Digital Commons Network^™

Omnidirectional Control Of The Hexapod Robot Tigerbug, Christopher B. Johnson

Theses

TigerBug is a six legged, hexapod robot built and designed by students in the Rochester Institute of Technology's (RIT) Multi Agent Bio-Robotics Laboratory (MABL). TigerBug is comprised of 18 servo motors, 3 degrees of freedom (DOF) per leg, supported by carbon fiber wrapped foam legs placed in a circular pattern around its hexagon shaped body. In order to control such a complex system, much research has been done in the field of kinematics. There exist two derivations of kinematic solutions, forward and inverse. The forward kinematic (FK) solution tends to be much simpler than its inverse kinematic (IK) counterpart. There …

Experimental Performance Study Of A Lab-Scale Hydrokite System, Shriya Gosavi

Theses

Hydropower plants are the main source of renewable energy from moving water. However, traditional dam systems are somewhat controversial since they are large and often require population relocation, disrupt fish migration, and change the natural flow of the river. Hydrokinetic systems are currently being developed which can harness energy from flowing water with less ecological impact. One hydrokinetic system that may be promising, a hydrokite system, consists of an oscillating arm, boom, and a translating hydrofoil. Due to the hydrodynamic forces caused by the water's velocity, the hydrokite moves back and forth extracting energy from the flow. Previous simulations have …

Post Buckling Of Non Sway Axially Restrained Columns Under Thermal(Fire) Loads, Bikash Khanal

Theses

The objective of this study was to numerically investigate the effects of slenderness ratios and end rotational restraints on the post-buckling behavior of non-sway columns. To study the effect of end restraints, numerical solutions were generated for three different support conditions, namely, hinged-hinged, fixed-hinged and fixed-fixed. Furthermore, for each of these support conditions, the effects of slenderness ratios on the post-buckling response were analyzed by considering the slenderness ratios of 50,125 and 200. Based on the numerical data presented in this thesis, the following conclusions can be made.  The unrestrained columns under mechanical loads do not exhibit any significant …

Groundwater Assessment In Sweihan Region, The Northeast United Arab Emirates, Maimouna Ali Al-Alawi

Theses

Sweihan is located in the northeast of Abu Dhabi Emirate, the United Arab Emirates. Sweihan landscape is sand dune ridges, which could reach a maximum width of 2 km, and a height of 30 meters, whereas the agricultural fields concentrated in the interdune spaces. Groundwater in Sweihan area is characterized by low recharge amounts, which is being used mainly in irrigation purpose. The intensive agricultural activities in the study area caused depletion and contamination of the groundwater due to heavy uses of organic and chemical fertilizers, as well as heavy pumping. The hydrochemical analysis of 27 samples of groundwater from …

A Comparative Study Of Domestic And Hospital Environmental Microbial Populations In Al-Ain (Uae), Amna Ali Jaffal

Theses

This is the first attempt to estimate biological indoor pollution in the environment of AI-Ain city. The numbers and types of bacteria and fungi in the air and on the surfaces were measured in AI-Ain hospital and three different types of domestic environments.

Five different types of wards at AI-Ain hospital, medical, surgical, pediatrics, operating theater, and intensive care unit were studied. Their estimated indoor bioaerosols were compared to indoor bioaerosols in three types of dwelling houses, very good, average, and poor quality houses in AI-Ain city. A bacteriological mechanical air sampler, MK2 (Casella London) was used in this study. …

The Effect Of Repeated Reading Strategy On Oral Reading Fluency Of A Fourth Grade Student With Reading Difficulties, Fatmeh Mahmud Al Jaffal

Theses

This study aims at examining the effects of repeated reading strategy on the oral reading fluency of a 9-year-old Fourth Grader with reading difficulties in a private school in the United Arab Emirates. The research employed a quantitative means by using a SingleSubject Design. A pre-post-test design was used. The results of this study indicate that repeated reading strategy is found to be overall effective on oral reading speed and oral reading accuracy. This study has some recommendations for teaching instructions and research. For example, teachers can use it as an instructional approach for improving the oral reading 11w1fluency not …

