Digital Commons Network^™

Attaining Realistic Simulations Of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, Derek J. Huber

Theses and Dissertations

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are comprised of wireless systems that communicate without the assistance of centrally managed routers or base stations. MANET research and development has increased due to computing technologies offering smaller, faster, smarter, and more power efficient platforms to operate on. Largely the testing and evaluation of new and existing MANET protocols has resided in simulation environments. This is due in part to the complexities and expenses incurred when conducting real world tests. Many researchers have come to recognize that these current simulations tend to assume away critical components of the MANET domain. These assumptions are made either …

A Photogrammetry-Based Hybrid System For Dynamic Tracking And Measurement, Daniel P. Magree

Theses and Dissertations

Noncontact measurements of lightweight flexible aerospace structures present several challenges. Objects are usually mounted on a test stand because current noncontact measurement techniques require that the net motion of the object be zero. However, it is often desirable to take measurements of the object under operational conditions, and in the case of miniature aerial vehicles (MAVs) and deploying space structures, the test article will undergo significant translational motion. This thesis describes a hybrid noncontact measurement system which will enable measurement of structural kinematics of an object freely moving about a volume. By using a real-time videogrammetry system, a set of …

Architectural Considerations For Single Operator Management Of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Gabriel T. Bugajski

Theses and Dissertations

Recently, small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have become ubiquitous in military battlefield operations due to their intelligence collection capabilities. However, these unmanned systems consistently demonstrate limitations and shortfalls with respect to size, weight, range, line of sight and information management. The United States Air Force Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047 describes an action plan for improved UAS employment which calls out single operator, multi-vehicle mission configurations. This thesis analyzes the information architecture using future concepts of operations, such as biologically-inspired flocking mechanisms. The analysis and empirical results present insight into the engineering of single-operator multiple-vehicle architectures.

A Full-Range, Multi-Variable, Cfd-Based Methodology To Identify Abnormal Near-Wall Hemodynamics In A Stented Coronary Artery, Jonathan Murphy, Fergal Boyle

Articles

The benefit of coronary stent implantation is reduced by excessive intimal hyperplasia which re-narrows the artery and the prevention of which is still a primary concern for clinicians. Abnormal hemodynamics create non-physiological viscous stress on the artery wall, one of the root causes of intimal hyperplasia following stent implantation. A methodology to comprehensively evaluate the viscous stress on the artery wall following stent implantation would be useful to evaluate a stent’s hemodynamic performance. The proposed methodology employs 3D computational fluid dynamics, the variables wall shear stress (WSS), WSS gradient (WSSG), WSS angle gradient (WSSAG) and a statistical analysis to evaluate …

Net Energy And Greenhouse Gas Emissions Evaluation Of Biodiesel Derived From Microalgae, Liaw Y. Batan

CO2 Summit: Technology and Opportunity

No abstract provided.

Unblocking Biofuels With Microchannel Technology, Jeff Mcdaniel

CO2 Summit: Technology and Opportunity

No abstract provided.

Challenges And Opportunities In Developing A Sustainable Biomass Infrastructure, Prabhakar Nair

CO2 Summit: Technology and Opportunity

No abstract provided.

After The License Approval: How Analytics Can Keep You In The Market, Robert Sitrin

Vaccine Technology III

Getting a BLA approved for a new vaccine can be a daunting task, but keeping the market supplied after licensure of a successful vaccine can be an even bigger challenge. Analytics can play an important role in keeping product supplied to the marketplace, especially during the critical launch phase The talk will describe the application of analytical comparability to GARDASIL®, Merck’s novel new vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, in order to bridge product produced by a launch facility to that produced by a scale-up facility without the need for a clinical trial. This effort assured a smooth transition of supply …

Nipah/Hendra: Understanding The Links Between Human And Veterinary Emerging Diseases, Jules Minke

Vaccine Technology III

Animals constitute an important source of infectious diseases for humans and the majority of recent emerging diseases in humans are zoonotic. Infections occur through direct or indirect transmission from wildlife reservoirs or via the food chain. Nipah and Hendra viruses have recently joined the growing list of viruses that emerged from bats to cause serious disease in humans and livestock. Although the precise mode of virus transmission is not fully understood, human infection appears to be the result of close contact with infected horses and pigs that act as amplifying hosts. Improved control strategies are necessary to reduce the transmission …

Development Of Protein Capsular Matrix Vaccine (Pcmv) Technology, Kevin P. Killeen, Ann Thanawastien, Tom Griffin

