Digital Commons Network^™

Analysis And Optimization Of Colorimetric Nanosensors For Rapid Detection Of Microbes In Water, Ruby A. Lang

Master's Theses

Access to safe water is a basic human right recognized by the United Nations General Assembly in 2010 (WHO, 2020). However, a least 2.2 billion people globally still are without safely managed water services meaning they use a drinking water source that can be contaminated with faeces (WHO, 2020). With such a pressing global health issue, it is clear that improvement to water systems is important and required in the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, to improve water systems and prove they are safe water sources, water quality testing must occur. A solution to this issue is the …

Pier Portal, Alec W. Hardy

Master's Theses

The Pier Portal marine monitoring system is an internet controlled underwater camera that will enable students, researchers, and the general public the ability to monitor underwater marine life and ocean conditions. Installed at Cal Poly’s Center for Coastal Marine Science pier at Avila Beach, California, the camera can be commanded in real-time to raise or lower to any position between the top of the pier and the bottom of the ocean floor, while providing a live-stream video to the operator and general public. This thesis effort focused on the integration of the various subsystem components through software, and the development …

Planning For Pollinators, Encouraging Biodiversity For Agriculture Resiliency, Sebastian Brian Cardoza

Master's Theses

Pollinators are essential to food production globally. Without them, the production of food becomes increasingly difficult, time consuming, and costly. Unfortunately, due to the rapid changes to our earth's physical and climatic structure millions of species are becoming classified as threatened, endangered or extinct. Among these declining species are pollinating insects such as Aphis mellifera (honeybee) and other native species. This is due to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD) and other native bees. The decline indicates that the future habitability of earth may be in jeopardy. The solution to this crisis is to expand the habitat of …

Tension Cranes, A Close Collaboration Of Architects And Engineers, William R. Adam, Madigan Smith

Architectural Engineering

This set of images and studies proves to show that architects and engineers can indeed work closely to produce amazing and beautiful results. This result came in the form of a project proposal for a high – rise residential tower located in the heart of San Francisco. The team elected to utilize a highly efficient system of cables in order to cantilever over the edges of the site and optimize the air space, make powerful vistas to increase residential value, and to form an elegant structural system holding everything together. In this paper, the design process is explained into engineering, …

Lilypaaaad - Structural Design, Katelyn Smith

Architectural Engineering

This report tells the story of the structural design process of the LilyPAAAAD tower. The highlights of this process include precedent studies, 2-D structural analysis studies, hand calculations, and drawings. Precedent studies gave insight into unknown possibilities and helped discover how other engineers achieved their design goals. Projects like Sendai Mediatheque and the HSBC Tower are innovative solutions to unique design criteria. 2-D structural studies revealed how the braced frame and outrigger systems worked. By changing member stiffness and studying the load path, the members that contributed the most to resisting the load could be identified. Hand calculations were essential …

The Aloe: High Rise Schematic Design And Analysis, Tony Duc Nguyen, Lilliann Lan Lai

Architectural Engineering

The authors of this document are architectural engineering (ARCE) undergraduate students from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). They joined the 2020 Skyscraper Collaboratory as part of the ARCE course 415: Interdisciplinary Capstone Project. This course emphasizes the analysis and evaluation of interdisciplinary challenges associated with integrating the design and construction processes to deliver a project with respect to the design, quality, and performance expectations for a client or presented criteria. The course was taught in collaboration with industry partners and associates from the global architectural, urban planning, and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Instruction …

Same Polytechnic College - Phase Zero, Amber Sutherland, Hester Lui, Nicole O'Connor

Architectural Engineering

The Same Polytechnic College, located in Same (Sah-may), Tanzania, is an on-going project that has been worked on by approximately 600 Cal Poly students over the past decade. The college is being designed for the Mbesese Initiative for Sustainable Development (MISD), a nonprofit organization working towards alleviating poverty in rural East Africa through the expansion of access to education. As an interdisciplinary team of architectural engineering, architecture, and landscape architecture students, the master plan of the college was refined and the design of “Phase Zero” was created as the first step towards the organization’s goal.

A Screenplay For Bystander Intervention For Sexual Harassment Scenarios For College Students, Shanti Herzog

Journalism

This project was developed to describe the drafting of a screenplay for an interactive, virtual reality sexual harassment training module for students of the California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. The research began with the examination of the prevalent and persisting issue of sexual harassment within college campus communities, and how to present college students with the tools to intervene as bystanders, thus encouraging them to intervene when encountering sexual harassment scenarios. The resulting screenplay was written to provide college students at Cal Poly with strategies to identify and take action when encountering sexual harassment, especially in small group gatherings …

Sandy Feet, Garrett E. Herbst, Jacqueline Chuang, Jerin T. Brust, Parker S. Duncan

General Engineering

Sgt. Brady is a former armed forces member with a transtibial amputation. He walks on sand frequently for work and leisure, but experiences severe pain and inconvenience because his current prosthesis is not meant for use on sand. Sand Foot V2 is a prosthesis that allows Sgt. Brady to walk on sand for long periods of time without issue.

