Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Sensor Interpolation And Super Resolution Image Reconstruction Using The Optimal Recovery Framework, Veenarai Moram

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Wireless sensor networks have the potential to benefit society in a myriad of ways, but due to constraints of sensor placement, obtaining the desired signals is not an easy problem. Retrieving the information accurately from sensors placed randomly is a challenging problem of sensor communication and signal interpolation. In this research the optimal recovery (OR) method, a deterministic framework that can use a priori bandwidth or spectral shape information, is used to interpolate from the given samples produced by sensors. In the reconstruction formulation, a worst case error signal occurs. To minimize this error, the OR method uses a norm …

Synthesis And Manufacture Of Photocrosslinkable Poly(Caprolactone)-Based 3d Scaffolds For Tissue Engineering Applications, Nathan Jonathan Castro

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

It is known that the body can efficiently repair hard tissue (bone) micro fractures by suturing the defect through the deposition of minerals resulting in an area that is stronger post-injury. Larger defects, however, generally cause more trouble since the body is incapable of repairing them. Bone defects can occur as a result of congenital abnormalities, trauma, or disease. Traditional methods for addressing these defects have involved the use of acellular cadaverous bone or autologous bone. Both contain innate problems associated with them; the former method can result in disease transmission, as well as very low integration with the host …

Dynamic Modeling Of Human Gait And Motor, Chad Everett Joshua Macdonald

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The simulation of gait, impairments and the outcomes of rehabilitation strategies is an important area of research. The ability to study the efficacy of treatment options before applying them to patients has the potential to improve the efficiency of the rehabilitation process. Any such simulations must incorporate some model of the motor learning process to properly anticipate the responses of patients.This dissertation presents initial work on the modeling of gait and the study of motor adaptation with a view towards simulating the motor adaptation process during gait.

Specifically, an inverse dynamic model of gait incorporating sagittal plane limb and torso …

Novel Control Technique For Cadmium Sulfide, Rafael Ordonez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cadmium sulfide Chemical-Bath-Deposition parameters are modified to allow, for the first time, real time monitoring of cadmium ion molarity using a commercially available cadmium ion Ion-Selective-Electreode at 60°C. This modification involves alterations to typical deposition parameters that eliminate the formation of cadmium hydroxide and keep cadmium ion molarity above 10-7M. The new or atypical parameters developed are pH values below 8.9 and lower moralities for all chemicals. In order to have complexation of cadmium ion driven mainly by ammonia, parameters that minimized complexation by other chemicals are found. Cadmium acetate concentration below 2mM and ammonium acetate concentration below 10mM minimize …

Commercialization And Optimization Of The Pixel Router, Steven James Dominick

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

The Pixel Router was developed at the University of Kentucky with the intent of supporting multi-projector displays by combining the scalability of commercial software solutions with the flexibility of commercial hardware solutions. This custom hardware solution uses a Look Up Table for an arbitrary input to output pixel mapping, but suffers from high memory latencies due to random SDRAM accesses. In order for this device to achieve marketability, the image interpolation method needed improvement as well. The previous design used the nearest neighbor interpolation method, which produces poor looking results but requires the least amount of memory accesses. A cache …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Avoiding Sanctions At The E-Discovery Meet-And-Confer In Common Law Countries, Milton Luoma, Vicki Luoma

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The rules of civil procedure in common law countries have been amended to better deal with the requirements of electronic discovery. One of the key changes in case management is the scheduling of a meet-and-confer session where the parties to litigation must meet early in the case before any discovery procedures have begun to exchange information regarding the nature, location, formats, and pertinent facts regarding custody and control of a party’s electronically stored information (ESI). Failure to abide by the rules and participate in good faith at the meet-and-confer session can have dire consequences for the parties and lawyers involved. …

Malware Forensics: Discovery Of The Intent Of Deception, Murray Brand, Craig Valli, Andrew Woodward

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Malicious software (malware) has a wide variety of analysis avoidance techniques that it can employ to hinder forensic analysis. Although legitimate software can incorporate the same analysis avoidance techniques to provide a measure of protection against reverse engineering and to protect intellectual property, malware invariably makes much greater use of such techniques to make detailed analysis labour intensive and very time consuming. Analysis avoidance techniques are so heavily used by malware that the detection of the use of analysis avoidance techniques could be a very good indicator of the presence of malicious intent. However, there is a tendency for analysis …

