Digital Commons Network^™

Analysis Of Engineering Content With Technology Education Programs, Todd D. Fantz, Petros J. Katsioloudis

STEMPS Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Comparison Of An Ankle-Foot-Orthosis And Neuroprosthesis During Level And Non-Level Walking For Individuals Post-Stroke, Michelle Beverly Gallagher

Master's Theses (2009 -)

This study used gait analysis to compare the efficacy of the two foot drop treatments (ankle-foot-orthosis and neuroprosthesis) and to contrast the stimulation control of the two different neuroprosthesis sensors during level and non-level ambulation of post-stroke individuals.

Eight subjects completed two gait analysis sessions, once while using a study-provided articulated AFO and the other while using a WalkAide. After four weeks of acclimation to the device, each subject performed two minute walking trials on a level, inclined and declined treadmill. Kinematic and heart rate data were collected for all sessions. Plantar pressure and WalkAide tilt, heel loading, and stimulation …

Droplet Behavior In Dense, Low Velocity Aerosols, Alexander Polley

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Rapid compression machines (RCM) are laboratory devices used to measure gas-phase fuel reactivity at conditions relevant to combustion engines. Test mixtures are generally prepared by rapidly compressing a gas phase fuel+oxidizer+diluent mixture to high pressure and temperature (e.g., 10-50 bar, 650-1000 K). It is extremely challenging to utilize diesel-relevant liquid fuels in these devices due to their involatility. One proposed method involves the delivery of an aerosol of suspended fuel droplets (∼ 0.1 mL_fuel/L_gas at stoichiometric fuel loading) to the machine. The compression stroke of the RCM subsequently heats the gas phase of the aerosol thereby achieving …

Bridge Damage Models For Seismic Risk Assessment Of Oregon Highway Network, Peter Dusicka, Jeffery Roberts

TREC Final Reports

The highway transportation network of the United States relies on the health and integrity of major infrastructure elements such as bridges. Frequently traveled parts of Oregon are within the seismically active Pacific Northwest and many of the bridges were designed and built to lateral demands that were assumed to be less than the current expectation, a deficiency caused by our growing awareness of seismic hazard and our enhanced understanding of the non-linear response of bridges. This vulnerability to damage from earthquakes can result in not only immediate damage, but also in potentially lingering economic impact caused by the disruption to …

The Bridge Newsletter Winter 2011, Missouri University Of Science And Technology

The Bridge Newsletter

-Living intentionally: Meet the Oerthers
-Making a lasting impact
-Phytoforensics
-The simple things of life

Modification Of Digital Music Files For Use In Human Temporary Threshold Shift Studies, C. G. Le Prell, Q. Yang, J. G. Harris

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

An exposure that is reproducible across clinical/laboratory environments, and appealing to subjects, is described here. Digital music files are level-equated within and across songs such that playlists deliver an exposure that is consistent across time. Modified music is more pleasant to listen to than pure tones or shaped noise and closely follows music exposures subjects may normally experience. Multiple therapeutics reduce noise-induced hearing loss in animals, but human trial design is complicated by limited access to noise-exposed subject populations. The development of standard music exposure parameters for temporary threshold shift studies would allow comparison of protection across agents with real-world …

Blind Pass Stability Analysis, Robert Burgin Neal Ii

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The stability of Blind Pass has been subjective since the opening of Redfish Pass in the 1920's. The inlet's stability, defined as its ability to maintain a consistent or equilibrium cross-section, is reviewed in terms of its historic performance and that provided through a 2009 maintenance project. Pre-project expectations are compared with physical results to illustrate the initial success of construction. The Escoffier relationship of tidal prism and cross-section area is implemented to gauge the 2009 projects long term stability. Additional monitoring within one year of construction is analyzed to further realize anticipated stability trends. The hydraulic benefit of a …

State Of The Art Of Piloted Electric Airplanes, Nasa's Centennial Challenge Data And Fundamental Design Implications, Lori Anne Costello

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to determine the current state of the electric airplane as primarily defined by results from NASA's Green Flight Challenge Competition. New equations must be derived in order to determine the endurance and range for electric airplanes since the standard equations depend upon weight change over a flight and the weight of an electric airplane does not change. These new equations could then be solved for the optimal velocity and altitude which were the two driving factors that could change range and endurance for a given airplane configuration. The best velocity for range and endurance …

Implications Of Arm Restraint On Lower Extremity Kinetics During Gait, Jason T. Long, John B. Groner, Dan C. Eastwood, Timothy R. Dillingham, Prateek Grover, Gerald F. Harris

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Background

Literature indicates the importance of the upper extremities in providing stability and propulsion for the body during ambulation. However, the kinetic implications of upper extremity restraint during gait are not as well documented.

Aim

The objective of this study was to examine the effect of arm restraint (unilateral and bilateral) on lower extremity joint kinetics during walking.

