Digital Commons Network^™

Internal Redundancy Of Mechanically-Fastened Steel Built-Up Axially-Loaded Members, Jason B. Lloyd

Open Access Dissertations

The objectives of this research were to determine if mechanically-fastened steel built-up axially-loaded tension members are resistant to complete cross-sectional fracture when a single component suddenly fractures and if so, to develop simplified methods of analysis for post-fracture load redistribution behavior for calculation of remaining fatigue life. The ability to resist complete member failure and perform at a predetermined level of reliability with a failed component is referred to as internal member redundancy (IMR). The experimental program included seven full-scale tests; five were extremely demanding fracture tests, including one specimen with a tack weld placed in the path of a …

The Effects Of Mastication And Digestion On The Bioaccessibility Of Energy From Nuts, Breanna M. Mcarthur

Open Access Dissertations

Walnuts consumption provides multiple health benefits, but the high energy and fat content of walnuts raises continued concerns regarding their role in weight management. These concerns persist despite the evidence from epidemiological and clinical studies indicating that nut consumption does not increase the risk of weight gain. The predominate factors contributing to the inverse or neutral relationship between walnut consumption and increased body weight is their high satiety properties and poor bioaccessibility of energy during digestion. Mastication is associated with each of these factors; however, its role in energy balance has not yet been clearly characterized. Moreover, mastication is modulated …

Spatial Genetic And Distribution Modeling For The Conservation Of Hellbender Salamanders, Emily Boersma Mccallen

Open Access Dissertations

Ecological data is inherently spatial; however, it is still the norm to model ecological data as spatially invariant. Failure to account for spatial structure in response variables and modeled relationships can result in inflated coefficient values, shifts in the relative importance and sign of predictors, cross-scale contradictions in relationships, and reduced predictive power due to the averaging of modeled relationships. When ecological models are used to support conservation decision-making, model error can be costly leading to both misallocation of limited resources and distrust of science-based management.

My dissertation focuses on developing methods to account for spatial structure in two models …

Three Essays On The Economics Of Specialized Agricultural Products: Equilibrium Contract Structure And Firm Boundary Under Uncertainty And Sunk Costs, Tanner Joseph Mccarty

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation contains three essays exploring how contractual form endogenously responds to uncertainty and irreversibility within a market for specialized agricultural products. It additionally explores the impact that this resulting contractual form has on rent and return distribution along the vertical supply chain. I accomplish this using a novel framework that meshes complete contracting and real options analysis. The first essay explores how equilibrium contract structure between an incumbent buyer and a seller considering entry into production of a specialized agricultural product endogenously responds to uncertainty and irreversibility. Results suggest that contract structure is sensitive to both the level and …

Self-Other Agreement In Person And Thing Orientations, Miranda M. Mcintyre

Open Access Dissertations

Personality judgments are inherently subjective—perceptions of one’s own traits often differ from perceptions held by others. However, research on personality relies overwhelmingly on self-reports. This lack of methodological diversity threatens the validity and reliability of individual differences research. The current work addresses this common-method bias for person orientation and thing orientation, which are personality traits that reflect interest in different aspects of individuals’ environments. Three studies investigated self-other agreement in these orientations and compared convergence with Big Five traits and vocational interests. Study 1 (N = 193) presents evidence that thirteen individual difference constructs vary in observability and desirability, which …

Characterizing The Auxin Herbicide Response In Horseweed (Erigeron Canadensis), Cara Lynn Mccauley

Open Access Dissertations

Auxin herbicides such as 2,4-D and dicamba have been used for over 70 years to control problematic broadleaf weed species. The auxin herbicide mode of action, particularly the precise mechanism in which auxin herbicides initiate the cascade of physiological effects that results in plant death, has yet to be fully characterized. As novel auxin herbicides are commercialized, it is important to understand the activity of new actives in relation to older chemistry. The first objective of this research was to evaluate the value of halauxifen-methyl, a new arylpicolinate auxin compound, against current auxin standards to manage glyphosate-resistant horseweed (Erigeron canadensis). …

