Digital Commons Network^™

Strength Evaluation And Transportation Behavior Of Preformed Particle Gel Using Screens And Tubes, Rajesh Sarma Challa

Masters Theses

"This research included a series of experiments, using screen models to evaluate the strength of swollen gel particles. It also includes the study of PPG propagation and extrusion behavior through tubes of various internal diameters. The effect of the particle gel swelling ratio (depending on brine concentration), flow rate; and mesh size on the gel injection pressure and injectivity were studied. The results show that gel injection pressure depends primarily on the swelling ratio and the mesh size. However, the injection pressure does not increase significantly with injection rates, behavior consistent with the real-time injection pressure and injection rate change …

Mechanical Properties And Microstructure Study For Direct Metal Deposition Of 316l Stainless Steel, Tian Fu

Masters Theses

"Direct metal deposition or laser cladding is a process capable of producing fully dense and net shape metal products and this process could be used on coating metal components in various engineering applications. This process has fast heating and cooling rates which can improve the surface hardness and provide excellent adhesion through metallurgical bond between coating material and substrate. This paper evaluated the laser deposited 316L stainless steel coating on 4340 steel, which is widely used for aircraft landing gear applications. The microstructure, micro-hardness and quantitative EDS were explored to verify the coating properties. The desired homogeneous microstructure and high …

Calibration Of Resistance Factors For Axial Capacity Of Driven Pile Into Missouri Soil, Mulugeta Abay Kebede

Masters Theses

"Over the past two decades the load resistance factor design (LRFD) has been accepted by the American Association for Transportation and Highway Officials (AASHTO) for the design of bridges. This approach is now gaining widespread popularity in the United States for substructure bridge design, including the design of driven pile foundations, as the states calibrate the geotechnical resistance factors for local geological conditions and practices. This study presents the geotechnical resistance factors calibrated for axially driven pile using the first-order reliability method (FORM) for the target reliability index of 2.33 and 3.0 based on 64 end-of-drives (EOD) and 22 beginning-of …

Establishing Workload Limitations For Application In Human Systems Integration, Muhammet Servet Gulum

Masters Theses

"As the amount of technology involved in the typical workplace increases and standard operational procedures become increasingly sophisticated the danger of overloading an operator's mental resources is increasing. As much as these technological developments help operators with daily tasks, for example by providing information via monitors and wireless headsets; it also increased the mental workload due to the bombardment of information. Mental workload is commonly associated with information processing tasks, limits. With all the extra information inputs it is difficult to set limits where excessive information becomes dangerous. The workload optimization is critical as it directly affects system performance and …

"In Situ" Printed Circuit Board Material Extraction Procedure With Conductor Surface Roughness Study, Amendra Koul

Masters Theses

"Analysis of printed circuit board (PCB) behavior in a wide frequency range from tens MHz to at least 40 GHz is very important for modern high-speed digital design and assuring for signal integrity (SI). this analysis includes preliminary evaluation of per-unit-length parameters of the PCB transmission line and transmission line characteristics, such as propagation and attenuation constants, and also extraction of these parameters from measurements on real test vehicles. This thesis describes an impedance calculator tool, which can substantially speed up PCB design, and the second topic considered in this work is characterization of dielectric parameters of substrates of printed …

Performance Evaluation Of A Novel Diesel Fuel Air Separation And Filtration System For An Indirect Injection Diesel Engine, Michael Ray Hess

Masters Theses

"The objective of this research was to evaluate an air/fuel separation system known as a Fuel Preporator. The device's efficacy was determined by studying the effect of air entrainment on engine performance and fuel consumption of a General Motors 6.5 L naturally aspirated indirect injection (IDI) diesel engine. A test bed was developed to accommodate the test engine and test methods were adapted from federal regulations for steady-state engine testing (40 CFR 89 Subpart E). Cases of 0%, 5%, 10%, and 20% volumetric air entrainment were investigated for engine operation with and without the Fuel Preporator. Key measured engine performance …

