Digital Commons Network^™

Getting Sandy: Creating Collapsing Sand Effects For An Ode To Love, Pisut Wisessing

All Theses

This thesis presents an artistic approach of creating collapsing sand effects in Brown Bag Films' animated short, An Ode To Love, directed by Matthew Darragh. A combination of rigid body simulation and fluid simulation tools, which are available in Houdini 3D animation software version 13, was used to successfully complete the task. A detailed design and implementation process to achieve the effects is documented in this work.

Verifying A Systematic Application To Accelerator Roadmap Using Shallow Water Wave Equations, Ranajeet Anand

All Theses

With the advent of parallel computing, a number of hardware architectures have become available for data parallel applications. Every architecture is unique with respect to characteristics such as floating point operations per second, memory bandwidth and synchronization costs. Data parallel applications possess inherent parallelism that needs to be studied and the hardware that can best exploit this parallelism can be identified and selected for large-scale implementation. The application that I have considered for my thesis is - numerical solution of shallow water wave equations using finite difference method. These equations are a set of partial differential equations that model the …

Silver Hair On The Silver Screen: Adaptations Of Jane Austen's Older Women, Hilary Richards

All Theses

Three adaptations of Jane Austen novels were produced between 1995 and 1999. These late 90s films represented a set of romantic comedies created in the style of heritage cinema. In adapting Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Mansfield Park, filmmakers reshaped the older women supporting characters in order to better fit the generic conventions of romantic comedies. Romantic comedies of the 1990s relied on a narrow view of the marriage plot whereby the focus in wholly on the courtship process of a predominately affluent, white, heterosexual couple. By excising the roles of the older women, Mrs. Jennings, Miss Bates, and Mrs. …

Acoustic Scattering And Radiation Response Of Circular Hexagonal And Auxetic Honeycomb Shell Structures, Vaibhav Iyer

All Theses

Sandwich panels with honeycomb cores are used in many engineering applications because of their high strength to weight ratio, vibration isolation and sound transmission loss characteristics. Previous studies indicate that such sandwich structures with auxetic honeycomb cores (negative in-plane Poisson's ratio) can have a higher sound transmission loss compared to a regular hexagonal honeycomb core structure. In this study, sound scattering and acoustic radiation characteristics of sandwich structures with hexagonal and auxetic cores arranged in a circular pattern interacting with exterior acoustic domains of both air and water have been investigated using finite element analysis. A novel in-plane honeycomb geometry …

Ecohydrological Function Of Lower Coastal Plain Bioretention Cells In South Carolina, Jessica Palazzolo

All Theses

Flooding and stormwater control is a critical issue in coastal South Carolina because of shallow water table elevation, topography and rapid urbanization in the region. A best management practice (BMP) using low impact design (LID) principles known as a bioretention cell (BRC) is gaining popularity for stormwater management. Five BRCs in four landscape positions (well-drained uplands, tidal-proximal, poorly-drained-uplands, and floodplain) were instrumented for microclimate, soil moisture, and water table elevation for hydraulic efficiency and for water quality measurements. Three BRCs did not have an overflow outlets, one BRC (floodplain) employed an underdrain system, and one BRC (tidal proximal) had an …

Evaluating The Changing Competitive Landscape Of Major League Baseball: The Eye Test., Nick Foley

All Theses

Americans oldest past time, baseball, has turned into a multi- billion dollar industry under Major League Baseball alone. Baseball is an entertainment industry that is driven by putting a profitable, entertaining, and competitive product on the field to draw the fans to the games or televisions. However, in the late 90’s, claims of a lack of competitive balance due to large market team spending became loud and widespread. An uncompetitive and unentertaining product would clearly cut into the profits of Major League Baseball. This was a fact that Bud Selig was well aware of when he commissioned the Blue Ribbon …

Anaerobic And Aerobic Biodegradation Of The Oil Dispersant Components 1,2-Propanediol And 2-Butoxyethanol In Seawater, Benjamin Rhiner

All Theses

Oil spills are a recurring issue associated with fossil fuel consumption. The largest accidental oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry was the Deepwater Horizon explosion and seafloor well blowout, where the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank, allowing the well to gush uncontrolled from April 20, 2010, until it was capped on July 15, 2010, releasing an estimated 210,000,000 gallons of oil. Oil dispersants were used in unprecedented quantities during the cleanup response to the spill with a total of 1,840,000 gallons of the dispersant COREXIT being applied. The goal of this research was to evaluate …

Identifying The Effects Of Narcissistic Leadership On Employee Job Satisfaction: A Study Within The Accounting Profession, Susan Shurden

All Dissertations

Narcissism is a personality disorder now identified in professionals in both education and business. The disorder is diagnosed when an individual possesses five of nine characteristics listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders/ (fourth edition, text revision version). Narcissism is prevalent in most successful leaders and is both destructive and constructive. The focus of this Dissertation is on the destructive characteristics and how narcissistic leadership affects job satisfaction among employees within the accounting profession.

