Digital Commons Network^™

Effectiveness Of Recycled Plastic Pin For Improving Bearing Capacity Of Embankment Over Soft Soil, Md Azijul Islam

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Construction of embankment over soft foundation soils is incredibly a challenging task due to the risk of bearing failure and excessive settlement of foundation soil. Most of the available conventional methods for addressing these problems are either expensive or time-consuming or both. Therefore, research has been striving to develop a sustainable alternative to the current conventional methods. A noble approach to improve the soft foundation soil could be the use of Recycled Plastic Pins (RPP) in combination with geosynthetics. The load transfer efficiency of a geosynthetic-reinforced and RPP supported embankment is influenced by interactions among embankment fill, geosynthetics, and foundation …

Performance Of Recycled Plastic Pins For Increasing Bearing Capacity Of Foundation Soil, Faria Fahim Badhon

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Mechanically Stabilized Earth (MSE) walls constructed on unsuitable foundation soil are prone to large deformation and bearing capacity failure. A variety of techniques can be applied to address this issue, such as removal and replacement of existing soil with competent soil, staged construction, dynamic compaction, stone columns, geosynthetic reinforcement. One common traditional approach followed by Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) for the improvement of unsuitable foundation soil is removal of the in-situ soil and replacement with suitable fill material. However, this method can be time-consuming and expensive. A pile-supported system in combination with geosynthetic reinforcement can provide a sustainable solution …

Agent-Based Model Simulation For Police Deployment Decision-Making In Patrol Operations, Yasaman Ghasemi

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Police patrolling plays a key role in responding to 911 calls and reducing crimes. The effectiveness of patrol operations heavily depends on the deployment of police officers – e.g., the number of officers assigned to specific policing districts or beats. The complex nature of the policing system – dynamic and stochastic criminal behavior, compounded with limited policing resources, render current (traditional) police operations, which are often managed in a reactive and stationary manner – often makes it very challenging to manage and control. This study develops an agent-based simulation framework to address the dynamically changing environment in police operations and …

Subclinical Atherosclerosis Quantified Through Cumulative Shear Measurement, Margaret Lynne Papka

Master's Theses

With the high mortality rate of cardiovascular disease, it is important to study the early signs. The early detection of cardiovascular disease can lead to saved lives. Currently the most prevalent detection methods are the Framingham Risk Score and the carotid intima media thickness, both of which are insufficient. The necessary tool for early detection requires a uniform quantification system. The stimulus leading to endothelial dysfunction, the most significant predictor of a major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE)—and subsequently subclinical atherosclerosis—is reduced shear stress. Increased surface relative roughness affects the flow profile transition from laminar to turbulent resulting in reduced shear …

Quantification Of Compound And Cascading Hydroclimatic Extreme Events, Sourav Mukherjee

All Dissertations

Compound and cascading hydroclimatic extreme events have garnered much attention in recent studies. The combined effects of interconnected extremes can cause widespread damage, with a higher potential impact than individual extremes. Both anthropogenic warming and natural climate variability affect these extremes, which is why detecting past extreme events, understanding the underlying mechanisms, and assessing their future impacts can aid in mitigation efforts to reduce their overall impact. However, thus far, identifying such events is oversimplified and the propagation of their impact as cascades from the physical to human systems remains partly explored.

The overreaching goal of this thesis is to …

Residual Life And Reliability Assessment Of Underground Rc Sanitary Sewer Pipelines Under Uncertainty, Himan Hojat Jalali, Moein Ebrahimi

Publications

Prioritization of limited funding for pipelines maintenance is a major issue that concerns municipalities nationwide. Conducting a probabilistic assessment can provide a complete characterization of the performance of structural elements and systems along with optimizing the limited resources. The most widely used probabilistic performance indicator is reliability, a measure of the probability of failure corresponding to a particular limit state (e.g., ultimate strength or serviceability). Reliability methods can be used to identify which pipeline sections within a particular system require the most urgent inspection or repair. To this end, an automated data-driven framework for large diameter reinforced concrete pipes (RCPs) …

Innovative Computational Methods For Pharmaceutical Problem Solving A Review Part Ii: Serious Gaming, Heather R. Campbell, Robert A. Lodder

Pharmaceutical Sciences Faculty Publications

Serious gaming has begun to take a foothold in pharmaceutical problem-solving. Companies such as Akili's Interactive are seeing success in the form of positive clinical trial results and FDA approval of digital therapeutics. Academic researchers have begun exploring novel uses for serious gaming in the way of protein design and more with promising results. This paper provides a review of such topics in addition to topics of game repurposing- repurposing a game originally intended for entertainment into a serious game-such as Minecraft and America's Army. Reviewing these topics this paper shows the utility of serious gaming as a tool for …

Innovative Computational Methods For Pharmaceutical Problem Solving A Review Part I: The Drug Development Process, Heather R. Campbell, Robert A. Lodder

Pharmaceutical Sciences Faculty Publications

Computational methods have provided pharmaceutical scientists and engineers a means to go beyond what's possible with experimental testing alone. Providing a means to study active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), excipients, and drug interactions at or near-atomic levels. This paper provides a review of this and other innovative computational methods used for solving pharmaceutical problems throughout the drug development process. Part one of two this paper will emphasize the role of computational methods and game theory in solving pharmaceutical challenges.

