Digital Commons Network^™

Revu: Project Development Platform, Arisa Laloo, Chervelle Pierre

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Student Publications

The development of Artificial intelligence (AI) tools has created new challenges for instructors.

Revu is designed to encourage students to build a deeper understanding of their projects through consistent interaction.

Competitive Programming Primer, Jon Ayuco, Pedro Marcet, Ivan Marriott

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Student Publications

Helps first-year CS/SWE Students that are confused on how advanced algorithms work.

Professors can give a visual aid in-class.

Encourages unsure students interested in Competitive Programming a low-risk place to practice

Remotely Controlled Car Via Lte/Wi-Fi, Nicholas Shenk, Christian Prieto, Joseph Digafe, Donoven Nicolas

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Student Publications

PROBLEM 

• Professionals must enter dangerous environments just to gather information 
• Existing robotic systems are expensive and complex
• Communication links are often unreliable or high-latency
• Limited real-time feedback reduces decision-making ability

Cali: Cobot Autonomous Living Interface, Nicholas Santamaria, Heber Lopez, Berke Celal Dogan

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Student Publications

The CALI (Cobot Autonomous Living Interface) system is an assistive robotic platform designed to help individuals with limited mobility eat independently. CALI integrates computer vision, neural networks, and robotic motion control to detect food items on a plate and deliver them safely to a user. By combining AI perception with precise robotic control, the system demonstrates a practical application of assistive robotics.

Low-Velocity Impact Behavior Of Reinforced Commodity And High-Performance Thermoplastic Composites, Yubo Ma

Research & Creative Achievement Day

The low velocity impact behavior and compression after impact performance of glass fiber reinforced polyethylene terephthalate glycol (GF/PETG), glass fiber reinforced amorphous polyethylene terephthalate (GF/PETa), and carbon fiber reinforced polyether ether ketone (CF/PEEK) thermoplastic composites were investigated to compare impact resistance across different material properties and cost levels. Quasi-isotropic laminates were fabricated by compression molding and subjected to drop weight impact at energy levels of 10, 15, and 20 J/mm, followed by compression after impact testing in accordance with ASTM D7136M and D7137 standards. Impact force response, energy absorption characteristics, and damage development were evaluated to assess material behavior under …

Growing Large Single And Multi-Crystals From Alum Powder, Owen Paulson, Mayra G. Aguilar, Owen T. Maloney, Kole C. Koehler

Research & Creative Achievement Day

Crystal growth science is used to replicate the growth of crystals that form in nature. Channels of hot fluid with concentrations of minerals created the crystals found as gemstones. At low concentrations, no crystal grows. At high concentrations, a multitude of crystals grow. At the ideal concentration, a single, clear crystal grows. Four solution concentrations were used to create seed crystals. Those Alum seed crystals were attached to a string and suspended in various concentrations of Alum solution to find concentrations that create no crystal, a single crystal, and a multi-crystal.

Growing Alum Crystals, Todd Carroll, Daniela Gutierrez Rubio, Kevin Dang, Samuel J. Whempner

Research & Creative Achievement Day

One of the easiest crystal growth experiments uses Alum powder to dissolve in water. The dissolved material slowly forms with seed crystals to create larger crystals. As the dissolved material is depleted, more is added to continue the crystal growth. Four different concentrations were used for seed crystal growth. Those crystals were attached to a string and hung in a bath of Alum solution. Different strategies were used to grow crystals and in some cases dissolve crystals.

Growing Alum Crystals, Jackson A. Struhar, Alexis M. Freiboth, Ana N. Schneider

Research & Creative Achievement Day

Alum, also known as Potash, is used to can pickles. Alum powder was used to create seed crystals. The seed crystal was hung in a jar submerged in distilled water with alum powder dissolved to attempt to grow an Alum crystal over the Spring semester. Three different concentrations were used to determine changes associated with crystal growth and quality. Numerous strategies were employed throughout the semester as growth methods worked and did not work.

