Digital Commons Network^™

Mobile Vehicle Road And Weather Observation Quality Check Methods, Daniel Raymond Koller

Theses and Dissertations

Today State Departments of Transportation rely more and more on road weather data to make maintenance decisions. Inaccurate data can result in wrong treatment applications or inadequate staffing levels to maintain the roadway at the desired level of service.

Previous methods of road condition data reporting have been limited to static in situ sensor stations. These road weather information systems (RWIS) provide varied data about precipitation, winds, temperature, and more, but their siting does not always provide an accurate representation of weather and road conditions along the roadway. The use of mobile data collection from vehicles travelling the highway corridors …

Spatial Design Thinking In The Age Of Multimedia, Chuan Gao

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

There are several emerging design methods and design thoughts, such as Evidence-Based design, Universal design, and so on, that have been utilized in spatial design. Further, the space design has been changed in the wake of invention of new materials, building technologies, and users' functional needs. Designers need to collect and reorganize a new spectrum of information in order to conduct design. Designer's thinking power plays an important role in creating space. Base on the research results in the realm of human cognitive faculty, synesthesia may hold the key to understanding a mechanism for thinking, cross-sensory perception and association involved …

Design And Construction Of A Fluidized Bed, Robert Ryan Mota

Theses and Dissertations

Coal combustion is responsible for the majority of electricity production in the United States. It is however, also the primary cause for carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to global warming. With oil reaching its peak production in the near future, alternative fuel sources will be needed to meet the worlds growing energy demands. Coal is an abundant resource that has the potential to meet those demands. In contrast to coal combustion, coal gasification only partially oxidizes the coal to produce a syngas containing of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which means less carbon dioxide emissions. Utilizing coal in gasification technologies is …

Heat Transfer Measurements On An Incidence-Tolerant Low Pressure Turbine Blade In A High Speed Linear Cascade At Low To Moderate Reynolds Numbers, Leolein Patrick Gouemeni Moualeu

Theses and Dissertations

Runway-independent aircraft are expected to be the future for short-haul flights by improving

air transportation and reducing area congestion encountered in airports. The Vehicle

Systems Program of NASA identified a Large Civil Tilt-Rotor, equipped with variable-speed

power-turbine engines, as the best concept. At cruise altitude, the engine rotor-speed will

be reduced by as much as the 50% of take-off speed. The large incidence variation in the

low pressure turbine associated with the change in speed can be detrimental to the engine

performance. Low pressure turbine blades in cruise altitude are more predisposed to develop

regions of boundary layer separation. Typical …

Optimizing Peak Gust And Maximum Sustained Wind Speed Estimates From Mid-Latitude Wave Cyclones, Timothy Andrew Joyner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Wind storms cause significant damage and economic loss and are a major recurring threat in many countries. Maximum sustained and peak gust weather station data from multiple historic wind storms occurring over more than three decades across Europe were analyzed to identify storm tracks, intensities, and areas of frequent high wind speeds. Wind surfaces for maximum sustained and peak gust winds were estimated based on an anisotropic (directionally-dependent) kriging interpolation methodology. Overall, wind speed magnitudes and high intensity locations were identified accurately for each storm. Directional trends and wind swaths were also consistently located in appropriate locations based on known …

Characterization And Uncertainty Analysis Of Siliciclastic Aquifer-Fault System, Ahmed Saad Elshall

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The complex siliciclastic aquifer system underneath the Baton Rouge area, Louisiana, USA, is fluvial in origin. The east-west trending Baton Rouge fault and Denham Springs-Scotlandville fault cut across East Baton Rouge Parish and play an important role in groundwater flow and aquifer salinization. To better understand the salinization underneath Baton Rouge, it is imperative to study the hydrofacies architecture and the groundwater flow field of the Baton Rogue aquifer-fault system. This is done through developing multiple detailed hydrofacies architecture models and multiple groundwater flow models of the aquifer-fault system, representing various uncertain model propositions. The hydrofacies architecture models focus on …

