Digital Commons Network^™

Enhanced Photorefractivity In A Polymeric Composite Photosensitized With Modified Carbon Nanotubes, Naveen Kumar Lingam

Masters Theses

"This work involves the photosensitization of photorefractive polymeric composites through the inclusion of multiwalled and singlewalled carbon nanotubes grafted to poly(N-vinyl carbazole). The photorefractive nature of the holograms gratings was established using two-beam-coupling, yielding two-beam-coupling gain coefficients approaching 80 cm⁻¹. Degenerate-four-wave-mixing experiments exhibited diffraction efficiencies as high as 60% as well as over-modulation voltages as low as ~ 40 V/µm. These notable figures of merit indicate that the grafting of the various carbon nanotubes to the poly(N-vinyl carbazole) polymer resulted in enhanced photorefractive performance. The mechanism responsible for this enhancement in photorefractive performance is investigated using a variety of experimental …

Water Analysis For Emerging Environmental Contaminants, Xiaoliang Cheng

Masters Theses

"The presence of emerging environmental contaminants in water bodies used either as drinking water or for recreational purpose has received considerable attention in the recent years. The emerging environmental contaminants can be defined as a wide range of chemicals that have been determined in the environment which may present serious health risks for humans. The occurrence of these contaminants indicate that both household and industrial chemicals have been introduced to water resources, a wide variety of chemicals, such as disinfection byproducts, pharmaceutical and personal care products and so on, have been detected at cetiain levels in either water bodies or …

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 …

2-D Path Planning For Direct Laser Deposition Process, Swathi Routhu

Masters Theses

"The zigzag and offset path have been the two most popular path patterns for tool movement in machining process. Different from the traditional machining processes, the quality of parts produced by the metal deposition process is much more dependent upon the choice of deposition paths. Due to the nature of the metal deposition processes, various tool path patterns not only change the efficiency but also affect the deposition height, a critical quality for metal deposition process. This thesis presents the research conducted on calculating zigzag pattern to improve efficiency by minimizing the idle path. The deposition height is highly dependent …

A Pilot Study In An Application Of Text Mining To Learning System Evaluation, Nitsawan Katerattanakul

Masters Theses

"Text mining concerns discovering and extracting knowledge from unstructured data. It transforms textual data into a usable, intelligible format that facilitates classifying documents, finding explicit relationships or associations between documents, and clustering documents into categories. Given a collection of survey comments evaluating the civil engineering learning system, text mining technique is applied to discover and extract knowledge from the comments. This research focuses on the study of a systematic way to apply a software tool, SAS Enterprise Miner, to the survey data. The purpose is to categorize the comments into different groups in an attempt to identify "major" concerns from …

Computational Intelligence Methods In Wireless Sensor Networks, Raghavendra V. Kulkarni

Doctoral Dissertations

"Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are networks of autonomous nodes that sense, compute and communicate in order to monitor an environment collectively. Ad hoc deployment, dynamic environment and resource constraints in nodes need to be considered while addressing WSN challenges such as deployment, localization, routing and scheduling. Adaptive mechanisms that exhibit intelligent behavior in complex and dynamic environments are desirable to address these challenges. The potential of computational intelligence ( CI) based approaches for addressing WSN challenges is investigated in this study. Contributions of this dissertation are in the following three areas: critical literature analysis, new architectures and approaches, and new …

Cretaceous/Paleogene Boundary Biostratigraphy And Palynofacies Of The Alo-1 Well, Southeastern Nigeria, Janet Diane Raymer

Masters Theses

"The Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary (K/Pg) has been studied in great detail because of the fascination most people have with the extinction of the dinosaurs. The response of the vegetation to this extinction event has been studied in detail in mid to high latitudes, but little is known about what happened in the tropics. Sixty-seven samples from the Nsukka and Imo formations in the Alo-1 well in the Anambra Basin, southeastern Nigeria have been studied for their palynological contents. The aims of the study was to use spores, pollen and dispersed organic matter components to interpret biostratigraphy, and evaluate depositional conditions across …

Graded-Index Fiber Collimator Enhanced Extrinsic Fabry-Perot Interferometer, Yinan Zhang

Masters Theses

"In this thesis, we studied a fringe visibility enhanced extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometer (EFPI) by fusion splicing a quarter-pitch graded-index fiber (GIF) fiber to the lead-in single-mode fiber (SMF). The performance of the GIF collimator is theoretically analyzed using a ray matrix model and experimentally verified through beam divergence angle measurements. The fringe visibility of the GIF-collimated EFPI is measured as a function of the cavity length and compared with that of a regular SMF-EFPI. At the cavity length of 500µm, the fringe visibility of the GIF-EFPI is 0.8 while that of the SMF-EFPI is only 0.2. The visibility enhanced GIF-EFPI …