Vaccine Technology III

Matrivax R&D Corp. is a start-up biotechnology company with R&D operations located in Boston, USA and a vaccine pilot facility in Haikou, China. We are developing a proprietary vaccine process that entraps polysaccharides in a cross-linked protein ‘carrier’ or matrix, termed Protein Capsular Matrix Vaccine (PCMV), as an alternative to conjugate vaccine technology. Despite highly efficacious pneumococcal vaccines such as Prevnar®, S. pneumoniae causes > 1 million deaths worldwide annually. Likewise, typhoid fever afflicts ~16 million people, resulting in 600,000 deaths despite effective vaccines such as Typhim Vi® and Ty21a. The premise is that inexpensive,efficacious polysaccharide vaccines that elicit TH-cell ‘memory’ …

A Vaccine Prototype Using Baculovirus Expression System For The Control Of Avian Influenza Virus, Mauricio Realpe, R. Mora, L. Castellanos, F. Robles, C. González-Hernández

Vaccine Technology III

A clade 1 sequence of H5 haemaglutinin from an Asian Avian H5N1 isolate was used as a the template to chemically synthetize a codon optimized version for expression in insect cells. A single clone was chosen for expression optimization and changes were introduced in order to maximize the amount of protein to be produced and to resemble another sequence demonstrated to be present in an isolate causing disease in Humans.

Preliminary analysis at lab scale have shown promising yields of the haemaglutinin using an activity titration assay and an ELISA-based detection method. Optimization of the cell seeding, MOI, and time …

Process Scale-Up And Optimization For Production Of High Efficacy Oral Rabies Vaccine, Amine Kamen, Chun Fang Shen, Stephane Lanthier, Danielle Jacob, Johnny Montes, Andrew Beresford

Vaccine Technology III

Rabies is an important causative agent of disease resulting in an acute infection of the nervous system and death of the individual. Rabies remains an important public health program in developing countries, and the indigenous threat of rabies continues in developed countries because of wildlife reservoirs. Globally, there are about 55,000 fatal human cases of rabies each year [WHO, 2007]. Control of rabies in wildlife remains an important challenge for government offices.

There are numbers of rabies vaccines commercially available for controls of wildlife rabies. However, these vaccines currently distributed to wildlife do not effectively immunize all at-risk species, especially …

Final Conference Program, Barry Buckland, John Aunins, Paula Marques Alves, Kathrin Jansen

Vaccine Technology III

List of talks during the conference.

The Global Manufacture Of Polio Vaccine In The Endgame Of Eradication, Philip Minor

Vaccine Technology III

The manufacture of medicines is increasingly globalised but biological products such as vaccines are more complex and their production raises significantly different issues to that of chemical entities. New producers in any region of the world may have difficulty in recognising all the concerns involved and can benefit from technology transfer exercises and a strong and scientifically competent regulatory authority. The issues will be discussed in the context of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in its terminal phases and future needs for the manufacture of polio vaccine.

Production Of Serotype 6-Derived Recombinant Adeno-Associated Virus In Serum-Free Suspension Cultures Of Hek 293 Cells, Érica A. Schulze

Vaccine Technology III

Recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) has become a promising candidate vector for gene therapy. Anchorage-dependent cells are traditionally used to produce rAAV. However, mass production to meet demands for clinical trials requires large-scale and cost-effective manufacturing processes. The key advantages of rAAV vectors are a broader tissue tropism through the use of different serotypes and a good safety profile.

In the present work, a serotype 6-derived rAAV was produced by transfection of suspension HEK293 cells in serum-free medium using three plasmids: one encoding the GFP gene flanked by ITR sequences, the second encoding the replication and capsid genes, and a third …

Development Of Inactivated Polio Vaccine From Attenuated Sabin Strains For Clinical Studies And Technology-Transfer Purposes, Yvonne E. Thomassen, Wilfried A.M. Bakker, Janny Westdijk, Aart G. Van ‘T Oever, Nico Van Den Heuvel, Jan Hendriks, Gideon F.A. Kersten, Leo A. Van Der Pol

Vaccine Technology III

Recently, responding to WHO’s call for new polio vaccines, the development of Sabin-IPV (injectable, formalin-Inactivated Polio Vaccine, based on attenuated ‘Sabin’ polio virus strains) was initated at NVI. This activity plays an important role in the WHO polio eradication strategy. The use of Sabin instead of wild-type Salk polio strains will provide additional safety during vaccine production. Initially, the Sabin-IPV production process will be based on the scale-down model of the current, and well-established, Salk-IPV process. In parallel, process development, optimization and formulation research is being carried out to further modernize the process and reduce cost per dose. The lab-scale …

