Digital Commons Network^™

Domain Architecture A Design Framework For System Development And Integration, Vassilka D. Kirova

Dissertations

The ever growing complexity of software systems has revealed many short-comings in existing software engineering practices and has raised interest in architecture-driven software development. A system's architecture provides a model of the system that suppresses implementation detail, allowing the architects to concentrate on the analysis and decisions that are most critical to structuring the system to satisfy its requirements. Recently, interests of researchers and practi-tioners have shifted from individual system architectures to architectures for classes of software systems which provide more general, reusable solutions to the issues of overall system organization, interoperability, and allocation of services to system components. These …

Investigation Of Thermal Contact Resistance At A Plastic-Metal Interface In Injection Molding, Lakshminarayanan Sridhar

Dissertations

Thermal contact resistance (TCR) at the plastic-metal interface is one of the parameters required for the simulation of plastic processing techniques such as injection molding. However, the available data is both unreliable and insufficient due to the difficulties involved in measuring this parameter. The effects of thermal contact resistance on the heat transfer in plastics processing with particular reference to injection molding of thermoplastics is investigated using combined experimental measurement techniques, parametric studies and numerical analysis.

TCR under steady state conditions has been determined experimentally at typical thermoplastic-mold metal interfaces for an amorphous and a semi-crystalline polymer using a one-dimensional …

Parallelization For Image Processing Algorithms Based Chain And Mid-Crack Codes, Wai-Tak Wong

Dissertations

Freeman chain code is a widely-used description for a contour image. Another mid-crack code algorithm was proposed as a more precise method for image representation. We have developed a coding algorithm which is suitable to generate either chain code description or mid-crack code description by switching between two different tables. Since there is a strong urge to use parallel processing in image related problems, a parallel coding algorithm is implemented. This algorithm is developed on a pyramid architecture and a N cube architecture. Using link-list data structure and neighbor identification, the algorithm gains efficiency because no sorting or neighborhood pairing …

A Methodology For Component-Based System Integration, Yongming Tang

Dissertations

Component-based software based on software architectures is emerging to be the next generation software development paradigm. The paradigm shifts the development focus from lines-of-codes to coarser-grained components and the interconnections among them. It consists of system architecture design, architecture description, component search and system integration from components to generate a software system.

However, one of the bottlenecks in this paradigm is the integration of the individual components into the overall system. In this dissertation a methodology for component-based system integration is proposed. It is based on an architectural aggregation view, a component model, flowgraphs and cyclomatic complexity. We introduce this …

Oxidation Of Dimethyl-Ether And Ethylene In The Atmosphere And Combustion Environment And Thermodynamic Studies On Hydrofluorocarbons Using Ab Initio Calculation Methods, Takahiro Yamada

Dissertations

Reaction pathways and kinetics are analyzed on CH₃OC·H₂ unimolecular decay and on the complete CH₃OC·H₂ + O₂ reaction system using thermodynamic properties (ΔH_f°₂₉₈, S°₂₉₈, and C(T) 300≤T/K≤1500) derived by two ab initio calculation methods, CBS-q and G2. These are used to determine thermodynamic properties of reactants, intermediate radicals and transition state (TS) compounds. Quantum Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel (QRRK) analysis is used to calculate energy dependent rate constants, k(E), and master equation is used to account for collisional stabilization. Comparison of calculated fall-off with experiment indicates that the CBS-q and …

A Theoretical Study Of Bubble Motion In Surfactant Solutions, Yanping Wang

Dissertations

We examine the effect of surfactants on a spherical gas bubble rising steadily in an infinite fluid at low and order one Reynolds number with order one and larger Peclet numbers. Our mathematical model is based on the Navier-Stokes equations coupled with a convection-diffusion equation together with appropriate interfacial conditions. The nonlinearity of the equations and boundary conditions, and the coupling between hydrodynamics and surfactant transport make the problem very challenging.