Biochar For Environmental Restoration: Multi-Level Investigations Into Structure And Performance, Joseph Martin

Open Access Dissertations

Biochar is a product that has been used since at least 1000 BCE for the enhancement of soil fertility. These original applications were in the Amazon jungle, where soils are naturally sub-par for most forms of conventional or industrial agriculture. Adapting this technology to other climates, soils, and farming uses requires a broad base of knowledge. The current state of biochar science seeks to understand how specific environmental behaviors arise from the physical and chemical structure of biochars, and in turn how variation in pyrolysis and feedstock can be manipulated to construct useful biochars.

This body of work seeks to …

Characterization Of Horizontal Air-Water Two-Phase Flow In Different Pipe Sizes, Ran Kong

Open Access Dissertations

The highly asymmetric void distribution in horizontal two-phase flow due to buoyancy adds further complications to the study of horizontal flow, both experimentally and analytically. As such, there has been limited research on horizontal two-phase flow, comparing with the extensively studied vertical two-phase flow. However, understanding of horizontal two-phase flow is essential to the correct simulation of two-phase flow in engineering systems such as nuclear power plant. With this in mind, the current work characterizes the horizontal air-water two-phase flow in straight pipes of different pipe sizes. An extensive experimental database is established for both global and local two-phase flow …

Mechanistic Understanding Of The Design And Characterization Of Biocompatible Nanodelivery Systems For The Encapsulation And Delivery Of Curcumin, Luis Fernando Maldonado Mejia

Open Access Dissertations

Nanotechnology techniques are enabling food scientists to create functional ingredients with micro- and nanostructures, displaying unique properties that are finding applications in encapsulation of bioactive compounds/phytochemicals, food flavors, essential oils, and other important high value ingredients. The ability of edible proteins and polysaccharides to fabricate different nanostructures was investigated using three different methods: 1) desolvation using water as solvent, and acetone, ethanol and methanol as non-solvent agents, 2) complex coacervation using the combination of two biopolymer polyelectrolytes, and 3) layer-by-layer deposition technique to fabricate nanotubes using the combination of two biopolymer polyelectrolytes. These nanoparticles were evaluated for their capacity to …

A Pseudo-Rigorous Lidar System Calibration Approach And A Strategy For Stability Analysis, Megan M.G. Miller

Open Access Dissertations

With LiDAR systems being a crucial technology for near real-time mapping and spatial analysis, the user community needs standardized LiDAR system calibration procedures that are robust for the wide range of users and scenarios. More specifically, a comprehensive calibration approach should entail rigor in automation for matching and handling the irregularity of LiDAR data, as well as generality in terms of type of terrain used and of raw measurement availability. Most times, the sensor model and raw measurements are unavailable to the end user, and therefore rigorous LiDAR system calibration is not possible. For this scenario, pseudo-rigorous methods have been …

Credit Network Payment Systems: Security, Privacy And Decentralization, Pedro Moreno Sanchez

Open Access Dissertations

A credit network models transitive trust between users and enables transactions between arbitrary pairs of users. With their flexible design and robustness against intrusions, credit networks form the basis of Sybil-tolerant social networks, spam-resistant communication protocols, and payment settlement systems. For instance, the Ripple credit network is used today by various banks worldwide as their backbone for cross-currency transactions. Open credit networks, however, expose users’ credit links as well as the transaction volumes to the public. This raises a significant privacy concern, which has largely been ignored by the research on credit networks so far.