Multi-Scale Modeling Of Inertial Flows Through Propped Fractures, Ali Takbiri Borujeni

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Non-Darcy flows are expected to be ubiquitous in near wellbore regions, completions, and in hydraulic fractures of high productivity gas wells. Further, the prevailing dynamic effective stress in the near wellbore region is expected to be an influencing factor for the completion conductivity and non-Darcy flow behavior in it. In other words, the properties (fracture permeability and β-factor) can vary with the time and location in the reservoir (especially in regions close to the wellbore). Using constant values based on empirical correlations for reservoirs/completions properties can lead to erroneous cumulative productivity predictions. With the recent advances in the imaging technology, …

Experimental And Modeling Study Of Foam Flow In Pipes With Two Foam-Flow Regimes, Ali Reza Edrisi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The use of foams can be found abundantly in many applications in a wide range of industries, including oil and gas industry. Although understanding foam flow behavior is crucial for the optimization of such applications, the complex flow behavior of foams has been a major challenge. Recent experimental studies with surfactant foams presented a new way to characterize foam flow characteristics by using two flow regimes: the low-quality regime showing either plug-flow or segregated-flow pattern, and the high-quality regime showing slug-flow pattern. This study consists of three main components: (1) experimental investigation of foam rheology in pipes; (2) building up …

Topology And Shape Optimization Of Hydrodynamically–Lubricated Bearings For Enhanced Load-Carrying Capacity, Mohammad Fesanghary

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Bearings are basic and essential components of nearly all machinery. They must be designed to work under different loads, speeds, and environments. Of all the performance parameters, load-carrying capacity (LCC) is often the most crucial design constraint. The objective of this research is to investigate different design methodologies that significantly improve the LCC of liquid-lubricated bearings. This goal can be achieved by either altering the surface texture or the bearing geometrical configuration. The methodology used here is based on mathematical topological/shape optimization algorithms. These methods can effectively improve the design performance while avoiding time-consuming trial-and-error design techniques. The first category …

Analytical Modeling And Diagnosis Of Penetration Rate Performance Of Pdc Bits, Reza Rahmani

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The high cost of drilling deep (15000+ ft) wells, due to slow rate of penetration (ROP) at depth, has severely limited the utilization and economic significance of deep hydrocarbon resources. The overall objective of this study was to obtain a better understanding of the major cause(s) of slow ROP in deep drilling. An analysis of field data demonstrated the impact of the problem and identified shale and limestone as the primary lithologies where slow ROP occurs at depth. Previous researchers have concluded that interactions between rock, drilling fluid, cuttings, and the bit control ROP. More specifically, several researchers have concluded …

Variations Of E-Region Total Electron Content And Electron Density Profiles Over High Latitudes During Winter Solstice 2007 Using Radio Occultation Measurements, Kajli Agrawal

Theses and Dissertations

The space weather phenomenon involves the Sun, interplanetary space and the Earth. Different space weather conditions have diverse effects on the various layers of the Earth's atmosphere Technological advancements have created a situation in which human civilization is not only dependent on resources from deep inside the Earth, but also on the upper atmosphere and outer space region. Therefore, it is essential to improve the understanding of the impacts of space weather conditions on the ionosphere. This research focuses on the variation of total electron content (TEC) and the electron density within the E-region of the ionosphere, which extends from …

Characterization Of Evaporative Metal Bonding In Superalloys For Use In Gasified Coal Turbine Generators, Joshua Elliot Braband

Theses and Dissertations

The diffusion bonding of Kanthal APMT, CM247LC, and Rene 80 was studied. The objective of the first part of this work was to create diffusion bonded test samples of Kanthal APMT, CM247LC, and Rene 80 using a 25μm thick zinc interlayer at varying times and temperatures. Then, using scanning electron microscopy to determine the profile of the zinc diffusing into the parent materials, the diffusion coefficients of the zinc interlayer into the materials were determined for each of the materials at each bonding time and temperature. The next objective was to create a finite element model of the bonding process …