Borate Based Bioactive Glass Scaffolds For Hard And Soft Tissue Engineering, Steven B. Jung

Doctoral Dissertations

"The main objectives of this dissertation were to evaluate bioactive borate glass scaffolds for hard and soft tissue applications and determine the potential toxicity of the borate glasses on the adjacent and systemic tissues. Porous randomly oriented fiber scaffolds composed of bioactive borate glass were implanted in subcutaneous soft tissue sites and in calvaria defects of laboratory rats and no signs of toxicity (necrotic tissue, increase in macrophages or other immune cells) were detected in any of the adjacent tissues (hard or soft). Systemic organs (kidney and liver) of laboratory rats implanted with bioactive borate scaffolds were analyzed for possible …

Adaptive Resource Allocation For Cognitive Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Behdis Eslamnour

Doctoral Dissertations

"Widespread use of resource constrained wireless ad hoc networks requires careful management of the network resources in order to maximize the utilization. In cognitive wireless networks, resources such as spectrum, energy, communication links/paths, time, space, modulation scheme, have to be managed to maintain quality of service (QoS). Therefore in the first paper, a distributed dynamic channel allocation scheme is proposed for multi-channel wireless ad hoc networks with single-radio nodes. The proposed learning scheme adapts the probabilities of selecting each channel as a function of the error in the performance index at each step.

Due to frequent changes in topology and …

Effects Of Optimized And Sub-Optimum Two Degree Of Freedom Lining Tolerances On Modeled Inlet Acoustic Attenuation And Normal Incidence Impedance Measurement At Elevated Temperatures, David R. Burd

Doctoral Dissertations

"This work first investigates the effect of manufacturing tolerances on realized attenuation for two degree-of-freedom linings with the use of lining models and finite element duct propagation codes. Acoustic linings were created for two turbofan engines that optimize attenuation at takeoff/sideline and approach conditions. Lining physical and geometric parameters were set, which best meet the optimum impedance requirements at two target frequencies. Similar linings were created to investigate sub-optimum designs. Variations of these parameters representing realistic manufacturing tolerances were used to systematically examine the effect on installed impedance and predicted attenuation. Attenuation at sideline and approach conditions was found to …

Ground Penetrating Radar Investigations In Upper Kama Potash Mines, Oleg N. Kovin

Doctoral Dissertations

"An understanding of the structure and state of the rock mass surrounding underground openings in the potash mines is critically important for safe mining, planning the methods of extraction of an orebody, and preventing the influx of ground water. Continuous common offset ground penetrating radar (GPR) data were acquired in the potash mine operated by the Joint Stock Company (JSC) "Silvinit" (Russia) as part of an investigation of both pre-existing fractures exposed by mine workings and other anomalous geological structures. During the course of GPR investigation, the electrical properties of salt-bearing units were determined, site-specific data acquisition techniques and object-oriented …

A Value Model For Product Development Process Using Lean Principles, Salik Yadav

Masters Theses

"This research presents a value quantification model for multi-stage product development Process (PDP) using lean value principles. The PDP stages considered in this research include conceptual development, systems design, detailed design and prototyping stages. The value at any of the PDP stages is formulated as a function of six factors: (a) importance of customer requirements, (b) cost of customer's ownership, (c) parts/service availability, (d) weighted average cost of capital, (e) information evolution, and (f) risk reduction. Factors (a)-(d) are adequately addressed in the literature. This study focuses on information evolution and risk reduction factors. These two factors are defined by …

An Analysis Of The Integration Of Lean And Safety, Pankaj Mahesh Pai

Masters Theses

"The lean philosophy has proven potential to help businesses improve productivity and reduce its losses. Lean can give businesses a cutting edge in this age of global competition. The fundamental principle of lean is to identify wastes in the system and reduce or eliminate them. There is a concern that during lean implementations, the focus on productivity may result in health and safety issues being ignored or worse, changes driven by lean may introduce new hazards. The relationship between lean and safety is not clearly understood. Lean and safety should be compatible. Both strive to improve processes. Both are against …

A Comparison Of Case-Based Reasoning And Regression Analysis Approaches For Cost Uncertainty Modeling, Karan Banga