When a bubble rises in a fluid containing surface-active agents, surfactant adsorbs onto the bubble surface at the leading edge, convects to the trailing edge by the surface flow …

Games Leaders Play: Collaborative Leadership Development Through Simulations In Knowledge-Based Organizations, John Paul Dentico Edd

Dissertations

New concepts of leadership and new methods of imparting these concepts to individuals are needed in the knowledge society of today. This study presented a practitioners model of collaborative leadership and a new experiential simulation methodology called LeadSimrn as a way in which organization members could learn this new model of leadership and develop confidence in its ability to engage complex issues. Using the LeadSimm simulation method, two scenarios were developed and two simulations were played. The San Jose Police Department played one simulation and the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank played the other. The researcher conducted eighteen …

A Professional Competency Survey Of Organizational Consultants In San Diego County, Angie Mays Edd

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to gain a clearer understanding of the rapidly growing field of Organizational Consulting. Specifically, this research focuses on developing profiles of various types of organizational consultants in San Diego County. The types of profiles considered included: Executive Coaches, Feedback Specialists, Motivational Speakers, Trainers, Educators, and Consultants. The research topics examined included: background and professional preparation of consultants, professional resources utilized, interventions most commonly used, and level of job satisfaction. A descriptive survey was employed to aid in the investigation. The questionnaire consisted of questions revised from Waller's (1988) national survey of training consultants, and …

Critical Thinking In Associate Degree Nursing Education, Nancy Tucker

Dissertations

Problem. This study sought to investigate the level of critical thinking (CT) of the associate degree in nursing (ADN) students and the relationship of CT and clinical judgment (CJ) with selected pre-admission and exit variables.

Method. A convenience sample of 112 ADN students (79 generic, 33 non-traditional) at a small, private liberal arts college on the West Coast participated in this exploratory study. The California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) was used to measure the level of CT, and CJ was measured using the Clinical Decision Making in Nursing Scale (CDMNS). Differences between the generic and non-traditional groups were explored …

Genuflect, Gentlemen And Other Stories, Matt B. Mullins

Dissertations

Genuflect, Gentlemen is a novella-Iength work of fiction in which Dan Mooney, a recovering drug-addict and former rock star, has a religious awakening that inspires him to write a journal as an attempt to find meaning in his past. This journal, a soapbox for Dan’s newly realized philosophies, focuses primarily in his troublesome experiences as a student at an all-boys Catholic boarding high school; it is essentially Dan’s version of the “story” of those years just before his fame when music was replacing religion as the center of his spirituality. The ultimate conclusion Dan reaches through the reconsideration of that …

A Resource Allocation Mechanism Based On Cost Function Synthesis In Complex Systems, Carlos C. Amaro

Dissertations

While the management of resources in computer systems can greatly impact the usefulness and integrity of the system, finding an optimal solution to the management problem is unfortunately NP hard. Adding to the complexity, today's 'modern' systems - such as in multimedia, medical, and military systems - may be, and often are, comprised of interacting real and non-real-time components. In addition, these systems can be driven by a host of non-functional objectives – often differing not only in nature, importance, and form, but also in dimensional units and range, and themselves interacting in complex ways. We refer to systems exhibiting …

A Folder Organization Model For Information Systems : Exploring Its Architectural Expressive Power And Predicate-Based Filing, Simon Doong

Dissertations

This dissertation presents an Internal Folder Organization (I-ORG) which supplements the architectural deficiencies of the existing model - the User Folder Organization (U-ORG), to electronically model a person's filing system in the modern office environment. An I-ORG folder organization gives a logical representation of how documents of the same or different kinds are related and grouped into folders based on predefined premises. Our model is represented by a Rooted Direct Acyclic Graph (RDAG). Each node in the graph represents a folder; and folders are related by "subfolder relationship" (for capturing the "and" relation) and "virtual-folder relationship" (for capturing the "or" …

A Graph Based Process Model Measurement Framework Using Scheduling Theory, Gary Guang-Li Mou

