Digital Commons Network^™

Interventions Of Waterjet Technology In Skin Incisions, Nadi Atalla

Dissertations

This research explores the use of waterjet (WJ) technology in performing skin incisions. The study defines the analytical relationships between the skin properties and the operating parameters of the WJ which include the skin thickness, its elastic modulus, the WJ pressure, the nozzle’s orifice diameter, its stand-off distance and the traverse speed of the WJ as well as the duration of applying the WJ pressure. An analytical model is developed to measure the depth incision of the skin, the water pressure and the water velocity, while using a WJ. Systemization and optimization models that determine the optimal operating parameters levels …

Statistical Machine Learning Methods For Mining Spatial And Temporal Data, Fei Tan

Dissertations

Spatial and temporal dependencies are ubiquitous properties of data in numerous domains. The popularity of spatial and temporal data mining has thus grown with the increasing prevalence of massive data. The presence of spatial and temporal attributes not only provides complementary useful perspectives, but also poses new challenges to the representation and integration into the learning procedure. In this dissertation, the involved spatial and temporal dependencies are explored with three genres: sample-wise, feature-wise, and target-wise. A family of novel methodologies is developed accordingly for the dependency representation in respective scenarios.

First, dependencies among discrete, continuous and repeated observations are studied …

Epitaxial Growth Of Iii-Nitride Nanostructures And Their Optoelectronic Applications, Moab Rajan Philip

Dissertations

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) using III-nitride nanowire heterostructures have been intensively studied as promising candidates for future phosphor-free solid-state lighting and full-color displays. Compared to conventional GaN-based planar LEDs, III-nitride nanowire LEDs exhibit numerous advantages including greatly reduced dislocation densities, polarization fields, and quantum-confined Stark effect due to the effective lateral stress relaxation, promising high efficiency full-color LEDs. Beside these advantages, however, several factors have been identified as the limiting factors for further enhancing the nanowire LED quantum efficiency and light output power. Some of the most probable causes have been identified as due to the lack of carrier confinement in …

N8- Polynitrogen Stabilized On Carbon-Based Supports As Metal-Free Electrocatalyst For Oxygen Reduction Reaction In Fuel Cells, Zhenhua Yao

Dissertations

The sluggish oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) kinetics at the cathode is one of the key factors limiting the performance of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). Platinum-based materials are the most widely studied catalysts for this ORR reaction while their large-scale practical application in fuel cells is hindered due to their scarcity and low stability. Therefore, highly active, low cost and robust non-Pt catalysts are being developed to overcome the drawbacks. Recently, a novel polynitrogen N8- (PN) stabilized on multiwall carbon nanotube (MWNT) was synthesized under ambient condition for the first time by our group and demonstrated high ORR activities. …

Surface-Enhanced Raman Detection Of Glucose On Several Novel Substrates For Biosensing Applications, Laila Saad Alqarni

Dissertations

The small normal Raman cross-section of glucose is considered to be a major challenge for its detection by Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) for medical applications. These applications include blood glucose level monitoring of diabetic patients and evaluation of patients with other medical conditions, since glucose is a marker for many human diseases. This dissertation focuses on Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering primarily for the detection of glucose. Some experiments also are carried out for the detection of the corresponding enzyme glucose oxidase that is used in electrochemical glucose sensors and in biofuel cells. This project explores the possibility of utilizing Surface …

Workload Allocation In Mobile Edge Computing Empowered Internet Of Things, Qiang Fan

Dissertations

In the past few years, a tremendous number of smart devices and objects, such as smart phones, wearable devices, industrial and utility components, are equipped with sensors to sense the real-time physical information from the environment. Hence, Internet of Things (IoT) is introduced, where various smart devices are connected with each other via the internet and empowered with data analytics. Owing to the high volume and fast velocity of data streams generated by IoT devices, the cloud that can provision flexible and efficient computing resources is employed as a smart "brain" to process and store the big data generated from …

Fouling And Aging In Membrane Filtration : Hybrid Afm-Based Characterization, Modelling And Reactive Membrane Design, Wanyi Fu

Dissertations

Membrane filtration has been extensively used in water and wastewater treatment, desalination, dairy making, and biomass/water separation. However, membrane fouling, aging and insufficient removal efficiency for dissolved organic matters remain major challenges for wider industrial applications. In order to tackle these challenges, this doctoral dissertation investigates mechanisms of membrane fouling and development of antifouling membrane filtration technologies. Specifically, four major research areas are explored: (i) nanoscale physicochemical characterization of the chemically modified polymeric membranes; (ii) quantitative modelling between membrane properties and membrane fouling and defouling kinetics; (iii) development of quantitative structure-activity relationships for membranes that undergo thermal and chemical aging …

Engineered Excipients Via Dry Particle Coating, Liang Chen

Dissertations

Excipients with good flowability, bulk density as well as compaction properties are desired for use in tableting since they play important roles in formulation development and processing, including, handling, mixing, feeding and compaction. However, it is often difficult to manufacture excipients that simultaneously possess all three desirable properties, particularly if their size is fine. In addition, it is desirable that the excipients promote direct compression of poorly compactable fine cohesive drug powders at sufficiently high drug loading, and not just achieve the desired high functional properties in placebo formulations. This dissertation aims to developed engineered excipients towards this unmet industry …

Temporal And Functional Cortical Aspects Related To Mirror Visual Feedback During Target-Directed Movement In Healthy And Stroke Individuals, Maryam Rohafza

