Digital Commons Network^™

Investigating Dataset Distinctiveness, Andrew Ulmer, Kent W. Gauen, Yung-Hsiang Lu, Zohar R. Kapach, Daniel P. Merrick

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Just as a human might struggle to interpret another human’s handwriting, a computer vision program might fail when asked to perform one task in two different domains. To be more specific, visualize a self-driving car as a human driver who had only ever driven on clear, sunny days, during daylight hours. This driver – the self-driving car – would inevitably face a significant challenge when asked to drive when it is violently raining or foggy during the night, putting the safety of its passengers in danger. An extensive understanding of the data we use to teach computer vision models – …

Determining The Optimal Traffic Opening Time Using Piezoelectric Sensors, Adlan Amran, Yen-Fang Su, Na Lu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) requires a reliable method of determining the early age quality of concrete to improve traffic opening time. We propose to develop an in-situ method that enables an accurate, efficient, and non-destructive health monitoring of concrete using the electromechanical impedance (EMI) technique coupled with a piezoelectric sensor named Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT). The test was conducted by mounting a PZT sensor on mortar samples. The PZT sensor was then excited by a voltage to track the strengthening of samples. The data obtained from the EMI technique was refined using the Root Mean Square Deviation (RMSD) …

Micro-Manipulation Using Learned Model, Matthew A. Lyng, Benjamin V. Johnson, David J. Cappelleri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Microscale devices can be found in applications ranging from sensors to structural components. The dominance of surface forces at the microscale hinders the assembly processes through nonlinear interactions that are difficult to model for automation, limiting designs of microsystems to primarily monolithic structures. Methods for modeling surface forces must be presented for viable manufacturing of devices consisting of multiple microparts. This paper proposes the implementation of supervised machine learning models to aid in automated micromanipulation tasks for advanced manufacturing applications. The developed models use sets of training data to implicitly model surface interactions and predict end-effector placement and paths that …

Expected Length Of The Longest Chain In Linear Hashing, Pongthip Srivarangkul, Hemanta K. Maji

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Hash table with chaining is a data structure that chains objects with identical hash values together with an entry or a memory address. It works by calculating a hash value from an input then placing the input in the hash table entry. When we place two inputs in the same entry, they chain together in a linear linked list. We are interested in the expected length of the longest chain in linear hashing and methods to reduce the length because the worst-case look-up time is directly proportional to it.

The linear hash function used to calculate hash value is defined …

An Automated Patternator System Development, Sanghun Shin, Huitaek Yun, Martin Byung-Guk Jun

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Spray patternation is a quantitative measurement of droplet properties such as size, density, and velocity within a spray. This process is required in industries involved in fuel injectors, thin film coating, agriculture, and consumer products in which faulty nozzles can lead to quality degradation. The patternator from En’Urga incorporate, a ring-shaped device that analyzes droplets through the laser sheets in the middle, is required to make such measurements, and some industries demand a large amount of injectors to be tested before engine assembly. As a result, the development of automated patternation system is paramount to reduce testing time of mass …

Identification Of Proximal And Isolated Aluminum Heteroatoms In Zeolites By Infrared Spectroscopy, Melanie A. Brunet Torres, Philip Kester, Rajamani Gounder

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

High demand for energy production and limited fossil fuel reserves are two factors that motivate intense research for new alternative energy resources. While we are still far from completely moving to renewable energy solutions, a new solution that replaces crude oil and coal with shale gas is currently under investigation. For this modern technology, new zeolite catalysts need to be developed for the conversion of light hydrocarbons gases to liquid transportation fuels. These catalysts are of special interest in the production of liquid fuels since they exhibit high reaction rates, molecular sieving properties and selectivity behavior. In this work, the …

Platinum-Gallium (Pt-Ga) Intermetallic Alloys For Propane Dehydrogenation, Brittany K. Roopnarine, Nicole J. Libretto, Johnny Zhuchen, Zhenwei Wu, Evan Wegener, Griffin Canning, Abhaya K. Datye, Jeffrey T. Miller

