Digital Commons Network^™

Protein And Endotoxin Interactions And Endotoxin Removal From Protein Solutions, Liping Li

Dissertations

The investigation objectives of this study include: endotoxin disaggregation by proteins; protein concentration effect on protein-endotoxin binding and endotoxin removal; size exclusion high performance liquid chromatography (SE-HPLC) studies on endotoxin dissociation by bovin serum albumin (BSA); use of Ca⁺² to re-aggregate endotoxin in hemoglobin solutions and the subsequent removal of endotoxin by ultrafiltration; quantitative determination of Ca⁺² effects on endotoxin removal and protein yield in a two-stage ultrafiltration.

It is known that some proteins can disaggregate endotoxins and form complexes with lipopolysaccharides (LPS). It is also known that Ca can act as "bridges" to aggregate LPS in aqueous …

Protection Of The New York City Water Supply Land Development Threats And The Programs To Control Them, Werner Mueller

Theses

The Surface Water Treatment Rule under the Safe Drinking Water Act requires that all surface water sources used for drinking water must be filtered, unless the purveyor can demonstrate that the water is of such high quality that filtration is not required. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) operates the New York City water supply system and is taking actions to ensure that the water supplied from the Catskill -- Delaware system remains of high enough quality to maintain an avoidance of filtration determination granted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). New watershed rules and regulations have …

Comparative Molecular Field Analysis (Comfa) Of Phenyl Ring Substituted Methylphenidates, Milind Misra

Theses

Comparative Molecular Field Analysis (CoMFA) was performed on 30 methylphenidate analogues having phenyl ring substituents at the 2-, 3-, and 4-positions in an attempt to explain the structure-activity relationships of the analogues. Several CoMFA studies were carried out using different conformations of methylphenidate as the template structures for the corresponding alignment rules. The identification of the bioactive conformation was variously based on the interfeature distances in WIN 35,428, on cluster analysis, and on a comparison of active methylphenidate analogues. The sensitivity of the models to various CoMFA parameters was compared. These parameters included altering the size and spacing of the …

Agents : Concept, Technologies & Applications And Search Engine To Compile Urls Containing Documents Related To Environment Science For Njpies, Dhaval P. Shah

Theses

Agents are emerging technology that is making computer systems easier to use by allowing people (computer users) to delegate work back to the computer. They act on user's behalf and achieve user's goals. The advent of these software agents gave rise to much discussion of just what such an agent is, and of how they differ from programs in general. Agents are in research area for a long time. Earlier they were considered a part of just Artificial Intelligence. Nowadays they are just not in research area anymore. Commercial agent based applications are existing in the market because of the …

Production Of Pulsed Low Energy Electron Beams, Shyam Das

Theses

In this thesis, an experimental setup for the production of low energy electron beams based on Explosive Electron Emission (EEE) is used to study the transmission of pulsed low energy electron beams through silicon nitride foils. The electron beam density before and after the foil are measured. The experimental values fully agree with the theoretical estimates. Work done in this thesis is a judicious combination of vacuum technology, pulsing of high voltage sources, thermal physics and electronics. Dia rams and -photo uaphs of the experimental setup arl-I presented. A paper was 9 presented at the American Vacuum Society (AVS) symposium …

Evaluation Of Multimedia Chemistry Courseware, Ryan D. Isahac

Theses

With the every growing costs of running a Chemistry laboratory and the ever-changing needs of today's studenis a logical alternative seems to be a computer based instructional format. When delivering courseware via the Internet, the greatest problem comes in making the interface and applications user-friendly and not jusi attractive. In order to test the utility of such a site, subjects are recruited and asked to evaluate the system. Their responses are essential in designing and improving the program to best meet the needs of students. In order to address student concerns, a Help Page was developed which clarified areas and …

Teaching Operating System Concepts Using Multimedia And Internet, Amit Narielwala

Theses

The prime objective of the thesis is to research and demonstrate the benefits and advantages of using Internet and multimedia tools for an interactive educational leaning experience. As we speak Internet is developing as a mainstream communication medium via personal computer as a tool at a breathtaking speed. The information technology field is a prime reason behind such phenomenon as it continues to mature and expand. In what is described as the "information age", the students of information technology need to master and devour new complex technological concepts and ideas at faster rate than ever before. The traditional approach using …

Cadmium, Chromium And Lead In Environmental Samples : Speciation And Determination, Hsing-Hui Yu

Dissertations

Heavy metals are important contaminants in many environmental media. This work focuses on the improvement of current methods for water and sediment analysis for three metals, cadmium, chromium and lead. Batch ion exchange was used for water speciation and a microwave assisted sequential extraction scheme was developed for sediment characterization. The developed methods were applied to a group of environmental samples.