Innovative Concrete Bridging Systems For Pedestrian Bridges: Implementation And Monitoring, Kurt Edward Bloch

Masters Theses

"Two precast, prestressed pedestrian bridges were designed for rapid construction in Rolla, MO, utilizing high-strength concrete (HSC) and high-strength self-consolidating concrete (HS-SCC) with a target 28 day compressive strength of 68.9 MPa (10,000 psi) and release compressive strength of 24.1 MPa (3,500 psi). In addition, a glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) bar reinforced deck panel system was utilized in one of the two deck panels on each bridge.

Material properties were tested for compression, elastic modulus, modulus of rupture, splitting tensile strength, creep, and shrinkage following ASTM standards. Instrumentation systems within the spandrel beams and precast deck panels were implemented …

Selective Solubilisation Of Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes Using Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, Sourabhi Debnath

Doctoral

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTS) are proposed to be one of the most promising nanomaterials, with unique electronic and mechanical properties which lend themselves to a variety of applications. In all cases the quality of the SWCNT material is important, and for some applications it is paramount. Despite sustained efforts, all currently known SWCNT synthetic techniques generate significant quantities of impurities. They also grow in bundles or ropes and are largely insoluble in common organic solvents. SWCNTS can have a range of structures and their electronic properties (metallic or semiconducting) depend on their structure and as well on their diameters. Currently …

Visible And Hyperspectral Imaging Systems For The Detection And Discrimination Of Mechanical And Microbiological Damage Of Mushrooms, Edurne Gaston

Doctoral

Horticultural products such as mushrooms are exposed to environmental conditions during their postharvest life, which may affect product quality. Loss of whiteness during storage is particularly important in the mushroom industry. Rough handling and distribution, fruiting body senescence and bacterial infections are among the main causes of mushroom discolouration. The aim of this work was to study the use of visible and hyperspectral imaging (HSI) systems for the detection and discrimination of mechanical and microbiological damage of mushrooms. This piece of research involved a) monitoring the browning of mushroom with visible computer imaging systems, b) investigating the effect of mechanical …

Efficacy Of Ozone And Ultrasound For Microbial Reduction In Fruit Juice, Sonal Patil

Doctoral

Concerns have arisen regarding the microbiological safety of fruit juices due to a number of outbreaks associated with pathogens. Non-thermal technologies for the inactivation of microorganisms are of increasing interest to the food industry for the control of spoilage as well as safety concerns. The objective of this thesis was to investigate the efficacy of ultrasound and ozone treatments for control of microbial issues associated with fruit juices. Inactivation of Escherichia coli (ATCC 25922, NCTC 12900) using power ultrasound was found to be influenced by strain, prior acid adaptation and suspension liquid, but the effect was negated at the higher …

Differential Genome-Wide Array–Based Methylation Profiles In Prognostic Subsets Of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, Meena Kanduri, Nicola Cahill, Hanna Göransson, Camilla Enström, Fergus Ryan, Anders Isaksson, Richard Rosenquist

Articles

Global hypomethylation and regional hypermethylation are well-known epigenetic features of cancer; however, in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), studies on genome-wide epigenetic modifications are limited. Here, we analyzed the global methylation profiles in CLL, by applying high-resolution methylation microarrays (27 578 CpG sites) to 23 CLL samples, belonging to the immunoglobulin heavy-chain variable (IGHV) mutated (favorable) and IGHV unmutated/IGHV3-21 (poor-prognostic) subsets. Overall, results demonstrated significant differences in methylation patterns between these subgroups. Specifically, in IGHV unmutated CLL, we identified methylation of 7 known or candidate tumor suppressor genes (eg, VHL, ABI3, and IGSF4) as well as 8 unmethylated genes involved in …

Speech Intelligibility From Image Processing, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Articles

Hearing loss research has traditionally been based on perceptual criteria, speech intelligibility and threshold levels. The development of computational models of the auditory-periphery has allowed experimentation via simulation to provide quantitative, repeatable results at a more granular level than would be practical with clinical research on human subjects.

