Digital Commons Network^™

Spatiotemporal Assessment Of Water Quality Around Western Australian Central Business District Using Satellite Multispectral Imaging, Muhammad Hassnain, Cameron Veal, Muhammad Rizwan Azhar

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Monitoring urban surface waters requires methods that preserve spatial detail while capturing seasonal and interannual variability. Multispectral satellite remote sensing provides a scalable complement to conventional field and laboratory monitoring across rivers, wetlands, lakes and coastal receiving waters. This study used Sentinel-2 Level-2A imagery processed through the Pixxel Aurora workflow to map a model-based water quality index (WQI) for the Swan-Canning River system, adjacent urban lakes and nearby coastal waters around Perth, Western Australia, from 2018 to 2025. Of 150 candidate images, 96 monthly WQI maps were accepted after software-based cloud correction, area-of-interest coverage checks and visual quality review. Satellite-derived …

Automated Haulage Trucks: Impact On Workplace Safety And Efficiency In Surface Mining Systems, Samuel Frimpong, Mabel Obosu

Mining Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The mining industry continues to face significant safety challenges, particularly with powered haulage equipment (PHE). PHE incidents account for a substantial percentage of mining-related fatalities, often resulting from vehicle collisions, equipment rollovers, operator errors, and blind-spot hazards. Despite the industry's efforts to improve safety protocols, fatal accidents involving haulage trucks remain persistent. The mining industry has increasingly adopted automation to enhance operational efficiency and improve safety, particularly in surface mines where haulage truck accidents remain a critical concern. Automation has significantly reduced human exposure to hazardous tasks by removing operators from dangerous environments, thereby mitigating risks associated with human error …

Benchmarking Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary And Fine-Tuned Object Detectors For Underground Mine Personnel Detection, Ellen Essien, Samuel Frimpong

Mining Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Reliable personnel detection is critical for the safe deployment of autonomous haulage systems in underground mining, where challenging environmental conditions demand robust real-time perception. Existing research has focused primarily on fine-tuned convolutional detectors, while systematic comparisons with zero-shot vision-language models remain limited. This study presents a cross-paradigm benchmark comparing four zero-shot vision-language models (YOLO-World, Grounding DINO, OWL-ViT, and OWLv2) with four fine-tuned YOLO detectors (YOLOv8s, YOLOv9s, YOLO11s, and YOLO26s) using 31,396 real-world underground coal mine images. Detection performance was evaluated using precision, recall, F1-score, average precision, inference speed, and condition- and target scale-specific recall. The experimental results show that the …

Geometric And Operational Design Principles For Autonomous Haulage Systems In Open-Pit Mining: A Systematic Review, Justina Senam Lotsu, Samuel Frimpong, Muhammad Azeem Raza

Mining Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The rapid deployment of autonomous haulage systems (AHSs) in open-pit mining has significantly altered haul road geometric design requirements, as autonomous trucks operate under strict kinematic constraints related to turning radius, gradient, and braking performance. Since haulage accounts for 50–60% of total mining costs, optimizing haul road geometry is critical for improving operational efficiency, energy consumption, and safety. This study presents a systematic review of 50 highly relevant studies selected from 81 candidate publications published between 2003 and 2025 through structured database searches and citation chaining. The review synthesizes current developments in haul road layout optimization, turning radius accommodation, gradient …

Biodesulfurization Of Crude Oil Using Locally Isolated Pseudomonas Aeruginosa From Oil-Contaminated Soil In Iraqi Kurdistan, Yousif Mohammed Sharif, Sherwan Mohammed Simo, Lokman Aziz Abdulkareem, Muthanna H. Al-Dahhan

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Locally sourced crude oil from Iraqi Kurdistan contains recalcitrant organosulfur compounds that impair air quality, corrode refinery equipment, and hinder compliance with fuel sulfur regulations. This study isolated a Pseudomonas sp. closely related to the Pseudomonas aeruginosa from oil-contaminated soil near Kashy Refinery (Duhok Province, Kurdistan Region, Iraq) and evaluated its biodesulfurization potential as an environmentally friendly alternative to hydrodesulfurization. Batch experiments were conducted at 34 °C and atmospheric pressure using mineral salts medium supplemented with 1%, 3%, and 5% (v/v) Tawki crude oil. The highest sulfur removal efficiency of 83.33% was obtained at 1% (v/v) crude oil after 10 …