Dissertations

Software development processes, as a means of ensuring software quality and productivity, have been widely accepted within the software development community; software process modeling, on the other hand, continues to be a subject of interest in the research community. Even with organizations that have achieved higher SEI maturity levels, processes are by and large described in documents and reinforced as guidelines or laws governing software development activities. The lack of industry-wide adaptation of software process modeling as part of development activities can be attributed to two major reasons: lack of forecast power in the (software) process modeling and lack of …

Pneumatic Fracture Propagation And Particulate Transport In Geologic Formations, Suresh Puppala

Dissertations

Pneumatic fracturing is an in situ remediation enhancement technology developed to increase the permeability of contaminated geologic formations. This technology can also be used to deliver atomized liquid and particulate supplements to geologic formations, thereby enhancing in situ processes such as bioremediation and reactive dechlorination.

The main objective of this study was the development of a mathematical model that simulates the propagation of pneumatic fractures in soil and rock formations. Pneumatic fracture propagation differs from other fluid fracturing phenomena in the propagation velocity (1-3 m/sec) and the viscosity of the fracturing fluid (1.9E-05 Pa•sec). For the purposes of model development, …

Automatic Analysis Of Electronic Drawings Using Neural Network, Yi Shi

Dissertations

Neural network technique has been found to be a powerful tool in pattern recognition. It captures associations or discovers regularities with a set of patterns, where the types, number of variables or diversity of the data are very great, the relationships between variables are vaguely understood, or the relationships are difficult to describe adequately with conventional approaches.

In this dissertation, which is related to the research and the system design aiming at recognizing the digital gate symbols and characters in electronic drawings, we have proposed: (1) A modified Kohonen neural network with a shift-invariant capability in pattern recognition; (2) An …

Adaptive Bootstrap Signal Separators For Bpsk/Qam-Modulated Wireless Cdma Systems In A Multipath Environment, Nico J.M. Van Waes

Dissertations

CDMA is an attractive multiple-access scheme, because of its potential capacity increase and its anti-multipath fading capability. For satisfactory performance, however, the effect of the "near-far" problem has to be resolved. This problem can be combated by using power-control, which, however, results in an overall reduction in communication ranges, and thus in a loss of capacity. Among other methods for mitigating the near-far problem is the use of decorrelating receivers, both of fixed type, which directly utilizes the cross-correlation of the users codes, and of adaptive type, which uses recursive algorithms that leads to signal decorrelation. Not to lessen the …

The Impact Of Selected Barriers On Students Completing Community College In Michigan, Terri Lynn Burt

Dissertations

Research studies have been conducted to investigate barriers that inhibit the ability of adult students to obtain a postsecondary education (Powell, 1989; Shields, 1990). These studies suggest that there are three distinct categories that could be used to describe this phenomenon: (1) situational, (2) dispositional, and (3) institutional. The overall purpose of this study was to determine what barriers, if any, are experienced by nontraditional African-American students in selected Midwest community colleges in comparison to White adult students according to selected demographic variables (e.g., age, sex, marital status, number of children, employment, status, income, and race). More specifically, this study …

The Relationship Of Self-Esteem, Learned Resourcefulness And Social Support To Health-Related Quality Of Life In Long-Term Cancer Survivors, Leli W. Pedro Dnsc, Ms, Rnc, Ocn

Dissertations

Increased survival and advances in oncology research demand that health professionals attend to the gap in knowledge regarding health-related quality of life (HRQL) variables associated with the unique sequelae of cancer in the long-term (LT) cancer survivor. Research in this area may direct the development of effective interventions to increase the HRQL of LT cancer survivors. The study's purpose was to describe the relationships between self-esteem, learned resourcefulness, and social support to HRQL as well as their predictive value to HRQL for LT cancer survivors. A quantitative, descriptive, correlational, and noninterventional design was used to describe the relationship of self-esteem, …

Analytical And Experimental Study Of Investment Casting With Laser Stereolithography Models, Wen-Long Yao

Dissertations

This dissertation presents an analytical and experimental investigation of ceramic shell cracking during the burnout process in investment casting with internally webbed laser stereolithography (SLA) patterns. Included in the consideration are the cracking temperature of the ceramic shell, the web link buckling temperature, and the glass transition temperature of the epoxy resin. The hypothesis is that shell cracking will occur when the cracking temperature is lower than the glass transition temperature and the web buckling temperature.