Potent, Rapid And Cost-Effective Influenza Vaccines Made In E. Coli, Thomas Hofstaetter

Vaccine Technology III

The traditional influenza vaccine, trivalent inactivated virus (TIV) has been in use in the United States in one form or another since the 1940s. The system for production involves injecting influenza virus into embryonated hen’s eggs, harvesting the allantoic fluid containing the virus, inactivation with formalin, disruption of the virus with non-ionic detergent, zonal centrifugation to enrich for antigen and a second inactivation step. The recent appearance of the H1N1 swine virus has provided an opportunity to test the pandemic response system established over the past ten years. What we find is that the public health system seems to work …

Clinical Development Of Formulated Therapeutic And Prophylactic Dna-Based Vaccines, Alain Rolland

Vaccine Technology III

Over the recent years, plasmid DNA vaccines have reached licensure against infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus in farmed salmon (Canada), West Nile virus in horses and metastatic melanoma in dogs (United States). A number of approaches are currently evaluated in clinical trials to enhance the potency of DNA vaccines in humans, including formulation of DNA with delivery systems and adjuvants as well as administration of DNA with devices. This presentation will report on the development of TransVaxTM, a poloxamer-formulated therapeutic DNA vaccine against human cytomegalovirus (CMV) in transplant patients. A vaccine that increases CMV-specific T-cell responses could reduce CMV reactivation after …

Development Of Recombinant Protein Based Chemical Conjugate Malaria Vaccines Targeting The Pre-Erythrocytic Stage, Transmission Blocking, Or Both, David L. Narum, Nicholas Macdonald, David Jones, Ruth Ellis, Yimin Wu, Patrick E. Duffy

Vaccine Technology III

The development of a Plasmodium falciparum malaria vaccine is critical for future control and elimination programs. Recombinant protein based chemical conjugate vaccines, covering different parasite stages, are being developed due to complexity of the parasite and sub-optimal immunogenicity of recombinant malaria proteins in humans, respectively. Chemical conjugation of recombinant malaria proteins to carrier proteins improves their immunogenicity in animal studies. A transmission blocking vaccine comprised of the ookinete protein Pfs25 chemically conjugated to Pseudomonas aeruginosa ExoProtein A (EPA) is currently being developed for pilot scale cGMP production. Bulk lots of Pfs25 and EPA have already been produced and released following …

The Challenge Of Developing New Generation Vaccines For Control And Eradication Of Foot And Mouth Disease In South America, Susana Levy

Vaccine Technology III

Foot and mouth disease (FMD) is a highly infectious viral disease that affects food producing animals such as cattle, pigs and sheep. The FMD status given by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) has a huge financial impact on countries that have economies based on meat trade. In the past 15 years the MERCOSUR countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) have consolidated industrial processes to supply the region with safe and efficacious vaccines to prevent FMD in livestock. Control and eradication programs rely heavily on compulsory vaccination with multivalent whole virus inactivated vaccines. Currently, vaccines are industrially obtained by …

Establishing A Platform For Spray Drying Inhalable Vaccines In South Africa, Willem Germishuizen, L Venter, A Khosa, F Mudau, P.B. Fourie, B Pulliam, M Kabadi, A Schiermeier, D.A . Edwards

Vaccine Technology III

Mycobacterium bovis BCG is the current vaccine for tuberculosis (TB). However, BCG as it is currently administered shows highly variable efficacy in protecting adults against TB. The natural route of infection of TB is via inhalation of bacilli-containing aerosols and it is postulated that immunization by the natural route of infection may lead to a greater immunity given the fact that the lungs are the primary target of infection. By eliciting both local and systemic immune responses, it is anticipated that an inhaled form of BCG will offer greater protection against pulmonary TB.

Current commercial BCG vaccine preparations are filled …

Application Of Animal-Free Recombinant Bioactive Protein Supplements To Improve The Performance Of Cell-Based Viral Vaccine Production, Kenneth Bertram, Marina Ross, Domenica Cavallaro, Larissa Chirkova, Geoffrey Francis

Vaccine Technology III

Animal cell culture for the production of viral vaccines has been performed for more than 50 years, and currently this technology is expanding rapidly to meet present and future demands of the health sector. The development and regulatory approval of continuous cell lines for manufacturing viral vaccines has brought numerous benefits to production processes. However, greater advances in the last decade have been achieved in mammalian cell production of biological therapeutics, including monoclonal antibodies, hormones, growth factors, cytokines and clotting factors. We and others have contributed to these upstream advances by improving cell culture media with the development of animal-free …

