Digital Commons Network^™

Improving The Simulation Of Large Lakes In Regional Climate Modeling: Two-Way Lake-Atmosphere Coupling With A 3d Hydrodynamic Model Of The Great Lakes, Pengfei Xue, Jeremy S. Pal, Xinyu Ye, John D. Lenters, Chenfu Huang, Philip Y. Chu

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Works

Accurate representations of lake–ice–atmosphere interactions in regional climate modeling remain one of the most critical and unresolved issues for understanding large-lake ecosystems and their watersheds. To date, the representation of the Great Lakes two-way interactions in regional climate models is achieved with one-dimensional (1D) lake models applied at the atmospheric model lake grid points distributed spatially across a 2D domain. While some progress has been made in refining 1D lake model processes, such models are fundamentally incapable of realistically resolving a number of physical processes in the Great Lakes. In this study, a two-way coupled 3D lake-ice–climate modeling system [Great …

Android Malware Classification Based On Anfis With Fuzzy C-Means Clustering Using Significant Application Permissions, Altyeb Altaher, Omar Barukab

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Mobile phones have become an essential part of our lives because we depend on them to perform many tasks, and they contain personal and important information. The continuous growth in the number of Android mobile applications resulted in an increase in the number of malware applications, which are real threats and can cause great losses. There is an urgent need for efficient and effective Android malware detection techniques. In this paper, we present an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system with fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM-ANFIS) for Android malware classification. The proposed approach utilizes the FCM clustering method to determine the optimum number …

Exploiting Alignments In Linked Data For Compression And Query Answering, Amit Krishna Joshi

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Linked data has experienced accelerated growth in recent years due to its interlinking ability across disparate sources, made possible via machine-processable RDF data. Today, a large number of organizations, including governments and news providers, publish data in RDF format, inviting developers to build useful applications through reuse and integration of structured data. This has led to tremendous increase in the amount of RDF data on the web. Although the growth of RDF data can be viewed as a positive sign for semantic web initiatives, it causes performance bottlenecks for RDF data management systems that store and provide access to data. …

University Of Nebraska At Omaha 2017-2018 Course Catalog, University Of Nebraska At Omaha

Graduate Catalogs

The University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) is a premier metropolitan university that combines the resources of a doctoral research institution with a thriving community in the heart of Omaha.

With a global reach and vision, UNO is large enough to provide opportunities students seek, yet personal enough to include the mentorship they need to achieve academic excellence, creativity, and engaged learningat competitive tuition rates.

UNO is committed to and engaged with the city surrounding it, allowing students unique hands-on opportunities, internships, service learning,applied research, and other collaborative activities that enhance time in the classroom.

This is the ”O” we want …

Linking Climate Change And Socio-Economic Impact For Long-Term Urban Growth In Three Mega-Cities, Qi Lu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Urbanization has become a global trend under the impact of population growth, socio-economic development, and globalization. However, the interactions between climate change and urban growth in the context of economic geography are unclear due to missing links in between the recent planning megacities. This study aims to conduct a multi-temporal change analysis of land use and land cover in New York City, City of London, and Beijing using a cellular automata-based Markov chain model collaborating with fuzzy set theory and multi-criteria evaluation to predict the city's future land use changes for 2030 and 2050 under the background of climate change. …

Human Centered Design Of An Open-Drum, Treadle Thresher For Quinoa Farmers In The Andes Of Northern Peru, Robert A. Hayes

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Growing international demand for quinoa in recent years has led to increased production throughout its South American range, including the Peruvian Andes. Small-scale farmers, who are among the poorest Peruvians, are increasingly growing quinoa for both food security and economic benefit; however, manual harvesting activities, such as threshing, are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This report documents the design, construction and operation of prototype quinoa thresher in a rural village in Northern Peru. In addition, an overview of the history and evolutionary approach to design for the developing world is presented. From this overview, a series of criteria is considered for the …

Characterization Of Ecological Water Stress In The U.S. Great Lakes Region Using A Geospatial Modeling Approach, Sara Alian

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Anthropocentric water resources management affects aquatic habitats by changing streamflow regime. Understanding the impacts of water withdrawal from different sources and consumption by various economic sectors at different spatial and temporal scales is key to characterizing ecologically harmful streamflow disturbances. To this end, we developed a generic, integrative framework to characterize catchment scale water stress at annual and monthly time scales. The framework accounts for spatially cumulative consumptive and non-consumptive use impacts and associated changes in flow due to depletion and return flow along the stream network. Application of the framework to the U.S. Great Lakes Region indicates that a …