Robust-Adaptive Estimation Of Unmeasurable States And External Disturbances Of A Dynamic Object Based On An Augmented Kalman Filter, Husan Igamberdiev, Uktam Farkhodovich Mamirov, Lu Liu, Bohong Wang, Bunyod Buronov

Chemical Technology, Control and Management

The paper addresses the problem of joint estimation of the directly unmeasurable states of a dynamic object and of external disturbances when information is available only on the control inputs and on the measured output signals. To solve this problem, a robust-adaptive algorithm based on an augmented Kalman filter is proposed, in which the external disturbance is included in the extended state vector. Two operating modes of the algorithm are considered. For slowly varying disturbances, a random-walk model with a constant process-noise covariance is used, whereas for rapidly varying inputs a signal adaptation  driven by the normalized innovation is proposed. …

How Do Governments Combat Jihad Online?, Noah Cook

Honors College Theses

Since the September 11th, 2001 attacks, jihadist groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and al-Shabaab have used the internet as a tool for recruitment, radicalization, and propaganda dissemination. Since then, governments, non-governmental organizations, and private companies have developed strategies to combat jihadism on the internet. This paper examines how these actors have worked to mitigate the digital jihadist footprint and its effects by analyzing three main approaches to countering violent Islamist extremism on the internet: counter narrative initiatives, awareness-raising programs, and content removals. This paper finds that each of these methods has its own strengths and weaknesses. Counter narrative campaigns show the …

Using Clustering Techniques And Mitre Att&Ck Threat Interpretation To Detect Anomalies In Modbus/Tcp For Industrial Control Systems, Shivanjali Khare, Tirthankar Ghosh, Jhansi Sreya Jagarapu, Atharva Haridas Sagare

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Recent attacks on America's critical infrastructure have drawn increased attention on securing industrial control systems and operational technology in power plants, utility companies, and other sectors providing public services. Attack detection and mitigation strategies on these systems have shown promising results using machine learning and other statistical baselining techniques, mostly using supervised learning and classification. Unsupervised learning using cluster analysis and other techniques remain mostly unexplored. In this paper, we propose multi-layered feature extraction and hybrid clustering framework to detect fine-grained nested attack patterns in Modbus-over-TCP traffic. Operating under the assumption of known number of distinct network categories, our approach …

Development And Uncertainty Assessment Of Secondary Method For Ph Measurement In Physicochemical Measurements, Sarvar Rakhmatullaev, Dostonbek Xujakulov, Mohinur Nigmatova

Chemical Technology, Control and Management

In physicochemical measurements across various industries, laboratory analyses commonly require the determination of pH as an indicator of hydrogen ion activity in aqueous solutions. Ensuring the accuracy and reliability of these measurements, obtaining precise readings from pH measuring instruments, and maintaining overall measurement quality represent critical challenges in guaranteeing the safety of both products and processes. This requires constant monitoring, accuracy assessment, calibration, metrological verification, and control of measuring instruments. In this case, it should be carried out not with solutions prepared in any laboratory, but with certified reference materials (СRM) with appropriate regulatory framework, ensuring metrological observation. …

Motor Imagery Eeg Decoding For Brain-Computer Interfaces: Structured Representation, Transfer, And Drift, Yiming Shen

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Motor imagery EEG decoding is often summarized by the accuracy of a final classifier, but the classifier is only the last stage of the pipeline. Before classification, the signal has already been shaped by preprocessing, feature extraction, source-session organization, and adaptation. This dissertation studies how feature representation, source-session transfer, and drift shape reliable MI-EEG decoding for brain-computer interfaces.