Growing Large Alum Crystals, Wyatt N. Laborde, Will Gunderson, Kyle R. Behrens

Research & Creative Achievement Day

Alum forms a colorless cubic crystal that can grow to the size of a small apple over the span of 2-3 months of growth in a concentrated solution. Many different seed crystal solutions were used to obtain large clear seed crystals. The best seed crystal was attached to a string and suspended in various concentrations of Alum solution to allow for the seed crystal to grow into a large crystal. By monitoring the weight of the crystal, the solution concentration was adjusted for optimum growth.

Design And Fabrication Of A Composite Torpedo Baseball Bat, Peyton A. Lee, Carter Mathison, Jaden J. Schwantz, Noah Misukanis, Cole V. Stalberger

Research & Creative Achievement Day

Observing current trends in Major League Baseball, there has been increasing interest in torpedo-style wood bats due to their unique weight distribution. Unlike traditional bat geometries, the torpedo design shifts more weight toward the hands, improving balance and allowing for greater control throughout the swing. This project applies the same concept using composite materials so that high school and college players can also have access to this design innovation. The proposed bat is constructed from carbon fiber reinforced polymer with an epoxy resin to create a lightweight and durable structure. The design aims to maintain the performance benefits of the …

Mechanism Of Improved Miscibility Of Co2–Oil Systems By Multiester-Headgroup Surfactants, Ning Xu, Yanling Wang, Baojun Bai, Yu Zhang, Wenjing Shi, Zhaonian Zhang, Wenhui Ding, Peixu Ma, Zan Gao

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In the pursuit of carbon neutrality, the CO₂-enhanced oil recovery provides dual benefits by enabling both carbon sequestration and incremental oil production. However, its application is limited by high minimum miscibility pressure. CO₂-philic and oil-affinitive surfactants have emerged as an effective, low-dosage, and cost-efficient strategy to reduce the minimum miscibility pressure. In this study, macroscopic phase behavior experiments combined with molecular dynamics simulations were employed to systematically elucidate the influence of multiester-head surfactants on CO₂–oil miscibility. Using a modified pressure–volume–temperature apparatus equipped with optical power monitoring, we determined that multiester-head surfactants reduced the first-contact …

Advances In The Design Of Bio-Organic Resistive Switching Memory, Muhammad Awais, Yi Sheng Wong, Feng Zhao, Kuan Yew Cheong

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Bio-organic materials have garnered significant attention as sustainable candidates for non-volatile resistive switching memory (RSM) because of their specialized chemical, structural, and environmental advantages. This review presents a design-centered perspective on bio-organic RSM by outlining the key device components required for effective device engineering, including electrode materials, memristive thin films, intermediate layers, substrates, and electrical measurement strategies. Each component is discussed in detail with respect to the material properties and operational parameters that influence overall device performance, such as functional groups, interfacial interactions, and processing conditions. The review further analyses the critical roles of electrode pairing, interfacial chemistry, additive incorporation, …

Experimental Investigation Of Mode-Ii Interlaminar Fatigue Damage In Stitched And Unstitched End-Notched Flexure Carbon Fiber Composites, Madelyn Sloan Berry

Honors Theses

Composite materials are increasingly used in aerospace structures due to their high strength-to-weight ratio, but their susceptibility to interlaminar fatigue damage remains a critical concern, particularly under mode-II shear loading. This study investigates the fatigue behavior of stitched and unstitched quasi-isotropic carbon fiber composite specimens made of SAERTEX Class-75 non-crimp fabrics and Hexcel 1078-1 epoxy via vacuum assisted resin transfer molding. Global fatigue behavior was analyzed using displacement and crack length cycle relationships derived from compliance calibration methods (CCM), while local behavior was examined using digital image correlation (DIC). Unstitched specimens exhibited a single rapid crack growth associated with unstable …

Aria – Ai Robot Intelligence Assistant, Balakrishna Reddy Channa Reddy

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

ARIA (AI Robot Intelligence Assistant) is an autonomous AI-powered robot designed to improve human-robot interaction and autonomous navigation. The system integrates advanced capabilities including face recognition, voice commands, AI responses, obstacle avoidance, phone tracking via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and autonomous navigation.

