Digital Commons Network^™

Percolation-Induced Thermo-Rheological Transitions In Biobased Graphene Nanoplatelet Nanofluids, Abiodun A. Saka, Tobechukwu K. Abor, Anthony C. Okafor, Monday U. Okoronkwo

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Biobased lubricants with thermally responsive rheology are increasingly needed for high-efficiency mechanical systems. Graphene nanoplatelet (GnP) nanofluids in vegetable oils are promising candidates, yet their percolation-driven thermo-rheological transitions remain insufficiently understood. In particular, the coupled concentration–temperature landscape controlling network-mediated flow transitions has not previously been established. Here, surfactant-free GnP nanofluids were prepared in high-oleic soybean oil (HOSO) at concentrations of 0.025–2.15% v/v (ϕ), and their rheological response was mapped between 25°C and 80 °C under steady-shear and oscillatory conditions. Below the percolation threshold (ɸ ≤ 0.1% v/v), the nanofluids exhibit near-Newtonian behavior, moderate reversible viscosity enhancement, and classical Arrhenius-type temperature …

Sensitivity Study Regarding Abs Formulation On Hybrid Rocket Performance, Ava T. Wilkey, Ryan J. Thibaudeau, Stephen A. Whitmore

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Student Publications and Presentations

Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) has emerged as a widely adopted solid fuel for hybrid rocket propulsion due to its compatibility with fused deposition modeling and favorable regression characteristics. As a terpolymer, however, ABS monomer mass fractions vary across commercial sources, introducing thermochemical variability that is rarely accounted for in propulsion modeling. This study presents a sensitivity analysis examining how compositional variability among ten commercially available ABS feedstock propagates into hybrid rocket performance predictions. Each source was characterized using bomb calorimetry and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy to derive source-specific constituent mass fractions and enthalpies of formation, which were supplied to NASA’s Chemical …

The Influence Of Urban Form On The Distribution Of Air Pollutants, Takin Khosrownia

Dissertations and Theses

Urban form exerts strong control on how pollution from outside a city is transported through the urban canopy and experienced at street level. This study uses the prognostic microclimate model ENVI-met to simulate an active pollutant released from an upwind rural highway and advected through an urban region represented by ten Local Climate Zone (LCZ) types. The cases share identical inflow and are isothermal, dry, and non-vegetated, so that differences among them are attributable to building morphology alone. PM2.5 is the primary exposure diagnostic. Its transport and ejection are characterized through plan-view contours, vertical plume sections, and spatially averaged streamwise …

Project Chimaera: Development Of A Tessellated Tetrahedral Truss Structure For Adaptive Multi-Regime Morphing Wing Technology, Evan Meyer, Eric Rodarte, Maximo Failla, Joshua Shuster, Jackson G. Schuler

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Project Chimaera: Physical Assembly of tessellated tetrahedral wing for Multi-Regime Flight. Modern Aircrafts lose aerodynamic efficiency because they are primarily made utilizing fixed wings which are designed for a single optimal flight condition. This forces an aircraft’s performance to become compromised across various speed maneuvers and flight regimes. Project Chimaera addresses this limitation through the development of a morphing wing capable of dynamically changing its geometry extensively during flight to allow an aircraft to travel between subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic speeds. Whereas traditional wings rely on wing flaps and other flight controls; Project Chimaera addresses the limitation of flight controls …

Terramechanics-Based Comparison Of Dem And Crm For Lunar Surface Applications, Nicolas Bonasoro

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Understanding how lunar regolith interacts with robotic systems is important for safe surface operations because uncertain terrain conditions can affect rover traversability and lunar lander stability. This work applies terramechanics to two space robotics applications: in-situ cone penetration testing (CPT) for terrain assessment and lunar lander touchdown analysis for evaluating sinkage, force response, and stability. The study compares the Discrete Element Method (DEM), which resolves particle-scale interactions and captures detailed regolith behavior, with the Continuum Representation Method (CRM), which models soil response more efficiently and supports rigid CAD components such as lander footpads, legs, and body geometries. Current CPT results …

Experimental Manufacturing Optimization Of 3d-Printed Ducted Fans, Stanlie Cerda-Cruz

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

This study aims to assess the efficiency gains, feasibility, and practicality of 3D printing fan and ducts with pre and post processing techniques. With the rapid expansion of MAV use; labs, students, hobbyists, can benefit from manufacturing Electric Ducted Fans (EDFs), both fans and ducts, in-house rather than purchasing traditional propellers. There are several advantages of utilizing EDFs, as they can minimize wing tip vortices, reduce wake contraction, and induce a duct lip Coanda effect which all lead to an increased system efficiency. However, EDF implementation in MAV's remain largely unexplored due to the difficulty of development and the production …