A Real-World, Hybrid Event Sequence Generation Framework For Android Apps, Jun Sun

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Generating meaningful inputs for Android apps is still a challenging issue that needs more research. Past research efforts have shown that random test generation is still an effective means to exercise User-Interface (UI) events to achieve high code coverage. At the same time, heuristic search approaches can effectively reach specified code targets. Our investigation shows that these approaches alone are insufficient to generate inputs that can exercise specific code locations in complex Android applications.

This thesis introduces a hybrid approach that combines two different input generation techniques--heuristic search based on genetic algorithm and random instigation of UI events, to reach …

Signal Fingerprinting And Machine Learning Framework For Uav Detection And Identification., Olusiji Oloruntobi Medaiyese

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advancement in technology has led to creative and innovative inventions. One such invention includes unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAVs (also known as drones) are now an intrinsic part of our society because their application is becoming ubiquitous in every industry ranging from transportation and logistics to environmental monitoring among others. With the numerous benign applications of UAVs, their emergence has added a new dimension to privacy and security issues. There are little or no strict regulations on the people that can purchase or own a UAV. For this reason, nefarious actors can take advantage of these aircraft to intrude into …

Development Of Tractor Instrumentation System: Hydraulics, And Controller Area Network (Can) Data Analysis Of Agricultural Machinery, Chee Town Liew

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The tractor is a very important piece of machinery in agriculture, and it has been evolving and progressing over the years with improved and increasingly complex functionality. Controller Area Network (CAN) has been incorporated into tractors and other machinery with SAE J1939 and ISO 11783 standards, serving as the communication bus for various on-board electronic controller units (ECUs), and carries various machine operation data that can be used for analyzing machine performance. Investigation of data extraction from CAN messages was conducted by examining the SAE J1939 and ISO 11783 standards. A case study on CAN bus data analysis for a …

Tractor Instrumentation System: Hitch And Pto, And Row Crop Tractor Electrification Considerations, Andrew Donesky

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Power sources used for vehicles are advancing at a fast pace. Electric batteries are becoming more power dense, thus allowing them to be used with electric motors in place of a diesel or gas powered systems. There are several ways that energy use and storage size can be computed for agricultural field operations, such as planting, using theoretical predictions, gathering engine load data from tractor’s Controller Area Network (CAN) bus, or integrating the CAN data to determine the actual power used by implements.

While measuring data from the CAN bus is a great way to capture actual tractor use information, …

Adaptive Activations And Shift Invariance In Shallow Convolutional Neural Networks, Chinmay Appa Rane

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Deep learning training training algorithms are a huge success in recent years in many fields including speech, text,image video etc. Deeper and deeper layers are proposed with huge success with resnet structures having around 152 layers. Shallow convolution neural networks(CNN's) are still an active research, where some phenomena are still unexplanined. CNN's are assumed to be invariant to shift due to its architecture, but recent studies have shown other wise. Apart from shift invariance, activation functions used in the network are of utmost importance, as they provide non linearity to the networks. Relu's are the most commonly used activation function. …

The Development Of Micro-Gas Chromatography System With Integrated Photonic Crystal Sensors, Priyanka Biswas

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Miniaturization of gas chromatography (GC) systems have made it possible to utilize the analytical technique in on-site applications without having to compromise data reliability offered by the conventional benchtop GC. Various types of miniaturized microsensors and nanosensors have been developed for a micro-gas chromatography (µGC) system. However, integration of an appropriate detector in µGC systems still face significant challenge. We present a solution to the problem through integration of µGC with photonic crystal slab (PCS) sensors using transfer printing technology. This integration offers an opportunity to utilize the advantages of optical sensors such as high sensitivity, immunity to electromagnetic interference, …

Object Classication, Detection And State Estimation Using Yolo V3 Deep Neural Network And Sensor Fusion Of Stereo Camera And Lidar, Kamalkumar Bharatkumar Mehta