Methods

Twenty-three healthy young participants were instrumented for three dimensional motion analysis, and tested in four randomly ordered upper extremity restraint conditions (unrestrained, bilateral restraint, right side restraint, and left side restraint). Temporal spatial parameters and gait/phase-specific lower extremity kinetics and kinematics …

Ranolazine Reduces Ca2+ Overload And Oxidative Stress And Improves Mitochondrial Integrity To Protect Against Ischemia Reperfusion Injury In Isolated Hearts, Mohammed Aldakkak, Amadou K.S. Camara, James S. Heisner, Meiying Yang, David F. Stowe

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Ranolazine is a clinically approved drug for treating cardiac ventricular dysrhythmias and angina. Its mechanism(s) of protection is not clearly understood but evidence points to blocking the late Na⁺ current that arises during ischemia, blocking mitochondrial complex I activity, or modulating mitochondrial metabolism. Here we tested the effect of ranolazine treatment before ischemia at the mitochondrial level in intact isolated hearts and in mitochondria isolated from hearts at different times of reperfusion. Left ventricular (LV) pressure (LVP), coronary flow (CF), and O₂ metabolism were measured in guinea pig isolated hearts perfused with Krebs-Ringer’s solution; mitochondrial (m) O_{2 …}

Isotope Identification And Source Directional Determination Using Gamma Radiation Profiling, Christopher L. Schrage

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

This thesis presents a method for evaluating gamma radiation profiles using a low power gamma radiation detector system (GRDS). This method enables multiple radioactive gamma isotopes to be identified and determine the respective vector directions of those sources relative to the GRDS location. This detection method must be accurate, implemented as a handheld or fixed solution, and have a suitable battery life for a variety of industrial needs.

This paper will first explain the low power GRDS that was used for developing these detection methods. The target gamma isotopes that are used for validating these methods will be described along …

A Survey Of Techniques And Challenges In Underwater Localization, Hwee-Pink Tan, Roee Diamant, Winston K. G. Seah, Marc Waldmeyer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are expected to support a variety of civilian and military applications. Sensed data can only be interpreted meaningfully when referenced to the location of the sensor, making localization an important problem. While global positioning system (GPS) receivers are commonly used in terrestrial WSNs to achieve this, this is infeasible in UWSNs as GPS signals do not propagate through water. Acoustic communications is the most promising mode of communication underwater. However, underwater acoustic channels are characterized by harsh physical layer conditions with low bandwidth, high propagation delay and high bit error rate. Moreover, the variable speed …

Phospholipid Transport In Silicon Hydrogel Contact Lenses, Yibei Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

Dry eye syndrome has been associated with the lack of phospholipids in the tear film, leading to disruption of the tear film and subsequent irritation. Characterization of the transport and release of phospholipids from a silicone hydrogel contact lens is required to assess the possible use of these lenses for phospholipid delivery to increase patient comfort. This thesis examines the use of silicone hydrogel contact lenses as phospholipid delivery devices. Contact lenses of silicone hydrogel composition were loaded with varying amounts of radiolabeled 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DMPC) from a solution of n-propanol. These lenses were eluted at 35°C into artificial …

Productivity Evaluation Of Self-Adaptive Software Model Driven Architecture, Basel Magableh

Articles

Anticipating context changes using a model-based approach requires a formal procedure for analysing and modelling context-dependent functionality and stable description of the architecture which supports dynamic decision-making and architecture evolution. This article demonstrates the capabilities of the context-oriented component-based application-model-driven architecture (COCA-MDA) to support the development of self- adaptive applications; the authors describe a state-of-the-art case study and evaluate the development effort involved in adopting the COCA-MDA in constructing the application. An intensive analysis of the applica- tion requirements simplified the process of modelling the application’s behavioural model; therefore, instead of modelling several variation models, the developers modelled an extra-functionality …

Using Reputation Based Trust To Overcome Malfunctions And Malicious Failures In Electric Power Protection Systems, Jose E. Fadul

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation advocates the use of reputation-based trust in conjunction with a trust management framework based on network flow techniques to form a trust management toolkit (TMT) for the defense of future Smart Grid enabled electric power grid from both malicious and non-malicious malfunctions. Increases in energy demand have prompted the implementation of Smart Grid technologies within the power grid. Smart Grid technologies enable Internet based communication capabilities within the power grid, but also increase the grid's vulnerability to cyber attacks. The benefits of TMT augmented electric power protection systems include: improved response times, added resilience to malicious and non-malicious …

Twitter Malware Collection System: An Automated Url Extraction And Examination Platform, Benjamin B. Kuhar

