Digital Commons Network^™

Temperature Transient Analysis For Bounded Oil Reservoir Under Depletion Drive, Yilin Mao, Mehdi Zeidouni

Faculty Publications

The significant pressure and temperature signals at wellbores associated with hydrocarbon production can be very useful for reservoir characterization and production analysis purposes. Temperature transient analysis is emerging partly due to the advancement of the downhole temperature monitoring system. Among different flow regimes encountered during the production of a vertical well, the long-lasting boundary dominated flow is crucial since most oil in conventional reservoirs are recovered during this period. The production induced temperature response behaves transient for boundary dominated pressure response and can be analyzed for reservoir property estimation. In this work, we derive a novel temperature transient analytical solution …

Ultrafast And Nonlinear Spectroscopy Of Nanomaterials, Rami Anthony Khoury

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Ultrafast and nonlinear spectroscopies are implemented in the investigation of excited-state dynamics and structural properties of materials and nanomaterials. In the first study, the excited-state dynamics of size-dependent colloidal TiO₂-Au nanocomposites are investigated using ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy. The dynamics corresponding to the plasmon depletion band are characterized by electron-phonon and phonon-phonon coupling lifetimes that are observed to be independent of the gold nanocluster shell thickness. The excited-state dynamics corresponding to the interband transition of gold is also spectrally overlapped with the interfacial electron transfer lifetime, which is shown to decrease as the nanocluster shell thickness increases. In …

Mymathlab Educational Intervention To Enhance Student Performance In Calculus I At Historically Black Colleges And Universities, Sheila Duplechain Derouen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

According to the Obama Administration, we need a workforce that is going to be STEM ready because this is the only way that the U.S. will be able to compete on a global level with other nations. Louisiana will demand a total of 66,250 STEM jobs by 2018, up from 61,610 in 2008, according to Georgetown University (Carnevale, Smith, & Melton, 2014). By 2020, sixty-five percent of the nation’s jobs will require post-secondary education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the attrition rate between first- and second-year college students is 24.5% (2017).

The purpose of this study is …

“All Of Our Skinfolk Ain’T Our Kinfolk;” A Triangulation Study Of The Impact Of Black Racial Identity On The Discourse Of Media Practitioners’ Coverage Of Social Justice, Political And Celebrity News, Gheni Nicole Platenburg

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Since its inception, in 1827, the black press worked to “plead [its] own cause.”[i] Following the 1968 Kerner Commission report, white newsrooms desegregated, and the number of black newsrooms sharply declined. Black journalists transitioning to the white press faced new editorial and psychological challenges.

Today’s black press functions as a shell of its former self, creating a vacancy for media that represent the needs and interests of the black community. Mainstream cable news programs possibly provide a solution to this void -- black journalists and pundits. Using a triangulation approach, this dissertation explores this possibility by examining the impact …

Mathematics Course For Elementary Teachers In An Alternate Certification Pathway, Rachael Cramer Williams

LSU Master's Theses

In the current alternate certification program for elementary teachers at McNeese State University, students receive course work from only one of the elementary mathematics methods courses required in the traditional certification program. To assure that candidates in the alternate path learn all the math they need, I have created a course that combines the most important concepts from the two courses in one. In this thesis I will describe how the new course was designed, present an outline of the course, detail the content at the unit level and provide a template for the final exam.

On Working From Within: Understanding Self And Story, Bruce Parker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Curriculum theory explores teaching and learning both in and out of schools. This research continues to engage with teachers and students as complex individuals whose identities and experiences influence their education and their approaches to teaching and learning. This research examines questions of self and story using autobiographical and autoethnographic methods. The project begins with an overview of some of the challenges public education and teachers have met with in the past two decades. One outcome of those challenges is control of the curriculum and classroom time has increasingly been taken away from students and teachers and given to administrators …

Nmr Structural Investigation Of Chlamydial Protein Complex And Lysine Glycomimetic For Drug Design, Abigael Chebichiy Songok