An Alternative To Stretch Wrap Using Triple Bottom Line, Christian Guirola

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Packaging products has always been a major sector of industries. Mass producing manufacturing companies use wooden pallets to store and transport items; these products are stacked and then secured by wrapping stretch wrap around them. The main issue with this packaging method is that millions of pounds of waste is produced. Some of the other effects include green house gas emissions during its production, limited recycling, and high packaging costs. In order to reduce the amounts of stretch wrap used by industries and distribution centers, there was a need to research and evaluate alternate methods to secure products on pallets. …

Simulation Of Cal Poly Super System Simulink Model Using Insolation Variation, Jacob Kory

Electrical Engineering

This senior project focuses on simulation of the Cal Poly SuPER system using an insolation model. First, local and historical weather data is examined to determine the range of limits that the model will utilize. Then, the insolation model is constructed to fit into the existing SuPER model. The overall system is tested under a variety of insolation values to determine system performance of motor and static loads. Based on these simulations, several factors of the current model are discovered that limit the power consumption profile under off-peak load conditions. Finally, recommendations on improvements to the model are discussed

Wii-Mote Head Tracking: A Three Dimensional Virtual Reality Display, David Fairman

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to create a customizable three dimensional virtual reality display on a system available to any non-technical user. This System will use the infrared camera component of a standard Nintendo Wii-mote to track a user's head motions in all six major directions. The virtual reality will be a customizable image projected onto a screen or simply shown on a computer or TV monitor. In order to appear 3-dimensional, the image will continually change according to the position of the user's head. As the user moves their head to the left and right, portions of the …

High Resolution Simulation Of Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging, Cindy G. Romero

Master's Theses

The goal of this Master’s thesis is to develop a more realistic simulation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) that has the ability to image detailed targets, and that can be used for Automatic Target Recognition (ATR). This thesis project is part of ongoing SAR ATR research at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) sponsored by Raytheon Space & Airborne Systems and supervised by Dr. John Saghri.

SAR is a form of radar that takes advantage of the forward motion of an antenna mounted on a moving platform (such as an airplane or spacecraft) to synthetically produce the effect of a …

Adaptive Critics For Dynamic Optimization, Raghavendra V. Kulkarni, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel action-dependent adaptive critic design (ACD) is developed for dynamic optimization. the proposed combination of a particle swarm optimization-Based actor and a neural network critic is demonstrated through dynamic sleep scheduling of wireless sensor motes for wildlife monitoring. the objective of the sleep scheduler is to dynamically adapt the sleep duration to node's battery capacity and movement pattern of animals in its environment in order to obtain snapshots of the animal on its trajectory uniformly. Simulation results show that the sleep time of the node determined by the actor critic yields superior quality of sensory data acquisition and enhanced …

Development Towards A Protocol To Test For The Creation Of A “Diabetic” Environment In A Blood Vessel Mimic, Kaitlyn Kirk, Development Towards A Protocol To Test For The Creation Of A “Diabetic” Environment In A Blood Vessel Mimic

Biomedical Engineering

Diabetes mellitus affects a huge proportion of people; about 6% of the population in the US had diabetes in 2007 (16). Diabetes promotes dyslipidemia, an imbalance in the circulating levels of lipids and lipoproteins, and diabetes is one of the leading risk factors for coronary artery and peripheral vascular diseases (11, 51, 52).  There are two types of diabetes; type 1 diabetes accounts for about 10% of diagnosed cases and type 2 accounts for about 90% (11).  Diabetic patients react differently to stents and there is a great need to enhance the treatment.  The goal of this project was, and …

Cubesat Developers' Workshop 2010, Tracy Owens, Ryan Race

Communication Studies

This project is the narrative component of the 7th Annual CubeSat Developers' Workshop 2010 planning process. It reviews the steps and team dynamics over the seven months spent coordinating the conference for the Aerospace Department. It was the first time that students from the Communcation Studies Department were brought in to help with the event, and the gap between the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Engineering was bridged.

Magnetic Design Web Application, Michael Brim

Electrical Engineering

The automated Magnetic Design Web Application, available at http://www.magneticdesign.org, generates the full design process of a power transformer, gapped inductor and toroidal inductor given design specifications provided by the user. Calculations are accomplished using Area Product, Ap, or Core Geometry, Kg, procedures. All design processes mirror the format used in Dr. Taufik’s Introduction to Magnetic Design lecture-notes. An administrative backend is provided where instructors can add or modify core design values to expand the array of materials used. The project aims to aid student understanding of magnetic design and course concepts while allowing instructors to broaden the scope of material …