A Data Driven Approach To Solar Generation Forecasting, Guangyuan Shi

Theses - ALL

With the developments in renewable energy resources, more Photovoltaic (PV) generators are being built. Compared to traditional generators, a PV generator is less controllable which will adversely impact power system operation and planning. To ensue seamless operation of power systems, PV forecasting is essential and necessary. A challenge in PV forecasting is that PV generation behavior differs in different regions due to the fact that PV generation is highly dependent on weather conditions, in particular solar irradiance. This makes it important to study the power output data based on a specific region. In this thesis, I first analyze how PV …

Analysis Of Cost And Energy Performance Of Geothermal Heat Pump Systems In Southern Louisiana, Claudia De Lourdes Duran Tapia

LSU Master's Theses

In the last three decades of geothermal heat pump (GHP) industry, there has been an urge to present data, especially performance and itemized installation cost, as a plan to reduce the lack of knowledge and trust towards GHP systems for heating and cooling. The potential of GHPs in hot and humid climates is significant [Tao and Zhu, 2012]. However, past research efforts have demonstrated this potential through the use of simulation rather than real-time data. Therefore, the scope of work for this research is to investigate GHP system applications for residential buildings in areas with hot and humid climates. Based …

An Exploration Study Of Using The Universities Performance And Enrolments Features For Predicting The International Quality, Aeshah Althagafi

Dissertations

Quality ranking systems are crucial in the assessment of the academic performance of an institution because these assessment systems give details about how different learning institutions deliver their services. Education quality is also of paramount importance to the students because it is through quality education that these students develop skills that are needed in the job market. Besides, education enhances a student's academic and reasoning capacities. When universities are subjected to ranking systems, they are likely to improve their quality to be ranked high in the system. When the university administrators are exposed to ranking, competition gears up. Through competition, …

Computational Studies On Fluid And Particle Dynamics, Chenguang Zhang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part includes chapter 2 to 4, which focus on development and application of numerical algorithm on particle and fluid simulation. Starting with a pure granular system in a driven cavity setup (Chapter 2), we move on to the immersed boundary simulation of fluid solid interaction (Chapter 3). This part ends with a coupled immersed boundary-discrete particle implementation. The second part includes Chapter 5 and Appendix A, each deals with an independent problem and focuses more on the theoretical aspects. Chapter 5 deals with a classic fluid dynamics problem of thermal wave …

Semantic Web Foundations For Representing, Reasoning, And Traversing Contextualized Knowledge Graphs, Vinh Thi Kim Nguyen

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and OWL have become World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for knowledge representation and reasoning. RDF triples about triples, or meta triples, form the basis for a contextualized knowledge graph. They represent the contextual information about individual triples such as the source, the occurring time or place, or the certainty. However, an efficient RDF representation for such meta-knowledge of triples remains a major limitation of the RDF data model. The existing reification approach allows such meta-knowledge of RDF triples to be expressed in RDF by using four triples per reified triple. While reification is …

Surface Enabled Lab-On-A-Chip (Loc) Device For Protein Detection And Separation, Zhichao Wang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Sensitive and selective chemical/biological detection/analysis for proteins is essential for applications such as disease diagnosis, species phenotype identification, product quality control, and sample examination. Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) device provides advantages of fast analysis, reduced amount of sample requirements, and low cost, to magnificently facilitate protein detection research. Isoelectric focusing (IEF) is a strong and reliable electrophoretic technique capable of discerning proteins from complex mixtures based on the isoelectric point (pI) differences. It has experienced plenty of fruitful developments during previous decades which has given it the capability of performing with highly robust and reproducible analysis. This progress has made IEF devices …

Evaluation Of Valiantzas’ Simplified Forms Of The Fao-56 Penman-Monteith Reference Evapotranspiration Model In A Humid Climate, Koffi Djaman, Daran Rudnick, Valere C. Mel, Denis Mutiibwa, Lamine Diop, Mamadou Sall, Isa Kabenge, Ansoumana Bodian, Hossein Tabari, Suat Irmak

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

The unavailability of some meteorological variables, especially solar radiation and wind speed, is the main constraint for reference evapotranspiration (ETo) estimation using the standard United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Penman–Monteith (FAO-PM) equation in most developing countries. The application of ETo methods with fewer input requirements is necessary under limited climatic data conditions. The FAO-PM method under limited data conditions and nine of Valiantzas’ equations were evaluated for daily ETo estimation in a humid climate in Uganda. The FAO-PM method with missing relative humidity data performed very well across Uganda, whereas using the long-term local wind speed average values …

