Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Passive Rf Sensors And Wireless Sensor Interrogation, Srikar Deshmukh

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

Recently, a new type of passive sensor called the antenna sensor has been developed. The antenna sensor incorporates a patch antenna as the sensing element as well as the data transmitting element. Physical factors such as strain and ground plane crack cause the patch antenna resonant frequency to change. By measuring the change in patch antenna resonant frequency these physical factors can be quantified.Conventional resonant frequency measurement methods require a wired connection to the antenna sensor. The wireless interrogation technique eliminates this requirement while offering all the advantages that a wireless sensor interface offers over a wired sensor interface. In …

A High Fill Factor Cmos Image Sensor For Ir Camera Applications, Daniel Mcbride

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

In this thesis, a unit cell for high-SNR applications is presented. The proposed circuit is significantly smaller than other circuits that perform dark current subtraction because less circuitry is used inside the unit cell. The proposed circuit uses only two transistors and one resistor inside each unit cell to suppress the dark current. The size of the circuit in the layout is 25 um x 25 µm. With this new unit cell and routing approach, the size of the unit cell was reduced by 300% compared to other circuits which also suppress dark current.

Implementation Of Security Within Gen2 Protocol, Shesh Kumar Jagannatha

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

In this thesis, I propose and evaluate several methods to integrate security within the identification process and memory access processes of the ISO 18000-6C (or GEN2) passive UHF radio frequency identification (RFID) protocol. The RFID Tags are promiscuous and they emit their unique identifiers in clear upon interrogation from the Reader. They do not have a mutual authentication process to validate the Readers and Tags, this allows eavesdropping, illicit reading from a malicious Reader and counterfeit Tags. GEN2 Tags are being integrated into driver's licenses and being used for border crossing identities; thus, there is a need to secure both …

The Development Of Scalable Pump Techniques For Gg Iag Fiber Lasers And Passive Athermalization Techniques For Solid State Laser, William Hageman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two parts: research pertaining to the development of scalable pump techniques for gain guided index-antiguided fiber lasers and research relating to the development of passive athermalization schemes for solid state lasers. The first section primarily details the development of a side pump scheme that allows for power scaling of gain-guided index anti-guided fibers. While these fibers have been demonstrated in past research, none have used a pump technology capable of pumping with the efficiencies, uniformity, and necessary length to allow for scaling of the fiber lasers to high output powers. The side pumped scheme developed in …

Heterojunctions And Schottky Diodes On Semiconductor Nanowires For Solar Cell Applications, Piao Liu

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Photovoltaic devices are receiving growing interest in both industry and research institutions due to the great demand for clean and renewable energy. Among all types of solar cells, cadmium sulfide (CdS) – cadmium telluride (CdTe) and cadmium sulfide (CdS) - copper indium diselenide (CuInSe₂ or CIS) heterojunctions based thin film solar cells are of great interest due to their high efficiency and low cost. Further improvement in power conversion efficiency over the traditional device structure can be achieved by tuning the optical and electric properties of the light absorption layer as well as the window layer, utilizing nano template-assisted …

Concentric Layout, A New Scientific Data Layout For Matrix Data Set In Hadoop File System, Lu Cheng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The data generated by scientific simulation, sensor, monitor or optical telescope has increased with dramatic speed. In order to analyze the raw data speed and space efficiently, data preprocess operation is needed to achieve better performance in data analysis phase. Current research shows an increasing tread of adopting MapReduce framework for large scale data processing. However, the data access patterns which generally applied to scientific data set are not supported by current MapReduce framework directly. The gap between the requirement from analytics application and the property of MapReduce framework motivates us to provide support for these data access patterns in …