Theses and Dissertations

As the world becomes more interconnected through various technological services and methods, the threat of malware is increasingly looming overhead. One avenue in particular that is examined in this research is the social networking service Twitter. This research develops the Twitter Malware Collection System (TMCS). This system gathers Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) posted on Twitter and scans them to determine if any are hosting malware. This scanning process is performed by a cluster of Virtual Machines (VMs) running a specified software configuration and the execution prevention system known as ESCAPE, which detects malicious code. When a URL is detected by …

Low Complexity Feature Extraction For Classification Of Harmonic Signals, Peter William

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

In this dissertation, feature extraction algorithms have been developed for extraction of characteristic features from harmonic signals. The common theme for all developed algorithms is the simplicity in generating a significant set of features directly from the time domain harmonic signal. The features are a time domain representation of the composite, yet sparse, harmonic signature in the spectral domain.The algorithms are adequate for low-power unattended sensors which perform sensing, feature extraction, and classification in a stand-alone scenario. The first algorithm generates the characteristic features using only the duration between successive zero-crossing intervals. The second algorithm estimates the harmonics’ amplitudes of …

Reducing Selection Bias In Case-Control Studies From Rare Disease Registries, J. Alexander Cole, John S. Taylor, Thomas N. Hangartner, Neal J. Weinreb, Pramod K. Mistry, Aneal Khan

Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering Faculty Publications

Background: In clinical research of rare diseases, where small patient numbers and disease heterogeneity limit study design options, registries are a valuable resource for demographic and outcome information. However, in contrast to prospective, randomized clinical trials, the observational design of registries is prone to introduce selection bias and negatively impact the validity of data analyses. The objective of the study was to demonstrate the utility of case-control matching and the risk-set method in order to control bias in data from a rare disease registry. Data from the International Collaborative Gaucher Group (ICGG) Gaucher Registry were used as an example.

Methods: …

Using Borehole Logging And Electron Backscatter Diffraction To Orient An Ice Core From Upper Fremont Glacier, Wyoming, Usa, R. W. Obbard, T. Cassano, K. Aho, G. Troderman, I. Baker

Dartmouth Scholarship

While glacier fabric reflects the accumulated strain, detailed azimuthal information is required to link the microstructure to the flow, and this is not easily gathered at depth. Borehole logging provides a way to obtain a log of azimuthal orientation of tilted stratigraphic features that can be used to orient the core with respect to glacier flow. We demonstrate this using acoustic borehole logs and the ice core from a 162 m borehole in Upper Fremont Glacier, Wind River Range, Wyoming, USA. We measured the dip of tilted dust and bubble layers in the actual ice core, identified them on the …

Assessing Near-Field Black Carbon Variability Due To Wood Burning And Evaluating Regression Models And Isc Dispersion Modeling, Stella Tan

Master's Theses

PM_2.5 variability within the neighborhood scale has not been thoroughly studied for wood burning communities. High variability in near-field PM_2.5 concentration may lead to harmful public exposure since monitoring does not occur on that scale. This study measures near-field PM_2.5 variability by measuring black carbon (BC), a component of PM_2.5, in a 1 km² area located in Cambria, California. BC and meteorological data (when meteorological instruments were available) were measured over thirteen 12-hour intensive operation periods (IOPs) occurring over the winters of 2009 and 2010. Near-field BC variability was measured to understand the type …

No-Free-Lunch Result For Interval And Fuzzy Computing: When Bounds Are Unusually Good, Their Computation Is Unusually Slow, Ildar Batyrshin, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

On several examples from interval and fuzzy computations and from related areas, we show that when the results of data processing are unusually good, their computation is unusually complex. This makes us think that there should be an analog of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle well known in quantum mechanics: when we an unusually beneficial situation in terms of results, it is not as perfect in terms of computations leading to these results. In short, nothing is perfect.

Extreme Distributions On Intervals, Monchaya Chiangpradit, Wararit Panichkitkosolkul, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main tasks of interval computation is to analyze situations in which we only know the lower and upper bounds on the desired quantity, i.e., we only know an interval that contains this quantity. One of the objectives of such analysis is to make decisions. According to decision theory, a consistent decision making procedure is equivalent to assigning probabilities to different values within each interval. Thus, we arrive at the problem of describing a natural probability distribution on an interval. In this paper, we describe such a distribution for the practically important case of the "weakest link" arrangement, …

Modeling The Collagen Fibril Network Of Biological Tissues As A Nonlinearly Elastic Material Using A Continuous Volume Fraction Distribution Function, Reza Shirazi, Pasquale Vena, Robert L. Sah, Stephen M. Klisch

Mechanical Engineering

Despite distinct mechanical functions, biological soft tissues have a common microstructure in which a ground matrix is reinforced by a collagen fibril network. The microstructural properties of the collagen network contribute to continuum mechanical tissue properties that are strongly anisotropic with tensile-compressive asymmetry. In this study, a novel approach based on a continuous distribution of collagen fibril volume fractions is developed to model fibril reinforced soft tissues as nonlinearly elastic and anisotropic material. Compared with other approaches that use a normalized number of fibrils for the definition of the distribution function, this representation is based on a distribution parameter (i.e. …