Application Of Modern Statistical Tools To Solving Contemporary Economic Problems: Evaluation Of The Regional Agricultural Campaign Impact And The Usda Forecasting Efforts, Ran Xie

All Dissertations

The research is comprised with three studies to implement statistical tools for examining two economic issues: the impact of a regional agricultural campaign on participating restaurants and efforts of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecasting reports in agricultural commodity markets. The first study examined how various components of the Certified South Carolina campaign are valued by participating restaurants. A choice experiment was conducted to estimate the average willingness to pay (WTP) for each campaign component using a mixed logit model. Three existing campaign components--Labeling, Multimedia Advertising, and the 'Fresh on the Menu' program were found to have a significant positive …

Clemson University Libraries 2014 Annual Report, Kay Wall, Amber Day

Publications

This report details the 2013-2014 fiscal year for the Clemson University Libraries. Although the Libraries were met with great changes during the year, there were many important achievements and highlights as well, such as the establishment of TigerPrints, Clemson’s institutional repository, the construction of the Cooper Digital Studio, and the reorganization of the Libraries’ units and naming of new unit heads.

Understanding Public Perceptions About Beach Nesting Shorebirds And Habitat Management On Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Marla Hamilton

All Dissertations

Coastline habitats along the eastern seaboard of North America serve as prime locations for beachfront development and consumptive and non-consumptive recreational opportunities. Many of these areas are also globally important nesting and wintering areas for threatened and endangered shorebirds (primarily species belonging to the order Charadriiformes). Across the span of their hemispheric ranges, shorebirds face significant threats due to increases habitat loss, human disturbance, and illegal hunting practices. With coastline use increasing human-wildlife interactions, positive public input and interaction is needed to mitigate negative consequences to wildlife. Although many techniques have been employed to discourage beach users from practicing recreational …

Synthesis, Design, And Environmental Fate Of Metallic Nanoparticles, Ashley E. Hart

All Dissertations

Rational design of nanoparticle surface chemistry offers the ability to control nanoparticle characteristics such as size, polydispersity, shape, dispersibility in various solvents, functionality and end fate. Ligand exchange has proved to be is a versatile method for modifying the surface of plasmonic nanoparticles. Ligand exchange has provided a “green” alternative to traditional biphasic syntheses that require large amounts of phase transfer catalysts. Ligand exchange can also be used to reduce the amount of post synthesis processing and waste when it is conducted on nanoparticles that have been synthesized with a method that affords control over nanoparticle size and polydispersity. Ligand …

Understanding Female Engineering Enrollment: Explaining Choice With Critical Engineering Agency, Allison F. Godwin

All Dissertations

One path to increasing the diversity of the engineering workforce is to understand the affective self-beliefs of women who choose engineering and how those beliefs change over time. By understanding these self-beliefs, educators can help to empower women to identify with engineering and see its potential to make change in their world. Rigorous research in this area is needed and could have significant positive impact on the engineering workforce. This research builds on critical agency theory by validating and refining the frame-work of Critical Engineering Agency (CEA), though which students’ interest in engineering is enhanced when they see opportunities to …

Chiasmic Rhetoric: Alan Turing Between Bodies And Words, Patricia Fancher

All Dissertations

This Dissertation analyzes the life and writing of inventor and scientist Alan Turing in order to identify and theorize chiasmic relations between bodies and texts. Chiasmic rhetoric, as I develop throughout the Dissertation, is the dynamic processes between materials and discourses that interact to construct powerful rhetorical effect, shape bodies, and also compose new knowledges. My research here extends our knowledge of the rhetoric of science by demonstrating the ways that Alan Turing's embodied experiences shape his rhetoric. Turing is an unusual figure for research on bodily rhetoric and embodied knowledge. He is often associated with disembodied knowledge and as …

Development And Application Of A Nostalgia Scale For Sport Tourism: A Multilevel Approach, Heetae Cho

All Dissertations

Nostalgia is best described as a sentimental and bittersweet yearning for a positive and pleasant past, particularly when juxtaposed with an unsatisfying present and uncertain future. One's positive memories surely influence the evocation of nostalgia, and an individual's negative feelings for the present or future are also related to nostalgia, since a person cannot return to the past. In other words, both positive and negative feelings are associated with nostalgia, and it is called a bittersweet emotion. In many cases, people are influenced by their past memories when they decide to attend sports events. As a result, individuals have their …