An analytical and experimental study has been conducted, with the cross-sectional area, the span length of the web structure, and the shell thickness being …

A Combined Simulated Annealing And Tabu Search Strategy To Solve Network Design Problem With Two Classes Of Users, Qifeng Zeng

Dissertations

A methodology to solve a transportation network design problem (TCNDP) with two classes of users (passenger cars and trucks) is developed. Given an existing highway system, with a capital investment budget constraint, the methodology selects the best links to be expanded by an extra lane by considering one of three types of traffic operations: exclusive for passenger cars, exclusive for trucks, and for both passenger cars and trucks such that the network total user equilibrium (UE) travel time is minimized.

The problem is formulated as an NP-hard combinatorial nonlinear integer programming problem. The classical branch and bound methodology for the …

Automobile Air Bag Inflation System Using Pressurized Carbon Dioxide, Bart Adams

Dissertations

A novel air bag inflator based on the evaporation ofliquefied carbon dioxide was developed. A detailed qualitative model wasestablished on the basis of an extensive experimental study. An integratedquantitative model of this inflator was constructed.

The system was studied by discharging the inflatorinto a tank and measuring pressure and temperature evolution (0-50 ms). Thedispersion of the two-phase spray duringinflation was investigated by high-speed cinematography.

The optimal storage pressure of the liquid CO₂was found to be 2000 psig (at 22 °C). Two distinct inflator behaviors wereidentified. First, at conditions corresponding to an initial entropy below the critical point, atwo-phase …

Space-Time Reduced Rank Methods And Cfar Signal Detection Algorithms With Applications To Hprf Radar, Tareq F. Ayoub

Dissertations

In radar applications, the statistical properties (covariance matrix) of the interference are typically unknown a priori and are estimated from a dataset with limited sample support. Often, the limited sample support leads to numerically ill-conditioned radar detectors. Under such circumstances, classical interference cancellation methods such as sample matrix inversion (SMI) do not perform satisfactorily. In these cases, innovative reduced-rank space-time adaptive processing (STAP) techniques outperform full-rank techniques. The high pulse repetition frequency (HPRF) radar problem is analyzed and it is shown that it is in the class of adaptive radar with limited sample support. Reduced-rank methods are studied for the …

A Low-Cost High-Speed Twin-Prefetching Dsp-Based Shared-Memory System For Real-Time Image Processing Applications, Charalambos Stephanou Christou

Dissertations

This dissertation introduces, investigates, and evaluates a low-cost high-speed twin-prefetching DSP-based bus-interconnected shared-memory system for real-time image processing applications. The proposed architecture can effectively support 32 DSPs in contrast to a maximum of 4 DSPs supported by existing DSP-based bus- interconnected systems. This significant enhancement is achieved by introducing two small programmable fast memories (Twins) between the processor and the shared bus interconnect. While one memory is transferring data from/to the shared memory, the other is supplying the core processor with data. The elimination of the traditional direct linkage of the shared bus and processor data bus makes feasible the …

Removal Of Volatile Organic Compound (Voc) Vapors In Biotrickling Filters : Process Modeling And Validation With Chlorinated Aromatic Compounds, Christos J. Mpanias

Dissertations

This study dealt with the removal of vapors of volatile organic compounds from airstreams in biotrickling filters (BTFs). A detailed general model was developed for describing the process under steady-state conditions. The model accounts for mass transfer between phases (air, liquid, biofilm) and biodegradation of pollutants in the biofilm. It also accounts for potential kinetic interactions among pollutants as well as potential process limitations by oxygen availability.

