Digital Commons Network^™

Framework Of Hardware Trojan Detection Leveraging Structural Checking Tool, Rafael Dacanay Del Carmen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since there is a significant demand for obtaining third-party soft Intellectual Property (IP) by first-party integrated circuit (IC) vendors, it is becoming easier for adversaries to insert malicious logic known as hardware Trojans into designs. Due to this, vendors need to find ways to screen the third-party IPs for possible security threats and then mitigate them. The development of the Structural Checking (SC) tool provides a solution to this issue. This tool analyzes the structure of an unknown soft IP design and creates a network of all the signals within the design and how they are connected to each other. …

Machine Learning Tools In The Predictive Analysis Of Ercot Load Demand Data, Md Riyad Hossain

Theses and Dissertations

The electric load industry has seen a significant transformation over the last few decades, culminating in the establishment and implementation of electricity markets. This transition separates electric generation services into a distinct, more competitive sector of the industry, allowing for the introduction of greater unpredictability into the system. Forecasting power system load has developed into a core research area in power and energy demand engineering in order to maintain a constant balance between electricity supply and demand. The purpose of this thesis dissertation is to reduce power system uncertainty by improving forecasting accuracy through the use of sophisticated machine …

Electromagnetic Modeling Of A Wind Tunnel Magnetic Suspension And Balance System, Desiree Driver

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Wind tunnels are used to study forces and moments acting on an aerodynamic body. While most results involve some interference from the mechanical supports used to hold the model, a Magnetic Suspension and Balance System (MSBS) is void of these interferences and presents an ideal test scenario. To further investigate the feasibility of dynamic stability testing at supersonic speeds using a MSBS, a preliminary design idea is currently being developed using an existing MSBS in a subsonic wind tunnel. This review focuses on the development of a mathematical model to more accurately portray the capabilities of the 6 inch Massachusetts …

Failure Mode, Effects And Criticality Analysis Of A Very Low Earth Orbit Cubesat Mission, Robb Christopher Borowicz

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

When space programs launch vehicles into orbit, multiple failures could arise throughout the mission and corrective actions are often not an option. Applying reliability engineering approaches during the design phase focuses on analyzing risk by anticipating potential failures and mitigating uncertainties in the design. Old Dominion University, in partnership with the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology designed and developed a 3U CubeSat mission to validate on-orbit, three space technology payloads. Mission SeaLion will fly as a secondary payload on stage two of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket and will be deployed in a very …

Pulse-Coupled Oscillator Networks: Achieving Phase Continuity And Learning Optimal Control In Physical Systems, Timothy Anglea

All Dissertations

In this dissertation, we consider the application of pulse-coupled oscillator theory to real-world, physical networks. When the phase of an oscillator is associated with a physical measure, such as clock timing or robotic heading, discontinuous adjustments of the oscillator's phase is undesirable and potentially disadvantageous. Rather, continuous adjustment of the oscillator phase value is needed over a certain amount of time. To ensure that both synchronization and desynchronization can still be achieved under the constraint of continuous phase value changes, we pursue a novel approach to analyze the generalization of a pulse-coupled oscillator network with a time-varying coupling strength. We …

Priority Enabled Content Based Forwarding In Fog Computing Via Sdn, Yasi̇n İnağ, Metehan Güzel, Feyza Yildirim Okay, Mehmet Demi̇rci̇, Suat Özdemi̇r

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) applications increases, an efficient transmitting of the data generated by these applications to a centralized cloud server can be a challenging issue. This paper aims to facilitate transmission by utilizing fog computing (FC) and software defined networking (SDN) technologies. To this end, it proposes two novel content based forwarding (CBF) models for IoT networks. The first model takes advantage of FC to reduce transmission and computational delay. Based on the first model, the second model makes use of the prioritization concept to address the timely delivery of critical data while ensuring the …

Development Of An Automated Electronic Prototyping System, Cesar Yahir Sanchez Zambrano

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Prototyping systems with interconnected components can be a time and resource expensive process. The process consists of three main phases (design, build and analysis) with each having their own associated cost. For the case of electronic circuits, the building phase is the costliest phase among the three, being prone to human errors which causes the circuit to fail. All three phases of the prototyping process are important. However, often a disproportionate amount of time is spent on the build phase due to the difficulty of making and troubleshooting circuits by hand. In this thesis we will discuss a system that …

Insole Fall Prevention Device, Nick M. Hughes, Andrew M. Slaboda

Biomedical Engineering

Falls among the aging population occur every single day, with 1 in every 5 resulting in some injury and 300,000 hospitalized every year with a hip fracture [1]. The most popular and effective way to mitigate these falls is through physical therapist intervention. However, with the increased popularity in telerehab, many patients at risk for falls cannot accurately convey their gait tendencies to their physical therapists from the comfort of their home or while not in direct contact with the PT. A device like an insole, implanted with force sensors, which measures different parts of a patient’s foot, could convey …