The architecture consists of multiple layers: sensors (camera, microphone, and ultrasonic), a Raspberry Pi serving as the AI brain, an Arduino for motor control, motors and wheels for movement, and phone connectivity via Bluetooth (BLE). This layered design enables real-time perception, decision-making, and physical interaction with the environment.

Future development directions include real-time learning, edge AI optimization, and …

Llm For Clinical Named Entity Recognition: A Study On Rag With Pubmed And Umls, Apoorv Tripathi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first step of biomedical NLP is recognizing clinical named entities, which consist of identifying and categorizing a variety of clinical entities such as diseases, symptoms, genetics, diagnostic tests, procedures, etc. from a body of unstructured clinical text. This study presents a PubMed and UMLS based Retrieval Augmented Generation framework which improves the performance of the Large Language Models to identify clinical entities by providing context. In particular, the framework consists of a two-stage pipeline, where candidate tokens are identified from initial LLM-based classification and refined with retrieved context from either PubMed or UMLS. The proposed framework is assessed across …

Data Analysis For A Regional Department Of Transportation, Maxwell Cook, Kendall Klewer, Jocelyn Wood

2026 Student Academic Showcase

The given client is the regional office of a state department of a transportation agency that oversees five counties within the state. The regional office has provided information pertaining to areas such as financials, car accidents, and contractors which will be used to explore a variety of data trends and insights. The goal of the data exploration is to determine if there are other ways in which money can be reallocated to create an optimized spending plan for future projects. Actual award cost versus estimated award cost, contractor versus timeliness of projects, and type of job versus employers in a …

Advanced Studies In Characterization Of Pyrolysis Products From Live Vegetation, Mahsa Alizadeh

Theses and Dissertations

Fire is a naturally occurring element in many ecosystems which can have both positive and negative effects. However, in recent years the frequency of the fires and the area they affect has increased. The rapid spread of wildland fires coupled with the limited resources available to forest services to manage wildland fires highlights the urgency for accurate prediction of fire spread. Fire prediction models enable the fire management services to predict the spread of fire and prioritize firefighting efforts more effectively. Understanding reactions and mechanisms occurring during wildland fires improves the fire prediction models. During wildland fires, the biomass covering …

Shelter Portal: Qr-Based Service Tracking For Low-Barrier Shelters, Kate Steele, Colton Knopik, Michael Fischer

2026 Symposium

Shelter Portal is a web-based service tracking application developed for low-barrier shelters, including Catholic Charities’ House of Charity and Rising Strong programs. Many shelters still rely on manual headcounts and estimated meal totals, which are labor-intensive, error-prone, and insufficient for tracking individual service use over time. This limits operational visibility and makes it difficult to generate reliable reports, identify usage trends, and support external reporting requirements. Shelter Portal addresses this problem by providing a more accurate and privacy-conscious way to document shelter services.

The system was designed as a kiosk and web-based platform that uses scannable QR code cards to …

Improving Electrochemical Measurements And Informing Future Reprocessing Of Advanced Nuclear Fuels, J. Marvin Torrie

Theses and Dissertations

This research promotes the application of molten salts through developing analytical tools in electroanalytical studies and in the data analysis of vapor pressure data. The electrochemical community lacks standardized, stable, and repeatable reference electrode designs which threaten the reliability of measured thermophysical properties and repeatability of published studies. This work confirms the application of a saturated reference electrode design for molten chlorides systems that outperforms traditional Ag+/Ag reference electrodes. In the field of thermal physical property measurements, vapor pressure data for chloride salts are diffused throughout the literature, uncertainty quantification is absent or limited, and all previous studies rely on …

Qualitative Dataset On Student Interpretation Of Automated Code Feedback And Programming Self-Efficacy, Mary Benjamin

Michigan Tech Research Data

This dataset supports a qualitative study examining how first-year engineering students interpret automated code feedback and how these interpretations relate to the development of programming self-efficacy.