Determination Of Optimum Polymer Dose For Grand Forks Wastewater Treatment Plant Lagoon Sludge Dewatering, Dipesh Das

Theses and Dissertations

The Grand Forks Waste Water Treatment Plant (GFWWTP) is currently sending its waste activated sludge (WAS) from the activated sludge treatment process to an existing on-site wastewater treatment lagoon which has been in operation since 2003. The plant produces approximately 65,000 gallons of WAS per day. Because of this high level of loading, the existing lagoon system is no longer considered as a treatment option for the produced sludge. The Plant Authority is trying to find a sustainable solution for sludge disposal and for this reason the GFWWTP is interested in introducing screw press system for the dewatering process. As …

A Sustainable Bio-Solids Management For The Grand Forks Wastewater Treatment Plant, Hasibul Hasan

Theses and Dissertations

The Grand Forks Waste Water Treatment Plant (GFWWTP) is currently sending its waste activated sludge (WAS) from the activated sludge treatment process to an existing on-site wastewater treatment lagoon which has been in operation since 2003. The plant produces approximately 65,000 gallons of WAS per day. Because of this high level of loading, the existing lagoon system is likely to get replaced by a more sustainable treatment option. Several methods were considered and studied thoroughly for this research, and - on site land application shows some potential. After surveying the Municipal Waste Water Treatment Facilities of the five neighboring states …

A Framework For The Integration Of Technology Into Curricula Development And Student Assessment, Washington Helps

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this work is to amalgamate technology and education in a manner which will prove to be beneficial to all stakeholders involved and which will allow for an improvement in the ubiquitous process of curriculum development in the teaching and learning sphere. The primary motivation surrounds the issue of limited human resources in terms of teachers and expert knowledge as well as available physical resources such as computer equipment or other classroom artifacts. It should be duly noted that it is in many developing countries where the student-teacher ratio is very high and where such a framework will …

The Blue Lights: Stories, Brian Douglas Maxwell

Theses and Dissertations

The Blue Lights is a collection of episodic short stories that looks at life along Florida's Space Coast, a strip of beach best known for its shuttle launches and proximity to Disney World. Most of the stories are set along the Atlantic, and all of them chronicle the day-to-day activities of an insular and antiquated beach culture. The stories are unhurried, subtle in construction and inward rather than dramatic, meant to represent a pre-Internet, pre-cell phone Florida where characters stumble into small yet illuminating moments of self-realization set in recognizable, though run-down, places.

Though the stories vary stylistically, The Blue …

Exploring The Impact Of Zebra Mussels (Dreissena Polymorpha) On Residental Lakeshore Property Values In Otter Tail And Becker Counties, Minnesota, Spencer Crowley Mcgrew

Theses and Dissertations

Aquatic invasive species are a major problem in Minnesota. Aquatic invasive species disrupt ecosystems, limit lake recreation, and reduce lakeshore property values. They are expensive to manage, and often impossible to eradicate once established. In this study, I am asking this question: What is the economic impact, in terms of residential shoreline property values, of the introduction of the invasive zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) into large and popular freshwater lakes in west central Minnesota?

Past studies comparing lakeshore property values based on environmental factors such as water quality, clarity, lake size, and depth have shown that these environmental amenities are …

Global Governance In The Information Age: The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Europe has long been deemed "more protective" of privacy than the United States. In the context of transatlantic cooperation in the war on terrorism, divergences in privacy law and policy have become ever more apparent. As has always been the case, the same technologies that pose new and vital privacy issues with regard to personal information and private data are those that are important sources for government actors, including law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Despite the increasing reliance by national agencies on information flowing from other nations, regulation of information transfer, processing and sharing has been achieved largely outside of …