The general model was experimentally validated using mono-chlorobenzene (m-CB) and ortho-dichlorobenzene (o-DCB) as model compounds either alone or in mixture with each other. Before BTF experiments were undertaken, a systematic kinetic study was …

Robust Fuzzyclustering For Object Recognition And Classification Of Relational Data, Sumit Sen

Dissertations

Prototype based fuzzy clustering algorithms have unique ability to partition the data while detecting multiple clusters simultaneously. However since real data is often contaminated with noise, the clustering methods need to be made robust to be useful in practice. This dissertation focuses on robust detection of multiple clusters from noisy range images for object recognition. Dave's noise clustering (NC) method has been shown to make prototype-based fuzzy clustering techniques robust. In this work, NC is generalized and the new NC membership is shown to be a product of fuzzy c-means (FCM) membership and robust M-estimator weight (or possibilistic membership). Thus …

The Intelligent Browser For Texpros, Chih-Ying Wang

Dissertations

Browsing is a technique, which helps users to formulate their query and retrieve information in the information retrieval system. This technique provides users with capabilities of understanding their information needs and gaining system knowledge during the course of the browsing and thus it eases the users' burden when issuing queries. The basic components of the browser provides an underlying structure which allows users to navigate and a browsing process controller which provides users with the needed assistance during each browsing session.

In this dissertation, a new infrastructure (OP-Net), transformed from the existing object network is proposed. Each object in the …

Performance Improvements In Wireless Cdma Communications Utilizing Adaptive Antenna Arrays, Weichen Ye

Dissertations

This dissertation studies applications of adaptive antenna arrays and space-time adaptive processing (STAP) in wireless code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communications. The work addresses three aspects of the CDMA communications problems: (I) near-far resistance, (2) reverse link, (3) forward link. In each case, adaptive arrays are applied and their performance is investigated.

The near-far effect is a well known problem which affects the reverse link of CDMA communication systems. The near-far resistance of STAP is analyzed for two processing methods: maximal ratio combining and optimum combining. It. is shown that while maximal ratio combining is not near-far resistant, optimum combining is near-far …

Modelling Of In-Situ Bioremediation With Emphasis On Inhibitory Kinetics And Biomass Growth, Dilip Kumar Mandal

Dissertations

This thesis was motivated by the need for better engineering tools to predict the extent of contaminant plume migration in the saturated zone. The principal result was a mathematical model analogous to a catalytic packed-bed reactor, in which the subsurface was considered to be composed (conceptually) of soil aggregates (the "catalyst" particles, in which biodegradation, diffusion, and sorption take place), and a mobile phase (groundwater) passing around the aggregates, in which convection, axial diffusion, and mass transfer from the aggregates take place.

The modelling emphasis was on a more detailed exposition of the biokinetics of the system (including an inhibitory …

Knowledge-Based Document Filing For Texpros, Xien Fan

Dissertations

This dissertation presents a knowledge-based document filing system for TEXPROS. The requirements of a. personal document processing system are investigated. In order for the system to be used in various application domains, a flexible, dynamic modeling approach is employed by getting the user involved in document modeling. The office documents are described using a dual-model which consists of a document type hierarchy and a folder organization. The document type hierarchy is used to capture the layout, logical and conceptual structures of documents. The folder organization, which is defined by the user, emulates the real world structure for organizing and storing …

Molecular Modelling Studies Of Acetylcholinesterase, Charilaos E. Linaras

Dissertations

The controversial role of electrostatic interactions in the process of steering of acetylcholine into the active site of acetylcholinesterases was investigated in this study. A novel methodology was implemented to simulate the process of recognition of acetylcholine by Torpedo Californica and both wild type and charge neutralized mutated Human AChE. The obtained results suggest the important role of coulombic interactions in the steering process. The steering process of selected irreversible AChE inhibitors was also simulated supporting the role of electrostatic interactions in the recognition process.

A novel methodology was also employed to model the covalent adducts of Torpedo Californica and …