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Natural gas is a source of energy for the United States. The Center for Innovative Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR) plans to use shale gas extracted from shale rock formations as a bridge fuel to replace coal and oil while the US transitions to renewable energy like solar and wind. After methane, the largest components in shale gas are light alkanes such as ethane and propane. These can be catalytically converted to olefins, which can be further reacted to produce fuels, for example. Olefins from alkanes can be accomplished by dehydrogenation by promoted platinum alloys. This study compares the …

Experimental Validation Of A Numerical Phase Change Model For Microchannel Slug Flow Boiling, Christian J. Retter, Todd A. Kingston, Justin A. Weibel, Suresh V. Garimella

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Thermal management of high-power electronic devices continues to be a critical challenge. Flow boiling in microchannel heat sinks has been demonstrated to be an effective method for removing high heat fluxes from these devices owing to utilization of the latent heat of the fluid and the large surface area enhancement for heat exchange. However, microchannel flow boiling technologies have yet to be broadly implemented due to a lack of experimentally validated prediction and design tools. The goal of this study is to use high-fidelity experimental data to validate a previously developed numerical phase change model, to help enable physics-based prediction …

Investigation Of The Effects Of Solid-State Treatments On The Structure And Mobility Of Copper In Zeolites, Jiayang Wu, Laura Wilcox, Rajamani Gounder

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Zeolites are microporous, aluminosilicate catalysts that play an important role in industrial applications as well as studies for the fundamental understanding of catalysts for emerging reactions of interest. The introduction of aluminum into the zeolite lattice introduces a negative charge on the framework that can be balanced with extra-framework cations. The control of the aluminum distribution and the choice of charge balancing cations allows for the ability to tailor the active sites to facilitate a desired reaction. This research focuses on studying copper active sites in zeolites. Copper oxide was used as a copper precursor to introduce copper ions in …

Predicting And Optimizing Solar Cell Performance With Material/Surface Characteristics, Yiheng Zhu, Allison Perna, Peter Bermel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Renewable energy sources have begun replacing fossil fuels at the utility scale. In particular, photovoltaics has grown rapidly in recent years. To further improve solar technology in terms of cost and efficiency and promote adoption, researchers often seek material and device level advancements. Photovoltaic simulation tools can be utilized to predict device performance before fabrication and experimentation, streamline research processes, and interpret experimental results. Therefore, we developed ContourPV, which simulates various combinations of values of different device characteristics to optimize and predict photovoltaic performance. ContourPV sweeps the inputted range of values for each chosen device or layer characteristic and obtains …

Examining The Effects Of Amino And Thiolate Ligands On The Reactivity And Selectivity Of Palladium On Carbon In Hydrogenation Reactions, Eric Liu, Christina Li

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Heterogeneous catalysts are used widely by chemical and energy industries because they show high reactivity but often suffer from lack of selectivity. On the other hand, ligands are commonly used in homogeneous catalysts to control the reactivity and selectivity; however, the effects of the ligands on the steric and electronic properties of heterogeneous catalysts are less understood. We examine the effects of four different ligands: 1-adamantanethiol, 1-adamantylamine, 1-dodecanethiol, and 1-dodecylamine, for the commercial hydrogenation catalyst palladium on carbon. Hydrogenation reactions are used as a screening tool to see the behavior that the different catalysts exhibit in the presence of unsaturated …

Targeting Pro-Inflammatory Function Of Microglia Using Small Molecules To Combat Neurodegeneration, Gabrielle C. Williams, Priya Prakash, Gaurav Chopra

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Microglia are the brain’s resident immune cells that are responsible for maintaining homeostasis in healthy conditions. During injury or infection, resting microglia get activated and produce pro-inflammatory cytokines such as IL-1b, IL-1a, IL-6, etc. along with reactive oxygen species like nitric oxide (NO) to combat neuroinflammatory diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Inflammation is characterized by the activation of resident-immune cells in the brain called microglia that respond to the eat-me signals released by the toxic amyloid beta peptides as well as the dying neurons in the microenvironment. Recent studies have shown that activated microglia induce neuronal death by secreting …