Novel Optical Microresonators For Sensing Applications, Hanzheng Wang

All Dissertations

Optical microresonators have been proven as an effective means for sensing applications. The high quality (Q) optical whispering gallery modes (WGMs) circulating around the rotationally symmetric structures can interact with the local environment through the evanescent field. The high sensitivity in detection was achieved by the long photon lifetime of the high-Q resonator (thus the long light-environment interaction path). The environmental variation near the resonator surface leads to the effective refractive index change and thus a shift at the resonance wavelength. In this Dissertation, we present our recent research on the development of new optical microresonators for sensing applications. Different …

A Biophysical Understanding Of The Applications And Implications Of Nanomaterials, Nicholas Geitner

All Dissertations

The last few decades have seen an explosion in the study and application of nanomaterials that continues to grow at a dizzying pace. Despite exciting applications in nano-enabled electronics, materials, medicine, and environmental remediation, an understanding of the interactions of these materials with natural materials and systems and the resulting implications lags severely behind. The purpose of this Dissertation is to illuminate these interactions as well as develop novel environmental applications from a biophysical perspective. Following an introduction and literature review in Chapter 1, Chapters 2-4 will explore the application of dendritic polymers as novel and biocompatible oil dispersants for …

Passivation And Functionalization Of Conjugated Polymer Nanoparticles With Head Group Modified Phospholipids And Proteins, Prakash Kandel

All Dissertations

Conjugated polymer nanoparticles (CPNs) possess important characteristics such as high fluorescence brightness, reasonable photostability, and non-toxicity. These properties allow the use of CPNs in fluorescence based cellular and biological applications including cellular labeling, imaging, biosensing, and single particle tracking. To realize the broad applications of CPNs, it is required that CPNs possess functionality to conjugate a recognition moiety and maintain colloidal stability in biological media. In the following Dissertation, we have prepared functionalized CPNs by surface passivation with head group- functionalized poly (ethylene glycol) lipids and proteins. We studied the colloidal stability of CPNs in biological media and investigated their …

Designing For Understanding: Helping Older Adults Understand Over-The-Counter Medication Information, Aqueasha Martin

All Dissertations

This research is motivated by some of the challenges faced by the healthcare community in communicating health information to the public and the potential for user-centered technology design to address some of these limitations. Each year, thousands die or are injured due to adverse-drug events due to both prescription and over-the-counter medications. The integration of technology has improved the incidence rate for adverse-drug events due to prescription medications. Similarly, personal health records and other consumer-based health applications have been shown to be beneficial for helping individuals manage their health. Despite this growing body of research, little to no research has …

Evaluation Of A Mycorrhizal-Like Fungus, Piriformospora Indica, On Floriculture Crops, Allison Justice

All Dissertations

Piriformospora indica is a fungal endophyte, often called an arbuscular mycorrhizal-like fungus, that has been shown to provide benefits to plant symbionts by increasing nutrient uptake, biomass production, flower number, and disease resistance in a wide range of plant hosts. Research was carried out to investigate the ability of P. indica to improve plant production in floriculture crops. The first objective was to determine the optimal environmental conditions for growing P. indica in pure culture. Environmental conditions were optimized to produce the maximum chlamydospores for inoculum preparation (Chapter 1). These findings were used in the remaining chapters to prepare inocula …

Projections Of Future Us Design Wind Speeds Due To Climate Change For Estimating Hurricane Losses, Fangqian Liu

All Dissertations

Hurricane is among the most dangerous and costliest natural hazards that affect the coastal environment of the United States (U.S.) every year. Hurricane activities have been observed to change in many aspects since the last century including the changes in both intensity and annual storm frequency. The extent to which aspect of climate change contributes to the variation in hurricane activities from long-term historical statistics is still not clearly understood at this point. This study examines the impacts of two climate change effects (change in annual storm frequency and sea surface temperature) on future U.S. design wind speeds for the …

Mechanisms And Reversal Of Elastin Specific Medial Arterial Calcification, Yang Lei

All Dissertations

There are two distinctive types of vascular calcification: atherosclerotic intimal calcification (AIC) and elastin specific medial arterial calcification (MAC). AIC occurs in the context of atherosclerosis, associated with lipids, macrophages, and vascular smooth muscle cells; whereas, MAC can exist independently of atherosclerosis and is associated with elastin and vascular smooth muscle cells. The work presented here focuses on the mechanisms and reversal of MAC. MAC, termed as Monckeberg's sclerosis, is a type of vascular calcification disease mostly occurs as linear deposits along elastic lamellae. Vascular calcification, including medial calcification, is a strong predictor of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Currently the …

A Comparison Of Adolescents' Digital And Print Reading Experiences: Does Mode Matter?, Heather J. Mccrea-Andrews

All Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed-methods research study was to investigate the comprehension and motivation of 36, sixth-grade students reading moderately challenging text under two conditions: Nook or book. Using a Sequential Explanatory Design model, quantitative data were collected prior to qualitative data collection (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011). A Matched Pairs Design model (Hinkle, Wiersma, & Jurs, 2003) was employed for the quantitative portion of the study with 18 participants randomly assigned to the Nook group and 18 participants randomly assigned to the book group. Nook group participants were instructed to use the following electronic features during reading: highlighting, note …

Incorporating Physics-Based Patterns Into Geophysical And Geostatistical Estimation Algorithms, Erasmus Kofi Oware

All Dissertations

Geophysical imaging systems are inherently non-linear and plagued with the challenge of limited data. These drawbacks make the solution non-unique and sensitive to small data perturbations; hence, regularization is performed to stabilize the solution. Regularization involves the application of a priori specification of the target to modify the solution space in order to make it tractable. However, the traditionally applied regularization model constraints are independent of the physical mechanisms driving the spatiotemporal evolution of the target parameters. To address this limitation, we introduce an innovative inversion scheme, basis-constrained inversion, which seeks to leverage advances in mechanistic modeling of physical phenomena …

Heterotrophic Culture Of Microalgae Using Biodiesel Derived Glycerol, Karthik Gopalakrishnan

All Dissertations

Algae-based technologies are fast growing and the growing demand for sustainable technologies is evident from the growing energy demand and global warming. Microalgae culturing for higher lipid contents have been a hot topic of intense discussion in the past years. Crude glycerol, a byproduct from biodiesel production seems to be an attractive feedstock for microbial cultivation and crude glycerol has been proven as a good alternative feedstock for cultivation of Chlorella protothecoides. The effect of impurities present in the crude glycerol is important to develop a method for high-density cultivation of microalgae to increase the commercialization potential of algae systems. …

Platform Technologies To Advance Clinically Relevant Tissue Engineered Heart Valve Products, Leslie Neil Sierad

All Dissertations

Diseased heart valves are commonly replaced by mechanical, bioprosthetic, or allograft heart valves. These replacements provide major improvements in cardiac function and quality of life, but have significant limitations and eventually require surgical replacement within 15-20 years. These risks are particularly prominent in pediatric patients and young adults. The field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, which combines scaffolds and cells, holds great promise in developing living replacement heart valves that would self-repair and grow in size along with the growing children.

The long-term goal of this project is to generate living, tissue-engineered heart valves from biological scaffolds and autologous …

Static And Dynamic In Vitro Testing Of Estrogen Coated Balloons, Adam Metzger

All Theses

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Atherosclerosis is the main contributing factor for CVD. Current treatment methods for atherosclerosis include balloon angioplasty and stent implantation, which both have drawbacks associated with them. Balloon angioplasty shows restenosis in 3-6 months after deployment in 25-50% of patients. Bare metal stents have all the risks associated with implanting a medical device in a blood contacting area along with restenosis due to neointimal hyperplasia and stent fracture. In coronary arteries, drug-eluting stents (DES) have been shown to be very safe and effective with a very low percentage of …

Is It Culturally Appropriate? Evaluation Efforts For Measuring The Cultural Appropriateness In Nutrition Education Programs Targeting The Hispanic Population, Andrea Aguilar Corrales

All Theses

Background: In the United States, nearly 70% of the population is overweight. The U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey says Hispanics have the second prevalence of obesity, thus, increasing the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes in the largest minority group in the U.S. (U.S. Census, 2010). This requires effective and culturally appropriate interventions to promote healthy lifestyles. (WHO, 2003). Objective: The purpose of this study was to design and pilot-test a culturally appropriate tool to assure the nutrition information provided to the Hispanic population is appropriate. Design: The research design consisted of a triangulation of methods …

Clemson Trustees Minutes, 2014 July 18, Clemson University Board Of Trustees

Minutes

No abstract provided.

Potential Susceptibility Of Canna Flaccida And Two Canna Hybrids To Five Species Of Phytophthora, Kristin Van Kampen

All Theses

The costs and need for clean water are increasing for greenhouse, nursery, and agricultural businesses. Runoff from irrigated agriculture and specialty crops also can take a toll on the surrounding environment, because irrigation runoff water can contain high amounts of nutrients, contaminants, and plant pathogens. To assuage the pollution contributed to runoff water and reduce the overall volume of water used, nurseries are starting to reuse irrigation runoff water. For this to be possible, the water first should be treated before reuse. Constructed wetlands are a biological treatment option that employs vegetation to collect, filter, and store runoff water. Some …