Analysis And Optimization Of The Two-Phase Series Capacitor Buck Dc-Dc Converter, Salahaldein Ali Aboajila Ahmed

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current sharing schemes for conventional multi-phase converters are based on sensing each phase current to deliver the current information to their controllers. In conventional buck converters, this fact may require a preset current sharing ratio at the expense of efficiency, which eventually requires a larger sensing circuit to achieve the sensing accuracy of each phase. Introducing the concept of automatic current sharing is one of the solutions to tackle this issue. Automatic current sharing (Current Sharing Mechanism CSM) is an advanced way to distribute heat generation in multi-phase switching topologies at full load. A two-phase series capacitor buck converter (2-pscB) …

Design & Analysis Of Mixed-Mode Integrated Circuit For Pulse-Shape Discrimination, Bryan Orabutt

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In nuclear science experiments it is usually necessary to determine the type of radiation, its energy and direction with considerable accuracy. The detection of neutrons and discriminating them from gamma rays is particularly difficult. A popular method of doing so is to measure characteristics intrinsic to the pulse shape of each radiation type in order to perform pulse-shape discrimination (PSD).

Historically, PSD capable systems have been designed with two approaches in mind: specialized analog circuitry, or digital signal processing (DSP). In this work we propose a PSD capable circuit topology using techniques from both the analog and DSP domains. We …

Modeling And Analysis Of Subcellular Protein Localization In Hyper-Dimensional Fluorescent Microscopy Images Using Deep Learning Methods, Yang Jiao

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Hyper-dimensional images are informative and become increasingly common in biomedical research. However, the machine learning methods of studying and processing the hyper-dimensional images are underdeveloped. Most of the methods only model the mapping functions between input and output by focusing on the spatial relationship, whereas neglect the temporal and causal relationships. In many cases, the spatial, temporal, and causal relationships are correlated and become a relationship complex. Therefore, only modeling the spatial relationship may result in inaccurate mapping function modeling and lead to undesired output. Despite the importance, there are multiple challenges on modeling the relationship complex, including the model …

Effects Of Distributed Energy Resources On The Bulk Electric System, Stryder Loveday

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The traditional power grid was designed with a centralized resource distribution in mind, with a relatively small number of large power generation facilities supplying the vast majority of load. With recent efforts to further diversify the power grid as well as an increased interest in renewable energy sources, there has been an unprecedented amount of new DistributedEnergy Resources (DERs) added to the grid within the last decade. This often heavily influences the local demand where these resources are installed, often causing power to flow in ways not anticipated by the original design of the grid. This thesis reviews the potential …

A Wearable Electronic Monitoring Device For Low Pressure Garment Applications And Temperature Analysis For Prevention Of Ulceration And Infection, Francisco Mata Carlos

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The healing process of several medical conditions related to venous insufficiency and burn scar management can be improved by the proper application of pressure. Current practices for applying pressure to an extremity do not guarantee the consensus ideal interface pressures for such medical conditions. Applying a low pressure range (within 15 – 40 mm Hg) is challenging due to many factors, but especially because the actual pressure applied by a compression garment used on a patient is unknown. The proposed device, used to sense and display low pressure values, is described in detail throughout the chapters of this thesis.An electronic …

Development Of Uav-Based Rail Track Geometry Irregularity Monitoring And Measuring Platform Empowered By Artificial Intelligence, Lihao Qiu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Rail tracks need to be consistently monitored and inspected for problems associated with rust, deformation, and cracks that, at their worst, can cause catastrophic train derailments. Many non-destructive testing approaches have been explored and extensively utilized to help inspect rails’ health, but most of them require intensive human power and/or heavy sensor systems (e.g. total stations, manual/car-mounted trolly, etc.) that are not efficient or convenient to cover a long range of rails and may interfere with the normal operation of trains.In light of the rapid development of unmanned aerial systems/vehicles (UAS’s/UAVs) and high definition photographic and optical distance measuring sensors, …

Automatic Testing Of Organic Strain Gauge Tactile Sensors., Brian P. Goulet

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Human-Robot Interaction is a developing field of science, that is posed to augment everything we do in life. Skin sensors that can detect touch, temperature, distance, and other physical interaction parameters at the human-robot interface are very important to enhancing the collaboration between humans and machines. As such, these sensors must be efficiently tested and characterized to give accurate feedback from the sensor to the robot. The objective of this work is to create a diversified software testing suite that removes as much human intervention as possible. The tests and methodology discussed here provide multiple realistic scenarios that the sensors …

Development Of A Fuzzy Logic Model-Less Aircraft Controller, Christopher M. Scott