Impact Of Guided Inquiry On Tenth Graders’ Understanding Of Chemical Bonds, Badreya Esmaeil Abdul Raheem Al Zarooni

Theses

Students' understandings of scientific conceptions have been of considerable interest to science education researchers and science teachers in recent years. Accordingly, many scholarly studies have been conducted on the students' understandings and misunderstandings, particularly, those concerned with chemistry. For the present study, the term misconception is used to encompass both alternative responses that arise from formal intervention; such as classroom study, as well as those resulted from the students own interactions with, and observations of their surrounding environment. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the understanding of the Grade-10 students about the concepts and misconception regarding the …

Impact Of Guided Inquiry On Tenth Graders' Understanding Of Chemical Bonds, Badreya Esmaeil Abdul Raheem Al Zarooni

Theses

Students’ understanding of scientific conceptions have been of considerable interest to science education researcher and science teacher in recent years. Accordingly,many scholarly studies have been conducted on the students' understandings and misunderstanding, particularly. Those concerned with chemistry. For the present study, the term misconception is used to encompass both alternative responses that arise from formal intervention: such as classroom study as well as those resulted from the student own interaction with, and observation of their surrounding environment

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the understanding of the Grade- students about the concepts and misconception regarding the chemical …

Computational Investigation Of Potential Failure Modes In Arterial Hemodynamic Flowpath, Praveen Kumar Koya

Theses

The formation of an arterial disease for large and medium size vessels is believed to be a multifactorial interplay of bio - mechanical - chemical processes in the arterial wall and the hemodynamic flow path. The present research presents the viewpoint of a mechanical engineer assuming that mechanical factors are of the key importance in the formation of aneurism, atherosclerotic plague and rupture. The repetitive pressure and shear stresses exerted by the blood flow on the weakened arterial wall may cause its progressive degrade, resulting in aneurism with the following potential rupture. Elevated blood pressure results in an elevated repetitive …

Investigation Of Spherical Bearings For Use In The Ultraform Finishing Polishing Process, Randall Scott Defisher Ii

Theses

UltraForm Finishing (UFF) is a production-level optical polishing process consisting of a moving belt that is pressed into an optical surface by a carrier wheel. The current configuration is comprised of a cylindrical carrier wheel attached to cylindrical roller bearings. As the optics market is moving towards aspheric geometry with smaller radii of curvature, geometric limitations associated with roller bearings requires the development of a modified approach to the UFF process.

This thesis explores the feasibility of incorporating spherical fluid bearing elements in the UFF process as a replacement for roller bearings. Self-acting (or wedge film) and externally pressurized hydrostatic …

Perceptual Modeling And Reproduction Of Gloss, Adria Fores Herranz

Theses

The reproduction of gloss on displays is generally not based on perception and as a consequence does not guarantee the best visualization of a real material. The reproduction is composed of four different steps: measurement, modeling, rendering, and display. The minimum number of measurements required to approximate a real material is unknown. The error metrics used to approximate measurements with analytical BRDF models are not based on perception, and the best visual approximation is not always obtained. Finally, the gloss perception difference between real objects and objects seen on displays has not sufficiently been studied and might be influencing the …

An Automatic Similarity Detection Engine Between Sacred Texts Using Text Mining And Similarity Measures, Salha Hassan Muhammed Qahl

Theses

Is there any similarity between the contexts of the Holy Bible and the Holy Quran, and can this be proven mathematically? The purpose of this research is using the Bible and the Quran as our corpus, we explore the performance of various feature extraction and machine learning techniques. The unstructured nature of text data adds an extra layer of complexity in the feature extraction task, and the inherently sparse nature of the corresponding data matrices makes text mining a distinctly difficult task. Among other things, We assess the difference between domain-based syntactic feature extraction and domain-free feature extraction, and then …

