Digital Commons Network^™

Evaluating The Effects Of The Blennerhassett Island Bridge Crossing (Ohio River) On Soil, Vegetation, And Wildlife, Joshua Allen Vance

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Corridor D was one of the original 23 highway corridors selected by the Appalachian Highway Development System in 1965 and stretches from Bridgeport, West Virginia to Cincinnati, Ohio. The last piece of Corridor D to be completed was the Blennerhassett Island Bridge which crosses over the Ohio River and Blennerhassett Island near Parkersburg, West Virginia and Belpre, Ohio. The Blennerhassett Island Bridge is a tied-arch style bridge about 1,220 m in length and 24 m above the ground and water surface. Construction of the bridge began in March 2005 and the bridge was opened to the public in June 2008. …

Hydrologic Soil Grouping Determination For Appalachian Minesoils, Anthony Willard

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The hydrologic soil group refers to the infiltration potential of the soil after prolonged wetting. This classification system separates soils into four hydrologic groups (A, B, C, and D), based upon the intake and transmission of water under conditions of maximum yearly wetness. Group A has the lowest runoff potential and D the highest. Several soil properties are used to determine the hydrologic soil groupings. In the study of the hydrologic soil nature, soil properties that affect infiltration, such as bulk density, porosity and texture, should be considered. Associated factors that affect infiltration in the field are slope and vegetation. …

Mechanisms Of Tungsten Carbide-Cobalt Nanoparticle-Induced Angiogenesis, Yingxue Zhu

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Hard metal or cemented carbide consists of a powder mixture of 80 to 90% of tungsten carbide (WC) and 5 to 10% of metallic cobalt (Co). Nanoparticles are engineered structures with one dimension of at least 100 nanometers or smaller. The small size results in properties that may be substantially different from particles of the same composition in the micrometer scale. It has been demonstrated that the inhalation of hard metal particles may cause an interstitial pulmonary disease and lung cancer, the mechanism of which involves an interaction between Co and WC particles, the generation of reactive oxygen species, and …

Spectral Approaches To Natural Mesh Processing, Takamitsu Kawai

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Mesh design is a major bottleneck in the creation of computer games and animation. Therefore simplifying the process of mesh editing is an important problem. Natural mesh processing is generally difficult to perform since natural meshes often have nontrivial surface shapes and high degrees of freedom. In this study I present novel approaches to natural mesh processing utilizing spectral methods based on the manifold harmonic basis.;Geometric scaling transformations do not respect the biological processes which govern the size and shape of living creatures. I describe an approach to scaling which can be related to biological function. Known biological laws of …

High Rank Tensor And Spherical Harmonic Models For Diffusion Mri Processing, Inas A. Yassine

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a non-invasive quantitative method of characterizing tissue micro-structure. Diffusion imaging attempts to characterize the manner by which the water molecules within a particular location move within a given amount of time. Measurement of the diffusion tensor (D) within a voxel allows a macroscopic voxel-averaged description of fiber structure, orientation and fully quantitative evaluation of the microstructural features of healthy and diseased tissue.;The rank two tensor model is incapable of resolving multiple fiber orientations within an individual voxel. This shortcoming of single tensor model stems from the fact that the tensor possesses only a single orientational …

Correlating Simulated Surface Marks With Near-Surface Tornado Structure, Michael I. Zimmerman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Tornadoes often leave behind patterns of debris deposition, or "surface marks", which provide a direct signature of their near surface winds. The intent of this thesis is to investigate what can be learned about near-surface tornado structure and intensity through the properties of surface marks generated by simulated, debris-laden tornadoes. Earlier work showed through numerical simulations that the tornado's structure and intensity is highly sensitive to properties of the near-surface flow and can change rapidly in time for some conditions. The strongest winds often occur within tens of meters of the surface where the threat to human life and property …

Procedures For A Long Term Retention Data For The Analysis And Design Of A Rudder For A Marine Vessel: Step Documentation, Franklin A. Montejo

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The process of mechanical design involves many steps, starting from a customer need. Then the engineer estimates the possible solutions until an optimal product is achieved. Through these design steps, information is created and exchanged among different design activities. Currently the industry lacks a means to preserve this information flow for future use.;In the end, much of the information generated in the design process may not be available due to obsolete software used to create the design; one missing part of the process; a missing link between the design tasks; unknown context of the design, and some other possibilities.;The present …

