Electrical and Electronics Commons^™

Gas Leakage Detection System (Glds), Daudi Simbeye

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

This paper mainly focuses on the detection of gas leakage and providing security when the user is around or away from home. The system is Short Message Service (SMS) based and uses wireless technology for providing security against gas leakage to users hence cost effective and more adaptable. The system comprises of sensors for detecting gas leak interfaced to microcontroller that will give an alert to user whenever there is a gas leakage, display warning information by using Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), sending SMS to the user for notification wherever he/she might be and turning off electric power with the …

Lunalight - Bringing Light To The Expanding World, Gabriela M. Igel, Daniel J. Patrick, Kimberley M. Smith

Materials Engineering

The LunaLight, a solar rechargeable light and cell phone charger, addresses the lack of access to electricity faced by 1.4 billion of the world’s population (International Finance Corporation). The LunaTech team has developed a product that is bright, simple, compact, versatile and competitive with existing products. Through a partnership with the non-profit organization One Million Lights, LunaTech has improved a previous team’s design to address user feedback, concerns of durability, and manufacturability.

The LunaLight design includes a 5 component plastic housing held together by 4 screws, a surface mounted PCB, a lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery, one high-brightness LED, a solar panel, …

The Bicycle-Powered Smartphone Charger, Chris Arntzen

Master's Theses

This thesis entails the design and fabrication of a smartphone charger that is powered by a bicycle dynamo hub. In addition to the design and validation of the charger prototype, this thesis involves the testing and characterization of the dynamo hub power source, the design and construction of specialized test equipment, and the design and prototyping of a handlebar-mounted case for the smartphone and charging electronics. With the intention of making the device a commercial product, price, aesthetics, and marketability are of importance to the design. An appropriate description of the charger circuit is a microcontroller-based energy management system, tailored …

Bi-Directional Flyback Dc-Dc Converter For Battery System Of The Dc House Project, Austin J. Luan

Master's Theses

The DC House project strongly relies on renewable energy sources to provide power to the house for various loads. However, when these sources are unable to provide power at a certain time, a back-up energy source from a battery must be readily available to fulfill the house’s power needs. This thesis proposes a bi-directional flyback power converter to allow a single-stage power path to charge the battery from and to discharge the battery to the DC House 48 V system bus. The design, simulation, and hardware prototype of the proposed flyback bi-directional converter will be conducted to demonstrate its feasibility. …

Eye "R" Glasses: Development Of An Infrared Sensor System For Detecting The Human Body, Rick Wong

Master's Theses

Throughout the years, sensors have been an integral part of automation, alert, and medical systems. Many of these systems measure physiological characteristics of the human body to alert themselves of their current conditions. Drowsy driver systems, for instance, measure the eyes and facial movements with a camera to determine if the driver is falling asleep at the wheel. Electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), and electromyography (EMG) employ electrodes on the human body to measure electrical activity of a patient’s REM sleep cycle patterns. Pulse oximeters use optical light through a process called photoplethysmography (PPG) to measure heart rate.

As diverse as …

A Novel Unit Cell Antenna For Highly Integrated Phased Arrays In The Shf Band, Timothy Bryan Ogilvie

Master's Theses

Phased arrays are electromagnetic antenna systems comprised of many radiating elements and processing electronics. Radiating elements are typically positioned in an orderly grid within the antenna aperture. In the receive mode of operation, radiating elements capture some of the signal energy from incoming radiation and guide these signals to processing electronics. Signals are filtered and amplified to maintain the desired sensitivity and complexly weighted using circuits with reconfigurable amplification gain and phase delay. Finally, all signals are combined. The summation of these complexly weighted spatial samples forms a spatial filter in the same way complexly weighted temporal samples establish a …

Multiple Input Single Output (Miso) Tablet/ Phone Charger, Kevin Wong

Master's Theses

This thesis entails the design and implementation of a multiple input single output (MISO) DC-DC converter using the flyback topology to charge tablets/ smartphones or any USB powered portable device. The MISO converter will enable the use of various renewable energy sources such as a solar panel/ rechargeable battery combination, bicycle dynamo, hydroelectric power, and wind turbine. This paper will cover the design, simulations, and test results of the MISO converter. The flyback topology was chosen due to its low part count and its efficiency at low power. The proposed converter has a nominal 12V input to output USB 2.0 …

Design, Fabrication, And Testing Of An Emr Based Orbital Debris Impact Testing Platform, Jeffrey J. Maniglia Jr.

Master's Theses

This paper describes the changes made from Cal Poly’s initial railgun system, the Mk. 1 railgun, to the Mk. 1.1 system, as well as the design, fabrication, and testing of a newer and larger Mk. 2 railgun system. The Mk. 1.1 system is developed as a more efficient alteration of the original Mk. 1 system, but is found to be defective due to hardware deficiencies and failure, as well as unforeseen efficiency losses. A Mk. 2 system is developed and built around donated hardware from the Naval Postgraduate School. The Mk. 2 system strove to implement an efficient, augmented, electromagnetic …

Cal Poly Wind Power Research Center Power Regulator, Ricardo Rodriguez, Steven Bounchareune

Electrical Engineering

Through funding from the California Central Coast Research Partnership (C3RP) the

CPWRC, led by Dr. Patrick Lemieux, has erected a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) at the

Cal Poly Escuela Ranch site EL04. With the help of Dr. John Ridgely and Dr. Art MacCarley, the team has implemented a controller that delivers the power being generated by the turbine to a resistor bank which maintains a safe working speed for the turbine. The authors objectives for this project are to (1) become familiar with the operation of the turbine, (2) develop an AC-DC converter that regulates the output of the …