Facebook Policy And User Knowledge: Self-Inflicted Totalitarianism, Richard Rockelmann Jr

Theses

Facebook has become an integral part of digital natives lives. As the technology is used more often, trust in the service increases. The unfortunate reality: people misinterpret trust by assuming anything can be said and done on this popular social media outlet. The problem of course is the fact that Facebook is a business that is fueled by sharing information to both third parties and other people. Their business scheme, combined with users misunderstanding of what power the policies have over them has the potential to incriminate and destroy students future they are working so hard to obtain. Are people …

Litigation-Fostered Bureaucratic Autonomy: Administrative Law Against Political Control, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

The idea of political control dominates our understanding of both what administrative law does and what it should do. This emphasis on political control, however, downplays the important ways that administrative law facilitates resistance to political control in administrative agencies. In this article, I offer studies of two instances in which agencies harnessed the power of seemingly standard administrative law litigation to resist the imposition of policies by political leadership. I classify these kinds of modes of resistance as instances of “litigation-fostered bureaucratic autonomy” and flesh out the mechanisms that drive the process. Acknowledging the role of such modes of …

The State Of The Region: Hampton Roads 2013, James V. Koch, Vinod Agarwal, Kelly Brown, Chris Colburn, Vicky Curtis, Steve Daniel, Elizabeth Janik, Lian Feng, Sharon Lomax, Molinaro Janet, Ken Plum, Ayush Toolsidass, Gary Wagner, Shara Weber, Gilbert Yochum

Economics Faculty Books

This is Old Dominion University's 14th annual State of the Region report. While it represents the work of many people connected in various ways to the university, the report does not constitute an official viewpoint of Old Dominion or it's president, John R. Broderick. The report maintains the goal of stimulating thought and discussion that ultimately will make Hampton Roads an even better place to live. We are proud of our region's many successes, but realize that it is possible to improve our performance. In order to do so, we must have accurate information about "where we are" and a …

Enhanced-Resolution Folded C-Section Phaser, S. Gupta, Lijun Jiang, C. Caloz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A new C-section phasers based on folded coupled-line couplers has been proposed for high-resolution analog signal processing (ASP). The folded configuration of the coupled-line coupler provides a tight coupling in a planar configuration between the input and the coupled port, using sections of relatively small coupling values. It subsequently provides a larger group delay swing in the corresponding C-section phaser required for enhanced resolution ASP. The proposed phaser is demonstrated using full-wave simulations. © 2013 IEEE.

Integration Of Arbitrary Lumped Multiport Circuit Networks Into The Discontinuous Galerkin Time-Domain Analysis, Ping Li, Li Jun Jiang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A hybrid electromagnetic (EM) circuit simulator is proposed for incorporating multiport lumped circuit networks through their admittance matrices into the discontinuous Galerkin time-domain (DGTD) method. The admittance matrix in the Laplace domain can be derived analytically or obtained from network parameters such as -parameters in the frequency domain. To convert frequency-dependent -parameters into the admittance matrix in the Laplace domain, the vector-fitting technique is employed to facilitate the mapping process. The computational domain of interest is split into two subdomains. One is the EM part solved by the DGTD, and another is the circuit part modeled by the basic I-V …

Pulsed Line Source Response Of A Thin Sheet With High-Contrast Dielectric And Conductive Properties - A Time-Domain Analysis, Adrianus T. De Hoop, Ling Ling Meng, Li (Lijun) Jun Jiang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A methodology is presented for analytically modeling the reflection and transmission of line-source excited pulsed electromagnetic fields at a thin, planar layer with high-contrast dielectric and conductive properties. Closed-form analytic time-domain expressions are derived for the field components in a 2-D setting via an extension of the Cagniard-DeHoop method. The response to the power exponential source and the power exponential monocycle pulse were studied using the newly proposed method. © 2013 IEEE.