One Social, Sowmya Sampath

Master's Projects

Facebook streams and Twitter tweets represent user content in two common social media systems. Users often have accounts on both these systems and to keep their content current for both of them they must update each separately. It is thus difficult to manage and maintain both of these social networks together. The goal of this project is to build a social website called One Social, where users can view their Facebook streams and Twitter tweets in one single view and thereby easily organize and maintain their updates. In One Social, users can enter a status message and can share it …

Ferric Iron Nanoparticle Formation Mediated By Negatively Charged Polypeptides, Vamsi Krishna Aluru

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The creation of magnetite particles by magnetotactic bacteria has been of great interest for a number of years. Previous studies have shown that magnetite nanocrystals have been synthesized in the presence of recombinant Mms6 protein. Mms6 plays a vital role in the biomineralization of bacterial magnetite nanocrystals. The objective of this research is to determine the effect of functional group type on size and shape of magnetic nanoparticles formed by biomineralization. Control over the size of nanoparticles is paramount. Use of nanoparticles as contrast agents in MRI is advantageous, as they are small enough to be localized in desired region …

Mercury Removal From Coal By Leaching With Sulfur Dioxide, Poornima Chateker

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Mercury from coal-fired utilities has been identified as one of the most hazardous air pollutants and the greatest potential public health concern. Furthermore, it has a tendency to bio-accumulate in the food chain. Mercury is present in coal in concentration well below 1 ppm; however, the large tonnages of coal consumed for electric power generation represent a significant source of mercury vapor entering the environment. There are various technologies available to control the emission of mercury from coal-fired power plants. Among them activated carbon injection into the flue gas stream has been studied for many years and is considered to …

Simulation-Based Optimum Design Of Sensor Arrays Using Multi-Objective Tabu Search, Zongyu Geng

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis is concerned with the optimum design of sensor arrays (i.e., electronic noses or tongues) using simulation experiments. The proposed design method adopts a set of new criteria, which more adequately represent the desirable properties of a sensor array in practice. A number of best non-dominated array designs are selected through a multiple objective (criteria) Tabu search algorithm. The evaluation of a candidate sensor array is based on its multivariate calibration model, which is efficiently estimated from well-designed simulation experiments. The method can be used to optimize the design of both linear and nonlinear sensor arrays.

Quantification Of Uncertainty Associated With Injecting Carbon Dioxide, And Design Of Ecbm Reservoir In Appalachian Basin Coals, Jesma Mohan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

There are tremendous coal bed methane resources throughout the world. However, with conventional production methods, 40-80% of methane is left behind as unrecoverable. Enhanced coal bed methane (ECBM) recovery by injection of Carbon dioxide (CO2) is motivated by the dual benefits of improved gas recovery and green house gas storage. In practice, this technology is relatively new, still in the early stage of development, and the economic performance of ECBM has yet to be verified. Due to the complexity of CBM reservoirs, the production performance involves significant uncertainties. It is imperative to quantify the uncertainty of production performance in order …

Design And Development Of A Prototype Of Dual Modality Pet/Optical Breast Cancer Margin Specification Imager, Krishna Nandanavanam

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis is an attempt to develop a prototype of a breast cancer imager to assess the margins of excised breast tissue. This device is proposed to be used to assure that the entire cancerous lesion has been removed by imaging the intensity of a radio labeled tracer and inspecting for a noncancerous margin in the volume of the tissue sample. The dual modality PET/optical breast cancer specification imager uses a pair of small PET detectors to measure the bioactivity of an excised sample of tissue. A co-registered optical image is taken to allow the surgeon to visually correlate the …

Emissions Characterization And Particle Size Distribution From A Dpf-Equipped Diesel Truck Fueled With Biodiesel Blends, Idowu O. Olatunji

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Biodiesel may be derived from either plant or animal sources, and is usually employed as a compression ignition fuel in a blend with petroleum diesel (PD). Emissions differences between vehicles operated on biodiesel blends and PD have been published previously, but data do not cover the latest engine technologies. Prior studies have shown that biodiesel offers advantages in reducing particulate matter, with either no advantage or a slight disadvantage for oxides of nitrogen emissions. Literature also suggests that diesel engine exhaust particle number emissions are dominated by nucleation mode particles (NMPs) if present, while the mass emissions are dominated by …