Reimagining Wind Based Sea Travel With Vertical Axis Wind Turbines, Julian Goins

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

In the realm of Nautical vehicles, aside from the occasional outliers like rarely used coal steamboats, experimental solar powered ships, or the military grade nuclear vessels, the vast majority of ships run off diesel-powered engines. The unsustainability of such methods will need to be addressed for the security of our planet’s future due to the limited and destructive nature of fossil fuels, much like it already is in many other fields. To that end, this project gains inspiration from the past and looks toward harnessing the power of the wind. In recent times, most sail boats are equipped with some …

Greenwall Use For Air Repair And Depollution (G.U.A.R.D.), Sophia Elwood, Sophia Piro, Maura Barrada, Kathrine Lopez, Wendi Goffer

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Creating habitable indoor environments for long-duration space missions and extraterrestrial habitats requires reliable, sustainable air quality improvement. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s ACE Lab provides a unique opportunity to investigate plant-based purification in a controlled environment while addressing campus air quality concerns linked to a high-traffic airport and exposure to jet fuel particulate matter and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). This collaborative project between Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering researchers and the Botanical Society evaluates whether a green wall can improve indoor air quality as a scalable model for future closed-loop habitats. In the study's first phase, student researchers documented ACE Lab dimensions to …

A Feedback Loop Control To Automate Cold Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Based Additive Manufacturing, Arineh Shahbazi

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Currently, nanoparticle annealing based additive manufacturing process requires high temperatures, making them unsuitable for a broad range of applications. By lowering the temperature and developing a process to use Cold Atmospheric Pressure Plasma (CAPP) for annealing, many more doors are opened to a wide range of materials, films, and environments for space, communication, and microelectronics. CAPP-based additive manufacturing technology is continually evolving, making projects like nanoparticle annealing more feasible. In this work, we designed a CAPP jet printer assembly consisting of a 0.25-inch outer diameter glass tube connected to a 3D printing nozzle. The flow of Argon gas in the …

Modeling Seiche Oscillations Using Damped Vibration Differential Equations, Sharjeel Malik, Justin Della

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Combustion instability in liquid rocket engines is driven by coupling acoustic pressure oscillations and unsteady heat release. To achieve specific desired outcomes, small perturbations can be made to either decay or grow, depending on system dynamics and artificial parameters. Using a linearized eigenvalue framework, where eigenvalues determine growth/decay rates and frequencies, and eigenvectors describe spatial mode shapes and couplings between pressure, velocity, and heat release, a mathematical model can be derived to describe said behavior for a cross-section of the rocket engine. The Rayleigh criterion is used to identify conditions under which energy is added to oscillations, while flame transfer …

Mechanical Vibrations And Damping, Axon Deadrick, Will Standish, Tanay Agarwal

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Mechanical vibrations occur in many engineering systems and can be described using second-order differential equations. In this project, the motion of vibrating systems is studied using the mass–spring model. The focus is on three types of oscillations: free vibrations, dampened vibrations, and forced oscillations. Free vibration describes how a system moves when it is displaced and then released without any external force. Damped vibration includes effects such as friction or resistance that cause the motion to gradually decrease over time. Forced oscillations occur when an external force acts on the system and continuously drives the motion. This project also examines …

A Differential Equation Approach To Heat Flow In A Thin Rod, Alexandria Krol, David Cardona, Collin Petrie

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

A Differential Equation Approach to Heat Flow in a Thin Rod examines how differential equations can be used to model and understand heat conduction in a fundamental physical system. Heat transfer in solids is a key concept in physics and engineering, particularly in systems where temperature changes over time. A thin rod provides a useful one-dimensional model for studying how heat moves through a material and how temperature varies along the rod as time passes. The primary objective is to develop a mathematical description of this process using differential equations. The analysis begins with physical principles such as conservation of …

Automated Battery Management Systems For Electric Vehicles, Woonki Na, Yuanyuan Xie