Stability Of The Interface Between Two Immiscible Liquids During Injection Into A Tapered Hele-Shaw Cell, Zihao Lin, Ivan C. Christov, Daihui Lu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In the early twentieth century, petroleum and mining engineers noticed that water does not displace oil uniformly. This phenomenon, when water penetrates through oil, is now known as viscous fingering. This discovery and the following extensive research have contributed to enhancing oil recovery. In this paper, we describe a numerical study conducted on the stability of the interface between two immiscible liquids in converging and diverging Hele-Shaw cells with varying gradients. Hele-Shaw cells are narrow flow geometries that mimic the properties of a porous medium with fixed permeability. By using computational tools built on the OpenFOAM platform, the multiphase flow …

Developing A Machine Learning Tool To Optimize Thermal Transport, Adam Sandor Garrett, Xiulin Ruan Professor, Prabudhya Roy Chowdhurry

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

One of the largest problems facing the world today is energy. Not only does much of the world use non-renewable energy, but the majority of that energy is lost as waste heat. One area of study that aims to solve this problem is thermoelectrics. Thermoelectrics encompasses a wide range of methods and materials but this paper will only cover superlattice structures and how they can be used to convert waste heat into electrical energy. There arises a problem in this of what the best structure is. The method used to optimize the superlattice structure is a genetic algorithm. This method …

Does Stat5a Have An Effect On Bmal1 Levels In Mammary Epithelial Cells?, Clare E. Aduwari, Aridany Suarez-Trujillo, Karen I. Plaut, Theresa M. Casey

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The mammary gland is a very important organ for reproduction in mammals because it produces milk which serves as the primary source of nutrients for newly-born offspring. Previous studies suggest that its development is regulated by circadian clocks, biochemical oscillators that generate circadian rhythms (the body’s internal clock). The circadian system plays a major role in homeostasis, coordinating the body’s internal physiology and synchronizing it with the external environment. Our lab showed that levels of the BMAL1 protein, a core clock component, increased in the mammary gland at the onset of lactation. Treatment of mammary epithelial cells (HC11) with the …

Spatial And Temporal Storm Generation From A Stochastic View, Jiaxiang Ding, Josept D. Revuelta-Acosta, Engel Bernard

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Precipitation is one of the most important parameters in the study of hydrology and most of the research has been done on daily storm generation. Current weather generation models are used to replicate daily or monthly time resolution, which is not able to show the variability within one day or one month. This project deals with sub-daily storm generation with finer resolution and more accurate estimation, which also requires an independent storm separation method. And the Monte Carlo correlated multivariate simulation is applied to compute the variables. The description is essential for soil erosion and water quality research. Another reason …

Incorporating Collisions And Resistance Into The Transition From Field Emission To The Space Charge Regime, Samuel D. Dynako, Adam M. Darr, Allen L. Garner

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Advancements in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and microplasmas, particularly with respect to applications in combustion and biotechnology, motivate studies into microscale gas breakdown to enable safe system design and implementation. Breakdown at microscale deviates from that predicted by Paschen’s law due to field emission—the stripping of electrons from the cathode in the presence of strong surface field—and follows the Fowler-Nordheim (FN) law. As injected current increases at this length scale, electrons accumulate in the gap and FN electron emission becomes space charge limited, leading to the Child-Langmuir (CL) law at vacuum and the Mott-Gurney (MG) law at high pressure. While theoretical …

Effect Of Carbohydrates On The Gut Microbiome, Maciej Filar, Mohit S. Verma

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The microbiome within the gut is directly linked to biological processes within a person, influencing factors such as metabolism, signaling pathways, and available nutrients. Long term dieting is known to alter ecological conditions within the gut, allowing certain types of microbes to flourish. Therefore, the overall health of an individual is ultimately influenced by shifts in the microbial community state caused by persistent dieting. This study investigates the connection between diet and the microbiome and draws an understanding of how common carbohydrates in food can affect bacterial composition. Using KBase software, anaerobic bacterial growth was investigated for bacteria subject to …