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Real-time object classification, localization, and detection with region-based convolution neural network (R-CNN) require high computational power, or it consumes a tremendous amount of time with the use of the available onboard computer system. Therefore, either of those ways is not practical in real-time object detection. In contrast, the YOLO-v3 network, which stands for you only look once, that uses the YOLO algorithm seems to be practical in live object classification, localization, and detection, since the YOLO algorithm seems to work faster than the sliding window algorithm used by R-CNN. Sensor fusion in this context requires estimation and association of information …

Development Of A Highly Sensitive Pressure Sensing System With Custom-Built Software For Continuous Physiological Measurements, Masoud Panahi

Masters Theses

In this work, a pressure sensing system was designed and fabricated by developing a highly sensitive cone-structured pressure sensor with a custom-built software for physiological monitoring applications. A novel highly sensitive cone structured porous polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) based pressure sensor capable of detecting very low-pressure ranges was developed for respiration monitoring. The pressure sensor was fabricated using a master mold, a hybrid-structured dielectric layer, and fabric-based electrodes. The master mold with inverted cone structures was created using a rapid and precise three-dimensional (3D) printing technique. The dielectric layer, with pores and cone structures, was prepared by annealing a mixture of PDMS, …

Design, Development, And Testing Of Research Payloads On Various Suborbital Flight-Test Platforms, Vijay Vishal Duraisamy

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

With recent advances in the commercial space industry, suborbital payload launches have become more common and accessible to researchers actively seeking solutions for problems involving prolonged space travel and future missions to Moon and Mars. Suborbital payload missions compared to orbital launches are less expensive and offer faster turnaround times; however, the novelty of this domain provides unique challenges. This multidisciplinary research effort aims to tackle some of these challenges by detailing the design, development, and testing techniques followed in the successful launch and recovery of payload experiments in currently active and upcoming suborbital launch vehicles. The research methodology involves …

Photocatalytic And Photochemical Decomposition Of Various Per- And Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (Pfas) In Water, Nusrat Chowdhury

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are anthropogenic compounds comprised of a perfluoroalkyl backbone and a terminal functional group. Their detrimental health effects of in humans, like other halogenated chemicals, have been well documented and thus the frequent occurrence of PFAS in the water environment is a recent global concern. After US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a drinking water health advisory for the two most detected long chain PFAS (such as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS)), industrial production and application of short chain PFAS continues to rise. Feasible and sensible treatment strategies are in dire need for environmental …

Application Of In Situ And Ex Situ Characterization Of Atomic Layer Deposition Processes For Gallium Phosphide And Sodium Fluoride, Sara Rose Kuraitis

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a vapor deposition technique for synthesizing thin films with nanometer thickness control. ALD films are deposited on a substrate surface in a cyclic layer-by-layer fashion utilizing alternating doses of highly reactive chemical precursors. Precursors are selected to undergo self-limiting chemical reactions with the surface, and desired film thickness is achieved by varying the number of ALD cycles accordingly. Optimization of ALD process parameters and precursor chemistry enables conformal coating of arbitrary substrate geometries, including high aspect ratio features such as trenches. In the decades since its introduction, ALD has been used for applications across many …

Teaching Learning Newsletter Vol 1 Issue 3, Sastra Deemed To Be University

TLC Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Aerial Flight Paths For Communication, Alisha Bevins

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This body of work presents an iterative process of refinement to understand naive perception of communication using the motion of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This includes what people believe the UAV is trying to communicate, and how they expect to respond through physical action or emotional response. Previous work in this area sought to communicate without clear definitions of the states attempting to be conveyed. In an attempt to present more concrete states and better understand specific motion perception, this work goes through multiple iterations of state elicitation and label assignment. The lessons learned in this work will be …

Electrical Characterization Of Phytoplankton Suspensions Using Impedance Spectroscopy., Margaret R Jett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Phytoplankton are closely monitored because of their important environmental role, and the impacts they have on their local ecosystems. Some phytoplankton respond to stress by producing lipids, which can be harvested for biofuels and other chemicals. Microfluidic devices have been important in improving the portability and throughput of phytoplankton characterization methods, increasing their potential for in situ use. This study utilized a small sample of phytoplankton suspended in a stagnant medium and measured the impedance response using a lab-on-chip and impedance analyzer. The individual cell characteristics were derived from the impedance response of the group. The goal was to characterize …

Room Temperature Alkali Treatment Of Rice Straw For Enhanced Enzymatic Hydrolysis., Seth Mains

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Due to the pollution of fossil fuels due to greenhouse emissions, researchers continue to search for alternative methods that allow for the clean production of energy, fuels, and polymer fibers. A method currently under investigation is the use of lignocellulosic biomass as a solution to current problems with energy and polymer fiber production. Through the process of pretreatment, possibilities for lignocellulosic biomass expand due to improved accessibility of the cellulose and hemicellulose which can be broken down via enzymatic hydrolysis into C5 and C6 sugars such as xylose and glucose. This study investigated the fermentation of the rice straw into …