Cfd Applications In Airship Design, Kevin Shields

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis examines the aerodynamic characteristics and flight dynamics of a lighter-than-air airship using analytical and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Modern airships have frequently been proposed for military operations; one of which, designated YEZ-2A, was a prototype whose design was initiated during the 1980's. Designs were evaluated through the wind tunnel tests of a 1:75 scaled model performed by Gomes. His tests relied on surface roughening techniques to compensate for the inability to maintain Reynolds number similarity among scales.;Later, the scaled prototype would receive further attention during a CFD study at WVU. This study was undertaken to numerically simulate the …

Field Development Strategies For Bakken Shale Formation, Saeed Zargari

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Bakken shale has been subjected to more attention during the last decade. Recently released reports discussing the high potential of the Bakken formation coupled with advancements in horizontal drilling, increased the interest of oil companies for investment in this field. Bakken formation is comprised of three layers. In this study upper and middle parts are the core of attention. Middle member which is believed to be the main reserve is mostly a limestone and the upper member is black shale. The upper member plays as a source and seal which has been subject to production in some parts as well.;In …

Xpath-Based Template Language For Describing The Placement Of Metadata Within A Document, Vijay Kumar Musham

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

In the recent years, there has been a tremendous growth in Internet and online resources that had previously been restricted to paper archives. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools can be used for digitalizing an existing corpus and making it available online. A number of federal agencies, universities, laboratories, and companies are placing their collections online and making them searchable via metadata fields such as author, title, and publishing organization. Manually creating metadata for a large collection is an extremely time-consuming task, and is difficult to automate, particularly for collections consisting of documents with diverse layout and structure. The Extract project …

Inclusive Dijet Cross Sections In Neutral Current Deep Inelastic Scattering At Hera, H. Abramowicz, I. Abt, L. Adamczyk, M. Adamus, R. Aggarwal, S. Antonelli, P. Antonioli, A. Antonov, M. Arneodo, V. Aushev, Y. Aushev, O. Bachynska, A. Bamberger, A. N. Barakbaev, G. Barbagli, G. Bari, F. Barreiro, D. Bartsch, M. Basile, O. Behnke, J. Behr, U. Behrens, L. Bellagamba, A. Bertolin, S. Bhadra, M. Bindi, C. Blohm, V. Bokhonov, T. Bołd, E. G. Boos, K. Borras, Margarita C. K. Mattingly

Faculty Publications

Single- and double-differential inclusive dijet cross sections in neutral current deep inelastic ep scattering have been measured with the ZEUS detector using an integrated luminosity of 374 pb-1. The measurement was performed at large values of the photon virtuality, Q2, between 125 and 20 000 GeV2. The jets were reconstructed with the kT cluster algorithm in the Breit reference frame and selected by requiring their transverse energies in the Breit frame, ET,Bjet, to be larger than 8 GeV. In addition, the invariant mass of the dijet system, Mjj, was required to be greater than 20 GeV. The cross sections are …

Correction To Mitochondrial Free [Ca2+] Increases During Atp/Adp Antiport And Adp Phosphorylation: Exploration Of Mechanisms, Johan Haumann, Ranjan K. Dash, David F. Stowe, Age D. Boelens, Daniel A. Beard, Amadou K.S. Camara

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Study On Intumescent Flame Retarded Polystyrene Composites With Improved Flame Retardancy, Hongdian Lu, Charles A. Wilkie

Chemistry Faculty Research and Publications

The flame retardancy and thermal stability of ammonium polyphosphate/tripentaerythritol (APP/TPE) intumescent flame retarded polystyrene composites (PS/IFR) combined with organically-modified layered inorganic materials (montmorillonite clay and zirconium phosphate), nanofiber (multiwall carbon nanotubs), nanoparticle (Fe₂O₃) and nickel catalyst were evaluated by cone calorimetry, microscale combustion calorimetry (MCC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Cone calorimetry revealed that a small substitution of IFR by most of these fillers (≤2%) imparted substantial improvement in flammability performance. The montmorillonite clay exhibited the highest efficiency in reducing the peak heat release rate of PS/IFR composite, while zirconium phosphate modified with C₂₁H_{26 …}

The New Orleans Jazz And Heritage Festival And Foundation, Inc., Lori B. Andrews

Arts Administration Master's Reports (1984-2016)

This report is the analysis of a three month internship with the Development Department of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation, Inc., This report includes an organizational profile, description of the development department, S.W.O.T. analysis, best practices, and intern recommendations as applied to my experiences with the organization from May 21 to August 10, 2010.

