arduino IDE to program the ESP8266, which is known to be an extremely user-friendly environment. All other software is both free and easy to use. Past methods of creating IoT projects involved either expensive hardware, often ranging from $50-$100 per node, or complicated programming requiring a full …

Complex Filters As As A Cascade Of Of Buffered Gingell Structures: Design From From Band-Stop Constraints, Samuel Robert Johnston

Master's Theses

This thesis presents an active Complex Filter implementation that that creates a transfer function with with a single real pole and a complex zero. The two-input/two-output network developed in in this thesis responds differently based upon upon the relative phase difference of of the two inputs. If a negative ninety-degree phase difference occurs between the two inputs, the filter will exhibits a bandstop response. While a positive ninety-degree phase difference exhibits a bandpass response. This topology is relatesd to to Gingell’s RC-CR polyphase topology but because of of the use of of op-amps, can be cascadedd without without suffering loading …

Manufacturing And Characterization Of Poly (Lactic Acid)/Carbon Black Conductive Composites For Fdm Feedstock: An Exploratory Study, Dylan Fitz-Gerald, Justin Boothe

Materials Engineering

This exploratory study developed methods of manufacturing and characterizing the electrical properties of small batches of conductive composite feedstock for the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) manufacturing process, commonly known as 3D printing. We utilized a solution casting process of Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) (Grade 4043D, NatureWorks, LLC.) and Carbon Black (CB) (Vulcan® XC72, Cabot Corp.) in chloroform. The resulting composite precursor was cryogenically treated with liquid nitrogen and milled in a coffee grinder in order to achieve particles that could be fed into the extruder. Composite precursors were dried in a vacuum oven at an elevated temperature of 38°C. Filaments were …

Testing Feasibility Of Inductive Power Coupling For Modern Applications, Andrew Burman

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

This project takes two bifilar tesla coils and uses them to find a % efficiency of power transfer as distances between the coils decrease. The reason this experiment is being conducted is to find possible implications for wireless charging of vehicles using similar style coils. This project conducted experiments on 60 Hz, 400 Hz, and 1 kHz frequencies for a small input signal. The general conclusion is that as the frequency increases more power can be transferred and higher efficiency of power transfer is seen. This project also concluded that it could be possible to get higher efficiency at a …

Design And Implementation Of A Three Dimensional Printer Using A Cylindrical Printing Process, Brandon Hoy

Electrical Engineering

Many 3D printers utilize a Cartesian (XYZ) printing process. Implementing a polar coordinate printer providing a faster printing method and introduces new printing algorithms, increasing printing efficiency. This cylindrical 3D printer applies a circular-moving baseplate and a heating printer head (extruder) moving radially and vertically. A processor accepts pre-processed polar data points and transpose the appropriate programmed printing commands to the motors units. The extruder also has a control loop, keeping the temperature inside the desired range. This prototype prints using polylactic acid (PLA) filament. Additionally, a display screen updates every second the: printing time, extruder temperature, and status notifications.

Rapid Battery Exchange (Rbx), Daniel Rostom

Electrical Engineering

Electric vehicles have begun to hit the main stream market, with sales raising form under 20,000 in 2001 to over 110,000 per year since 2014 [1]. With new models hitting the market every year, and more people becoming conscious about their fossil fuel usage, this trend will only continue until there are more electric vehicles than combustion vehicles on the road. A major drawback of electric vehicles is their limited range, and relatively long recharge times. Even with advancements in battery charging speed, such as the Tesla super charger, able to provide up to 90 miles of range in just …

Active Charge Balancing For Cardiac Stimulation, Maci Miri

Electrical Engineering

Worldwide, there are about 3 million people who have pacemakers, with 10,000 new implantations of ICD’s each month. [heart.org] Due to the gravity and importance of the function that ICD’s provide, these devices must be extremely reliable and highly effective. However, because of the high tolerances of IC manufacturing, stimulation circuits for pacemakers may be slightly unmatched and over time, may have a net DC charge applied to the tissues in the heart. Extra charge pumped into body tissues is dangerous for the patient’s health; the pH of the tissue can be raised and corrosion of the stimulating electrodes may …