การกำหนดขนาดแบตเตอรี่ที่เหมาะสมเพื่อใช้เป็นระบบพลังงานสำรองในระบบผลิตไฟฟ้า, พชรพล สกุลสุธีบุตร

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

จากการที่ปริมาณความต้องการใช้ไฟฟ้ามีแนวโน้มเพิ่มสูงขึ้นในแต่ละปี ภาครัฐจึงต้องวางแผนเพิ่มกำลังผลิตให้เพียงพอต่อความต้องการใช้ไฟฟ้าเพื่อรักษาความเชื่อถือได้ของระบบไฟฟ้าให้อยู่ในเกณฑ์ที่ยอมรับได้ ทั้งนี้ การสร้างโรงไฟฟ้าขนาดใหญ่ที่มีความเชื่อถือได้สูงเป็นหนึ่งในทางเลือกที่ภาครัฐใช้ในการแก้ปัญหามาโดยตลอด อย่างไรก็ตาม การก่อสร้างโรงไฟฟ้าขนาดใหญ่ใช้ระยะเวลาเตรียมการนานและอาจไม่ได้รับการยอมรับจากประชาชนในพื้นที่ ดังนั้น ภาครัฐจึงจัดทำแผนพัฒนากำลังผลิตไฟฟ้าควบคู่ไปกับแผนพัฒนาพลังงานทดแทนและพลังงานทางเลือกเพื่อจัดหาพลังงานให้เพียงพอต่อความต้องการอย่างมั่นคง และเป็นมิตรต่อสิ่งแวดล้อม อย่างไรก็ดี พลังงานหมุนเวียนก็มีความไม่แน่นอนและมีความผันผวนสูงซึ่งอาจส่งผลกระทบต่อระดับความเชื่อถือได้ของระบบไฟฟ้าซึ่งอาจก่อให้เกิดเหตุการณ์ไฟฟ้าดับเป็นระยะเวลานานได้ วิทยานิพนธ์ฉบับนี้ จึงได้เสนอแนวคิดในการนำแบตเตอรี่เข้ามาใช้เป็นระบบพลังงานสำรองในระบบผลิตไฟฟ้า และนำเสนอหลักการกำหนดขนาดของแบตเตอรี่ให้มีความเหมาะสมเพื่อเพิ่มความเชื่อถือได้ของระบบผลิตไฟฟ้าและลดการเกิดเหตุการณ์ไฟฟ้าดับ โดยขนาดของแบตเตอรี่จะถูกกำหนดจากดัชนีความเชื่อถือได้ของระบบผลิตไฟฟ้า อาทิเช่น พลังงานที่คาดว่าจะไม่ได้รับการจ่ายต่อปี และความถี่ในการเกิดไฟฟ้าดับต่อปี เป็นต้น ทั้งนี้ ดัชนีความเชื่อถือได้เหล่านี้จะถูกคำนวณมาจากการจำลองสถานะการทำงานของระบบไฟฟ้าแบบ Monte Carlo ที่พัฒนาขึ้นด้วยโปรแกรม MATLAB สำหรับตัวอย่างการวิเคราะห์เพื่อกำหนดขนาดที่เหมาะสมของแบตเตอรี่เพื่อใช้เป็นระบบพลังงานสำรองในระบบผลิตไฟฟ้าจะอาศัยระบบทดสอบ IEEE-RTS96 นอกจากนี้ จะทำการวิเคราะห์ระบบไฟฟ้าของประเทศไทยที่อ้างอิงตามแผนพัฒนากำลังผลิตไฟฟ้า ฉบับปี พ.ศ. 2558 - 2579 โดยแบ่งการพิจารณาออกเป็น 6 ภูมิภาคตามลักษณะทางภูมิศาสตร์ของประเทศไทยด้วย

The Political Water Web Of The United States, Omar Hammad

Dissertations and Theses

The United States’ water systems are interstate in their nature; these systems are governed by Congressional compact agreements. Water compacts have been influenced by common factors that have reverberated throughout the water-web of the country. These impacts varied in their scale, national level federal regulations, such as the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and recent concerns about climate change are macro-scale influences. Localized drivers such as regional economics and population change are localized impacts. While these concepts and issues influence water compacts as a whole, their impacts occur at different periods, albeit for the same reason. As such, we see …

2d Vector Map And Database Design For Indoor Assisted Navigation, Luciano Caraciolo Albuquerque

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper we implemented a 2D Vector Map, map editor and Database design intended to provide an efficient way to convert cad files from indoor environments to a set of vectors representing hallways, doors, exits, elevators, and other entities embedded in a floor plan, and save them in a database for use by other applications, such as assisted navigation for blind people.