Dietary Energy Density As Marker Of Dietary Quality In Swedish Children And Adolescents: The European Youth Heart Study, Emma Patterson, J. Wärnberg, E. Poortvliet, John Kearney, M. Sjöström

Articles

To investigate if dietary energy density is associated with measures of dietary quality (food group, micronutrient and macronutrient intakes) in children and adolescents.

Automation Of Cad Model Based Assembly Simulations Using Motion Capture, Anup Madhav Vader

Masters Theses

"The manufacturing industry often uses text and video as a supplement for worker training procedures. Unfortunately, text is often difficult to follow and video lends itself to occlusion issues. CAD based animations of assembly operations can overcome these shortcomings while offering greater potential for operations analysis and simulation flexibility. However, creating such CAD based training simulations manually is a time intensive task and many a times fail to reveal the practical assembly issues faced in the real world. Thus, it is highly beneficial to be able to automate these simulations using motion capture from a physical environment. This thesis research …

Development Of Novel Backscatter Communication Systems Using A Multi-Hop Framework And Distributed Beamforming, Vikram Reddy Surendra

Masters Theses

"The goal of this thesis it to develop a wireless networking framework for battery-free devices based on passive, backscatter communication. In contrast to traditional, active communication systems, where the radio signal has to be generated using large amount of energy from batteries, the passive systems reflect the RF signal. The information is encoded by modulating the reflected signal, which consumes significantly less energy than active transmission. The existing passive, backscatter systems have limited communication capabilities. For example, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems support short-distance, direct communication between active reader and passive tags. The communication range is limited due to …

Design And Critical Performance Evaluation Of Horizontal Axis Hydrokinetic Turbines, Suchi Subhra Mukherji

Masters Theses

"The current work discusses the hydrodynamic performance of horizontal axis hydrokinetic turbines (HAHkT) under different turbine geometries and flow conditions. Hydrokinetic turbines are a class of zero-head hydropower systems which utilize kinetic energy of flowing water to drive a generator. However, such turbines often suffer from low-efficiency. A detailed computational fluid dynamics study was performed using a low-order k-[omega] SST (Shear Stress Transport) turbulence model to examine the effect of each of tip-speed ratio, solidity, angle of attack and number of blades on the performance of small HAHkTs with a power capacity of 10 kW. The numerical models (both two-dimensional …

Magnetocaloric Effect In Thin Films And Heterostructures, Christopher Bauer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goals of this work are the optimization of the magnetocaloric effect in Gadolinium thin film structures. We approach this issue from two directions, that of process optimization and of interface effects. Past results showed Gd₂O₃ in our Gadolinium thin films, and the presence of such oxide seemed to grow with the temperature at which the film was grown or annealed. Comparison of samples grown without chamber gettering to those that were gettered show differences in their structural and magnetic properties, and we conclude that gettering is an effective step in enhancing the quality of Gd thin …

Spousal Crossover Effects Of Job Demands On Health, Rachel Jane Daniels

Dissertations and Theses

The primary goal of this dissertation was to examine the crossover effects of an individual's job demands on the perceived health of the spouse. Using a sample of grocery store employees and their partners, crossover relationships were examined for 90 dyads using Structural Equation Modeling. Although the models had good fit, the proposed direct crossover relationships of job demands on health were not supported. Job demands of one partner did not significantly predict health outcomes in the other partner; although follow-up analyses found significant crossover of women's job satisfaction on men's mental health scores. An additional crossover relationship was supported …

Women And Resistance In The African Diaspora, With Special Focus On The Caribbean (Trinidad And Tobago) And U.S.A., Clare Johnson Washington

Dissertations and Theses

American history has celebrated the involvement of black women in the "underground railroad," but little is said about women's everyday resistance to the institutional constraints and abuses of slavery. Many Americans have probably heard of and know about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth -- two very prominent black female resistance leaders and abolitionists -- but this thesis addresses the lives of some of the less-celebrated and lesser-known (more obscure) women; part of the focus is on the common tasks, relationships, burdens, and leadership roles of these very brave enslaved women.