The Weakening Of Branch Predictor Performance As An Inevitable Side Effect Of Exploiting Control Independence, Christopher Joseph Michael

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Many algorithms are inherently sequential and hard to explicitly parallelize. Cores designed to aggressively handle these problems exhibit deeper pipelines and wider fetch widths to exploit instruction-level parallelism via out-of-order execution. As these parameters increase, so does the amount of instructions fetched along an incorrect path when a branch is mispredicted. Many of the instructions squashed after a branch are control independent, meaning they will be fetched regardless of whether the candidate branch is taken or not. There has been much research in retaining these control independent instructions on misprediction of the candidate branch. This research shows that there is …

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 …

Protection Of Upqc Against The Load Side Short Circuits, Iurie Axente, Malabika Basu, Michael Conlon, Kevin Gaughan

Articles

This study presents a protection scheme for protecting the series inverter of a unified power quality conditioner (UPQC). The proposed scheme protects the series inverter from overcurrents and overvoltages, which appear during short-circuit faults on the load side of the UPQC. The main protection element is a crowbar connected across the secondary of the series transformer and consists of a pair of antiparallel connected thyristors, which is governed by a simple Zener diode-based control circuit. In the case of an overvoltage, the crowbar short circuits the secondary of the transformer, thus removing the overvoltage and diverting the fault current from …

Finite Element Analysis Of Ring-Shaped Emission Profile In Plasma Bullet, Yukinori Sakiyama, David B. Graves, Julien Jarrige, Mounir Laroussi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Using a one-way coupled model of neutral gas flow and plasma dynamics we report a mechanism to explain the ring-shaped emission pattern that has been observed experimentally in plasma bullets at atmospheric pressure. We solve a fluid model with the local field approximation in one-dimensional cylindrical coordinates, corresponding to a cross-section of a plasma bullet. Pulselike uniform electric field is assumed to be applied perpendicular to the simulation domain. Time and spatially resolved spectroscopic measurements support the simulation results.

Experimental Studies On The Plasma Bullet Propagation And Its Inhibition, Erdinc Karakas, Mounir Laroussi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Plasma bullets generated by atmospheric pressure low temperature plasma jets have recently been an active research topic due to their unique properties and their enhanced plasma chemistry. In this paper, experimental insights into the plasma bullet lifetime and its velocity are reported. Data obtained from intensified charge-coupled device camera and time-resolved optical emission spectroscopy (OES) elucidated the existence of a weakly ionized channel between the plasma bullet and its source (such as the plasma pencil). Factors responsible for the inhibition of the propagation of the bullet, such as low helium mole fraction, the magnitude of the applied voltage, and the …

Design Of Organic Tandem Solar Cells Using Pcpdtbt: Pc61 Bm And P3ht: Pc71bm, Gon Namkoong, Patrick Boland, Keejoo Lee, James Dean

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We conducted optical and electrical simulations with the goal of determining the optimal design for conjugated polymer-fullerene tandem solar cells using poly[2,6-(4,4-bis-(2-ethylhexyl)- 4H-cyclopenta[2,1- b;3,4- b′] dithiophene)-alt-4,7-(2,1,3-benzothiadiazole)] (PCPDTBT): [6,6]-phenyl C₆₁ butyric acid methyl ester (PC₆₁ BM) as a bottom cell and poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT): [6,6]-phenyl C₇₁ butyric acid methyl ester (PC₇₁BM) as a top cell. The effects of photon density, absorption, balanced and unbalanced charge carrier transport, and bimolecular recombination in the two subcells were incorporated into the simulations. We found that the maximum energy conversion efficiency (η) is 9% when charge carrier mobilities in …