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Research and design of drugs for treatment against microbial infections require the study of pathogenic proteins involved during infection and replication. Drugs can be designed to interfere with the interaction network of these pathogenic proteins and inhibit the infection process. Determination of the structure and ligands of the target proteins in microbes is essential for designing mechanistic-based drugs. Two Chlamydia proteins involved in host cell invasion were investigated in this study. The goal is to identify amino acids involved at the binding interface of Chlamydia chaperon proteins Scc1 and Scc4 by solution NMR spectroscopy. This information will give a lead …

Sell Yourself: Building A Foundational Structure Around An Institution's Position In The College Application Process, Brock Thomas Adams

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The act of persuasion, specifically in the context of higher education recruiting, lacks both a breadth and depth of research. This could be due to economic trends inevitably promoting college attendance for high school seniors. With the recent influx of both online education, as well as for-profit institutions, there has been a shift in the approach to recruiting potential students to enroll at affiliated institutions each year. This study took a qualitative, grounded theory approach to understand both the intended persuasive strategies conceived by participating four-year Universities in the state of Utah, as well as the actual messages delivered to …

Characterizing Cytoplasmic Maturation And Improving Competence Of Bovine In Vitro Matured Oocytes, Brittany Alanna Foster

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

As the necessity to improve in vitro embryo production efficiency is ever increasing, so too is the prerequisite obligation to improve oocyte competence. The ability of an oocyte to successfully produce a viable embryo requires that it both completes meiotic maturation and synchronously achieves cytoplasmic competence; an encompassing term that refers to the oocytes correct accumulation and storage of mRNAs, proteins and factors as well as the development and reorganization of organelles and the cytoskeleton. The current research was designed to analyze those methods that go into oocyte collection and pre-maturation handling to determine if there are ways to ensure …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Polyaniline Agglomerates And Polyaniline Nanoparticles To Use As Printed Sensors To Detect Spoilage Of Catfish During Refrigerated Storage, Vashti Martae Campbell

LSU Master's Theses

There is growing interest in the development of sensors contained in packaging for seafood that are applicable at the consumer level to monitor freshness in a non-destructive manner. Total volatile basic nitrogen (TVB-N) analysis indicates the freshness of seafood. TVB-N analysis is sensitive to the spoilage compounds comprised of ammonia, trimethylamine, dimethylamine, and biogenic amines commonly found in seafood and whose concentration increases when spoilage microbial growth occurs. However, TVB-N analysis is laborious and is not suitable for use at the consumer level. Polyaniline (PANI) is a polymer that may be used as a sensor for detecting TVB-N in seafood. …

Modeling And Analysis Of Thermal Effects On A Fractured Wellbore During Lost Circulation And Wellbore Strengthening Processes, Ze Wang

LSU Master's Theses

To successfully prevent fracture propagation and combat lost circulation, a thorough understanding of the stress state in the near-wellbore region with fractures is imperative. One important factor that is not yet fully understood is how temperature variation during lost circulation affects pre-existing or newly initiated fractures. To address this problem, a 3D finite element analysis was conducted in this study to simulate the transport processes and state of stresses in the near-wellbore region during mud invasion into fractures. To take the thermal effects into account, a thermo-poro-elasticity model was coupled with flow and heat transfer processes. This study included a …

Integration Of Cuda Processing Within The C++ Library For Parallelism And Concurrency (Hpx), Patrick Diehl, Madhavan Seshadri, Thomas Heller, Hartmut Kaiser

Faculty Publications

Experience shows that on today's high performance systems the utilization of different acceleration cards in conjunction with a high utilization of all other parts of the system is difficult. Future architectures, like exascale clusters, are expected to aggravate this issue as the number of cores are expected to increase and memory hierarchies are expected to become deeper. One big aspect for distributed applications is to guarantee high utilization of all available resources, including local or remote acceleration cards on a cluster while fully using all the available CPU resources and the integration of the GPU work into the overall programming …

How Do New Media Environments Influence Consumer Responses To Advertising? A Meta-Analytic Approach To Ad Avoidance, A-Reum Jung