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The Modeling and Control for Agile Aircraft Development (MCAAD) group at NASA Langley Research Center(LaRC) is developing techniques for Real-Time Global Modeling (RTGM) and Robust Learning Control (RLC) for NASA’s Transformational Tools and Technologies Project. This project seeks to develop a systematic approach to reduce the iterative nature of aircraft design by introducing a model-less control law and enabling inflight aerodynamic modeling and controller design. The development of the flight control system without prior knowledge of the aircraft aerodynamic model makes use of TakagiSugeno-Kang fuzzy logic inference systems for pitch and roll controllers and are tested in various simulations and …

Design And Analysis Of Electrical Power And Communication Systems For 3u Sealion Cubesat Mission, Joseph D. Siciliano

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Old Dominion University (ODU) Space Systems students in conjunction with the United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) are designing and developing a 3U Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) CubeSat mission aptly named SeaLion. This work specifically details the design of the Electrical Power System (EPS) and Communication System of the satellite. Electrical power in orbit is a precious commodity and must be carefully regulated and distributed to ensure the satellite’s operational health. Commonly, CubeSat electrical power is retained in orbit via outward facing solar cells and stored in onboard rechargeable batteries. This thesis proposes using non-rechargeable primary battery cells and …

Diffusive Dynamics Of Biological Macromolecules In The Cytoplasm Of Live Bacteria, Asmaa Sadoon

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bacteria are small organisms that play important roles in our bodies and in maintaining our surrounding environment. However, bacterial infections are considered as one of the health diseases that threatens the lives of humans. Resistance of bacteria to antibiotics has made treating bacterial infections more challenging. With the emergence of many developed optical techniques, it has become possible to study various biological mechanisms of molecules inside these small organisms with high resolution and precise localization. In this research, single particle tracking photoactivation localization microscopy (sptPALM) technique was used to investigate the dynamics of fluorescent histonelike nucleoid-structuring proteins (H-NS) in live …

Structural Checking Tool Restructure And Matching Improvements, Derek Taylor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the rising complexity and size of hardware designs, saving development time and cost by employing third-party intellectual property (IP) into various first-party designs has become a necessity. However, using third-party IPs introduces the risk of adding malicious behavior to the design, including hardware Trojans. Different from software Trojan detection, the detection of hardware Trojans in an efficient and cost-effective manner is an ongoing area of study and has significant complexities depending on the development stage where Trojan detection is leveraged. Therefore, this thesis research proposes improvements to various components of the soft IP analysis methodology utilized by the Structural …

Live Access Control Policy Error Detection Through Hardware, Bryce Mendenhall

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Access Control (AC) is a widely used security measure designed to protect resources and infrastructure in an information system. The integrity of the AC policy is crucial to the protection of the system. Errors within an AC policy may cause many vulnerabilities such as information leaks, information loss, and malicious activities. Thus, such errors must be detected and promptly fixed. However, current AC error detection models do not allow for real-time error detection, nor do they provide the source of errors. This thesis presents a live error detection model called LogicDetect which utilizes emulated Boolean digital logic circuits to provide …

Machine Learning Classification Of Digitally Modulated Signals, James A. Latshaw

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Automatic classification of digitally modulated signals is a challenging problem that has traditionally been approached using signal processing tools such as log-likelihood algorithms for signal classification or cyclostationary signal analysis. These approaches are computationally intensive and cumbersome in general, and in recent years alternative approaches that use machine learning have been presented in the literature for automatic classification of digitally modulated signals. This thesis studies deep learning approaches for classifying digitally modulated signals that use deep artificial neural networks in conjunction with the canonical representation of digitally modulated signals in terms of in-phase and quadrature components. Specifically, capsule networks are …

Improving Intelligent Transportation Safety And Reliability Through Lowering Costs, Integrating Machine Learning, And Studying Model Sensitivity, Cavender Holt

All Theses

As intelligent transportation becomes increasingly prevalent in the domain of transportation, it is essential to understand the safety, reliability, and performance of these systems. We investigate two primary areas in the problem domain. The first area concerns increasing the feasibility and reducing the cost of deploying pedestrian detection systems to intersections in order to increase safety. By allowing pedestrian detection to be placed in intersections, the data can be better utilized to create systems to prevent accidents from occurring. By employing a dynamic compression scheme for pedestrian detection, we show the reduction of network bandwidth improved by 2.12× over the …

Infrared Electric Field Enhancement Via A Hyperbolic-Metalens-Coupled Nanoantenna, Mohamed Jebril Kyamo

Theses and Dissertations

The development of near- and mid-infrared applications requires high enhancement of the electric field intensity (EFI) and a high absorption cross-section of the electric field. The high enhancement of EFI can be obtained by concentrating optical energy to areas much smaller than the diffraction limit or by using surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). Noble metals such as gold (Au) or silver (Ag) are not feasible for infrared (IR) applications because of high losses, lack of tunability, low resolution, and low-intensity enhancement. Our methods to solve these problems are based on appropriate metamaterial selection and on coupling systems with optimization of their …