A Divide-And-Conquer Approach To Syntax-Guided Synthesis, Peiyuan Shen, Xiaokang Qiu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Program synthesis aims to generate programs automatically from user-provided specifications. One critical research thrust is called Syntax-Guideds Synthesis. In addition to semantic specifications, the user should also provide a syntactic template of the desired program, which helps the synthesizer reduce the search space. The traditional symbolic approaches, such as CounterExample-Guided Inductive Synthesis (CEGIS) framework, does not scale to large search spaces. The goal of this project is to explore a compositional, divide-n-conquer approach that heuristically divides the synthesis task into subtasks and solves them separately. The idea is to decompose the function to be synthesized by creating a set of …

Real-Time Non-Contact Road Defect Detection Using Inexpensive Sensors, Zhao Xing Lim, Mohammad Jahanshahi, Tarutal Ghosh Mondal, Da Cheng, Shutao Wang, Mohammad K. Sweidan, Aanis Ahmad, Omar Hesham Abouhussein, Xi Chen

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Road defects such as potholes, humps, and road cracks have become one of the main concerns for road and traffic safety worldwide. Pavement defect detection is crucial to ensure road safety. However, current solutions to this problem are either too time-consuming or too expensive to be employed large-scale. We propose a novel approach which has the ability to autonomously detect potholes in real-time using cost-effective sensors. Inexpensive sensors are mounted on a vehicle and a deep learning algorithm is used to identify road defects. The detection system is paired with a GPS and positional sensors to map the location of …

Purdue Air Sense: A Methodology For Improving The Accuracy Of Ambient Aerosol Mass Concentration And Size Distribution Measurement With Low-Cost Optical Sensing Techniques, Rishabh Ramsisaria, Satya Sundar Patra, Brandon Emil Boor

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

There is a global lack of a means for monitoring air pollutant levels at a local level due to expensive and bulky instrument requirements. It is important to monitor toxic gas levels, as well as particulate matter levels, in the atmosphere to study their effects on human health and to further develop city- and community-level air pollution solutions. In this study, with the means of a Raspberry Pi, low-cost Alphasense Optical Particle Counter and gas sensors, and methodical calibration techniques, we built a portable 3-D printed module powered by clean electricity generated by an on-board Voltaic solar cell that measures …

Experimental Evaluation Of A Krypton Propellant Arrangement In A T-100-3 Hall-Effect Thruster, Adam Patel, Javier Cortina Fernandez, Justin Chow, Osvaldo Alejandro Martin, Alexey Shashurin

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Stationary Hall thrusters are electric, moderate-specific impulse propulsion systems developed in Russia. These devices manipulate electric and magnetic fields to expel ionized gas (plasma) components, resulting in thrust. The success of Hall-effect engines in USSR satellite-transfer missions quickly sparked western interest in the design. Extensive government and academic study commenced shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the technology was made available to the United States. The common SPT-100 model was the primary subject of such studies. Unfortunately, limited literature exists for rare and uncommon Hall thruster models. The T-100-3 stationary plasma thruster suffers from this gap; few …

Image Analysis Of A Vesicle To Calculate The Bending Modulus, Pheobe Appel, Charlie Lin, Vivek Narsimhan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The cell membrane is an essential component of living cells and the dynamics of the membrane will provide insight into how a biological cell reacts to mechanical strain. Membrane mechanics are important in a variety of cellular processes like secretion, trafficking, signaling, and storage. Giant unilamellar vesicles are a model system for cellular membranes since the major component of all membranes is a phospholipid bilayer. Giant unilamellar vesicles allow one to examine physicochemical processes that occur in all cellular membranes, such as fusion, budding, and fission in a more controlled fashion. Contour fluctuations of the vesicles are analyzed to calculate …

Waste Heat Recovery From A Vented Electric Clothes Dryer Utilizing A Finned-Tube Heat Exchanger, Abdul Raheem A. Shaik, Stephen L. Caskey, Eckhard A. Groll

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Conventional residential clothes dryers continuously vent moist, hot air during the drying process. The vented air leaves the home but still has useful temperature and humidity that could be recovered to offset other heating demands in the home. A study is carried out to quantify the amount of heat extracted from the waste heat stream of a conventional, vented clothes dryer. To extract the heat, a water cooled, fin-and-tube heat exchanger is located within the exhaust duct. A steady state thermodynamic dry coil and wet coil model was built in Engineering Equation Solver (EES). The model accounts for the heat …