The study focuses on student interactions with an automated code critiquer (WebTA) in a MATLAB-based introductory programming course. It explores how feedback influences students’ emotional responses, debugging behaviors, and confidence development.

Conceptual framing: Automated Feedback → Interpretation → Self-Efficacy Development

Fully Coupled, High-Resolution Atmosphere–Ocean–Wave Simulations Of The Offshore Wind Energy Environment During Hurricane Henri (2021), Chunyong Jung, Pengfei Xue, Chenfu Huang, William Pringle, Mrinal Biswas, Geeta Nain, Jiali Wang

Michigan Tech Publications

A new fully coupled modeling system, integrating atmosphere, ocean, and wave models, is presented to simulate intricate interactions during tropical cyclones and explore their potential implications for offshore infrastructure. The system is evaluated on Hurricane Henri (2021), chosen for its distinctive track along the US northeast coast, an area of densely populated regions and offshore wind energy zones. Three simulation setups are compared: atmosphere only, atmosphere–ocean, and a fully coupled atmosphere–ocean–wave model. Among them, the fully coupled model produces the most realistic results, improving not only the storm intensity near the surface but also the wind structure from the near …

A Treatise On Tool Development: The Arthroscope’S Cultural, Technological, And Metascientific Translation, Montgomery F. Waterer

Honors Theses

The arthroscope was a revolutionary development in the fields of medicine, engineering, and ethics. There are many valuable lessons to be learned from the story of its development and translation that are relevant to the future of medicine and society. Beginning with a brief description of the tool’s design, this paper will examine a period within the history of the arthroscope. This window contains multiple innovators and ends with the life and work of Dr. Robert Jackson. In examining the relevant historical facts of its development, this paper will then briefly address the importance of sports medicine in the development …

Comparison Of Pfas-Free Hydrophobic Layer-By-Layer Coatings For Cellulosic Textiles: Evaluation Of Water Repellency, Mechanical Durability, And The Effects Of Fabric Construction, Elvira Isenzhulova, Radika Bhaskar

School of Design and Engineering Papers

Environmentally safe water-repellent coatings are urgently needed for the textile industry as an alternative to PFAS-based finishes. Challenges include development of coatings that are effective in imparting both water repellency and mechanical durability, with relatively simple synthesis to promote industry use. This study compared the performance and abrasion resistance of two different bio-based, layer-by-layer (LbL) self-assembled hydrophobic coatings for cellulosic fibers. Textile samples were coated with bilayers composed of negatively charged plant-derived carnauba wax and a positively charged component: either poly-L-lysine or lower-cost zinc oxide nanoparticles. To investigate the influence of surface microroughness on coating adhesion and performance, two different …

Energetic Characterization Of 3-D Printed Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene Fuels For Hybrid Rocket Propulsion Applications, Stephen A. Whitmore, Ryan J. Thibaudeau, Ava T. Wilkey

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Hybrid rocket technologies are gaining recognition as eco-friendly alternatives to traditional propulsion systems. Utah State University’s Propulsion Research Laboratory has developed a High-Performance Green Hybrid Propulsion (HPGHP) technology, leveraging 3D-printed ABS fuel for reliable, low-energy ignition. Among tested materials, only ABS shows suitable electrical-breakdown properties for arc ignition. Unfortunately, due to the proprietary formulations in commercial ABS blends, and its limited use as a rocket-propellant, related composition and combustion data are limited. This study uses spectroscopic evaluation and bomb calorimetry to estimate material compositions, enthalpies of formation, and combustion energies for multiple commercially available 3-D print feed stock ABS types, …

Transitional And Turbulent Dynamics In Viscoelastic Wall-Bounded Flows, Alexia Martinez Ibarra

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

The addition of small amounts of long-chain polymers to a turbulent flow has been reported to modify the flow phenomena when compared to Newtonian flows, resulting in a significant skin-friction reduction. Although polymer-induced drag reduction has been extensively studied through both experimental and numerical studies, a unified and predictive understanding of the phenomenon is still lacking. This dissertation focuses on better understanding of this phenomenon, particularly on the transitional regime, which remains largely unexplored but is of utmost importance for both practical and fundamental purposes.