The exchangeable species of these metals in water were preconcentrated on ion exchange resins. These include the bioavailable free ions and weakly complexed ions. Metals sorbed on particles and strongly complexed ions, less bioavailable, were eliminated. The method was …

Applications Of A Microtrap For On-Line Monitoring Of Volatile Organics, Chaohua Feng

Dissertations

Microtrap is made by packing a narrow metal tubing with adsorbents. The advantage of a microtrap is that it can be heated and cooled in the order of seconds. It has been used previously as a concentration cum injection device for on-line gas chromatography and also monitoring non-methane organic carbon in air emissions. In this research breakthrough and desorption characteristics of the microtrap were studied. A two-stage microtrap system was developed to reduce breakthrough while making sharp injection for GC separation. Microtrap was also used as a concentrator cum injector in on-line mass spectrometry. Finally, a microtrap based, continuous non-methane …

Development Of Membrane Extraction Systems For Measuring Trace Level Organic Compounds In Water, Xuemei Guo

Dissertations

The presence of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in ground and surface water resources poses a threat to public health. The measurement of these trace level contaminants in water is of significant importance. Conventional methods for analysis of trace volatile organic compounds in water include purge and trap, head space analysis, and solid phase microextraction (SPME). While these are excellent laboratory techniques, none of them can be used for continuous, on-line monitoring of water streams. Membrane separation of organic compounds from water provides an exciting possibility for on-line extraction and analysis. In previous investigations, water continuously flowed on the feed side …

Developing Techniques For Enhancing Comprehensibility Of Controlled Medical Terminologies, Huanying Gu

Dissertations

A controlled medical terminology (CMT) is a collection of concepts (or terms) that are used in the medical domain. Typically, a CMT also contains attributes of those concepts and/or relationships between those concepts. Electronic CMTs are extremely useful and important for communication between and integration of independent information systems in healthcare, because data in this area is highly fragmented. A single query in this area might involve several databases, e.g., a clinical database, a pharmacy database, a radiology database, and a lab test database.

Unfortunately, the extensive sizes of CMTs, often containing tens of thousands of concepts and hundreds of …

Porting The Sisal Functional Language To Distributed-Memory Multiprocessors, Jui-Yuan Ku

Dissertations

Parallel computing is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in recent years. The sizes of application problems continuously increase for solving real-world problems. Distributed-memory multiprocessors have been regarded as a viable architecture of scalable and economical design for building large scale parallel machines. While these parallel machines can provide computational capabilities, programming such large-scale machines is often very difficult due to many practical issues including parallelization, data distribution, workload distribution, and remote memory latency.

This thesis proposes to solve the programmability and performance issues of distributed-memory machines using the Sisal functional language. The programs written in Sisal will be automatically parallelized, scheduled and …

Flame Dynamics In Steady Strained Flows, Zili Huang

Dissertations

In this dissertation, the response of a premixed flame to time-dependent strained flow fields is investigated. Because of the potential application to turbulent combustion modeling, the main focus is on the particular case of a flame in stagnation point flow with an imposed oscillatory strain rate. The flame is modeled as a hydrodynamic discontinuity separating burned from unburned gasses. To complete the formulation of the problem, conditions relating the fluid variables across the flame front are needed, as is a flame speed equation that determines the evolution of the discontinuity. These conditions are derived through asymptotic analysis of the flame …

Dynamical Systems Associated With Particle Flow Models : Theory And Numerical Methods, Roman V. Samulyak

Dissertations

A new class of integro - partial differential equation models is derived for the prediction of granular flow dynamics. These models are obtained using a novel limiting averaging method (inspired by techniques employed in the derivation of infinite-dimensional dynamical systems models) on the Newtonian equations of motion of a many-particle system incorporating widely used inelastic particle-particle force formulas. By using Taylor series expansions, these models can be approximated by a system of partial differential equations of the Navier-Stokes type. Solutions of the new models for granular flows down inclined planes and in vibrating beds are compared with known experimental and …

Automatic Document Classification And Extraction System (Adoces), Xuhong Li

Dissertations

Document processing is a critical element of office automation. Document image processing begins from the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) phase with complex processing for document classification and extraction. Document classification is a process that classifies an incoming document into a particular predefined document type. Document extraction is a process that extracts information pertinent to the users from the content of a document and assigns the information as the values of the “logical structure” of the document type. Therefore, after document classification and extraction, a paper document will be represented in its digital form instead of its original image file format, …