Effects Of Wrist Tendon Vibration On Arm Tracking In People Poststroke, Megan O. Conrad, Robert A. Scheidt, Brian D. Schmit

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The goal of this study was to evaluate the influence of wrist tendon vibration on a multijoint elbow/shoulder tracking task. We hypothesized that tendon vibration applied at the wrist musculature would improve upper arm tracking performance in chronic stroke survivors through increased, Ia-afferent feedback to the central nervous system (CNS). To test this hypothesis, 10 chronic stroke and 5 neurologically intact subjects grasped the handle of a planar robot as they tracked a target through a horizontal figure-8 pattern. A total of 36 trials were completed by each subject. During the middle trials, 70-Hz tendon vibration was applied at the …

Thirdhand Tobacco Smoke: Emerging Evidence And Arguments For A Multidisciplinary Research Agenda, Georg E. Matt, Penelope J. Quintana, Hugo Destaillats, Lara A. Gundel, Mohamad Sleiman, Brett C. Singer, Peyton Jacob, Jonathan P. Winickoff, Prue Talbot, Suzaynn Schick, Yinsheng Wang, Bo Hang, Manuela Martins-Green, James F. Pankow, Melbourne F. Hovell, Neal L. Benowitz, Virender K. Rehan, Jonathan M. Samet

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

There is broad consensus regarding the health impact of tobacco use and secondhand smoke exposure, yet considerable ambiguity exists about the nature and consequences of thirdhand smoke (THS). We introduce definitions of THS and THS exposure and review recent findings about constituents, indoor sorption-desorption dynamics, and transformations of THS; distribution and persistence of THS in residential settings; implications for pathways of exposure; potential clinical significance and health effects; and behavioral and policy issues that affect and are affected by THS. Physical and chemical transformations of tobacco smoke pollutants take place over time scales ranging from seconds to months and include …

Targeting Breast Cancer Detection With Communications Technology, Hacer Varol

Theses and Dissertations

Breast cancer continues to be a significant public health problem in the United States: It is the second leading cause of female mortality, and, disturbingly, one out of eight women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her life time. Until the cause of this disease is fully understood, early detection remains the only hope to improve prognosis and treatment. In this thesis, the tumor detection problem in breast images is formulated as a hypothesis testing problem, where the signal of interest is the tumor and the noise refers to the healthy tissue in the breast. …

Me-Em Enewsbrief, September 2011, Department Of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, Michigan Technological University

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering eNewsBrief

No abstract provided.

Model-Driven Productivity Evaluation For Self-Adaptive Context-Oriented Software Development, Basel Magableh, Stephen Barrett

Articles

Anticipating context changes using a model-based approach requires a formal procedure for analysing and mod- elling their context-dependent functionality, and a stable descrip- tion of the architecture which supports dynamic decision-making and architecture evolution. This article demonstrates the capabil- ities of the context-oriented component-based application-model- driven architecture (COCA-MDA) to support the development of self-adaptive applications; we describe a state-of-the-art case study and evaluate the development effort involved in adopting the COCA-MDA in constructing the application. An intensive analysis of the application requirements simplified the process of modelling the application’s behavioural model; therefore, instead of modelling several variation models, the developers …

Self-Adaptive Application For Indoor Wayfinding For Individuals With Cognitive Impairments, Basel Magableh, Stephen Barrett

Articles

This article focuses on describing a Model Driven Archi- tecture (COCA-MDA) approach that facilitates the develop- ment of self-adaptive application for indoor wayfinding for individuals with cognitive impairments. COCA-MDA pro- vides the following benefits: 1) It enables the architecture to anticipate several behavioural variations based on the context and the specific needs of the individuals with cog- nitive impairments. 2) It enables the application to proac- tively anticipate or reactively address unforeseen changes through support by a dynamic-decision making and policy framework. The policy framework is based on a stable de- scription of software models and proprieties. 3) It can …

Vibration-Based Health Monitoring Of Multiple-Stage Gear Train And Differential Planetary Transmission Involving Teeth Damage And Backlash Nonlinearity, Andrew Patrick Sommer

Master's Theses

The objective of this thesis is to develop vibration-based fault detection strategies for on-line condition monitoring of gear transmission systems. The study divides the thesis into three sections. First of all, the local stresses created by a root fatigue crack on a pinion spur gear are analyzed using a quasi-static finite element model and non-linear contact mechanics simulation. Backlash between gear teeth which is essential to provide better lubrication on tooth surfaces and to eliminate interference is included as a defect and a necessary part of transmission design. The second section is dedicated to fixed axis power trains. Torsional vibration …