It first studies within-session decoding on public MI-EEG datasets using nested validation that keeps preprocessing, feature fitting, and model selection inside the training folds. This analysis separates gains from feature representation from gains due to nonlinear classification, and relates both comparisons to …

One Size Does Not Fit All: Revisiting World Models And Neurosymbolic Ai, Amit P. Sheth, Madhur Thareja, Anushka Pawar, Niyati Rawal

Publications

World models are being built twice, from opposite ends, without a shared theory of how the two halves should meet. One lineage grounds the world model in perception: a self-supervised, latent-predictive encoder – exemplified by Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) – that learns the structure of sensory experi-ence. A second, older lineage grounds the world model in cognition: an explicit, inspectable structure of entities, rules, and constraints, ranging from knowledge graphs to formal logic to physical law. Neither lineage alone has produced a world model that is simultane-ously adaptive and auditable. We argue this is not solved by picking a …

Neural Network Driven By Electrochemical Performance Data For Predicting The Discharge Termination Time Of Seawater Electrolyte-Based Metal-Air Batteries, Peng-Peng Shen, Yi-Chi Pan, Yu-Rong Liu, Lu-Dan Zhang, Ning Niu, Guan-Jun Wang, De-Kun Yang, Xin-Long Tian, Peng Rao

Journal of Electrochemistry

Seawater electrolyte-based metal-air batteries exhibit great promise for marine energy supply systems. However, conventional statistical analysis methods, though applicable to seawater metal-air battery lifetime prediction, have inherent limitations of insufficient prediction accuracy and large error. Herein, a deep time-series regression framework based on InceptionTime and incorporating prior-biased attention pooling is proposed to construct a nonlinear mapping between electrochemical performance sequences and the discharge termination time of catalysts. Specifically, chronoamperometric profiles are employed to extract long-term stability features, while prior knowledge derived from linear sweep voltammetry is introduced to strengthen the attention weighting over critical potential regions. Under a nested leave-one-catalyst-out …

Microwave-Assisted Synthesis Of Core-Shell Structured Pd@Pdptcufe Recessed Truncated Octahedral Nanocrystals For Multifunctional Electrocatalysis, De-Zhong Hu, Wen-Dan Jiang, Wei Keat Ng, Jun Yang, Xiong-Wu Kang

Journal of Electrochemistry

Developing cost-efficient and durable multifunctional electrocatalysts of hydrogen evolution reaction, oxygen reduction reaction and oxygen evolution reaction is crucial for improving energy conversion efficiency in electrolytic water splitting electrolyzer and advancing rechargeable zinc-air batteries. Polyhedral shaped nanocrystals with well-defined crystal facets represent a type of model catalysts that enables the exploration of structure-activity relationships. However, it is still very challenging to prepare alloy nanocrystals with multiple metal components due to their complicated redox potentials and mixing enthalpy. Herein, we report a rapid microwave-assisted polyol reduction method for syntheses of core-shell Pd@PdPtCu, Pd@PdPtCuNi, Pd@PdPtCuCo and Pd@PdPtCuZn octahedral nanocrystals, and recessed truncated-octahedral …

Biki: Design Overhaul, Meg Rawson

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

For children from bilingual households, kindergarten can represent both an introduction to formal mathematics education and a period of increased exposure to the English language. Students may therefore be learning foundational mathematical concepts while simultaneously developing the English vocabulary used to describe those concepts. BiKi (Bilingual Math for Kindergartners) was developed to help bridge this gap through an educational application that combines visual, auditory, and interactive learning activities to reinforce mathematical vocabulary in both English and a student’s home language.

This work builds upon the existing BiKi application while maintaining its original educational goals and intended audience. The primary focus …

In-Orbit Demonstration Of The Vyom-2u: A Green Monopropellant-Based Propulsion System Onboard Isro's Pslv C60 Poem-4, Ashtesh Kumar, Tushar Jadav, Prashant Singh, Rajat Kumar, Sajo George, Sivakami S., Rohit Shanbhag, Neel Gharat, Shubham Singh, Henry Sam, Suman Vadla