Mineta Transportation Institute

Electric vehicle (EV) safety, efficiency, and lifetime are strongly influenced by how well battery cells are managed, and as EV adoption accelerates, improving battery performance has become critical to vehicle reliability, cost, and public trust. This report conducts a field study on the core technologies and challenges in Battery Management Systems (BMS), focusing on the classification of BMS circuit topologies (design/structures) and systematically reviewing different topologies of active cell balancing circuits (systems that move energy from stronger battery cells to weaker ones). The study provides a detailed analysis of the working principles, advantages, and disadvantages of various active balancing circuit …

Sensitivity Analysis Of A Low-Power Wireless Capacitive Charging System To Inform Thermal Limitations And Battery Size Reduction Potential For Electric Passenger Vehicles, Karmen Teuscher

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

The purpose of using electric vehicles instead of internal combustion engine vehicles that burn gas is to reduce pollutants in the air and potential environmental impacts such as climate change. EVs produce much less air pollutants than ICEVs but manufacturing the EV batteries and the repeated recharging still contributes to the overall air pollution.

Capacitive power transfer systems can wirelessly charge vehicles through the road as they drive along highways or stop at traffic lights. If vehicles charge as they drive, an opportunity opens to reduce the size of the battery while maintaining the same driving range. Reducing the size …

Development And Testing Of A Computer Vision Pose Estimation System For Planar Mobile Robots, Andrew Jones

Master's Theses

This thesis details the development and testing of a computer vision-based real-time pose estimation system for differential drive robots. A single camera with a fisheye lens is used to locate ArUco markers placed at fixed locations and attached to robots. Using the OpenCV library, the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem is solved to facilitate the transformation of 2-D robot positions in an image to world-frame coordinates. An analytical solution is presented to estimate robot poses based on a single PnP solution, rather than solving the PnP problem for each pose estimate. Pose information is relayed to individual robots using a multi-microcontroller architecture …

A Thickness-Invariant Origami Robot With Integrated Actuation And Multimodel Locomotion, Larry L. Howell, Davis Wing, Nathan Usevitch, Sam Bridge, William Bowler

Faculty Publications

ABSTRACT Origami robots possess the potential for advanced reconfigurability in various contexts and environments. This paper describes and demonstrates the function of an origami robot following a thickness-invariant version of the Yoshimura tessellation. This thickness-invariance allows for the simple folding pattern to be expanded vertically, allowing all robotics components to be housed within the panels of the robot without impacting the functional relationships between folds of the pattern, or requiring other, more complex forms of thickness accommodation. The mathematics and engineering to create such a robot are presented to enable the use of these techniques in creating other origami-based robots. …

Thermal Conversion Of Cotton Gin Byproducts Into Liquid Fuels And High-Value Chemicals, Emmanuel Asare

Mechanical Engineering Theses

In this study, we performed fast pyrolysis, catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP), and catalytic hydropyrolysis (CHP) of cotton gin byproducts (CGB) to investigate their conversion into hydrocarbon-rich liquid fuels and high-value aromatic chemicals. Five CGB fractions (CC1, CC2, SM, TM, and FCGB) were collected from different stages of cotton ginning operation and characterized by proximate, ultimate, and higher heating value (HHV) analysis. The feedstocks contained 41.5 44.8 wt.% carbon, 54.2–58.5 wt.% volatile matter, 6.0–15 wt.% ash, and higher heating values of 15.2–16.8 MJ kg⁻¹. All pyrolysis experiments were performed using a Pyroprobe 5200 coupled with GC-MS/FID, while catalyst loading, hydrogen pressure, …

Theory, Implementation, And Practical Applications Of A Modern Parabolized Navier-Stokes Code, Logan B. Freeman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

The Parabolized Navier-Stokes (PNS) method is a specialized computational approach for solving the equations that govern fluid flowing faster than the speed of sound, known as supersonic flow. By leveraging unique physical properties of supersonic environments—specifically that information cannot travel upstream—this method allows for significantly more efficient calculations than traditional approaches. Supersonic flows are important for many military and civilian applications including hypersonic weapons, high-speed passenger aircraft, and reentry. This thesis provides a comprehensive review of the two-dimensional PNS formulation, detailing the mathematical derivation and its practical implementation for solving flow problems. Through performance analysis and error assessment, this research …

A Cfd-Dem Framework For Characterizing Nanoparticle Adhesion Effects On Creeping-Flow Permeability In Composite Manufacturing, Gavin Stoker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Modern aircraft, spacecraft, and high-performance vehicles are increasingly built from composite materials, engineered combinations of plastics and fibers that are lighter and stronger than traditional metals. Researchers are now pushing these materials further by mixing in microscopic particles thousands of times smaller than a human hair, called nanoparticles, to make them even tougher and more resistant to damage. The challenge is getting those nanoparticles distributed evenly. During manufacturing, liquid plastic resin is pumped through a network of tightly packed fibers, carrying the nanoparticles along with it. But nanoparticles tend to clump together and stick to surfaces as they travel, clogging …