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study aims to a) identify a comprehensive list of the antecedents and consequences of ad avoidance, b) examine how strongly they relate to ad avoidance, and c) investigate how those relationships differ across media formats. In order to fulfill these purposes, two studies (a meta-analysis and an online survey) were conducted. The meta-analysis yielded 52 antecedents and 7 consequences. Ad-related perception, ad tactics, personal characteristics, ad exposure conditions, personal experiences, and demographic information were major categories of antecedents. Decreased cognitive abilities to recall and recognize ad messages were primary consequences of advertising avoidance. In addition, the survey found that …

Malleilactone Is A Burkholderia Pseudomallei Virulence Factor Regulated By Antibiotics And Quorum Sensing, Jennifer R. Klaus, Jacqueline Deay, Benjamin Neuenswander, Wyatt Hursh, Zhe Gao, Tiffany Bouddhara, Todd D. Williams, Justin Douglas, Kyle Monize, Patricia Martins, Charlotte Majerczyk, Mohammad R. Seyedsayamdost, Blake R. Peterson, Mario Rivera, Josephine R. Chandler

Faculty Publications

© 2018 American Society for Microbiology. Burkholderia pseudomallei, the causative agent of melioidosis, encodes almost a dozen predicted polyketide (PK) biosynthetic gene clusters. Many of these are regulated by LuxR-I-type acyl-homoserine (AHL) quorum-sensing systems. One of the PK gene clusters, the mal gene cluster, is conserved in the close relative Burkholderia thailandensis. The B. thailandensis mal genes code for the cytotoxin malleilactone and are regulated by a genetically linked LuxR-type transcription factor, MalR. Although AHLs typically interact with LuxR-type proteins to modulate gene transcription, the B. thailandensis MalR does not appear to be an AHL receptor. Here, we characterize the …

Louisiana Agriculture Summer, 2018, Lsu Agcenter

Louisiana Agriculture

No abstract provided.

Synthesis And In Vitro Pdt Evaluation Of New Porphyrins Containing Meso-Epoxymethylaryl Cationic Groups, Jaqueline Carneiro, Alan Gonçalves, Zehua Zhou, Kaitlin E. Griffin, Nichole E.M. Kaufman, Maria Da Graça Henriques Vicente

Faculty Publications

© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Objectives: Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is an effective cancer treatment that uses photosensitizers, light, and oxygen to destroy malignant cells. Porphyrins, and in particular the cationic derivatives, are the most investigated photosensitizers for PDT. In this context, it is important to study new methodologies to develop efficient cationic photosensitizers for use in PDT. Materials and Methods: New porphyrins bearing cationic epoxymethylaryl groups were synthesized and characterized. Their cellular uptake, intracellular localization, and phototoxicity were evaluated in human HEp2 cells, and compared with their methylated analogs. Results: All cationic porphyrins were efficient generators of singlet oxygen, with …

Natively Oxidized Amino Acid Residues In The Spinach Cytochrome B6 F Complex, Ryan M. Taylor, Larry Sallans, Laurie K. Frankel, Terry M. Bricker

Faculty Publications

© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature. The cytochrome b6f complex of oxygenic photosynthesis produces substantial levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS). It has been observed that the ROS production rate by b6f is 10–20 fold higher than that observed for the analogous respiratory cytochrome bc1 complex. The types of ROS produced (O2•−, 1O2, and, possibly, H2O2) and the site(s) of ROS production within the b6f complex have been the subject of some debate. Proposed sources of ROS have included the heme bp, PQp•− (possible sources for O2•−), the Rieske iron–sulfur cluster (possible source of O2•− and/or …

An Evaluation Of College Student Attitudes Toward Gay Adoption, Cassandra Chaney Phd, Le'brian Patrick

Faculty Publications

Given the increasing debate regarding same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption, few studies to date have examined college student attitudes regarding this topic. This qualitative study explores the sentiments of 31 college students from a large university in the southern region of the country towards gay adoption before and after viewing the documentary We Are Dad (2005). The study allowed students to provide their level of agreement or disagreement with the statements provided by respondents on a public blog site who debated both sides of this issue. In addition, students responded to the following two questions during two points in time: …