A Stroke Therapy Brace Design, Evan Kirkbride

Electrical Engineering

Victims of stroke often have difficulty with rehabilitation. With limited movement on their affected arm, patients often do not want to move much for physical therapy. In this project, we design a robotic brace that helps stroke patients move their arm more effectively in a reaching or pulling motion. By giving patients more movement in their affected arm than they would have otherwise, patients gain more from rehabilitation. The brace also adapts to the patient’s needs, providing more inclination or resistance as needed for their physical therapy. This kind of therapy engages patients rather than relying on their likely dwindled …

Car Safe, David Van Workum

Electrical Engineering

The Car Safe project helps protect parents and caretakers from the dangers associated with leaving children in hot vehicles. The device supports parents through notifying them of the child’s wellbeing and status while within an automobile. Specifically, the device monitors the child’s ergonomic experience and the spatial proximity between the caretaker and child. Car Safe utilizes this information and determines if the child finds himself in a dangerous environment. Due to its compact design, the device functions independently of a specific car seat design, allowing customers to integrate Car Safe in the car seat environment of their choosing.

Design Of An Integrated Acceleration Acquisition Subsystem To Satisfy High-Speed And Low-Area Requirements For Cubesats, Ryan J. Rumsey

Master's Theses

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s PolySat team is designing the Multipurpose Orbital Spring Ejection System (MOSES) in order to record acceleration data during the launch of CubeSats as well as to provide GPS coordinates to locate the position of CubeSats once they are injected into orbit. This work focuses on the design and development of the acceleration data acquisition (DAQ) subsystem of MOSES. This subsystem is designed around the need for a high-speed sampling system of at least 200 kHz across four channels of data, plus low-area limitations in the MOSES form factor which is roughly half the size of …

Hall Effect Modeling In Fem Simulators And Comparison To Experimental Results In Silicon And Printed Sensors, Leonardo A. Frem

Master's Theses

Finite element method simulation models for thin-film semiconductor-based Hall sensors were developed using secondary data in order to understand their behavior under strong magnetic fields. Given a device geometry and charge carrier density and mobility, the models accurately calculated sensor resistance, Hall voltage under a normally-incident constant magnetic field, and expected offset from a population of Hall devices. The model was successfully matched against data from integrated chip Hall sensors from St. Jude Medical. Additionally, the feasibility of creating Hall effect devices with common carbon ink was explored experimentally. The material properties obtained from testing these ink-based devices through the …

Low-Frequency Series Loaded Resonant Inverter Characterization, Alfredo Medina

Master's Theses

Modern power systems require multiple conversions between DC and AC to deliver power from renewable energy sources. Recent growth in DC loads result in increased system costs and reduced efficiency, due to redundant conversions. Advances in DC microgrid systems demonstrate superior performance by reducing conversion stages. The literature reveals practical DC microgrid systems composed of wind and solar power to replace existing fossil fuel technologies for residential consumers. Although higher efficiencies are achieved, some household appliances require AC power; thus, the need for highly efficient DC to AC converters is imperative in establishing DC microgrid systems. Resonant inverter topologies exhibit …

Bitrate Classification Of Twice-Encoded Audio Using Objective Quality Features, Colm Sloan, Damien Kelly, Naomi Harte, Anil C. Kokaram, Andrew Hines

Conference papers

When a user uploads audio files to a music stream- ing service, these files are subsequently re-encoded to lower bitrates to target different devices, e.g. low bitrate for mobile. To save time and bandwidth uploading files, some users encode their original files using a lossy codec. The metadata for these files cannot always be trusted as users might have encoded their files more than once. Determining the lowest bitrate of the files allows the streaming service to skip the process of encoding the files to bitrates higher than that of the uploaded files, saving on processing and storage space. This …

Vector Processor Virtualization: Distributed Memory Hierarchy And Simultaneous Multithreading, Seyedamin Rooholamin

Dissertations

Taking advantage of DLP (Data-Level Parallelism) is indispensable in most data streaming and multimedia applications. Several architectures have been proposed to improve both the performance and energy consumption for such applications. Superscalar and VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processors, along with SIMD (Single-Instruction Multiple-Data) and vector processor (VP) accelerators, are among the available options for designers to accomplish their desired requirements. On the other hand, these choices turn out to be large resource and energy consumers, while also not being always used efficiently due to data dependencies among instructions and limited portion of vectorizable code in single applications that deploy …