Firstly, direct numerical simulations are performed to study the effect of polymers on the laminar-turbulent …

Uscis-Grounded Ai: Preventing Hallucinations In Immigration Legal Services, Hephzibah Igwe

ONU Student Research Colloquium

Artificial intelligence chatbots increasingly provide legal information to consumers, but AI "hallucinations" (confidently stated but incorrect responses) pose serious risks in immigration law. Incorrect information about USCIS forms, fees, processing times, or filing procedures can result in visa denials, deportation proceedings, or permanent bars to entry.

This research presents a novel "source-grounded AI" system that eliminates hallucinations in immigration legal information. Rather than relying solely on large language models (LLMs) trained on general internet data, the system uses USCIS.gov as the primary source of truth for all operational data including current forms, fees, processing times, filing addresses, and policy updates. …

A Trojan Attack On Tdma Synchronization In Energy-Harvesting Wireless Networks, Ethan Berei

ONU Student Research Colloquium

This paper investigates a Trojan attack targeting the time-division multiple access (TDMA) synchronization mechanism in single-hop energy-harvesting wireless networks. The attack compromises a single node, which subtly skews its transmission timing to operate outside its assigned time slot, causing localized transmission overlaps and triggering repeated network-wide resynchronization events. This behavior shortens the synchronization interval, significantly increases control-plane traffic, and leads to higher energy consumption and delay in energy-constrained networks. The attack is modeled within a finite state machine (FSM) framework and experimentally evaluated under varying energy-harvesting conditions. Experimental results show that the number of synchronization events can increase by up …

Mason Avenue Culvert, Caden Boynton

Honors Theses

This project addressed the replacement of a culvert crossing Wabascon Creek along North Mason Avenue in Battle Creek, Michigan. Following significant flooding caused by snowmelt in 2023, the existing wooden box culvert—originally constructed in the 1960s—sustained damage when inlet wingwalls detached from the structure, requiring temporary repairs. Design alternatives were developed to provide a durable and reliable replacement, incorporating structural, water resources, transportation, and construction engineering considerations. The design process also addressed environmental sustainability requirements, cost-effectiveness and constructability. Final deliverables included engineering calculations, plans and specifications, a cost estimate and a project schedule to support implementation of a resilient long-term …

Ergonomic And Material Flow Improvements For A Medical Device Assembly Line, Matthew Kobus

Honors Theses

This project evaluated material handling inefficiencies and ergonomic concerns within Stryker’s Neptune medical device assembly line. Two primary issues were identified: lack of a standardized part-location system in the supermarket and excessive operator travel between subassembly and main assembly. These issues resulted in search waste, motion waste, lost production time, and increased ergonomic strain.

To address the labeling issue, a standardized bin labeling system was developed and tested. A time study comparing labeled and unlabeled conditions showed that average retrieval time decreased from approximately 120 seconds to 22 seconds, an 81% reduction. Statistical analysis confirmed that this improvement was significant …

Analyzing Proposed Unmanned Aerial System Regulations And Their Impact On Manned Aircraft Operations, Kordell Irish

Honors Theses

The purpose of the thesis is to investigate the current state of the proposed Part 108 regulations and to find possible solutions to the problems faced by Part 108 implementation, with a focus on the interactions between manned and unmanned aircraft. The thesis covers upcoming changes to federal aviation regulations by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regarding unmanned aircraft systems and their integration into the national airspace system. Currently, most unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are regulated under Part 107 of the federal aviation regulation. A brief literature review will provide a background and timeline in the lead-up to the Part …