Fault-Resilient Lightweight Cryptographic Block Ciphers For Secure Embedded Systems, Kai Tian

Theses

The development of extremely-constrained environments having sensitive nodes such as RFID tags and nano-sensors necessitates the use of lightweight block ciphers. Indeed, lightweight block ciphers are essential for providing low-cost confidentiality to such applications. Nevertheless, providing the required security properties does not guarantee their reliability and hardware assurance when the architectures are prone to natural and malicious faults. In this thesis, considering false-alarm resistivity, error detection schemes for the lightweight block ciphers are proposed with the case study of XTEA (eXtended TEA). We note that lightweight block ciphers might be better suited for low-resource environments compared to the Advanced Encryption …

Extending The Sensing Of Online Social Networks – A Healthcare Perspective, Asma’ Wasfi Fayez Mustafa

Theses

Obesity is a rising health concern in the United Arab Emirates. Obesity leads to health risks such as diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions. It may also lead to eating disorders, depression, and low self-esteem. Regular exercising helps to protect from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and better manage stress. Despite all the benefits of exercising, people are doing less of it. In this research, an effort is made to encourage people to exercise by extending the prevalent sensing abilities of Online Social Networks (OSNs). Sensors are used to collect and generate data to be processed, clustered and …

Supervised Material Classification In Oblique Aerial Imagery Using Gabor Filter Features, Michael L. Harris

Theses

RIT's Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Image Generation (DIRSIG) tool allows modeling of real world scenes to create synthetic imagery for sensor design and analysis, trade studies, algorithm validation, and training image analysts. To increase model construction speed, and the diversity and size of synthetic scenes which can be generated it is desirable to automatically segment real world imagery into different material types and import a material classmap into DIRSIG.

This work contributes a methodology based on standard texture recognition techniques to supervised classification of material types in oblique aerial imagery. Oblique imagery provides many challenges for texture recognition due …

Surface Treatments To Reduce Leakage Current In Homojunction In0:53ga0:47as Pin Diodes For Tfet Applications, Abhinav Gaur

Theses

In the field of low power electronics, Tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs) are gaining momentum due to aggressive voltage scaling. To enable scaling of power supply while maintaining a high Ion, a steep subthreshold slope and low I0 are required. A TFET operates as a gated PIN diode under reverse bias with the intrinsic region as the channel.

This study focuses on minimizing I0 in a III-V homojunction PIN diode. I0 or leakage current is the current owing in a PIN diode under reverse bias, that forms the o-state current (Vgate = 0 V) in a TFET. Various surface treatment combinations …

A Methodological Framework For Evaluating The Environmental Performance Of Large-Scale Sanitation Systems In Developing Countries, Pedro Cruz-Diloné

Theses

It is 2014 and approximately 40% of the world population still has no access to adequate sanitary toilets. For these 2.6 billion people the problem is not only finding a safe and dignified place to defecate, but also trying to combat deadly diseases associated with the exposure to pathogens in feces left on the ground or near waterways. Improving sanitation is not only favorable to health, but also promotes dignity, economic benefits and environmental conservation. Although there have been numerous efforts to improve sanitation systems in the developing world, adoption rates and long term use are relatively low due to …

Metacognition And Decision-Making Style In Clinical Narratives, Limor Hochberg

Theses

Clinical decision-making has high-stakes outcomes for both physicians and patients, yet little research has attempted to model and automatically annotate such decision-making. The dual process model (Evans, 2008) posits two types of decision-making, which may be ordered on a continuum from intuitive to analytical (Hammond, 1981). Training clinicians to recognize decision-making style and select the most appropriate mode of reasoning for a

particular context may help reduce diagnostic error (Norman, 2009).