Dissertations

Stroke is the leading cause of disability in the United States (American Heart Association, American Stroke Association) affecting 800,000 individuals annually (i.e., one person every 45 seconds). Therapy for stroke often uses repetitive task practice, which is difficult to perform for patients due to impairment. Mirror visual feedback (MVF) based rehabilitation uses the effect of observing the mirror reflection of volitional movement of one limb, to activate visuomotor brain areas that process movement of the opposite limb. In persons with hemiplegia due to stroke, exercising the less affected limb while observing its reflection, perceived by them as the motion of …

Tomato Puree Convective Heat Transfer Simulation Using Boussinesq Approximation, Matteo Fabbri

Theses

With the advance of new technologies, the food industries are requiring systems that allow to produce the desired products with faster rates at cheaper costs. In this case, the study was initiated with the purpose to better understand what happens inside a package containing tomato puree when this is heated above 343 K in a tunnel pasteurizer. If the fluid must reach the thermal and microbiological condition of “pasteurization”, the system must guarantee that the temperature (around 343° Kelvin) is kept for a certain time allowing to pasteurize even the cooler package’s fluid-particle. The faster the system can heat the …

A Study Of Machine Learning And Deep Learning Models For Solving Medical Imaging Problems, Fadi G. Farhat

Theses

Application of machine learning and deep learning methods on medical imaging aims to create systems that can help in the diagnosis of disease and the automation of analyzing medical images in order to facilitate treatment planning. Deep learning methods do well in image recognition, but medical images present unique challenges. The lack of large amounts of data, the image size, and the high class-imbalance in most datasets, makes training a machine learning model to recognize a particular pattern that is typically present only in case images a formidable task.

Experiments are conducted to classify breast cancer images as healthy or …

Blind Source Separation Using Dictionary Learning Over Time-Varying Channels, Anushreya Ghosh

Theses

Distributed sensors observe radio frequency (RF) sources over flat-fading channels. The activity pattern is sparse and intermittent in the sense that while the number of latent sources may be larger than the number of sensors, only a few of them may be active at any particular time instant. It is further assumed that the source activity is modeled by a Hidden Markov Model. In previous work, the Blind Source Separation (BSS) problem solved for stationary channels using Dictionary Learning (DL). This thesis studies the effect of time-varying channels on the performance of DL algorithms. The performance metric is the probability …

Deep Morphological Neural Networks, Yucong Shen

Theses

Mathematical morphology is a theory and technique applied to collect features like geometric and topological structures in digital images. Determining suitable morphological operations and structuring elements for a give purpose is a cumbersome and time-consuming task. In this paper, morphological neural networks are proposed to address this problem. Serving as a non-linear feature extracting layers in deep learning frameworks, the efficiency of the proposed morphological layer is confirmed analytically and empirically. With a known target, a single-filter morphological layer learns the structuring element correctly, and an adaptive layer can automatically select appropriate morphological operations. For high level applications, the proposed …

The Use Of Electrical Resistance Tomography To Determine The Minimum Agitation Speed For Solids Suspension In Stirred Tank Reactors, Baran Teoman

Theses

Njs, the minimum agitation speed needed to just suspend all the solid particles in a solid-liquid mixture stirred in an agitated vessel, is a critical parameter to properly operate industrial tanks in a large number of industrial operations. As a result, a significant literature on Njs is available. The oldest and the most common method to measure Njs experimentally is that of Zwietering’s (Chem. Eng. Sci., 1958, 8, 244-253), where Njs can be visually obtained by determining when the solids stay at the bottom of the tank for no more than 1-2 seconds before being swept away. Although this has …

A Comparative Study Of Russian Trolls Using Several Machine Learning Models On Twitter Data, Kannan Neten Dharan Kannan Neten Dharan

Theses

Ever since Russian trolls have been brought into light, their interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections has been monitored and studied thoroughly. These Russian trolls have fake accounts registered on several major social media sites to influence public opinions. Our work involves trying to discover patterns in these tweets and classifying them by using different machine learning approaches such as Support Vector Machines, Word2vec and neural network models, and then creating a benchmark to compare all the different models. Two machine learning models are developed for this purpose. The first one is used to classify any given specific tweet …

Glass Transition Temperature Of Particles For Drug Delivery, Yiqing Yang

Theses

Drug delivery plays an important role in targeted therapies and nanoparticles which can be used as drug carriers and it’s a frequently researched topic. Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA), a highly biocompatible polymer, has been used as a drug delivery vehicle in many studies. One of the challenges facing drug delivery particles is the problem of burst release which is when a large amount of the drug is suddenly released from the particle once it is placed in the body. This is generally undesirable as usually a slow and controlled release is preferred. The glass transition temperature has an effect on drug …

Ce 342-141: Geology, Rafal Wojcik

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ce 101-011: Civil Engineering Computer Aided Design, Stephanie Santos

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ene 262-142: Introduction To Environmental Engineering, Ashish Borgaonkar

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ce 260-141: Civil Engineering Methods, Stephanie Santos

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ce 494-142: Civil Engineering Design I, Joseph Baladi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Mech 237-141: Strength Of Materials, G. Milano

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Mech 236-111: Engineering Mechanics-Dynamics, Mohamed A. Mahgoub

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Mech 236-121: Engineering Mechanics-Dynamics, Mohamed A. Mahgoub

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ce 341-141: Soil Mechanics, Janitha Batagoda

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ce 200-141: Surveying, Allison Lapatka

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Mech 237-142: Strength Of Materials, Abdullah Shabarek

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ce 341a-142: Soil Mechanics Laboratory, Ehsan Mehryaar

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ce 332-001: Structural Analysis, Rajendra Navalurkar

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ce 432-002: Structural Steel Design, Ahmed Ibrahim

Civil and Environmental Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.