The Effect Of An Educational Workshop On High School Future Farmers Of America Parliamentary Procedure Leadership Development Teams, Brooke Gilstrap, Alyssa Snow

Agricultural Education and Communication

Within the California Future Farmers of America Association (FFA), there are a variety of Leadership Development Events (LDE’s) including the Parliamentary Procedure contest. Within this contest students sharpen their knowledge through reviewing Robert's Rules of Order and applying this knowledge to an exam as well as a live demonstration. Through this contest, students also improve upon their public speaking skills and research agricultural education and industry issues. Students compete in several invitational contests before entering the sectional, regional, and state levels of competition where their advanced knowledge comes into play with a wider audience. Over the span of California, there …

Non-Toxic Soil Thickeners For Reducing Mudslide Intensity, Mitchell William Jensen

Materials Engineering

This project was intended to be a continuation of senior project work done last year by a group consisting of two Materials Engineering students and a Soil Science student. Their report was crucial in identifying a range of food thickeners that could be capable of performing in the mud thickening application. All thickeners that were chosen both this year and last year are biocompatible, to alleviate some toxicity concerns. The food thickeners all belong to a class of compounds known as colloids. Since water is the fluid being thickened, these compounds are more accurately referred to as hydrocolloids. Hydrocolloids are …

Failure Analysis Of Investment Cast Near-Alpha Titanium Alloys, Garrett Ryan Bader, Jonathan Anton Linquist

Materials Engineering

In this project, fracture surfaces of three titanium investment castings were studied as part of a failure analysis on a TaylorMade metalwood. The crack formation occurred between investment cast Ti 9-1-1 and rolled Ti 6-4 joined by laser beam welding. The microstructure of the Ti 9-1-1 contained alpha colonies in large prior beta grains, while the Ti 6-4 was primarily Widmanstätten in basket weave morphology, refined with subsequent rolling. Over a period of cyclic loading, cracking occurred at the face-sole transition in the metalwoods that had been cast from a certain supplier B, while metalwoods that had undergone similar treatment …

Insulated Solar Electric Cooker, Paige Camacho, Ahmed Gouda, Caroline Hodes, Wyatt Johnson

General Engineering

The purpose of this Final Project Report is to highlight the work completed by the interdisciplinary engineering capstone project for the Insulated Solar Electric Cooker (ISEC) at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo under the supervision of Professor Jim Widmann (Mechanical Engineering) and Dr. Peter Schwartz (Physics). Dr. Schwartz, better known as Pete, has been working on the project with a team of students for the past five years and is working to integrate the ISEC in Ghanaian communities. This project focuses on making the ISEC mass-manufacturable and making the transition from biomass cooking to solar cooking as familiar …

Creating A Livestock Show From The Beginning For The Benefit Of Youth In The Agriculture Industry And Continuing The Tradition Of Showing, Chloé Fowler, Matthew Durian

Agricultural Education and Communication

Youth throughout the country have been shown to benefit through organizations focused on leadership and real-world tangible skills. Organizations such as the National FFA Organization and 4-H Youth Development are key organizations for this growth. Livestock shows are another layer to these organizations and youth development. “Livestock shows provide interactions through different environments that expose participants to different cultures,” (Davis, 1998).

For these reasons it is important to provide more opportunities to the next generation of agriculture. There are currently 28 different livestock jackpots within the state of California throughout one year, (CJLA, 2020). Due to the large geographic landscape …

Possible Solution To Housing Problem: Long Term Housing Investment Plan, Tucker Reed

Construction Management

The purpose of this paper is to provide young men and women entering the work force with the ability to invest towards acquiring a large plot of land to live on. In the current housing condition, Americans, more exactly those living in large urban populations are finding it difficult to find a permanent home in the same city as their workplace. This is particularly true for those whose professions require frequent relocation. The research conducted is meant to provide a person with little to no knowledge of construction with the conceptual understanding of the correct channels to purchase land and …

Flexible Fault Tolerance For The Robot Operating System, Sukhman S. Marok

Master's Theses

The introduction of autonomous vehicles has the potential to reduce the number of accidents and save countless lives. These benefits can only be realized if autonomous vehicles can prove to be safer than human drivers. There is a large amount of active research around developing robust algorithms for all parts of the autonomous vehicle stack including sensing, localization, mapping, perception, prediction, planning, and control. Additionally, some of these research projects have involved the use of the Robot Operating System (ROS). However, another key aspect of realizing an autonomous vehicle is a fault-tolerant design that can ensure the safe operation of …