In this state of affairs, …

Visual Analytics To Support Atomistic Simulations Design, Daniel Felipe Mejia Padilla

Open Access Dissertations

Nowadays, complex simulations of a variety of processes are extensively used in academia and industry. Particularly in academia, powerful scientific software tools are constantly developed to simulate complex systems; for instance, simulations of quantum transport using the non-equilibrium greens Function formalism. The potential impact of these scientific tools in industry is huge, but it is hindered by the lack of usability of the software by those who are not deeply familiar with it. Visual analytics is a new field that has shown the positive impact of interactive visualizations in software usability and the cognitive process of the user. This research …

Framework For Assessing The Pavement Surface Evaluation And Rating Method In Pavement Management Plans, Sharlan R. Montgomery

Open Access Dissertations

With the increasing popularity and use of the pavement surface evaluation and rating (PASER) method by local agencies throughout the U.S., the variability inherent in manual condition assessments, and the lack of research pertaining to the PASER method, there is a need to better understand the PASER method and its use by local agencies. This research consisted of three research phases. Phase 1 investigated the relationship between the pavement condition index (PCI) and PASER. Corresponding PCI and PASER data were collected for both asphalt and concrete pavement segments. Both a general linear regression model and an ordered probability model were …

Hybrid Cloud Model Checking Using The Interaction Layer Of Harms For Ambient Intelligent Systems, Mauricio Alejandro Gomez Morales

Open Access Dissertations

Soon, humans will be co-living and taking advantage of the help of multi-agent systems in a broader way than the present. Such systems will involve machines or devices of any variety, including robots. These kind of solutions will adapt to the special needs of each individual. However, to the concern of this research effort, systems like the ones mentioned above might encounter situations that will not be seen before execution time. It is understood that there are two possible outcomes that could materialize; either keep working without corrective measures, which could lead to an entirely different end or completely stop …

Structure-Function Analysis Of A Flavivirus Non-Structural Protein, Michael J. Dibiaso White

Open Access Dissertations

Flaviviruses are positive single-stranded RNA arthropod-borne viruses within the family Flaviviridae which includes Dengue virus (DENV), West Nile virus (WNV), Yellow fever virus (YFV), Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) and Zika virus (ZIKV). From DENV alone approximately half of the world lives under the threat of contracting a flavivirus infection, with about 390 million infections globally per year. As arthropod borne viruses, these are easily transmissible, and spread is often di cult to contain. The non-structural protein 1 (NS1) has been shown to be integral in flavivirus pathogenesis. With recently defined roles in increasing infection of mosquitos as well as contributing …

Mapping Soils Of The Uasin Gishu Plateau, Kenya With Limited Data Using A Knowledge-Based Inference Mapping Approach, Mercy W. Ngunjiri

Open Access Dissertations

Kenya has a current population of ~47 million people living on an arable land area of ~56,000 km2 (~1.7 times the area of Indiana). With an annual growth rate of ~800,000 people, there is tremendous pressure on the soil resource to produce more food. Understanding the available soil resources is important to increase and sustain agricultural productivity. Soil surveys made with traditional approaches are too expensive, and new surveys must rely on limited data, legacy information and new digital mapping techniques. We used three knowledge-based inference soil mapping approaches to predict soil types and properties for the Uasin Gishu Plateau …

Absolute Convergence Of The Twisted Arthur-Selberg Trace Formula, Abishek Parab

Open Access Dissertations

We show that the distributions occurring in the geometric and spectral side of the twisted Arthur-Selberg trace formula extend to non-compactly supported test functions. The geometric assertion is modulo a hypothesis on root systems proven among other cases, when the group is split. The result extends the work of Finis-Lapid (and M¨uller, spectral side) to the twisted setting. We also give an application towards finiteness of residues of certain Rankin-Selberg L-functions.