This study makes preliminary steps towards detection of decision style, based on an annotated dataset of image-based clinical reasoning in which speech data were collected from physicians as they …

A Brain Computer Interface For Interactive And Intelligent Image Search And Retrieval, Shitij P. Kumar

Theses

This research proposes a Brain Computer Interface as an interactive and intelligent Image Search and Retrieval tool that allows users, disabled or otherwise to browse and search for images using brain signals. The proposed BCI system implements decoding the brain state by using a non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) signals, in combination with machine learning, artificial intelligence and automatic content and similarity analysis of images. The user can spell search queries using a mental typewriter (Hex-O-Speller), and the resulting images from the web search are shown to the user as a Rapid Serial Visual Presentations (RSVP). For each image shown, the EEG …

Gaussian Beam Scattering From A Deterministic Rough Metal Surface, Qi Wang

Theses

A full-wave theory of plane wave scattering from rough surfaces called the Correction Current (CC) method was recently developed for the two-dimensional scatter problem that have a one-dimensional roughness profile. The method involves a primary field and radiation modes that are plane-wave-type fields that satisfy the boundary conditions at the rough surface. These fields do not satisfy Maxwell's source free equations, but they are forced to satisfy Maxwell's equations with distributed sources upon the introduction of fictitious volume currents distributions which correct for the field errors. Additionally, current sheet distributions are introduced which generate a radiation modal field that satisfies …

Electrospinning Of Ceria And Nickel Oxide Nanofibers, Jyothi Swaroop Reddy Yerasi

Theses

Electrospinning uses an electrical charge to draw very fine fibers from a liquid. It has very high potential for industrial processing. Electrospinning is cost effective, repeatable and it can produce long, continuous nanofibers. Polymers such as polyalcohol, polyamides, and PLLA can be easily electrospun. The increase in demand for clean energy combined with the research work in progress and the potential advantages of electrospun electrodes over conventionally fabricated SOFCs makes electrospinning a strong candidate. In this thesis, ceramic nanofibers (ceria and nickel oxide) that can potentially be used in SOFCs are fabricated.

A three-phase approach is implemented in the fabrication …

Unbalanced Workload Allocation In Large Assembly Lines., Christian E. Lopez

Theses

In modern production systems that perform under high cost environments, even small improvements in line efficiency represents large savings over the lifetime of an assembly line. In the beginning of modern production systems, it was thought that a `perfectly balanced' line was the most efficient way to design the line. However in practice, the ideal perfectly balanced line seldom occurs, because some degree of imbalance is inevitable.

Recent studies have found that unbalanced lines with a bowl shape workload configuration can yield performance in throughput as good as, or even better than those of a perfectly balanced line. This thesis …

The Development Of A Performance Assessment Methodology For Activity Based Intelligence: A Study Of Spatial, Temporal, And Multimodal Considerations, Christian M. Lewis

Theses

Activity Based Intelligence (ABI) is the derivation of information from a series of in- dividual actions, interactions, and transactions being recorded over a period of time. This usually occurs in Motion imagery and/or Full Motion Video. Due to the growth of unmanned aerial systems technology and the preponderance of mobile video devices, more interest has developed in analyzing people's actions and interactions in these video streams. Currently only visually subjective quality metrics exist for determining the utility of these data in detecting specific activities. One common misconception is that ABI boils down to a simple resolution problem; more pixels and …

Design And Simulation Of Short Channel Si:Hfo2 Ferroelectric Field Effect Transistor (Fefet), Idris H. Smaili

Theses

Non-volatile memories using ferroelectric capacitors, known as Ferroelectric Random Access Memory (FRAM) have been studied for many years, but they suffer from loss of data during read out process. Ferroelectric Field Effect Transistors (FeFETs), which are based on ferroelectric gate oxide, have been of recent interest for non-volatile memory applications. The FeFETs utilize the polarization of the ferroelectric layer incorporated into the transistor gate stack to control the channel conductivity. Therefore, in FeFET devices, the read out process is non-destructive because it is only processed by measuring the resistivity in the channel region. The drain current-gate voltage (ID-VG) characteristics of …