Small Satellite Conference

Vyom 2U is a compact 2U green monopropellant propulsion system designed to deliver a total impulse of 1700 Ns. At Beginning-of-Life (BOL) conditions, corresponding to a tank pressure of 24 bar, the thruster can deliver up to 1.1 N with a specific impulse of approximately 250 s, while requiring a peak electrical power of 15 W. At an operating pressure of 14 bar, the propulsion system delivers a thrust of approximately 0.67 N with a specific impulse of about 238 s. This operating point was deliberately selected for in-orbit operations to maintain sub-newton thrust levels compatible with the attitude control …

Investigation Of A Demonstration Mission For Three-Dimensional Remote Sensing Using “Structured Radio Waves” With Orbital Angular Momentum, Hisatoshi Kimura, Tsukasa Funane, Yosuke Tanabe, Miki Yonehara, Makoto Ito, Keigo Nakamura, Yasuyuki Miyazaki, Satoshi Ikari, Shinichi Nakasuka, Koichi Watanabe

Small Satellite Conference

Background

• As a new radar technology for remote sensing, three-dimensional observation methods using electromagnetic waves with spatial phase distributions are being studied to obtain azimuth-angle information in addition to conventional radar measurements^[1].
• We are considering the use of “structured radio waves”, which are formed by superposing two radio waves carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM), as radio waves with spatial phase distributions^[2,3].

Purpose

• Evaluate the effects of satellite position and attitude errors on azimuth-angle estimation and clarify the requirements for a demonstration mission. 
• Assess the feasibility and provide recommendations.

Mission Orientated Flight Software Development: Cubestep, Tirth Thakkar, Howard Lee, Viren Kumar, Maranda Laws, Shridhi Seth, Marco Maggia, Navid Nakhjiri

Small Satellite Conference

Small satellite teams often develop flight software and mission operations separately, leading to software behaviors that drift out of sync with ground procedures. To fix this, we present a co-design approach that directly links mission goals and operational procedures to the onboard flight software architecture. Demonstrated on the CubeSTEP-Cerberus mission using NASA’s F′ framework and FreeRTOS, our system maps mission intent into five constrained software states (Initialization, Safe, Idle, Experiment, and Transmit) guarded by automated health checks. This co-design strategy ensures the spacecraft acts autonomously to preserve its goals while strictly maintaining operator control over critical decisions.

Semi-Autonomous Reconnaissance Satellite: A Laboratory Demonstration Of End-To-End On-Board Mission Autonomy, Eran Shtoyerman, Raphael Cohen, Rafi Cohen, Oshri Fatkiev, Guy Zaidman, Gal Pinchas, Doron Shterman

Small Satellite Conference

Real-time satellite responsiveness to user requests from the field remains largely unavailable in current space systems. Such capabilities are typically restricted to low-altitude airborne platforms, primarily due to limited satellite communication bandwidth, intermittent ground contact, and the reliance on ground-based mission planning. Enabling true responsiveness requires a paradigm shift toward highly autonomous satellites, in which target selection, task execution, and mission planning are performed on board.

For example, a user may request a satellite to perform the following task in real-time: detect a ceiling tanker ship in a specified area, estimate its velocity from video data, and autonomously track the …

A Comparative Analysis Of Sensing Methodologies During Rendezvous & Proximity Operations, Tyler Ritz, Ian Silverberg, Axel Garcia, Giovanni Lavezzi

Small Satellite Conference

The result: Actionable state estimates in seconds not hours

Fusing a small passive imager with a state-of-the-art ranging payload, such as Peregrine Space Corp’s CORVID 12U and 3U variants, collapses the time to a 10 m relative-navigation gate (1σ RSS uncertainty in 3-axes) by two to three orders of magnitude versus angles-only navigation. While ingested measurement types differ across scenarios, the CONOPS remains unchanged. Active ranging replaces hours of parallax inference with direct measurements.

Spot: A Cubesat Mission For High-Resolution Monitorig Of Anthropogenic Sulfur Emissions, Carla Roesch, Colleen Golja, James Custer, Catherine Ember, Jerome Woodwark, Andrew Matheson, Joshua Vande Hey, Sonymol Vk, Steven Heer, Zixuan Gao, Tim Trent

Small Satellite Conference

Resolving individual industrial sources of SO₂ to constrain aerosol forcing — one of the largest remaining uncertainties in Earth's energy budget.