The Visual Representation Of Sound For The Hearing Impaired, Jonathan Brophy

Electrical Engineering

There are many difficulties that arise when one is faced with a hearing disability. New applications of advancing technology have the potential to enable designs capable of assisting the hearing impaired with the ability to see sound. This project seeks to provide a user with a visual representation of loud noises detected using small directional microphones. The microphones determine the location of the sound above a set decibel level and a microprocessor determines the approximate location of the sound source and displays a vertical colored bar on a video image in the direction of the noise using virtual reality glasses. …

Pscad Modeling Of One-Cycle Control Var, Andre Keir Azares

Electrical Engineering

Voltage support has been a common problem utilities have faced for many years and although there exists many solutions, the advent of renewable energy devices and electric vehicles make the problem of voltage support an even greater challenge today. The increasing use of electronic devices by consumers also increases the magnitude of dealing with voltage support. A promising new solution to voltage support is seen in One Cycle Control, a new control method that uses a nonlinear feedback technique on power electronics to produce high quality sine waves with fast dynamic response. This control paradigm is seen in its application …

Cal Poly Brocade Challenge 2013, Chandler Morehardt, Alexa Coburn, Juan Silva, Kerry Sun, Greg Wang, Raul Chagoya, Jd Torres

Architectural Engineering

No abstract provided.

Multiplicative Feedback Audio Distortion Circuit, Colton Parsons

Electrical Engineering

This circuit aims to distort an audio signal input in a novel and aesthetically pleasing manner. When it comes to the timbre of a note, even harmonics generally sound better than odd harmonics. Most forms of audio signal distortion (usually for electric guitar) primarily add odd harmonics to a signal, as this is easily accomplished by clipping the waveform. This project instead utilizes a signal multiplier in a feedback loop, with one multiplier input coming from the circuit’s input, and the other from the multiplier’s own output. This process creates even harmonics. A delay line is placed in the loop, …

Cubesat Launch Sequencer, Billy Beecher

Electrical Engineering

I am working with the Naval Postgraduate School to develop a low cost CubeSat launch sequencer for NPSCuL that is designed to operate in low Earth orbit. The system will be capable of providing programmable delays with a minimum delay of one second to a maximum delay of five minutes. Delays must be accurate to within ± 10% or within one second, whichever is less. After the delay, the system will provide the necessary launch signal. To ensure protection from radiation, the system will feature triple redundancy and voting logic stages to ensure that the proper signal is propagated.

Broadband, Rugged, High Linearity, Low-Noise Amplifier, Shane Smith

Electrical Engineering

This report examines the application of a low-noise amplifier module for a Global Positioning System (GPS). This low-noise amplifier module helps allow the carrier signal to get the amplification needed to give a smoother analog to digital conversion. However, the frequency range of the GPS spectrum reaches up to 1.6GHz, where component noise becomes an issue and can create a disrupted signal. This low-noise amplifier needs to create a reasonable gain, while achieving a low noise figure. An amplifier with high gain and low noise figure becomes difficult because they create a design trade-off, higher the gain brings higher the …

Alternative Wheelchair Control System, Jessica Hendricks, Tara Keigharn

Electrical Engineering

We geared this project towards assisting an individual with limited[1] motor function to operate a wheelchair. The product targets individuals who find use of a joystick is ineffective or painful. We focused our design on the wheelchair bought from Adaptive Driving Systems (Driving, 2013); but ultimately we would like to field a final product capable of applying to any electric wheelchair. Our goal: a person to operate the electric wheelchair using sensors that transmit a translation of an individual’s hand movement through a wireless transmission to a microcontroller installed on the wheel chair that then controls the wheelchair’s movement. …

High Frequency Open Air Optical Communication System, Alexander C. Wolff

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project is to create a wireless optical communication system that operates at high frequencies (up to 3 GHz). The system will function by taking a digital electric input signal, converting it to a photonic signal, recovering the signal at the other end of a short distance (~1 foot) and converting it back into a digital signal. Unlike the more common fiber-optic data transmission systems, this system will transmit light through air, instead of fiber, as its medium. Doing so will have the benefits of a wireless system combined with the benefits from an optical system, including …

Adaptive Data Acquisition For Communication Networks, Behzad Ahmadi

Dissertations

In an increasing number of communication systems, such as sensor networks or local area networks within medical, financial or military institutions, nodes communicate information sources (e.g., video, audio) over multiple hops. Moreover, nodes have, or can acquire, correlated information sources from the environment, e.g., from data bases or from measurements. Among the new design problems raised by the outlined scenarios, two key issues are addressed in this dissertation: 1) How to preserve the consistency of sensitive information across multiple hops; 2) How to incorporate the design of actuation in the form of data acquisition and network probing in the optimization …

Enabling Sustainable Power Distribution Networks By Using Smart Grid Communications, Chun-Hao Lo

Dissertations

Smart grid modernization enables integration of computing, information and communications capabilities into the legacy electric power grid system, especially the low voltage distribution networks where various consumers are located. The evolutionary paradigm has initiated worldwide deployment of an enormous number of smart meters as well as renewable energy sources at end-user levels. The future distribution networks as part of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) will involve decentralized power control operations under associated smart grid communications networks. This dissertation addresses three potential problems anticipated in the future distribution networks of smart grid: 1) local power congestion due to power surpluses produced by …

High Performance Digital Signal Processing: Theory, Design, And Applications In Finance, Mustafa Ugur Torun

Dissertations

The way scientific research and business is conducted has drastically changed over the last decade. Big data and data-intensive scientific discovery are two terms that have been coined recently. They describe the tremendous amounts of noisy data, created extremely rapidly by various sensing devices and methods that need to be explored for information inference. Researchers and practitioners who can obtain meaningful information out of big data in the shortest time gain a competitive advantage. Hence, there is more need than ever for a variety of high performance computational tools for scientific and business analytics. Interest in developing efficient data processing …