Genotype By Management Investigations Into The Physiology Of Maize Response To Late Season Nitrogen Applications, Sarah M. Mueller

Open Access Dissertations

The timing and rate of N fertilizer application is among the most important decisions in maize management. Nitrogen is often a yield-limiting nutrient, but it is also an expensive input and has negative environmental impacts when lost from fields. Because of this, there has been interest in applying a portion of the total N application later in the summer with the goal of increased synchrony between soil N availability and crop N demand. In order to assess the usefulness of split N applications, this dissertation evaluated 1) how N accumulation has changed with hybrid improvement, 2) the impact of split …

Towards Ontology-Based Phishing Detection, Gilchan Park

Open Access Dissertations

Detection of phishing emails is a topic that has received a lot of attention both from academia and industry due to the devastating effects that phishing enabled data breaches have had on private individual and companies. Notwithstanding enormous efforts to detect phishing attacks, phishing still remains a major threat in information security, and the damages from it are not forecasted to disappear in the near future. One of the reasons is the diversity of attacks, especially within spear phishing and whaling. Another reason is that the natural language part of the detectors is usually devoid of semantics. Many of the …

Corporate Social Responsibility Of Construction And Real Estate Development Companies In Developing Countries: An Assessment Model, Ahmed Nabil Abdel-Salam

Open Access Dissertations

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) contributes significantly to the community development which is based on the principles of fairness, social justice, participation, and continuous learning with core emphasis on educating, enabling, and empowering community members. CSR not only helps to develop the community but also contributes toward sustainable development of business. Companies involved in the construction industry are serving several stakeholders internally and externally. In this dissertation, CSR, with regard to two stakeholders (company employees and the community) is studied to assess the mutual impacts between the company and the community.

The main objective of this research is to develop guidelines …

College Students And Athletes: Identity Adherence, Injury, Illness, Depression, Social Support, And Problem Behaviors, Samuel L. Nekvasil

Open Access Dissertations

College students are at pivotal time in their life for identity development. They are typically away from home for the first time, independently making decisions while also striving to maintain their academic performance. A subset of this population, college athletes, face a number of unique challenges often connected with their potentially competing identities as athletes and students (i.e., athletic and academic identities). In addition, when injury/illness occurs, identity adherence may shift for all students (i.e., athletes and non-athletes) and there is the potential that they may engage in problem behaviors (i.e., risky sexual behavior, illicit drug use, problem alcohol use, …

Cooperative Multiple Agents Based Algorithm For Optimal Evacuation Planning Under Time–Varying Uncertainty, Byung Hoon Oh

Open Access Dissertations

In the aftermath of natural disasters, the optimal evacuation planning plays a crucial role in saving people’s lives by providing plans to timely extricate victims to safe locations. For the evacuation in the aftermath, aerial vehicles (e.g., helicopters) become efficient assets when a disaster area is difficult to access by ground vehicles due to the destruction of the road network, or the large number of victims affected. In this regard, a mathematical model and efficient solution is necessary for optimal evacuation planning using a fleet of aerial vehicles, as proposed in this dissertation. The Optimal Evacuation Planning Problem (OEPP) is …

Fostering Internal Motivation To Respond Without Sexism: A Self-Determination Theory Approach, Laura Ruth Parker

Open Access Dissertations

Internal motivation to respond without sexism (Klonis, Plant, & Devine, 2005) may be a powerful way to combat sexism and gender discrimination. However, little is known about how this motivation develops. Drawing from self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000), Experiment 1 demonstrated that teaching people about the harmful consequences of sexism in a way that supported their fundamental human needs for autonomy and competence strengthened internal motivation. However, harm information and fundamental need support only increased internal motivation for participants low in social dominance orientation (SDO; Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994). Participants low in SDO reported the greatest recognition …

Hispanic Children Thrown Into Limbo: Language Ideologies Of Spanish Heritage Speakers And Their English Peers In A Monolingual And A Bilingual School In Indiana, Carmen Octavio

Open Access Dissertations

Spanish heritage speakers are a growing and heterogeneous population that shares a status of inequality within society regarding their language and culture. This study explored the language ideologies of Spanish heritage speakers and their English peers in two different settings: an urban monolingual school and a sub-urban bilingual school with a Dual-Immersion language program in Indiana.