Autongc Flight Opnav Experiment Results On Capstone, Andrew J. Liounis, Sun Hur-Diaz, Behnam Azimi, Nichalas L. Cason, Chris R. Gnam, Grant Hecht, Steven Z. Queen, Michael J. Romeo, Sean R. Semper, Nathan Stacey, Andrew Tennenbaum, Daniel G. Berdugo, Carl J. De Vries, Benjamin Leser, Anne Long, Liam A. Greenlee, Joseph W. Patton, Steven B. Slegel, Isaac R. Witte

Small Satellite Conference

Summary: We successfully demonstrated on-board automated optical navigation (OpNav) in a lunar near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) using images of the Moon, the Earth, and other solar system bodies, advancing the technology readiness level (TRL) of the autonomous guidance navigation and control (autoNGC) OpNav capabilities from 5 to 7.

Toward Public Access To On-Orbit Propulsion Data From Equuleus: Preparing Real Flight Data For Community Use, Hiroyuki Koizumi, Isamu Moriai, Hokuto Sekine, Keita Nishii, Mariko Akiyama, Shintaro Nakajima, Yosuke Kawabata, Yasuho Ataka, Shunichiro Nomura, Ryota Fuse, Ryu Funase

Small Satellite Conference

EQUULEUS is a 6U lunar exploration CubeSat, jointly developed and operated by the University of Tokyo and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It was launched in November 2022 by the Space Launch System (SLS) into a lunar transfer orbit and achieved insertion into a trajectory toward the Earth–Moon Lagrange region through multiple lunar flybys using its onboard water resistojet propulsion system AQUARIUS. The EQUULEUS primary mission is the demonstration of trajectory control technology in the Sun-Earth-Moon region for the first time by a nano-spacecraft.

Tailored Catalysts For Space Propulsion, Florian Harth, Kathy Bynum, Ilaria Longobardo, Hendrik Spod, Ingo Gräf, Alexander Bier, Hans-Jörg Wölk

Small Satellite Conference

Why catalysts matter in space propulsion

Chemical propulsion systems remain indispensable for satellite attitude control, orbit correction and collision avoidance maneuvers due to their reliability and high specific impulse. In monopropellant thrusters, the catalyst initiates the rapid decomposition of the propellant, generating hot reaction gases that produce thrust without external ignition. Catalyst performance and especially catalyst stability therefore directly determine ignition reliability, response time, thermal stability and operational lifetime of the propulsion system.

Heraeus Precious Metals provides heterogeneous catalysts tailored for space propulsion by combining precious metal chemistry, support engineering and scalable manufacturing to meet the demanding requirements of aerospace …

A Feasibility-Aware Attitude Trajectory Planner For Small Satellites, Patrick Mckeen, Niclas Scheuer, Kerri Cahoy

Small Satellite Conference

Spacecraft attitude control traditionally requires extensive per-mission engineering—hand-tuned gains, mission-specific mode logic, and conservative operating envelopes—that breaks down when on-orbit conditions deviate from ground assumptions. This is especially costly for small satellites, where limited ground support makes autonomous adaptability essential. We present a feasibility-aware attitude trajectory planner that replaces this hand-engineered stack with continuous planning from a digital twin: less a new feedback law than a different division of labor, in which the mode logic, gain tuning, and desaturation a conventional ADCS builds as separate pieces are instead absorbed into a single optimization.