Design And Simulation For Encoded Pn-Ofc Saw Sensor Systems, John Pavlina

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors provide versatility in that they can offer wireless, passive operation in numerous environments. Various SAW device embodiments may also be employed for retrieval of the sensed data. Single sensor systems typically use a single carrier frequency and a simple device embodiment since tagging is not required. However, it is necessary in a multi-sensor environment to both identify the sensor and retrieve the information. Overlapping sensor data signals in time and frequency present problems when attempting to collect the sensed data at the receiver. This dissertation defines a system simulation environment exclusive to SAW sensors. The …

Modeling And Design Of Multi-Port Dc/Dc Converters, Zhijun Qian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, a new satellite platform power architecture based on paralleled three-port DC/DC converters is proposed to reduce the total satellite power system mass. Moreover, a fourport DC/DC converter is proposed for renewable energy applications where several renewable sources are employed. Compared to the traditional two-port converter, three-port or four-port converters are classified as multi-port converters. Multi-port converters have less component count and less conversion stage than the traditional power processing solution which adopts several independent two-port converters. Due to their advantages multi-port converters recently have attracted much attention in academia, resulting in many topologies for various applications. But …

High-Density And High-Efficiency Soft Switching Modular Bi-Directional Dc-Dc Converter For Hybrid Electric Vehicles, John Elmes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation1 presents the design of a high-density and high-efficiency soft-switching bi-directional DC-DC converter for hybrid-electric vehicles. The converter operates in a new bidirectional interleaved variable-frequency quasi-square-wave (QSW) mode, which enables high efficiency, high switching frequency, and high power-density. The converter presented utilizes a new variable frequency interleaving approach which allows for each module to operate in an interleaved position while allowing for tolerance in inductance and snubber capacitor values. The variable frequency interleaved soft-switching operation paired with a high-density nanocrystalline inductor and high-density system structure results in a very high performance converter, well exceeding that of the current technology. …

Robust Dialog Management Through A Context-Centric Architecture, Victor C. Hung

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents and evaluates a method of managing spoken dialog interactions with a robust attention to fulfilling the human user’s goals in the presence of speech recognition limitations. Assistive speech-based embodied conversation agents are computer-based entities that interact with humans to help accomplish a certain task or communicate information via spoken input and output. A challenging aspect of this task involves open dialog, where the user is free to converse in an unstructured manner. With this style of input, the machine’s ability to communicate may be hindered by poor reception of utterances, caused by a user’s inadequate command of …

Query Processing In Location-Based Services, Fuyu Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the advances in wireless communication technology and advanced positioning systems, a variety of Location-Based Services (LBS) become available to the public. Mobile users can issue location-based queries to probe their surrounding environments. One important type of query in LBS is moving monitoring queries over mobile objects. Due to the high frequency in location updates and the expensive cost of continuous query processing, server computation capacity and wireless communication bandwidth are the two limiting factors for large-scale deployment of moving object database systems. To address both of the scalability factors, distributed computing has been considered. These schemes enable moving objects …

Extreme Ultraviolet Spectral Streak Camera, John Michael Szilagyi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The recent development of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) sources has increased the need for diagnostic tools, and has opened up a previously limited portion of the spectrum. With ultrafast laser systems and spectroscopy moving into shorter timescales and wavelengths, the need for nanosecond scale imaging of EUV is increasing. EUV’s high absorption has limited the number of imaging options due to the many atomic resonances in this spectrum. Currently EUV is imaged with photodiodes and X-ray CCDs. However photodiodes are limited in that they can only resolve intensity with respect to time and X-ray CCDs are limited to temporal resolution in …

Design Of A Wideband Dual-Polarized Cavity Backed Slot Antenna, Rajesh Paryani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A new technique for designing wideband dual-polarized cavity-backed slot antennas is presented. The structure is in the form of a double-resonant, dual-polarized slot antenna backed by a shallow substrate integrated cavity with a depth of approximately one tenth the free space wavelength. The presence of the cavity behind the slot enhances the antenna's directivity and reduces the possibility of surface wave propagation in the antenna substrate when the element is used in an array environment. Moreover, the dual-polarized nature of this radiating element may be exploited to synthesize any desired polarization (vertical, horizontal, RHCP, or LHCP). The double-resonant behavior observed …