Conceptual Design Of A South Pole Carrier Pigeon Uav, Kendrick M. Dlima

Master's Theses

Currently, the South Pole has a large data problem. It is estimated that 1.2 TB of data is being produced every day, but less than 500 GB of that data is being uploaded via aging satellites to researchers in other parts of the world. This requires those at the South Pole to analyze the data and carefully select the parts to send, possibly missing out on vital scientific information. The South Pole Carrier Pigeon will look to bridge this data gap.

The Carrier Pigeon will be a small unmanned aerial vehicle that will carry a 30 TB solid-state hard drive …

The Influence Of The Sensory Environment On Avian Reproductive Success And Human Well-Being, Danielle Marie Ferraro

Master's Theses

Sensory pollutants such as anthropogenic noise and night lighting now expose much of the world to evolutionarily novel sound and night lighting conditions, which can have detrimental effects on humans and wildlife. In my first chapter, we exposed wild Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana) nestlings to noise, light, and combination (i.e., noise and light) treatments. Nests exposed to noise and light together experienced less predation than control and light-exposed nests, and noise-exposed nests experienced less predation than control nests, yet overall nest success was only higher in noise-exposed nests compared to light-exposed nests. Although exposure to light decreased nestling body condition …

Solar Energy Generation Forecasting And Power Output Optimization Of Utility Scale Solar Field, Byungyu Kim

Master's Theses

The optimization of photovoltaic (PV) power generation system requires an accurate system performance model capable of validating the PV system optimization design. Currently, many commercial PV system modeling programs are available, but those programs are not able to model PV systems on a distorted ground level. Furthermore, they were not designed to optimize PV systems that are already installed. To solve these types of problems, this thesis proposes an optimization method using model simulations and a MATLAB-based PV system performance model. The optimization method is particularly designed to address partial shading issues often encountered in PV system installed on distorted …

Design Of A Printed Circuit Board For A Sensorless Three-Phase Brushless Dc Motor Control System, Joshua Castle

Master's Theses

The use of brushless motors has increased in recent years due to superior performance characteristics compared with alternatives. The operation of a brushless motor is dependent upon a separate controller which is often in the form of a printed circuit board. As such, the size and performance capability of the controller can restrict the performance of the overall motor control system so advancements of these controllers further the potential use of BLDC motors. This project outlines the design of a PCB based, sensorless motor controller for operation of a three-phase BLDC motor powered by a 24 V, high current external …

A Study Of The Standard Cirrus Wing Lift Distribution Versus Bell Shaped Lift Distribution, William H. Bergman

Master's Theses

This thesis discusses a comparison of the differences in aerodynamic performance of wings designed with elliptical and bell-shaped lift distributions. The method uses a Standard Cirrus sailplane wing with a lift distribution associated with the induced drag benefits of an elliptical distribution (span efficiency = 0.96) as the basis of comparison. The Standard Cirrus is a standard class sailplane with 15-meter wingspan that was designed by Schempp-Hirth in 1969. This sailplane wing was modeled and analyzed in XFLR5, then validated against existing wind tunnel airfoil data, and Standard Cirrus flight test data. The root bending moment of the baseline wing …

Attractiveness Of English Thyme (Thymus Vulgaris L.) To Arthropod Natural Enemies And Its Suitability As A Dual Use Resource, Kristina K. Van Wert

Master's Theses

Current agroecosystem management practices have a negative effect on natural enemies and their ability to control insect pests. Conservation biological control through the addition of flowering resources can manage food resources for natural enemies. These floral resources can also provide multiple ecosystem services. Study goals were to determine if perennial Thymus vulgaris L. was attractive to natural enemies and if so, could it be a dual use resource encouraging pest management and providing harvestable product. In 2018 plots in three locations were used to examine the effect of habitat throughout the growing season on the attractiveness of T. vulgaris. …

Investigation Of New Forward Osmosis Draw Agents And Prioritization Of Recent Developments Of Draw Agents Using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Jodie Wei Yu

Master's Theses

Forward osmosis (FO) is an emerging technology for water treatment due to their ability to draw freshwater using an osmotic pressure gradient across a semi-permeable membrane. However, the lack of draw agents that could both produce reasonable flux and be separated from the draw solution at a low cost stand in the way of widespread implementation. This study had two objectives: evaluate the performance of three materials — peptone, carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC), and magnetite nanoparticles (Fe₃O₄ NPs) — as potential draw agents, and to use multi-criteria decision matrices to systematically prioritize known draw agents from literature for …