Built on the ALTRO trajectory optimization algorithm, …

Shining A Spotlight On Maritime Dark Traffic, Alex Da Silva Curiel, Darren Jones, Rob Knight, Rupert Taylor, Leo Jofeh, Sir Martin Sweeting, Per Atle Våland, Simon Flack, Patrik Mandelin, Håkon Heier

Small Satellite Conference

The ability to support Maritime Domain Awareness from space using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been successfully demonstrated in the past, however practical challenges in achieving the necessary area coverage, temporal coverage and spatial resolution for a practical system has eluded wider adoption. Yet demand for Maritime Surveillance has increased in recent years, to protect important maritime energy and communications infrastructure, fisheries, and maritime reserves, and especially for maintaining national security and territorial integrity. A novel approach to the SAR payload design solves these challenges, and smallsat technologies have also matured to the point where a High-Resolution Wide-Swath (HRWS) system …

High-Torque Reaction Wheels For Agile Small Satellites, Thomas Brunsgaard, Matt Carton, Kearney Lackas

Small Satellite Conference

Blue Canyon Technologies has developed a high-torque reaction wheel (RW) product line to meet the growing attitude control demands of next-generation small spacecraft. As small satellites expand into missions requiring rapid retargeting and precise pointing, spacecraft agility is foundational to mission performance. More targets equal more data collection, translating to greater mission insight and revenue generation. 

This paper describes Blue Canyon’s approach to product line architecture that enabled rapid development and deployment of high-torque reaction wheels across multiple size classes. The high-torque variants deliver 0.5 Nm of torque, representing a 2X increase over standard configurations with 60% of the baseline …

Development Of Piezo Fast Steering Mirrors For Fso Inter-Satellite Communication, Frank Claeyssen, Arnaud Gilson, Thomas Maillard, David Ferris, Xavier De Lepine, Oliver Sosnicki, Jocelyn Rebufa, Clément Cote, Francis Bortolaso, Pascal Mexe

Small Satellite Conference

To allow faster communication between satellites, Radio Frequency (RF) links are being replaced by laser optical links, often called Free-Space Optical Communication (FSO). Each satellite embeds several optical communication terminals (OCT), each one needing two Fast Steering Mirrors (FSM) for laser beam fine and fast steering. Thus, for some giant constellations, the total number of FSM can reach up to 100 000 FSM. This New Space market induces not only technical challenges, such as good SWaP, but also industrial challenges, in particular reproducibility, cost-effectiveness and low cost of ownership vs Orbit segment. To address these various FSM needs, CEDRAT TECHNOLOGIES …

Modeling Of Supersonic Wave And Shock Propagation Using The Lattice Boltzmann Method, Timothy P. Schroeder

Beyond: Undergraduate Research Journal

The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) has emerged as a mesoscopic alternative to traditional Navier-Stokes solvers for modeling fluid dynamics offering advantages in computational efficiency, parallelization, and handling of complex boundaries. Despite these strengths, accurately reproducing compressible, shock-driven phenomena remains challenging. This study investigates the performance of LBM in simulating the Sod shock tube problem, a classical benchmark for compressible flow-using both single and double distribution function formulations across one- and two-dimensional lattice stencils. A MATLAB-based solver was developed to model the flow under isothermal conditions and compared to the analytical solution using the L2 norm error. The one-dimensional models achieved …

Design And Implementation Of A Semi Automated Uhf Ground Station For Small Satellite Missions: A Case Study From India, Binoop Joseph, Vinayak Manoj, Thomas Francis, Madhav Vinod, Nikhil Jacob, Salih Majeed, Prajin I. R., Meghana Suresh, Salman Al Fariz K., Sijo George, Anish Chandra B. S., Anamika Kamath, Anjay Sudesh, Anurag Reghu, Aravind M. B., Manu Mohan, Ashfaque K. P., Amal Chandran

Small Satellite Conference

Mission success ultimately depends on reliable telecommand and telemetry links between spacecraft and Earth. For small satellites operating under tight power, size and link margin constraints, a technically robust and regulation compliant ground station is a mission critical enabler rather than an afterthought.

This poster presents a case study of a semi automated UHF ground station designed, built and commissioned by HEX20 in Thiruvananthapuram — one of the earliest privately owned and operated satellite ground stations in India — covering the hardware signal chain, the tracking and decoding software stack, integration and calibration, and the regulatory path to operation.

Validation Of A Modular Adcs Architecture For Small Satellites, Saish Sridharan

Small Satellite Conference

Poster Presented at the 2026 Small Satellite Conference