A graphical application as developed in C++ to allow the user to input a CAD DXF file, process the file to automatically obtain nodes and edges, and save the nodes and edges to a database for posterior …

Renewable Carbon From Lignin Biomass And Its Electrode And Catalyst Applications In Batteries, Supercapacitors, And Fuel Cells, Muslum Demir

Theses and Dissertations

Over the last century, almost all of the carbon materials developed for the energy industry are derived from fossil fuels. The growing global concerns about energy needs, fossil fuels consumption, and the related environmental issues have motived scientists to find new, green and sustainable energy resources such as the wind, solar and biomass energy. Essentially, biomass-derived materials can be utilized in energy storage and conversion devices such as Li-ion batteries, fuel cells, and supercapacitors. Among the biomass resources, lignin is a high volume byproduct from the pulp and paper industry and is currently burned to generate electricity and steam. The …

Biochemical Variation In Caribbean Sponges Of The Genus Aplysina, Sarah L. Criddle

Honors Theses

Sponges are among the simplest multicellular organisms, consisting of groupings of cells with similar functions rather than true tissues. Nonetheless, sponges are ecologically significant in many marine environments, including coral reefs. They are sedentary organisms that feed by filtration from the water column, which contributes to the numerous roles they play on coral reefs, including upkeep of the reef, production of usable energy, and recycling of nutrients. Like all multicellular organisms, sponges are made up of biologically significant macromolecules. These macromolecules provide the energy for the sponge, and their relative concentrations determine how sponges can store and access the energy …

Dynamic Testing Of Bovine Cortical Bone, Kenton Wong

Honors Theses

Bone is the primary structural element of mammalian animals. It plays a critical role in support, strength, and resilience, and has been the subject of many investigations into its material properties. The high strain rate behavior of bone has remained relatively unexplored, however, and its properties under dynamic loads perpendicular to the diaphysis of the bone are somewhat poorly understood. Bone is an anisotropic material and displays different properties depending on its orientation during testing. It is known that bone is weaker under a compressive load in the transverse direction, but the relationship has not been tested at high strain …

Surface Ozone And Its Precursors At Summit, Greenland: Comparison Between Observations And Model Simulations, Yaoxian Huang, Shiliang Wu, Louisa J. Kramer, Detlev Helmig, Richard E. Honrath

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Recent studies have shown significant challenges for atmospheric models to simulate tropospheric ozone (O3/and its precursors in the Arctic. In this study, ground-based data were combined with a global 3-D chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem) to examine the abundance and seasonal variations of O3 and its precursors at Summit, Greenland (72.34° N, 38.29° W; 3212 ma.s.l.). Model simulations for atmospheric nitrogen oxides (NOx/, peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN), ethane (C2H6/, propane (C3H8/, carbon monoxide (CO), and O3 for the period July 2008-June 2010 were compared with observations. The model performed well in simulating certain species (such as CO and C3H8/, but some significant …

Recruitment Strategies For Manufacturers In Northwest Louisiana, Markey W. Pierre

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Acquiring information about successful human resources strategies that help to effectively recruit skilled labor is critical for manufacturers. Manufacturing is the backbone of the United States, yet 6 of 10 skilled labor jobs are unfilled because traditional methods and strategies used by human resource leaders to recruit are inadequate. Guided through the lens of strategic human resource management and using the concepts and views of resource-based theory, the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies that manufacturing human resource professionals use to successfully recruit skilled labor in Northwest Louisiana. The data collection for this case study was …

Modeling Algae Powered Neighborhood Through Gis And Bim Integration, Florina Dutt, Steven Jige Quan, Erik Woodworth, Daniel Castro-Lacouture, Ben J. Stuart, Perry Pei-Ju Yang

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper aims to propose a modeling method for algae powered neighborhoods through GIS-BIM integration. In the first part of the paper, the applicability of different types of algae systems in an urban neighborhood are studied. The various systems of algae provide different strengths and weakness that affect their performance and suitability for given urban scenarios. Through extensive literature review, the variables that affect the performance of the micro-algae in the built environment are identified, with a focus on flat-panel photo bio-reactors and tubular photobioreactors. A previous GIS model for data management, performance analysis and design of the algae systems …

How Bicycling Sharing System Usage Is Affected By Land Use And Urban Form: Analysis From System And User Perspectives, Ahmadreza Faghih-Imani, Naveen Eluru, Rajesh Paleti