Overproduction Of Aromatic Amino Acids From Cyanobacteria, Shujun Dong, Arnav Deshpande, John Morgan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

L-phenylalanine, L-tyrosine and L-tryptophan are aromatic amino acids that are widely used in industrial, agricultural and pharmaceutical applications. Currently, heterotrophic microorganisms are fed require an organic source of carbon to produce amino acids, photosynthetic bacteria are investigated. Mutagenesis by methyl methanesulfonate followed by selection on aromatic amino acid analogues produced mutants that are able to overproduce aromatic amino acids. Two mutant strains were investigated: TA1, which is a better L-phenylalanine overproducer, and 5FT1, which overproduces L-tryptophan. To test the influence of growth conditions on amino acid production, we grew mutant strains of Synechocytis sp. 6803 under enhanced CO2 or glucose-rich …

Developing Successful Ios Applications, Kousei Richeson, Trevor Stamper

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Have you ever wanted to publish a popular iOS application? If so, this paper discusses the successful characteristics in successful iOS mobile applications, as well as the characteristics to avoid when developing. This information is gathered from multiple academic journals and interviews with professionals in the field. This paper highlights the importance of applying all the important key characteristics in an organized manner. Using simple software engineering techniques such as using the MVC (Model-View-Controller) are the key driving forces in developing successful iOS mobile applications. This paper also puts emphasis on data-driven applications and brings up common mistakes to avoid …

Predict The Failure Of Hydraulic Pumps By Different Machine Learning Algorithms, Yifei Zhou, Monika Ivantysynova, Nathan Keller

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Pump failure is a general concerned problem in the hydraulic field. Once happening, it will cause a huge property loss and even the life loss. The common methods to prevent the occurrence of pump failure is by preventative maintenance and breakdown maintenance, however, both of them have significant drawbacks. This research focuses on the axial piston pump and provides a new solution by the prognostic of pump failure using the classification of machine learning. Different kinds of sensors (temperature, acceleration and etc.) were installed into a good condition pump and three different kinds of damaged pumps to measure 10 of …

Sort Vs. Hash Join On Knights Landing Architecture, Victor L. Pan, Felix Lin

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

With the increasing amount of information stored, there is a need for efficient database algorithms. One of the most important database operations is “join”. This involves combining columns from two tables and grouping common values in the same row in order to minimize redundant data. The two main algorithms used are hash join and sort merge join. Hash join builds a hash table to allow for faster searching. Sort merge join first sorts the two tables to make it more efficient when comparing values. There has been a lot of debate over which approach is superior. At first, hash join …

Building Modern Cloud Accessible Tools For Materials Simulations, Nicholas J. Finan, Saaketh Desai, Samuel Reeve, Alejandro Strachan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In recent years, commercial computer systems have grown more user friendly, allowing for new users to quickly and easily make contributions. Unfortunately, this trend is not as apparent in the field of computational materials simulations. The tools used by researchers in this field have remained just as esoteric as the systems of the past. While the methods used in materials simulations continue to grow in complexity and accuracy, the user experience has been neglected entirely. This project aims to eliminate the need for hours spent adjusting file formats and searching for preexisting code, and instead allow researchers to focus on …

Developing Strategies To Toughen Bio-Inspired Adhesives, Narelli P. Narciso, Samuel Lee Huntington, Jonathan J. Wilker

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Mussels and other marine creatures adhere very well in underwater environments, having the ability to withstand the force of the sea. These animals have inspired synthetic biomimetic adhesives for wet systems, presenting potential for biomedical applications. However, most current commercial adhesives tend to be brittle, not resisting repetitive movements. This study assesses toughening strategies to improve the mussel-inspired adhesives’ ductility while maintaining its strength. The strategies included altering the polymer’s chemical structure by changing the percentage of polyethylene glycol (PEG) in the molecule and by adding fillers, such as calcium carbonate, silica and nacre - a calcium carbonate compound found …