The Pdf Of Irradiance For A Free-Space Optical Communications Channel: A Physics Based Model, David Wayne

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An accurate PDF of irradiance for a FSO channel is important when designing a laser radar, active laser imaging, or a communications system to operate over the channel. Parameters such as detector threshold level, probability of detection, mean fade time, number of fades, BER, and SNR are derived from the PDF and determine the design constraints of the receiver, transmitter, and corresponding electronics. Current PDF models of irradiance, such as the Gamma-Gamma, do not fully capture the effect of aperture averaging; a reduction in scintillation as the diameter of the collecting optic is increased. The Gamma-Gamma PDF of irradiance is …

Hurricane Wind Speed And Rain Rate Measurements Using The Airborne Hurricane Imaging Radiometer (Hirad), Ruba Amarin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents results for an end-to-end computer simulation of a new airborne microwave remote sensor, the Hurricane Imaging Radiometer, HIRAD, which will provide improved hurricane surveillance. The emphasis of this research is the retrieval of hurricane-force wind speeds in the presence of intense rain and over long atmospheric slant path lengths that are encountered across its wide swath. Brightness temperature (Tb) simulations are performed using a forward microwave radiative transfer model (RTM) that includes an ocean surface emissivity model at high wind speeds developed especially for HIRAD high incidence angle measurements and a rain model for the hurricane environment. …

Conventional And Zvt Synchronous Buck Converter Design, Analysis, And Measurement, Mark Cory

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The role played by power converting circuits is extremely important to almost any electronic system built today. Circuits that use converters of any type depend on power that is consistent in form and reliable in order to properly function. In addition, today's demands require more efficient use of energy, from large stationary systems such as power plants all the way down to small mobile devices such as laptops and cell phones. This places a need to reduce any losses to a minimum. The power conversion circuitry in a system is a very good place to reduce a large amount of …

Single Channel Vocal Separation Using Median Filtering And Factorisation Techniques, Derry Fitzgerald, Mikel Gainza

Articles

This paper deals with the problem of the extraction of vocals from single channel audio signals containing both vocals and other instruments, including both pitched instruments and percussion instruments. A novel median filtering-based approach for the extraction of vocal tracks is described, which is simple and efficient to implement. Further improvements in separation quality are then obtained by the application of tensor factorisation techniques to further extract residual instruments from the vocal mix. Finally, a novel use of non-negative partial matrix cofactorisation is demonstrated as a means of further improving separation quality. Here the original single channel mixture is partially …

The Fractal Market Hypothesis: Applications To Financial Forecasting, Jonathan Blackledge

Books/Book chapters

No abstract provided.

Connecting Micro-Generators In Parallel To The Low Voltage Distribution Network Utilising Standard En50438 In The Republic Of Ireland, Liam Murphy

Other resources

The green agenda has been much to the fore internationally and has particularly had an influence in Republic of Ireland (ROI) where there are ‘green’ ministers in Government. Mr. Eamon Ryan who is the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources has particularly championed the idea of self generation. The author’s interest in the subject matter is to investigate the up-take of micro-generation and determine the likely short term future along with the grid tie standard i.e. EN50438.

Issues surrounding micro-generation are considered from the international and national perspective and from a customer and generation utility point of view. The …

Blind Single Channel Sound Source Separation, Mark Leddy

Masters

In recent years source separation has become an increasingly popular area of research in the signal processing community. The subject has found applications in a variety of fields such as medical imaging, sound and audio, econometrics and geophysics. This document will discuss the application of source separation techniques to the area of audio. Sound source separation is the process of observing a mixture signal made up of a number of sources, and from this mixture estimating the individual source signals. Audio source separation techniques may be crudely split into the following areas; techniques that utilise attributes of the sources, and …