The focus for heritage language students in US schools is usually on the linguistic components of bilingual or English monolingual development and does not focus on ideologies or climate within classrooms where heritage students are taught. With little to no focus on ideologies or …

Particle Engineering For Intracellular Delivery Of Antibiotics, Yihua Pei

Open Access Dissertations

Infections by intracellular bacteria have been recognized for many years, but they are difficult to cure due to the poor intracellular penetration of most antibiotics. To overcome poor intracellular delivery of antibiotics, we developed two polymeric nanoparticle formulation (NPs) that efficiently encapsulate and deliver antibiotics to the target cells – the macrophages in the liver and spleen. The first formulation (PpZEV) was based on a blend of polymers with distinct functions: (i) poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA, P) serving as the main delivery platform, (ii) polyethylene glycol-PLGA conjugate (PEG-PLGA, p) to help maintain an appropriate level of polarity for timely release of …

Electrolytic Microsystems For Biomedical Applications, Satya V.R.V. Tejasvi Parupudi

Open Access Dissertations

With an American dying each minute due to cancer and with a global burden of over $170 billion by 2020, there is a critical need for alternate solutions, especially for deep-seated, inoperable tumors in the liver and brain. Systemic chemotherapy has side effects and radiation is expensive. Challenges of current technologies for treating the liver include poor performance near vascular structures and the inability to treat multiple nodular tumors. Brain tumor treatment suffers from inadequate intra-cerebral drug concentration and uncontrollable drug delivery. These difficulties motivate the development of low-cost solutions that have fractionated application and are localized, monitored, and compatible …

The Effective Reproduction Number For A Class Of Mixing Matrices In Meta-Population Models In Epidemiology, Gayane Poghotanyan

Open Access Dissertations

Meta-populations models that account for population heterogeneities due to age, gender, spatial location, etc., and incorporate realistic mixing matrices are important for identifying optimal intervention strategies that can mitigate outbreaks of infectious diseases. Problems of finding optimal vaccination strategies for infectious diseases (including measles, mumps and rubella, HIV, and many others) based on such meta-population models are considered in this thesis. The problems are stated in the form of constrained minimization problems for the effective reproduction number, which is a threshold quantity that determines whether or not the disease can spread in the population. One of the most important findings …

Impact Of Changing Climate On Water Resources In The Western Lake Erie Basin Using Swat, Sushant Mehan

Open Access Dissertations

Water quality impairment in the Great Lakes Region has become a major concern for the scientific community. With increasing high intensity short duration precipitation events and rise in temperatures, there is the need to determine the impacts of a changing climate on water resources in the Great Lakes region. This is especially so in the Western Lake Erie Basin (WLEB); Lake Erie is prone to toxic harmful algal blooms due to climate variations and large nutrient and sediment inflows from the surrounding, primarily agricultural lands. The aim of this study was to determine the implications of future climate conditions on …

Quality Control Along Supply Chain, Didun Peng

Open Access Dissertations

Product quality is the core competitiveness of a brand, prompting brand-owner continuously to pursue. Learning curve is the tool to improve product quality by variance reduction. At the same time, knowledge depreciation with its negative effects attracts attention. Thus, a comprehensive learning curve is introduced in this dissertation. This research focus to explore the quality improvement along the supply chain. There are three contributions in this dissertation: 1) it provides the supply chain’s optimal distribution of quality improvement to manufacture and its suppliers; 2) it shows the benefit from coordinated quality improvement among the supply chain; 3) it illustrates the …

Residual Dimension Of Finitely Generated Nilpotent Groups, Mark A. Pengitore

Open Access Dissertations

In previous work, the author claimed an effective characterization for residual finiteness and lower asymptotic bounds for conjugacy separability of all finitely generated nilpotent groups. However, a counterexample to the characterization of residual finiteness for finitely generated nilpotent groups was communicated to the author which also had consequences to the lower asymptotic bound provided for conjugacy separability for the class of finitely generated nilpotent groups. Subsequently, the statements of the asymptotic characterization of residual finiteness and the asymptotic lower bound for conjugacy separability for the same class of groups along with their proofs are incorrect. In this article, we provide …