Tribological Characterization Of Nickel-Based Cold Spray Coatings For Aerospace And Industrial Manufacturing, Albert Alejandro

Theses and Dissertations

Cold Spray Additive Manufacturing (CSAM) is a sub-category of thermal spray technology where a metal powder is accelerated in a gas stream toward a metal substrate at high velocities, producing a metallurgical bond with the metal substrate on impact. The present study investigates the effect of Al2O3 additions on the tribological properties of nickel-based cold spray coatings deposited on aluminum 6061 for aerospace and industrial manufacturing. The tribological performance of the nickel-based cold spray coatings with and without Al2O3 additions was evaluated using an abrasive wear test based on the ball-crater technique. In addition, the wear and friction characteristics of …

Control, Decision-Making, And Learning Approaches For Connected And Autonomous Driving Systems With Humans-In-The-Loop, Fangjian Li

All Dissertations

By virtue of vehicular connectivity and automation, the vehicle becomes increasingly intelligent and self-driving capable. However, no matter what automation level the vehicle can achieve, humans will still be in the loop despite their roles. First, considering the manual driving car as a disturbance to the connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), a novel string stability is proposed for mixed traffic platoons consisting of both autonomous and manual driving cars to guarantee acceptable motion fluctuation and platoon safety. Furthermore, humans are naturally considered as the rider in the passenger vehicle. A human-centered cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is designed to improve …

Proposed Application For An Entity Component System In An Energy Services Interface, Tylor Slay, Grace B. Spitzer, Robert B. Bass

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

An Entity Component System is a data-oriented architecture originally developed to streamline video game performance. Despite being quite new, Entity Component Systems are relatively well established within the video game industry due to the cutting edge nature of research into performance, especially around graphics. However, Entity Component Systems have not been widely examined or adopted outside of that industry. We propose adopting an Entity Component Systems framework to serve the needs of an Energy Service Interfaces. We examine the needs of an Energy Service Interface, give an overview of open-source Entity Component Systems (ECSs) libraries, examine some preliminary performance results …

Autonomous Navigator Mobile Robot Upgrade, David Sansoucy

Thinking Matters Student Research Symposium

The mobile robot platform has been developed over the course of 10 years at USM. In Spring 2020, Belle-Isle and Werner updated the previous framework by rewriting the software to use the ROS framework running on an on-board Raspberry Pi 3. They also implemented navigation using an A* motion planning algorithm and image processing. In Summer 2021, Ames incorporated Lidar and Kinect sensors onto the robot to improve its real-time navigation capabilities. He also made improvements to the power distribution systems. This project aimed to build on the ROS frameworks developed by the previous 2 teams with the main goal …

Identification Of Orthologous Gene Groups Using Machine Learning, Dillon Burgess

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Identification of genes that show similarity between different organisms, a.k.a orthologous genes, is an open problem in computational biology. The purpose of this thesis is to create an algorithm to group orthologous genes using machine learning. Following an optimization step to find the best characterization based on training data, we represented sequences of genes or proteins with kmer vectors. These kmer vectors were then clustered into orthologous groups using hierarchical clustering. We optimized the clustering phase with the same training data for the method and parameter selection. Our results indicated that use of protein sequences with k=2 and scaling the …

Composite Style Pixel And Point Convolution-Based Deep Fusion Neural Network Architecture For The Semantic Segmentation Of Hyperspectral And Lidar Data, Kevin T. Decker, Brett J. Borghetti

Faculty Publications

Multimodal hyperspectral and lidar data sets provide complementary spectral and structural data. Joint processing and exploitation to produce semantically labeled pixel maps through semantic segmentation has proven useful for a variety of decision tasks. In this work, we identify two areas of improvement over previous approaches and present a proof of concept network implementing these improvements. First, rather than using a late fusion style architecture as in prior work, our approach implements a composite style fusion architecture to allow for the simultaneous generation of multimodal features and the learning of fused features during encoding. Second, our approach processes the higher …

Real-Time Measurement Of Parametric Influences On The Refractive Index And Length Changes In Silica Optical Fibers, Sohel Rana, Austin Fleming, Harish Subbaraman, Nirmala Kandadai

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, we present a simple cascaded Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) that can be used to measure in real-time the refractive index (RI) and length variation in silica optical fibers caused due to external physical parameters, such as temperature, strain, and radiation. As a proof-of-concept, we experimentally demonstrate real-time monitoring of temperature effects on the RI and length and measure the thermo-optic coefficient (TOC) and thermal expansion coefficient (TEC) by using the cascaded FPI within a temperature range of 21–486°C. The experimental results provide a TEC of 5.53 × 10⁻⁷ /°C and TOC of 4.28 × 10⁻⁶ /°C …