Instruction Fusion And Vector Processor Virtualization For Higher Throughput Simultaneous Multithreaded Processors, Yaojie Lu

Dissertations

The utilization wall, caused by the breakdown of threshold voltage scaling, hinders performance gains for new generation microprocessors. To alleviate its impact, an instruction fusion technique is first proposed for multiscalar and many-core processors. With instruction fusion, similar copies of an instruction to be run on multiple pipelines or cores are merged into a single copy for simultaneous execution. Instruction fusion applied to vector code enables the processor to idle early pipeline stages and instruction caches at various times during program implementation with minimum performance degradation, while reducing the program size and the required instruction memory bandwidth. Instruction fusion is …

On Greening Optical Access Networks, Mina Taheri Hosseinabadi

Dissertations

With the remarkable growth of fiber-based services, the number of FTTx subscribers has been dramatically increasing in recent years. Owing to the environmental concern, reducing energy consumption of optical access networks has become an important issue for network designers. In Ethernet passive optical network (EPON), the optical line terminal (OLT) located at the central office broadcasts the downstream traffic to all optical network units (ONUs), each of which checks all arrival downstream packets to obtain those destined to itself. Since traffic of ONUs changes dynamically, properly defining the sleep mode for idle ONUs can potentially save a significant amount of …

Optimum Distance Between Ground Base Stations For High-Speed Train Communications Using Free-Space Optical Laser Links, Sina Fathi Kazerooni

Theses

High-Speed trains (HSTs) can travel at speeds up to 430 Km/h. The increasing adoption rate of HSTs, and large number of Internet-connected digital devices, pose a great demand for a fast and reliable Internet connection in high-speed trains. Different radio-frequency (RF) wireless communication systems have been studied for HSTs. However, RF wireless communications in high-speed mobility environments suffer from frequent handovers, penetration loss, and Doppler effect. These problems promote the use of other technologies such as free-space optical (FSO) communications to provide reliable Internet connection for HST’s passengers.

Two different approaches for performing signal handover using FSO technology for ground …

Simulation Of A Low Voltage Customer Microgrid Using Petri Nets, Joshua Mark

Theses

With renewable energy coming to the forefront of how power is generated and delivered to the modern consumer, Microgrids are emerging as an optimal and efficient method for implementing renewables and changing the infrastructure of the dated transmission and distribution grid. This thesis work presents mathematical models of Petri Nets for the simulation of a low voltage customer Microgrid. Using previous work created in this specific field, a Hybrid Petri Net is modified such that it consists of multiple distributed generators, storage, and the utility which is referred to as the main distribution grid in this thesis. A Discrete Petri …

Cloud-Aided Wireless Systems: Communications And Radar Applications, Shahrouz Khalili

Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on cloud-assisted radio technologies for communication, including mobile cloud computing and Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN), and for radar systems.

This dissertation first concentrates on cloud-aided communications. Mobile cloud computing, which allows mobile users to run computationally heavy applications on battery limited devices, such as cell phones, is considered initially. Mobile cloud computing enables the offloading of computation-intensive applications from a mobile device to a cloud processor via a wireless interface. The interplay between offloading decisions at the application layer and physical-layer parameters, which determine the energy and latency associated with the mobile-cloud communication, motivates the inter-layer …

Energetic Behavior Of Resistive Random-Access Memory Cells, Christopher M. Bisbee

Macalester Journal of Physics and Astronomy

In order to investigate the switching characteristics of Resistive Random Access Memory cells (ReRAM) in terms of their thermodynamic free energy properties, we need to build a number of models that replicate the system. This report contains the models used to investigate filament growth patterns based on different boundary conditions applied to the electrode-filament system. Using Comsol Multiphysics software, we determined that when a fixed voltage is applied to each electrode in the electrode-filament system, we should expect filament dissolution that resets our cells into the High Resistance State (HRS). If we instead fix a set amount of charge on …