Masters Theses

"This thesis presents case-based reasoning approach for estimating the cost and modeling cost uncertainty of a new product in the concept selection stage. Case-based reasoning (CBR) is an approach which uses old cases/experiences to understand and solve new problems. The CBR approach consists of creating a knowledge-base (or database) containing past cases (products), defining a new case (concept), retrieving cases similar to the new case, and adjusting the solution of the retrieved cases to the new case. The first paper compares case-based reasoning, in studying the effects of varying design attribute specifications on cost estimation accuracy and cost distribution reliability. …

Multi Axis Slicing For Rapid Prototyping, Divya Kanakanala

Masters Theses

"With multi-axis capability, direct laser deposition process can produce a metal part without the usage of support structures. In order to fully utilize such a capability, a slicing method for multi-axis metal deposition process is discussed. Using the geometry information of adjacent layers, the slicing direction and layer thickness can be changed as needed. A hierarchy structure is designed to manage the topological information which is used to determine the slicing sequence. The parallel slicing process is studied to build hollow type structure. With such a character, the hole like feature can be deposited directly to save the required machining …

Strategic Criteria For Evaluating Inland Freight Hub Locations, Robert Tyler Lipscomb

Masters Theses

"The aim of this thesis is to develop criteria that can be used to evaluate the current capabilities and sustainability of inland freight hubs. A review of the literature highlights the need for a more efficient freight distribution system to combat supply chain deficiencies and the important role that inland freight hubs play in creating this system. Also in the literature is a call for a more comprehensive approach to hub development decisions and the use of multi-criteria decision analysis. The decision to devote resources to logistics developments in a specific region must consider many factors that are both quantitative …

The Effects Of Personal Protective Equipment Level A Suits On Human Task Performance, Yvette L. Simon

Masters Theses

"First response teams dealing with hazardous substances often require the highest level of protection provided by Level A suits. These suits are fully encapsulating, bulky, and heat retentive. The effect of these suits on the wearer's ability to perform various tasks is of interest when it comes to human performance analysis. This research effort examined the effect of the Level A suit on fine motor and gross motor dexterity. Seven members of the National Guard's Civil Support Team (CST) performed a battery of six tasks designed to test these abilities. Tasks comprised the Minnesota Dexterity test and the Mirror Tracer …

Design And Development Of Microwire Feeder For Laser Applications, Amogh J. Shenoy

Masters Theses

"This thesis focuses on the design and development of a microwire feeder for laser applications. The use of wire-feeders in laser welding and electrical discharge machining applications has been prominent which can handle wire of 0.25 mm and it can go up to 10.0 mm in other applications. Development of microwire handling devices is complicated and difficult due to its low buckling strength; the need for high accuracy for its use; and the harsh environment it is exposed to, in laser applications. This paper presents a systematic methodology for the design and development of a high-precision microwire handling device. This …

Incorporating New Technology Into Healthcare: An Analysis Of Performance, Acceptance, And Safety, Anthony Joseph Strawhun

Masters Theses

"Each year, advances in the healthcare industry allows for better patient care and increased ability to save lives. Looking at standardized and common healthcare devices for both inside and outside the hospital environment, this research studied the tradeoffs and human factors that affect operator performance and patient survival. This research studied the impact of human factors and technology in the development and implementation of the automated external defibrillator for out-of-hospital use and the incremental advantages of SMArT infusion pump technology over traditional intravenous infusion pumps for in-hospital care. The study highlights the complex human factors of both products and establishes …

Phase Equilibria In Iron Phosphate System, Liying Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

"The main objectives of this research were to synthesize iron phosphate compounds, study phase equilibria in the iron phosphate system, focusing on the glass forming area, and investigate glass formability and properties based on the liquidus regions. Twelve iron phosphate compounds were successfully prepared and studied in terms of liquidus temperature or decomposition behavior. The liquidus surface of the Fe₃PO₇- Fe(PO₃)₃ system was re-determined and found to be significantly different from that originally presented by Wentrup in 1935. Eutectic points exist at 58.0 mole% Fe₂O₃ (1070⁰C), 42.7 mole% Fe₂O₃ (925°C), and 37.0 mole% Fe₂O₃ (907°C). The latter two eutectic points …

The Placement Of Remediation Amendments Into Contaminated Sediments Via Waterjet Technologies, Gavin Hunter Ray Risley

Masters Theses

"The use of amendments to perform in situ remediation of contaminated sediments is a technique that is relatively mature. The need exists to develop a method of amendment delivery that will efficiently place the amendments into the contaminated zone at depth with minimal impacts to the benthic communities and contaminant resuspension. Waterjets have been used for hundreds of years as an excavation, cutting, and cleaning tool, but they can also be used to inject remediation amendments into contaminated sediments if setup properly. In order to test this concept, a waterjet amendment injection system and nozzle have been developed and tested. …

Dynamic Reconfiguration And Control Of Smart Power Systems, Pinaki Mitra

Doctoral Dissertations

"To address the increasing demand and complexity, modern power systems need intelligence at almost all levels which can transform them into 'smart' power systems. The term 'smart power systems' not only refers to the terrestrial power systems with a significant penetration of distributed energy resources and energy storage such as plug-in electric vehicle parking lots (SmartParks), but also includes other isolated power systems, such as the power systems of naval electric ships. The research presented in this dissertation contributes to the dynamic reconfiguration and control of both terrestrial and ship power system with the application of computational intelligence methods.