Prompt-Driven Tabletop Robotic Manipulation With A Structured Llm Interface And Visual Verification, Tomas Franco

Master's Theses

Creating a tabletop robotic manipulation system that connects language goals to robot actions is a challenging problem. Large language models can interpret mission objectives and reason through actions, but when placed directly in control of hardware they can produce hallucinated commands that result in unsafe behavior without the proper safeguards.

This thesis presents a constrained LLM-guided manipulation system built around the Quanser Qarm, a four degree of freedom manipulator with a mounted Realsense RGB-D camera and a gripper with readable current. Every decision made by the LLM planner is routed through a gated command interface that restricts the model to …

Extended Adaptive Oscillator Framework For Gait Phase Estimation With Adaptive Coupling And Transition Detection Across Locomotion Tasks, Nikhila Radha Krishnan

All Theses

Gait phase is a human-inspired physical variable that describes the instantaneous position of a person within a gait cycle. Adaptive oscillators have been widely used for gait phase estimation due to their ability to synchronize with periodic and pseudo-periodic biomechanical signals and generate monotonically increasing cyclic phase values. Typically, the performance of adaptive oscillators is strongly influenced by coupling strength, a parameter that bridges a trade-off between convergence speed and steady-state variability of the estimated stride frequency. In gait assistive applications, stride frequency estimation must be sufficiently fast to enable phase-based assistance while achieving a stable stride frequency estimate. The …

Smart Process Planning For Automated Fiber Placement, Matthew J. Godbold

All Dissertations

Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) is a preeminent manufacturing technology for producing high-performance composite structures, offering precise material placement, reduced waste, and the potential for highly optimized lightweight designs. While AFP has been widely adopted in aerospace applications, its broader use across industries such as automotive, wind energy, maritime, and sporting goods remains limited. A key barrier to wider adoption is the traditional separation of design, manufacturing, and inspection processes, which drives up cost and results in inefficiencies, sub-optimal designs, and limited feedback between lifecycle stages. In current practice, manufacturing is treated as an isolated process, disconnected from early-stage design decisions …

Integrated Power, Energy, And Thermal Management For Autonomous Hybrid Off-Road Vehicles: Multi-Timescale Modeling, Predictive Control, And Resilient Thermal Design, Anirudh Sundar

All Dissertations

Electrification and autonomy are increasingly important for off-road vehicles operating in construction, agriculture, mining, defense, and other demanding environments. These platforms must deliver high tractive power under unstructured terrain, harsh ambient conditions, low-speed operation, and large auxiliary loads. While hybrid and electrified powertrains offer improved efficiency, mobility, and auxiliary power capability, they also introduce significant challenges in managing tightly coupled power, energy, and thermal subsystems. In particular, lithium-ion batteries, power electronics, electric machines, and internal combustion engine-generator systems operate across different temperature limits and timescales, requiring coordinated management to ensure efficiency, durability, and safe operation. This dissertation develops modeling, planning, …

Microstructural Shielding And Advanced Fatigue Crack Analysis In The Presence Of Deformation Twinning, Seyed Ali Asli

All Dissertations

Design methods to mitigate fatigue failures have remained relatively stagnant, as engineers have relied on existing continuum-level models and adhered to the damage tolerance design methodology. Although damage-tolerant design has led to increased safety, extended component in-service life, and better life predictions, it still relies on maintenance routines to identify dangerous cracks. This research aims to test the hypothesis that bundles of deformation twin boundaries will increase the resistance to fatigue crack growth (FCG). Slip and twinning are two dominant mechanisms of plastic deformation in metals. Slip is more common in materials with face-centered cubic (FCC) crystal structures at room …

A Hybrid Machine Learning-Based Feasibility Prediction Of 3d Mechanical Designs Using Scalar And Geometric Features, Md Mohsin Uddin Fahim

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The computational bottleneck of structural feasibility screening frequently hinders the transition from a digital 3D model to a physically manufactured component. Traditionally, engineers have relied on either overly rigid heuristic constraint checks or computationally exhaustive finite element simulations. To address this inefficiency, this thesis proposes and validates a hybrid machine-learning framework to predict the structural manufacturability of 3D mechanical designs. Moving beyond the conventional reliance on isolated scalar parameters, the proposed methodology extracts and integrates both scalar manufacturing constraints (e.g., tolerance, minimum feature thickness) and spatial geometric descriptors (e.g., bounding volume, aspect ratio) directly from STL mesh data. Utilizing a …