What Can Mixed-Species Flock Movement Tell Us About The Value Of Amazonian Secondary Forests? Insights From Spatial Behavior, Karl Mokross, Jonathan R. Potts, Cameron L. Rutt, Philip C. Stouffer

Faculty Publications

The value of secondary forest for rain forest species remains an important question for conservation in the 21st century. Here, we describe the spatial behavior of understory mixed-species flocks in a heterogeneous landscape in central Amazonia. Understory mixed-species flocks represent a diverse, highly organized component of the rich Amazonian avifauna. We recorded movements within 26 flock home ranges in primary forest, secondary forest, interfaces between forest types, and forest fragments. We describe frequency and movement orientation in relation to forest edges, movement patterns and proportion of use between secondary and primary forest, the relation between home range sizes and vegetation …

Relative Contributions Of Halobacteriovorax And Bacteriophage To Bacterial Cell Death Under Various Environmental Conditions, Huan Chen, Edward A. Laws, Julio L. Martin, Timkhite Kulu Berhane, Paul A. Gulig, Henry N. Williams

Faculty Publications

The role of protists and bacteriophages in bacterial predation in the microbial food web has been well studied. There is mounting evidence that Bdellovibrio and like organisms (BALOs) also contribute to bacterial mortality and, in some cases, more so than bacteriophages. A full understanding of the ecologic function of the microbial food web requires recognition of all major predators and the magnitude of each predator’s contribution. Here we investigated the contribution of Halobacteriovorax, one of the BALOs, and bacteriophages when incubated with their common prey, Vibrio vulnificus, in a seawater microcosm. We observed that Halobacteriovorax was the greatest responder to …

Stabilization Of Miscible Viscous Fingering By A Step Growth Polymerization Reaction, S. Stewart, D. Marin, M. Tullier, J. Pojman, E. Meiburg, P. Bunton

Faculty Publications

© 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature. Abstract: Fingering is a hydrodynamic instability that occurs when a more mobile fluid displaces a fluid of lower mobility. When the primary source of the mobility difference is viscosity, the instability is termed viscous fingering. Viscous fingering is often, though not always, undesirable in industrial processes, particularly secondary petroleum recovery. Linear stability analysis by Hejazi et al. has indicated that the production of a non-monotonic viscosity profile can stabilize the interface. Herein, we use step-growth polymerization at the interface between two miscible monomers as a model system. In particular, a dithiol …

Emotional Judges And Unlucky Juveniles, Ozkan Eren, Naci Mocan

Faculty Publications

Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a US state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. We find that unexpected losses increase sentence lengths assigned by judges during the week following the game. Unexpected wins, or losses that were expected to be close contests ex ante have no impact. The effects of these emotional shocks are asymmetrically borne by black defendants. The impact of upset losses on sentence lengths is larger for defendants if their cases are handled …

Self-Regulation Of Emotional Responses To Zika: Spiral Of Fear, James Price Dillard, Chun Yang, Ruobing Li

Faculty Publications

Fear of infectious disease can create a variety of problems not the least of which is fear itself. An important question is how individuals attempt to manage their fear. The appearance of Zika in the U.S. presented an opportunity to examine this issue in a consequential natural context. Beginning nine days after the W.H.O. declared Zika a world health crisis, two-waves of survey data were collected from women ages 18–35 who were living in the Southern U.S. (N = 561). Most respondents (71%) used one or more emotion regulation strategies and a plurality (41%) utilized multiple strategies. Fear of Zika …

Dimensions Of Diversity In U.S. Arts Participation: Race-Ethnicity, Education, Genre Origins, And Means Of Broadcast Consumption, Nile Degray Patterson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Dimensions of Diversity in U.S. Arts Participation uses data from the 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts to investigate the following three research questions: (1) Does education’s association with visual and performing arts participation vary by race-ethnicity; (2) does visual and performing arts attendance amongst racial-ethnic groups differ depending upon a genre’s cultural roots; and (3) does education’s relationship to visual and performing arts consumption vary between traditional and non-traditional broadcast media? Major findings reveal that education has a more consistent positive association with the likelihood and diversity of visual and performing arts attendance for Whites than non-Whites. …