Evaluation Of Mosfets For Terahertz Detector Arrays, Gregory J. Fertig

Theses

The terahertz (THz) region of the electromagnetic spectrum is one of the last remaining regions that has yet to be fully characterized. THz imaging is one of the foremost drivers of this technology gap and has the potential to push development in the near term to a similar capability level as infrared (IR). Properties of THz radiation are introduced, along with promising current applications. Interest in array based imaging of THz radiation (T-Rays) has gained traction lately, specifically using a CMOS process due to its ease of manufacturability and the use of MOSFETs as a detection mechanism. The theory outlined …

Modeling, Simulation And Fabrication Of 100 Nm (Leff) High Performance Cmos Transistors, Chandan K. Amareshbabu

Theses

A 100 nm CMOS process is modeled and simulated using advanced ion implantation, diffusion models, recombination and mobility models; in ATHENA and ATLAS respectively. This process is designed for a mask length of 150 nm and effective gate length of =

The drive current on modeled and simulated device for NMOS and PMOS are 300 µA/µm and 63 µA/µm at 1.2 V drain and gate bias respectively. The threshold voltage for the modeled NMOS and PMOS is 0.479 V and -0.58 V with DIBL less than 12 mV/V on both the devices.

Unit process improvements includes retrograde well doping to …

An Extension Of The Hull White Model For Interest Rate Modeling, Xiao Lu

Theses

Since the time of the Black-Scholes model published in 1973, the research about mathematical finance models has never stopped. The original Black-Scholes model is for stock and stock derivatives pricing. However, stock derivatives is not the only kind of financial instrument in the market. Fix income derivatives also plays a very important role in the financial market, appealing to many researchers to explore more about their pricing model.

The fundamental theory of Black-Scholes is still employed in the pricing model for fix income derivatives, but there is something else making the research even more complicate: the definition function for the …

Continuous Methods For Elliptic Inverse Problems, Corinne Teravainen

Theses

Numerous mathematical models in applied and industrial mathematics take the form of a partial differential equation involving certain variable coefficients. These coefficients are known and they often describe some physical properties of the model. The direct problem in this context is to solve the partial differential equation. By contrast, an inverse problem asks for the identification of the variable coefficient when a certain measurement of a solution of the partial differential equation is available. A commonly used approach to inverse problems is to solve an optimization problem whose solution is an approximation of the sought coefficient. Such optimization problems are …

Classifying Mechanisms Of Spiral Wave Breakup Underlying Cardiac Fibrillation Using Quantitative Metrics, Sejal Jagdish Rai

Theses

Cardiovascular diseases are one of the leading causes of death in the world and manifest themselves in several forms, including arrhythmias. These disruptions in the normal rhythm of the heart inhibit the regular transmission of electrical signals that are essential for the heart to contract and pump blood to the rest of the body. During reentrant arrhythmias, spiral or scroll waves of electrical activation are conducted through the cardiac tissue and excite it repeatedly. As these waves propagate through the heart, they can break up in an irregular manner, leading to the onset of fibrillation. There are several mechanisms by …

Design And Cryptanalysis Of A Customizable Authenticated Encryption Algorithm, Matthew Joseph Kelly

Theses

It is common knowledge that encryption is a useful tool for providing confidentiality.

Authentication, however, is often overlooked.

Authentication provides data integrity; it helps ensure that any tampering with or corruption of data is detected.

It also provides assurance of message origin.

Authenticated encryption (AE) algorithms provide both confidentiality and integrity / authenticity by processing plaintext and producing both ciphertext and a Message Authentication Code (MAC).

It has been shown too many times throughout history that encryption without authentication is generally insecure.

This has recently culminated in a push for new authenticated encryption algorithms.

There are several authenticated encryption algorithms …