Web-Based Ide For Interfacing View Controller, Tejasvi Palvai

Master's Projects

The main idea of this project is to develop a web-based IDE, which helps users to avoid installing or configuring the Desktop IDE. It also enables users to create XHTML pages using the drag and drop mechanism in Struts. Struts extends the Java Servlet API to encourage developers to adopt the MVC (Model-View- Controller) architecture. In this project, a web application for interfacing the view and controller parts of the MVC architecture was developed. This web-based IDE connects the View and Controller components when the user drags and drops HTML elements in the UI of the IDE. With this project, …

Automatic Execution Path Finding Tool, Fan Yang

Master's Projects

Today, there are many hackers trying to break software using reverse engineering tech- niques. To better protect software, we need to understand reverse engineering methods. This project presents a tool that automatically analyzes executable code in a manner simi- lar to the way an attack might analyze code.

Using reverse engineering techniques, executables can be disassembled to yield an as- sembly code representation of the program. Assembly code is much more human reada- ble than binary code. With assembly code, an attacker can attempt to modify the program to do something other than what was intended by the developer.

The …

Return To College Education Revisited: Is Relevance Relevant?, Olga Yakusheva

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This study examines whether the size of the college earnings premium varies depending on the quality of the match between an individual’s degree field and his/her occupation. The study uses the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to obtain a new measure of the quality of occupational match for a sample of 2268 young adults with post-secondary degrees from the restricted use High School and Beyond (1980/92) data. The study finds that people whose occupations better match their degree fields earn significantly higher returns to post-secondary schooling. This result is robust to controlling for an extensive set of pre-existing differences among individuals, …

The Cd-Te Phase Diagram, Robert F. Brebrick

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The properties of the liquid phase in the Cd–Te system are fit using thermodynamic properties of CdTe(c) recently optimized by the author. These include a high temperature heat capacity significantly lower than commonly used such that the enthalpy of formation of CdTe(c) at its melting point is about 10 kJ/mol less negative than previously thought. An associated solution model with Cd, CdTe, and Te species is used. Seven adjustable parameters are sufficient to quantitatively fit the liquidus and partial pressures of Te₂ and Cd. Additional partial pressures for Te rich CdTe(c) near its melting point are extracted from an …

Midwave Infrared Quantum Dot Avalanche Photodiode, David A. Ramirez, Jiayi Shao, Majeed M. Hayat, Sanjay Krishna

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

We report the first demonstration of a GaAs based avalanche photodiode (APD) operating in the midwave infrared region . In the device, called the quantum dot avalanche photodiode, an intersubband quantum dots-in-a-well detector is coupled with an APD through a tunnel barrier. Using this approach, we have increased the photocurrent and reached a conversion efficiency of 12%, which is one of the highest reported conversion efficiencies for any quantum dot detector.

Neuroeconomics: Constructing Identity, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

The paper asks whether neuroeconomics will make instrumental use of neuroscience to adjudicate existing disputes in economics or be more seriously transformed by neuroscience in ways that might transform economics. The paper pursues the question by asking how neuroscience constructs an understanding of individuals as whole persons. The body of the paper is devoted to examining two approaches: Don Ross's neurocellular approach to neuroeconomics and Joseph Dumit's cultural anthropological science organization approach. The accounts are used to identify boundaries on single individual explanations. Within that space Andy Clark's external scaffolding view and Nathaniel Wilcox's socially distributed cognition view are employed.

Program Committee Report December 2010, Regenstrief Center For Healthcare Engineering

RCHE Reports

No abstract provided.

Double Your Money

Cal Poly Magazine

No abstract provided.

Alum Ain Mckendrick Is Putting The Whole (Tech) World In Your Hands, Teresa Mariani Hendrix

Cal Poly Magazine

No abstract provided.