Endocannabinoid Metabolome Of Human Breast Milk, Adriana V. Gaitan Espinoza

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Human breast milk (HBM) is an extremely complex yet fascinating biofluid tailored to meet an infant’s nutritional requirements for development. Amongst the nutrients present in HBM, the long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFAs) are of high importance due to the pivotal role they play in infant cognitive and visual development, and growth. In addition, the LCPUFAs are precursors to endocannabinoids (EC) which are endogenous lipid mediators. EC exert metabolic responses including appetite and food intake regulation, and they have been identified to play a role in establishing the suckling response of the newborn that is needed to nurse. Thus, we aimed …

Numerical Convergence Of Nonlinear Nonlocal Continuum Models To Local Elastodynamics, Prashant K. Jha, Robert Lipton

Faculty Publications

We quantify the numerical error and modeling error associated with replacing a nonlinear nonlocal bond-based peridynamic model with a local elasticity model or a linearized peridynamic model away from the fracture set. The nonlocal model treated here is characterized by a double-well potential and is a smooth version of the peridynamic model introduced in the work of Silling. The nonlinear peridynamic evolutions are shown to converge to the solution of linear elastodynamics at a rate linear with respect to the length scale ε of nonlocal interaction. This rate also holds for the convergence of solutions of the linearized peridynamic model …

The Use Of Expansions To Increase The Mean Length Utterance Of Preschool Students, Kaitlyn Carley Geffen

LSU Master's Theses

Language is an important area of development addressed in preschool, as it is the foundation for literacy development and the way children express their thoughts and understandings. Mean length utterance (MLU) can be used as a measure of a child’s expressive language development. One intervention that has been used to increase MLU is expansion. Expansion is when an adult responds to a child’s utterance by expanding their sentence to form a more complete or complex sentence. This study used an Expansion Intervention to increase the MLU of preschool aged students. The subjects consisted of three preschool children attending a …

Risk Assessment Of Fall Armyworm Resistance To Transgenic Corn Containing Single Or Pyramided Bacillus Thuringiensis Genes, Ying Niu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (J.E. Smith), is a target pest of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) crops in North and South America. However, after more than two decades of the intense use of Bt crop technology, S. frugiperda has developed resistance to Bt corn in several countries. The objectives of this study were: 1) to characterize the inheritance and fitness costs of Cry1A.105 resistance in S. frugiperda; 2) to evaluate larval survival and plant injury of Cry1A.105-susceptibile, -resistant, and -heterozygous S. frugiperda populations on transgenic corn plants containing single or pyramided Bt genes; 3) to estimate the frequency of Cry2Ab2 …

Demonstration Of The Gas Assisted Gravity Drainage (Gagd) Process In Carbonate Rocks., Alok Jiteshkumar Shah

LSU Master's Theses

The Gas Assisted Gravity Drainage (GAGD) process was developed and patented by Dr. Rao at LSU in the early 2000s. The process involves the use of several existing or new vertical injection wells to inject gas and use the natural segregation of reservoir fluids from the density difference and the gravitational forces to displace the trapped oil and mobilize the oil downwards to be produced by a horizontal producing well. The GAGD process can be implemented as a secondary or tertiary oil recovery method. Several physical model experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the GAGD process for …

Heuristics For Client Assignment And Load Balancing Problems In Online Games, Shawn Michael Farlow

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have been very popular over the past decade. The infrastructure necessary to support a large number of players simultaneously playing these games raises interesting problems to solve. Since the computations involved in solving those problems need to be done while the game is being played, they should not be so expensive that they cause any noticeable slowdown, as this would lead to a poor player perception of the game. Many of the problems in MMOGs are NP-Hard or NP-Complete, therefore we must develop heuristics for those problems without negatively affecting the player experience as a …