In …

Rethinking International Women's Human Rights Through Eve Sedgwick, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Thanks to Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk for organizing this amazing workshop. Since the death of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I have wanted to honor her memory, and this panel is the perfect venue. Sedgwick's foundational understandings of sexuality, gender, and identity set the stage for much of my work and that of those I admire.

My own work looks at how the state regulates gender in the "public" sphere. I attempt to challenge the tensions and intersections among international and comparative notions of equality and identity. Group identity constructions vary across cultural lines and conflict with liberal notions of …

Pregnant Man?: A Conversation, Darren Rosenblum, Noa Ben-Asher, Mary Anne Case, Elizabeth Emens, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol, Vivian M. Gutierrez, Lisa C. Ikemoto, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, Kimberly Mutcherson, Peter Siegelman, Beth Jones

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

I'm a law professor who works on gender, sexuality, and culture in the international and comparative context. That's my head working. In "real" life, my partner, Howard, and I have been engaged in having a baby together for several years, a project that came to fruition with the birth of our daughter Melina. Of course, such a project evokes intensely complex feelings and thoughts. Beyond a simple transposition of the personal onto the political, I feel so fortunate to have engaged in myriad conversations with a variety of friends and colleagues who think much more carefully about the family …

A Little More Mascara: Response To Making Up Is Hard To Do, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Dear Adrienne and Bob:

First, thanks for including me in this written conversation. For those who don't know you both, I should say that your conversation is actually very queer. Bob, your resistance to saying you're straight means more when one can see how you present yourself. Few men in the U.S. come across as ambiguously as you do, so your refusal to claim straight privilege really means something. Adrienne, for someone who doesn't know you, your shopping-talk may seem more Kim Kardashian-consumerist than it is—I think it's more about your incessant fabulousness. Now, to connect who you are …

New York's Post-Verdict Scheme For The Treatment Of Insanity Acquittees: Balancing Public Safety With Rights Of The Mentally Ill, Larry Cunningham

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

In this Article, I will explore both the statutory workings of the insanity review system in New York and examine ways in which CPL § 330.20 can be improved. In Part I, I will provide a detailed account of how a typical insanity review moves through the system. In Part II, I will explore the ways in which CPL § 330.20, as currently written, protects both the public and individual rights. In Part III, I will propose modest reforms to improve the law.

Caught In A Time Warp: The Education Rights Of English Language Learners, Rosemary Salomone

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Although the United States has long experience in educating children from immigrant families, the role the home language should play in the education of those who are not proficient in English remains politically charged and unresolved. For the past four decades, since the first infusion of federal funds that support programs for what are now called "English Language Learners," this question has engaged educators, policy makers, and researchers in a heated debate centering on bilingual education versus English-Only instruction. The first approach generally uses the child's home language either as a transitional bridge to learning English or, less commonly, …

Sense And Sentencing: Our Imprisonment Epidemic, Michael A. Simons

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Over the past thirty years, the most important sentencing development has not been the legislative adoption of mandatory guidelines, or the judicial creation of advisory guidelines, or the adoption of a wide variety of guidelines systems in the states, or the widespread elimination of parole, or the abandonment of rehabilitation as a sentencing goal. No, the most important sentencing development has been our rejection of the principal of parsimony: the notion that a sentence should be as long as - but no longer than - necessary to accomplish the goals of punishment. Instead, we have replaced parsimony with severity, …

Bankruptcy Reform And Economic Recovery, G. Ray Warner

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

In 2005, following years of intensive lobbying by the consumer credit industry, the focus of the consumer bankruptcy law was changed from the liberal debtor-focused "fresh start" approach embodied in the 1978 Bankruptcy Code to a creditor-focused "can pay/must pay" approach. Although the shift to a can pay/must pay system started years earlier to address perceived abuses, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 ("BAPCPA") completed that shift by engrafting onto the bankruptcy law a fairly strict and largely objective test for determining a debtor's ability to repay debt and by setting forth channeling rules designed …