Knowledge Management For Texpros, Jianshun Hu

Dissertations

Most of the document processing systems today have applied Al technologies to support their system intelligent behaviors. For the application of Al technologies in such systems, the core problem is how to represent and manage different kinds of knowledge to support their inference engine components' functionalities. In other words, knowledge management has become a critical issue in the document processing systems. In this dissertation, within the scope of the TEXt PROcessing System (TEXPROS), we identify knowledge of various kinds that are applicable in the system. We investigate several problems of managing this knowledge and then develop a knowledge base for …

Pattern Discovery In Trees : Algorithms And Applications To Document And Scientific Data Management, Chia-Yo Chang

Dissertations

Ordered, labeled trees are trees in which each node has a label and the left-to-right order of its children (if it has any) is fixed. Such trees have many applications in vision, pattern recognition, molecular biology and natural language processing.

In this dissertation we present algorithms for finding patterns in the ordered labeled trees. Specifically we study the largest approximately common substructure (LACS) problem for such trees. We consider a substructure of a tree T to be a connected subgraph of T. Given two trees T₁, T₂ and an integer d, the LACS problem is to find …

A New-Generation Class Of Parallel Architectures And Their Performance Evaluation, Qian Wang

Dissertations

The development of computers with hundreds or thousands of processors and capability for very high performance is absolutely essential for many computation problems, such as weather modeling, fluid dynamics, and aerodynamics. Several interconnection networks have been proposed for parallel computers. Nevertheless, the majority of them are plagued by rather poor topological properties that result in large memory latencies for DSM (Distributed Shared-Memory) computers. On the other hand, scalable networks with very good topological properties are often impossible to build because of their prohibitively high VLSI (e.g., wiring) complexity. Such a network is the generalized hypercube (GH). The GH supports full-connectivity …

Modeling Controlled Vocabularies Using Oodbs And Multilevel Area Diagrams, Li-Min Liu

Dissertations

A Controlled Vocabulary (CV) is a software system of domain knowledge that consolidates and unifies the terminology of a large application domain. With a common, centralized CV, costly and time-consuming translations can be eliminated between pairs of organizations and pairs of software systems. Unfortunately, the more knowledge we put into a CV, the harder it is to understand and maintain it. In this dissertation, a comprehensive theoretical methodology for modeling CVs using Object-Oriented Database (OODB) technology is presented. We present two methods for representing a semantic network CV as an equivalent OODB, which we call an Object-Oriented Vocabulary Repository (OOVR). …

Sustainable Green Manufacturing Of Energetic Materials, Ted Alex Formeza

Theses

Pollution from manufacturing processes of the major energetic materials currently used in the U.S., 1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazacyclohexane (RDX), 1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7 tetraazacyclooctane (HMX) was briefly evaluated. It was found that acetic acid was a major pollutant. It appeared that the British Process could be controlled to reduce the polluting effluents better than the Bachmann Process used in the U.S. Most of the effort for producing the next generation of energetic materials is currently centered around the production of 1,3,3-trinitroazetidine (TNAZ). We evaluated five synthetic routes for producing TNAZ. We reduced the number of potential processes by carefully considering possible changes in the schemes that …

Improved Su320 Nir Camera Image Processing System, Weimin Shi

Theses

This paper describes an improved image processing system which is applied in solar observation. In order to get the higher performance in frame grabbing rate, the system is using, PCI Master Bus with on-board memory frame-grabber. From software side, the application program has been modified to reduce the grabbing time, which speeds up the whole process significantly. The paper described them in detail.

Catalyctic Reduction Of Nitric Oxide By Copper Catalyzed Granular Activated Carbon In The Presence Of Oxygen, Shan Xiao

Theses

The catalytic reduction of nitric oxides by solid carbonaceous material consisting primarily of granular activated carbon or (GAC) was studied in a fix bed catalytic reactor in order to develop the technology for removing NO and soot simultaneously from diesel engine exhaust. The catalytic activity and conversion of NO as a function of reaction temperature was evaluated as a function of space velocity. The results show that at lean condition and high gaseous hourly space velocity, vis., 50,000 ~ 80,000, Cu-ZSM-5 does not perform as well with CO and GAC as it does with gaseous hydrocarbons(HC). Plain GAC has low …

Decision Support System For Forecasting Product And Waste Disposal Over Time, Amit P. Amte

Theses

A current barrier to the end-of-life product strategies is a lack of knowledge of the quantity and timing of product returns or waste generation. Consequently, a Decision Support System (DSS), to predict the timing and quantity of waste generation is needed. Therefore a web-based system that predicts the rate of product entering the waste-stream has been developed. The system accepts information relating to sales, reliability, storage and disposal behavior. This data is used to simulate the return waste flow. The DSS can be used to simulate the effect of different policies and to provide data for end-of-life and multi-lifecycle strategy …

History Of Oxygenated Gasoline Use In New Jersey 1992-1998, Jean Niebuhr Borne

Theses

New Jersey has been required to use oxygenated gasoline from November 1 to March 30 since 1992 in order to reduce carbon monoxide from vehicles. This requirement was part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. For the past six winters, New Jersey has utilized gasoline with methyl butyl tertiary ether, MTBE, as the oxygenate. In New Jersey, and in many states across the country, health complaints were reported after oxygenated fuel started flowing from gas pumps.