A New Efie Method Based On Coulomb Gauge For The Low-Frequency Electromagnetic Analysis, Xiaoyan Y.Z. Xiong, Li (Lijun) Jun Jiang, Wei E.I. Sha, Yat Hei Lo

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

To solve the low-frequency breakdown inherent from the electric field integral equation (EFIE), an alternative new form of the EFIE is proposed by using the Coulomb-gauge Green's function of quasi-static approximation. Di®erent from the commonly adopted Lorentz-gauge EFIE, the Coulomb-gauge EFIE separates the solenoidal and irrotational surface currents explicitly, which captures inductive and capacitive responses through electrodynamic and electrostatic Green's functions, respectively. By applying existing techniques such as the loop-tree decomposition, frequency normalization, and basis rearrangement, the Coulomb-gauge EFIE also can remedy the low-frequency breakdown problem. Through comparative studies between the Lorentz-gauge and Coulomb-gauge EFIE approaches from mathematical, physical and …

The Numerical Steepest Descent Path Method For Calculating Physical Optics Integrals On Smooth Conducting Quadratic Surfaces, Yu Mao Wu, Li (Lijun) Jun Jiang, Wei E.I. Sha, Weng Cho Chew

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, we use the numerical steepest descent path (NSDP) method to analyze the highly oscillatory physical optics (PO) integral on smooth conducting parabolic surfaces, including both monostatic and bistatic cases. Quadratic variations of the amplitude and phase functions are used to approximate the integrand of PO integral. Then the surface PO integral is reduced into several highly oscillatory line integrals. By invoking the NSDP method, these highly oscillatory PO line integrals are defined on the corresponding NSDPs. Furthermore, the critical point contributions for the PO integral are exactly extracted and represented based on the NSDPs. The proposed NSDP …

Overview Of Large-Scale Computing: The Past, The Present, And The Future, Weng Cho Chew, Li (Lijun) Jun Jiang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This is a brief review of the development of computational electromagnetics (CEM) to partially summarize its achievements, issues, and possibilities. © 1963-2012 IEEE.

Skin-Effect Loss Models For Time- And Frequency-Domain Peec Solver, Albert E. Ruehli, Giulio Antonini, Li (Lijun) Jun Jiang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A challenging and interesting issue for the solution of large electromagnetic problems is the efficient, sufficiently accurate modeling of the broadband skin-effect loss for conducting planes and 3-D shapes. The inclusion of such models in an electromagnetic (EM) solver can be very costly in compute time and memory requirements. These issues are particularly important for the class of signal, power, and noise integrity (NI) problems. In this paper, we concentrate on partial element equivalent circuit (PEEC)-type methods which are suitable for the solution of this class of problems. Progress has been made recently in the design of skin-effect models. The …

Finite-Width Feed And Load Models, Yat Hei Lo, Li (Lijun) Jun Jiang, Weng Cho Chew

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We demonstrate a new method of applying the feed model for the method of moments (MoM) formulation for the electric field integral equation (EFIE). The model is based around a previously reported magnetic ribbon current model which is accurate and allows for a finite width of the feed port. However, with proper approximations, one can reduce the formulation such that the magnetic field operator can be removed in order to simplify computations arising from the curl of the dyadic Green's function and its singularities. We show here that the new feed model can also be used to model a lumped …

An Iterative Source Reconstruction Method Exploiting Phaseless Electric Field Data, Ping Li, Lijun Jiang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Conventional equivalent source reconstruction methods (SRM) require both phase and amplitude information of the acquired field data. However, there are situations where the phase information is not available or impractical to obtain. Hence, the development of SRM using phaseless fields is important. In this paper, a novel iterative SRM based on phaseless electric fields is presented. The reconstructed equivalent current source can be electric, magnetic current, or both. They can fit the physical geometry of the radiator. Electric field integral equation (EFIE) is employed to build the relationship between the reconstructed current source and measured fields. It can precisely reproduce …