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

There is a rapid growth of bicycle-sharing systems (BSS) around the world. Cities are supporting these systems as a more sustainable transport mode for short trips. Given the relatively recent adoption of BSS, there is substantial interest in understanding how these systems impact urban transportation. In this paper, we examine the functioning of the hugely successful New York City CitiBike system. We focus on the interaction of BSS with land-use and built environment attributes and the influence of weather condition and temporal characteristics on BSS usage. Towards this end, CitiBike system is analyzed along two dimensions: (1) at the system …

Heavy Metal Distribution And Groundwater Quality Assessment For A Coastal Area On A Chinese Island, Sha Lou, Shuguang Liu, Chaomeng Dai, An Tao, Bo Tan, Gangfeng Ma, Roman Sergeeyvich Chalov, Sergey Romanovich Chalov

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Chongming Island is located in the lower Yangtze Estuary in China. Due to the Leachate from a refuse landfill and the hydrodynamics of the Yangtze Estuary, the groundwater environment is particularly complicated on Chongming Island. Field observations were carried out around the landfill disposal site. The groundwater table, temperature, pH, salinity, and dissolved oxygen were measured in the field by portable equipment, and 192 water samples were collected at eight groundwater sites and one surface water site. Through laboratory analysis we found the highest measured concentration of Cr to be 54.07 μg/L, and the measured concentration of Zn was in …

Contributing Factors To Child Stunting In Guatemala: A Systems Analysis Focused On Enteric Disease Transmission And Mycotoxin Exposure, Lee Emerson Voth-Gaeddert

Doctoral Dissertations

"Child stunting -- low height-for-age -- is a United Nation's indicator for chronic malnutrition that has been linked to both acute and chronic health problems. Data from Guatemala suggests for children under five years of age, 49% are classified as stunted. This dissertation tests the following hypotheses, among children in Guatemala 1) environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) is correlated with height-for-age, 2) aflatoxin B (AFB) exposure is correlated with height-for-age, and 3) AFB exposure is correlated with EED. A network analysis was conducted on data from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) collected in 2012 to identify trends in a …

Optimal Electric Vehicle Scheduling : A Co-Optimized System And Customer Perspective, Maigha

Doctoral Dissertations

"Electric vehicles provide a two pronged solution to the problems faced by the electricity and transportation sectors. They provide a green, highly efficient alternative to the internal combustion engine vehicles, thus reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. Secondly, they bear the potential of supporting the grid as energy storage devices while incentivizing the customers through their participation in energy markets. Despite these advantages, widespread adoption of electric vehicles faces socio-technical and economic bottleneck. This dissertation seeks to provide solutions that balance system and customer objectives under present technological capabilities. The research uses electric vehicles as controllable loads and resources. The …

Event-Triggered Near Optimal Adaptive Control Of Interconnected Systems, Vignesh Narayanan

Doctoral Dissertations

"Increased interest in complex interconnected systems like smart-grid, cyber manufacturing have attracted researchers to develop optimal adaptive control schemes to elicit a desired performance when the complex system dynamics are uncertain. In this dissertation, motivated by the fact that aperiodic event sampling saves network resources while ensuring system stability, a suite of novel event-sampled distributed near-optimal adaptive control schemes are introduced for uncertain linear and affine nonlinear interconnected systems in a forward-in-time and online manner.

First, a novel stochastic hybrid Q-learning scheme is proposed to generate optimal adaptive control law and to accelerate the learning process in the presence of …

Development Of A Variogram Approach To Spatial Outlier Detection Using A Supplemental Digital Elevation Model Dataset, Zane Daniel Helwig

Masters Theses

"When developing a ground water model, the quality of the dataset should first be evaluated. Spatial outliers can lead to predictions which are not representative of actual conditions. In order to isolate misrepresentative points, a method is presented which examines the experimental variogram of a ground water elevation dataset. To define a threshold variance between pairs of ground water elevation measures, ground elevation values from a digital elevation model (DEM) are used to determine a maximum reasonable variance expected to occur on the experimental variogram. To determine appropriate DEM parameters, a separate study was also done which observed characteristic behavior …

Assessing The Usefulness Of Different Feature Sets For Predicting The Comprehension Difficulty Of Text, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher, Noel Fitzpatrick

Conference papers

Within English second language acquisition there is an enthusiasm for using authentic text as learning materials in classroom and online settings. This enthusiasm, however, is tempered by the difficulty in finding authentic texts at suitable levels of comprehension difficulty for specific groups of learners. An automated way to rate the comprehension difficulty of a text would make finding suitable texts a much more manageable task. While readability metrics have been in use for over 50 years now they only capture a small amount of what constitutes comprehension difficulty. In this paper we examine other features of texts that are related …