The Yanks Are Striking: Kern County, The 1921 Oil Strike And The Discourse On Americanism, Peter F. Hussey

Master's Theses

In the fall of 1921 oil workers of the San Joaquin Valley faced a post-war economic slump, wage cuts across the board and an increasingly hostile attitude of oil operators towards consultation with the federal government on labor relations. They voted to strike, and the next day eight thousand workers walked off the fields. Strikers crafted an image of “patriotic unionism,” underpinned by a faith in the federal government and the ideology of the American Legion. The strike did not end in gruesome class warfare like had been seen months earlier in the coal mines of West Virginia, but rather …

A Study Of The Utilization Of Panel Method For Low Aspect Ratio Wing Analysis, William Barton D. Newey

Master's Theses

This study demonstrates the applicability of using a modified application strategy of panel method to analyze low aspect ratio wings at preliminary design phases. Conventional panel methods fail to capture the leading edge vortex (LEV) that is shed by wings with low aspect ratios, typically below 2 depending on planform. This aerodynamic phenomenon contributes to a significant amount of the lift of these wings and the result is a drastic underestimation of the lift characteristics when analyzed by conventional panel method. To capture the effect of the leading edge vortex, a panel method code was used with an extended definition …

Three Axis Attitude Control System Design And Analysis Tool Development For The Cal Poly Cubesat Laboratory, Liam T. Bruno

Master's Theses

The Cal Poly CubeSat Laboratory (CPCL) is currently facing unprecedented engineering challenges—both technically and programmatically—due to the increasing cost and complexity of CubeSat flight missions. In responding to recent RFPs, the CPCL has been forced to find commercially available solutions to entire mission critical spacecraft subsystems such as propulsion and attitude determination & control, because currently no in-house options exist for consideration. The commercially available solutions for these subsystems are often extremely expensive and sometimes provide excessively good performance with respect to mission requirements. Furthermore, use of entire commercial subsystems detracts from the hands-on learning objectives of the CPCL by …

Reduction Of Fat Content In Processed Meats Using Hot-Boning And Cold-Batter Mincing Technology, Morgan P. Wonderly

Master's Theses

Processed meats have received negative publicity due to high fat contents that have been linked to adverse effects on human health. Fat is an essential ingredient in many processed meat products, so reducing this all while maintaining the desired characteristics of the product is a challenge. The purpose of this study was to generate low-fat meat products using a combination of hot-boning/crust-freeze-air-chilling (HB-CFAC) and cold-batter mincing (CBM) technologies. Pork hams were subjected to HB-CFAC or chill-boning/crust-freeze-air-chilling (CB-CFAC) prior to 3 min pre-mincing and 6 min mincing for control gels with back-fat addition or low-fat gels with water addition instead of …

Wildland Fire Location Management System (Wflms), Robert G. Goldie, Jack A. Gallegos

Electrical Engineering

Wildland firefighters work in complex, dangerous environments where effective communication is key to developing situational awareness. Currently, the only communication firefighters have is with Very High Frequency (VHF) 160 MHz band analog radios. While digital radio protocols could potentially allow location data and commands to be sent to field crews, the technology is primarily for voice communication. This project presents a new system that frees up voice channels and uses LoRa transceivers for robust communication. The system allows for emergency and location reports to be sent to a dispatcher via an airborne repeater. The entire system is software-defined, so it …

Feasibility Of Cross Laminated Timber Panels In Construction: A Case Study Of Carbon12, Erik John Graber

Construction Management

Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) is an extremely strong engineered wood panel intended for roof, floor, or wall applications. Currently there is little research comparing CLT to steel and concrete, materials CLT hopes to replace This research uses a detailed literary analysis on CLT and case study on Carbon12, a recently constructed CLT structure in Portland, Oregon, to compare the cost and schedule requirements of CLT with a cast-in-place concrete slab. The case study consisted of a detailed analysis of Carbon12, interview with Scott Noble, senior project manager for Carbon12, and a detailed schedule and cost analysis. Results showed that for …

Fighting For Equality In The Workforce, Madison Taylor Dewing

Communication Studies

Inequality, discrimination, and sexual harassment has been occurring ever since individuals stepped into the workforce. All individuals are affected by these issues but in this paper, I mainly focus on women. I discuss the psychological effects these issues have on individuals, and then introduce my method and concepts. Throughout this paper, I use feminist criticism to take a closer look as to how women are portrayed in the two films, Bombshell, and 9 to 5, which are decades apart, and see how women have been treated in the workforce versus men. I then use identification to discover how these films …