Spatial Structure And Energy Content Of Wakes Behind Single And Arrayed Undulated Cylinders, Taiga Naomi Drucker-Boisvert, OndˇRej FerˇCák, Jérémie Auzoux, Sarah E. Smith, Zein Sadek, Rowan Moore, Christain T. Murphy, Trevor Dunt, Jennifer A. Franck, Raul Bayoan Cal

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Biologically inspired undulated cylinder geometries significantly influence wake structure and vortex-induced vibrations in turbulent flows, yet the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. It is further unknown how these influences extend to multi-cylinder arrays, where interacting wakes accumulate and mix. This study examines the wake characteristics of an undulated cylinder and a smooth elliptic cylinder in single- and multi-cylinder array configurations, using particle image velocimetry and proper orthogonal decomposition (POD). Relative to the smooth elliptic cylinder, the undulated geometry induces pronounced spanwise-axial variability, characterized by enhanced near-wake mean momentum and weak far-wake signatures, consistent with reduced turbulent kinetic energy. While …

Water-Heated Maisotsenko Cycle Humidifiers: A Component-Level Study On Evaporation And Exit Brine Concentration, Omar Abdulfattah Farag Omar A. Farag

Renewable Mechanical Energy

Maisotsenko-cycle (M-cycle) Heat-and-Mass Exchangers (HMXs) are usually assessed as part of complete cooling or desalination systems, which makes the behaviour of the humidifier itself difficult to distinguish. Here, a validated model is used to examine a water-heated M-cycle humidifier as an independent component. Inlet saline-water temperature, ambient temperature, Relative Humidity (RH), and water-to-air Mass-flow Ratio (MR) were varied, and performance was described by Water Evaporation Rate (WER), outlet-air specific humidity, and outlet brine salinity. Water heating and a larger MR produced the strongest increase in moisture addition because they maintained a warmer water film and greater transfer potential. At fixed …

Toward Risk-Informed Design Of Supercooling Heat Exchangers: Statistical Inference And Experimental Investigation Of Heterogeneous Ice Nucleation, Daniel B. Gardner

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Ice-based cooling storage systems can reduce electricity costs and grid strain by making ice during off-peak hours and using it for air conditioning during the day. One promising design works by chilling water below its freezing point as it flows through a heat exchanger, then allowing it to freeze in a separate storage tank. The challenge is that the chilled water can freeze prematurely inside the heat exchanger itself, blocking the flow and shutting the system down. Preventing this unwanted freezing requires understanding how and where ice begins to form on surfaces, a process called nucleation.

This dissertation investigates ice …

Decarbonizing The C3 Splitter: Performance Optimization And Environmental Impact Of Mvr Integration, Dalia A. Ali Associate Prof.

Chemical Engineering

Due to the relatively low volatility (α) of propane and propene components, their separation is one of the most energy-intensive processes in the petrochemical industry. This study evaluates the technical, environmental and thermodynamic performance of a mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) heat pump integrated into a C3 splitter, compared to a conventional steam-heated distillation column. A sensitivity study was conducted using Aspen Plus software at different pressures, reflux ratios (RR) and at turndown operations. According to the results, the MVR system uses a compressor to raise the overhead vapor pressure to 38.7 bar to operate the heater without the need for …

Multi-Dimensional Framework For Industry 5.0: Integrating Human-Centric, Sustainability, And Operational Resilience, Tamer Adel Mohamed, Mohamed Boumalkha, Ahmed S.I. Amar

Mechanical Engineering

Industry 5.0 reframes digital transformation as a socio-technical endeavor in which automation serves human capabilities, environmental limits, and operational continuity. Yet, much of the current discourse remains either conceptual—lacking implementable metrics—or technologycentric— treating humans and sustainability as constraints instead of design objectives. This paper develops a multi-dimensional implementation framework that operationalizes the three pillars of Industry 5.0: human-centricity, sustainability, and operational resilience. We synthesize recent advances in collaborative robotics and safety-aware human–robot collaboration, digital twins (including human and supply-chain twins), and AI-driven decision support—augmented by emerging 6G ultra-reliable low-latency networking capabilities such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, terahertz communications, multi-access edge …