Conversion Of Multicellds Digital Snapshots To Isa-Tab Format., Corey P. Chitwood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The MultiCellular Data Standard (MultiCellDS) is an interdisciplinary effort to create a data standard for sharing multicellular experimental, simulation, and clinical data. The ultimate goal of the overall project is to allow for data sharing that will lead to better analyses and simulations for multicellular biology and predictive medicine in association with the PhysiCell, a software that allows for simulations of large numbers of cells in 3D tissues. Digital cell lines are files that contain a standardized representation of a biological cell line and include phenotypic parameters as well as microenvironmental conditions for use in simulations. A Digital Cell Line …

Wetting And Drying Dynamics For Tio2 With Pbs Quantum Dots., Kelly M. Lee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Initial solar cells utilized silicon and alloys for their economic viability. Photoelectrochemical photovoltaic cells were discovered with technological advancement which increased solar efficiency and further improved economic feasibility leading to quantum dot sensitized solar cells. Lead sulfide quantum dots and titanium dioxide were studied for wetting and drying effects. Zeta potential, pH values, SEM, and optical microscopes quantified or observed the colloidal suspension and dried sample behavior. Combined mixtures of lead sulfide and titania were dried at 3.6 pH and 12.56 pH values. This due to the observed zeta potential isoelectric point of titania, and behavior showed increased stability occurring …

The Study Of Copper Corrosion Mechanisms Using Electrochemical Experimental Techniques., Evan Grimm

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to discover and thoroughly explain the corrosion mechanisms of copper in saltwater, tap water and deionized water, and to apply these methods and findings when testing the corrosion mechanisms of other materials. The experimental procedure consisted of measuring the open circuit potential, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, linear sweep voltammetry, and Tafel analysis.

The copper was found to corrode at a greater rate in saltwater, followed by tap water then deionized water, with a larger difference between saltwater and tap water than between tap water and deionized water. Each reaction was found to be both kinetically …

Industrial Control System Data Resiliency, Daniel A. Bovard

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis identifies and fortifies against a critical vulnerability in industrial control system (ICS) security. A properly designed ICS security framework consists of a multi-layered approach starting with heavy fortifications in information technology and ending with control information of operational technology. Currently, ICS security frameworks lack visibility and place blind trust in devices at the lowest level of the control hierarchy. Attaining control data visibility at the lowest level of the control hierarchy is critical to increasing the resiliency of an ICS security posture. This thesis demonstrates how this data can be captured at the lowest level of the control …

Advances In The Synthesis And Application Of Anti-Fouling Membranes Using Two-Dimensional Nanomaterials, Asif Shahzad, Jae Min Oh, Mudassar Azam, Jibran Iqbal, Sabir Hussain, Waheed Miran, Kashif Rasool

All Works

This article provides a comprehensive review of the recent progress in the application of advanced two-dimensional nanomaterials (2DNMs) in membranes fabrication and application for water purification. The membranes fouling, its types, and anti-fouling mechanisms of different 2DNMs containing membrane systems are also discussed. The developments in membrane synthesis and modification using 2DNMs, especially graphene and graphene family materials, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), MXenes, and others are critically reviewed. Further, the application potential of next-generation 2DNMs-based membranes in water/wastewater treatment systems is surveyed. Finally, the current problems and future opportunities of applying 2DNMs for anti-fouling membranes are also debated.

Noninvasive Measurement Of Arterial Compliance With A Blood Pressure Cuff Using A Surrogate Arm Bench Top Model For Oscillometric Use, Shane Wilsey

Master's Theses

A surrogate arm model was created that is capable of being used for oscillometry. This model is capable of being used as a bench top model for blood pressure cuff devices. The arm consists of endplates and internal supports that are 3D printed with ABS, a silicone rubber outer sleeve, and interchangeable arteries made from two silicone rubber strips glued together at the edges. The interchangeable arteries have varying compliances that can be used as different inputs for oscillometric testing. A process was established to measure the artery compliances with a curve fit correlation of 0.95. However, testing revealed that …

Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (Lift) Based Bioprinting Of The Collagen I With Retina Photoreceptor Cells, Md Shakil Arman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the 3D bioprinting of retina cone cells using the laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) technique. Bioprinting has a great potential to mimic and regenerate the human organoid system, and the LIFT technique has emerged as an efficient method for high resolution micropatterning and microfabrication of biomaterials and cells due to its capability of creating precise, controlled microdroplets. In this research, the parameters for an effective femtosecond laser-based LIFT process for 3D bioprinting of collagen biomaterial were studied. Different concentrations of collagen I solutions were tested to find out the right concentration that can be transferred through the …