Fault Testing Quantum Switching Circuits, Marek Perkowski, Jacob Biamonte

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Test pattern generation is an electronic design automation tool that attempts to find an input (or test) sequence that, when applied to a digital circuit, enables one to distinguish between the correct circuit behavior and the faulty behavior caused by particular faults. The effectiveness of this classical method is measured by the fault coverage achieved for the fault model and the number of generated vectors, which should be directly proportional to test application time. This work address the quantum process validation problem by considering the quantum mechanical adaptation of test pattern generation methods used to test classical circuits. We found …

Analysis And Optimization Of Electrical Systems In A Solar Car With Applications To Gato Del Sol Iii-Iv, Krishna Venkatesh Prayaga

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Gato del Sol III, was powered by a solar array of 480 Silicon mono-crystalline photovoltaic cells. Maximum Power Point trackers efficiently made use of these cells and tracked the optimal load. The cells were mounted on a fiber glass and foam core composite shell. The shell rides on a lightweight aluminum space frame chassis, which is powered by a 95% efficient brushless DC motor. Gato del Sol IV was the University of Kentucky Solar Car Team’s (UKSCT) entry into the American Solar Car Challenge (ASC) 2010 event. The car makes use of 310 high density lithium-polymer batteries to account for …

Theoretical Modeling And Analysis Of Ammonia Gas Sensing Properties Of Vertically Aligned Multiwalled Carbon Nanotube Resistive Sensors And Enhancing Their Sensitivity, Shripriya Darshini Poduri

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Vertically aligned Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes (MWCNTs) were grown in the pores of Anodized Aluminum Oxide (AAO) templates and investigated for resistive sensor applications. High Sensitivity of 23% to low concentration (100 ppm) of ammonia was observed. An equivalent circuit model was developed to understand the current flow path in the resistive sensor. This helped us in achieving high sensitivities through amorphous carbon (a-C) layer thickness tailoring by employing post-growth processing techniques like plasma etching.

A simulation model in MATLAB was developed to calculate the device resistance and the change in the sensitivity as a function of device parameters. The steady …

Leakage Current Reduction Of Mos Capacitor Induced By Rapid Thermal Processing, Yichun Wang

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

With the MOSFET scaling practice, the performance of IC devices is improved tremendously as we experienced in the last decades. However, the small semiconductor devices also bring some drawbacks among which the high gate leakage current is becoming increasingly serious.

This thesis work is focused on the of gate leakage current reduction in thin oxide semiconductor devices. The method being studied is the Phonon Energy Coupling Enhancement (PECE) effect induced by Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP). The basic MOS capacitors are used to check improvements of leakage current reduction after appropriate RTP process.

Through sets of experiments, it is found that …

Spontaneous Periodic Deformations In Nonchiral Planar-Aligned Bimesogens With A Nematic-Nematic Transition And A Negative Elastic Constant, V. P. Panov, J. K. Vij, Yuri Panarin, A. Kohlmeier, M. G. Tamba, R. A. Lewis, G. H. Mehl

Articles

Hydrocarbon linked mesogenic dimers are found to exhibit an additional nematic phase below the conventional uniaxial nematic phase as confirmed by x-ray diffraction. The phase produces unusual periodic stripe domains in planar cells. The stripes are found to be parallel to the rubbing direction (in rubbed cells) with a well-defined period equal to double the cell gap. The stripes appear without external electromagnetic field, temperature or thickness gradients, rubbing or hybrid alignment treatments. Simple modeling proposes a negative sign for at least one of the two elastic constants: splay and twist, as a necessary condition for the observed pattern.

Liquid Crystal Display Modes In A Nontilted Bent-Core Biaxial Smectic Liquid Crystal, Mamatha Nagaraj, Yuri Panarin, J. K. Vij, C. Keith, C. Tschierske

Articles

Liquid crystal display (LCD) modes associated with the rotation of the secondary director in nontilted, biaxial smectic phase of an achiral bent-core compound are demonstrated. For LCDs, we find that at least four display modes are possible using SmAPA phase of the studied material, in which the minor directors in adjacent layers are aligned antiferroelectrically. The advantages of these modes include low driving field (1–2 V/ µm), high contrast ratio 1000:1, relatively fast switching time of 0.5 ms and continuous gray scale. The molecular short axis or the polar axis in a negative dielectric, biaxial material is oriented by the …