Oxybusters is a grassroots organization dedicated to the removal of oxygenated gasoline off the market. The group has pressured Governor Whitman to …

Recasting Cohn's Many Sorted Logic Into A Constrained Logic, Christopher Brendan Koelbl

Theses

The use of a many sorted logic for theorem proving carries many advantages over a traditional unsorted logic. By placing restrictions on the search space, a many sorted logic can significantly reduce the amount steps in the resolution process. However, as a logic becomes more efficient, it increases in complexity.

One of these efficient log ics is Cohn's Many Sorted Logic, LLAMA. It uses complex data structures such as the sort lattice and sort arrays to maintain information about the sorts. Recasting LLAMA into Bürckert's constrained logic will keep the functionality of LLAMA while using a format that reduces the …

An Examination Of The Self-Perceptions Of The Physical Environment And Psychological Health Of Latina Women Living In The St. Columbia Neighborhood Of Newark, New Jersey, Veronica Maria Maya

Theses

A correlation between perceptions of environmental quality and psychological health has been established in a sample of Latina women. Three psychological scales exist to measure psychological constructs such as learned helplessness, hopelessness, and selfesteem. These three scales have been used in conjunction with an environmental survey designed to capture the perceptions of the sample to their physical environment.

The mean of scores for each psychological construct in the Latina sample were compared to the mean of scores for these constructs in independent samples of oncology, hemodialysis, and spinal cord injured patients being treated for depression. This comparison yields the following …

Domain Architecture A Design Framework For System Development And Integration, Vassilka D. Kirova

Dissertations

The ever growing complexity of software systems has revealed many short-comings in existing software engineering practices and has raised interest in architecture-driven software development. A system's architecture provides a model of the system that suppresses implementation detail, allowing the architects to concentrate on the analysis and decisions that are most critical to structuring the system to satisfy its requirements. Recently, interests of researchers and practi-tioners have shifted from individual system architectures to architectures for classes of software systems which provide more general, reusable solutions to the issues of overall system organization, interoperability, and allocation of services to system components. These …

Parallelization For Image Processing Algorithms Based Chain And Mid-Crack Codes, Wai-Tak Wong

Dissertations

Freeman chain code is a widely-used description for a contour image. Another mid-crack code algorithm was proposed as a more precise method for image representation. We have developed a coding algorithm which is suitable to generate either chain code description or mid-crack code description by switching between two different tables. Since there is a strong urge to use parallel processing in image related problems, a parallel coding algorithm is implemented. This algorithm is developed on a pyramid architecture and a N cube architecture. Using link-list data structure and neighbor identification, the algorithm gains efficiency because no sorting or neighborhood pairing …

A Methodology For Component-Based System Integration, Yongming Tang

Dissertations

Component-based software based on software architectures is emerging to be the next generation software development paradigm. The paradigm shifts the development focus from lines-of-codes to coarser-grained components and the interconnections among them. It consists of system architecture design, architecture description, component search and system integration from components to generate a software system.

However, one of the bottlenecks in this paradigm is the integration of the individual components into the overall system. In this dissertation a methodology for component-based system integration is proposed. It is based on an architectural aggregation view, a component model, flowgraphs and cyclomatic complexity. We introduce this …

Oxidation Of Dimethyl-Ether And Ethylene In The Atmosphere And Combustion Environment And Thermodynamic Studies On Hydrofluorocarbons Using Ab Initio Calculation Methods, Takahiro Yamada

Dissertations

Reaction pathways and kinetics are analyzed on CH₃OC·H₂ unimolecular decay and on the complete CH₃OC·H₂ + O₂ reaction system using thermodynamic properties (ΔH_f°₂₉₈, S°₂₉₈, and C(T) 300≤T/K≤1500) derived by two ab initio calculation methods, CBS-q and G2. These are used to determine thermodynamic properties of reactants, intermediate radicals and transition state (TS) compounds. Quantum Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel (QRRK) analysis is used to calculate energy dependent rate constants, k(E), and master equation is used to account for collisional stabilization. Comparison of calculated fall-off with experiment indicates that the CBS-q and …