Resistance history in the Caribbean and Americas in its various …

Quasi Steady Capillary Corner Flow, John Alex Baker

Dissertations and Theses

It is possible to drain slender containers filled with wetting liquids via capillary flows along the interior corners of the container. Usually the well established equations governing such flows demand numerical techniques. In the case of container draining unique boundary conditions resulting from local section geometry allow for a quasi-steady assumption and in turn permit analytical solutions. The quasi-steady assumption may also be employed for certain problems in which the corner flows cause passive capillary migration of the fluid within the container. The analytic solutions are useful because of the ease in which geometric effects may be observed. Container draining …

The Centerpiece To Real Reform? Political, Legal, And Social Barriers To Reentry In California,, Eumi Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Exclude Evidence You Exclude Justice’? A Critical Evaluation Of Israel’S Exclusionary Rule After Issacharov, Binyamin Blum

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Misuse Made Plain: Evaluating Concerns About Neuroscience In National Security, Emily Murphy, Kelly Loweberg, Brenda M. Simon, Amy Burns, Libby Greismann, Jennifer M. Halbleib, Govind Persad, David L.M. Preston, Harker Rhodes

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Alienated: A Reworking Of The Racialization Thesis After September 11, Ming Hsu Chen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Is There Monopsony In The Labor Market? Evidence From A Natural Experiment, Douglas O. Staiger, Joanne Spetz, Ciaran S. Phibbs

Dartmouth Scholarship

Recent theoretical and empirical advances have renewed interest in monopsonistic models of the labor market. However, there is little direct empirical support for these models. We use an exogenous change in wages at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals as a natural experiment to investigate the extent of monopsony in the nurse labor market. We estimate that labor supply to individual hospitals is quite inelastic, with short-run elasticity around 0.1. We also find that non-VA hospitals responded to the VA wage change by changing their own wages.

Deriving An X-Ray Luminosity Function Of Dwarf Novae Based On Parallax Measurements, K. Byckling, K. Mukai, J. R. Thorstensen, J. P. Osborne

Dartmouth Scholarship

We have derived an X-ray luminosity function using parallax-based distance measurements of a set of 12 dwarf novae, consisting of Suzaku, XMM-Newton and ASCA observations. The shape of the X-ray luminosity function obtained is the most accurate to date, and the luminosities of our sample are concentrated between ~10^{30}-10^{31} erg s^{-1}, lower than previous measurements of X-ray luminosity functions of dwarf novae. Based on the integrated X-ray luminosity function, the sample becomes more incomplete below ~3 x 10^{30} erg s^{-1} than it is above this luminosity limit, and the sample is dominated by X-ray bright dwarf novae. The total integrated …

Sentencing Reform In California, Aaron J. Rappaport

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Above All Else Stop Digging: Local Government Law As A (Partial) Cause Of (And Solution To) The Current Housing Crisis, Darien Shanske

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Engquist And The Erosion Of The Equal Protection Clause: An Attempt To Stop The Creep Of Irrational Dicta, Darien Shanske

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Essay On Cataloging, Daniel Canncasciato

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The imminent arrival of Resource Description and Access (RDA), the proposed successor to Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR), makes now an opportune time to clarify a profound misunderstanding regarding the objective of cataloging. The objective has been widely misunderstood to be about the production of bibliographic records, or about the production of bibliographic records and their supporting authority records, or about the production of perfect bibliographic and authority records. This essay offers a more accurate picture of the objective of cataloging, working from Cutter’s early statement of principles as a reference point in re-considering some misperceptions and actions being taken in …