Digital Commons Network^™

Comprehensive Analysis Of Spray Development And Low Temperature Combustion Characteristics In A Cvcc With Nvh Of Renewable Aerospace Fuels: Hefa & Ft Synthetic Kerosene (S8) Compared To Jet-A & Ulsd, Coleman Norton

Honors College Theses

A comprehensive analysis was conducted to research the viability of Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA) and S8 Synthetic Kerosene fuels as a drop-in replacement for conventional petroleum-based fuels, Jet-A and ULSD (Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel). Global transportation remains heavily dependent on liquid fossil fuels, while renewable aerospace fuels offer a promising pathway to reducing life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. However, the combustion performance and long-term feasibility of these fuels remain insufficiently characterized. This study performed a thorough assessment of each fuel's thermophysical and combustion properties. Thermophysical characterization encompassed viscosity, freezing point, energy density, spray atomization, and volatility. …

Peluang Pemullhan Tindakan Ultra Vires Direksi Suatu Perseroan Terbatas, Ari Wahyudi Hertanto

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

Abstract

Karstic Cavities Underground Investigation: Gpr And Geotechnical Data Correlation, Mehrez Jamei, Mabrouk Abdelkader, Anwar Ahmed, Yahya Alassaf

Journal of Sustainable Mining

This paper focuses on the methodology involving ground penetration radar (GPR) for detecting and localizing random cavities in underground limestone soil, in conjunction with geotechnical data. A GPR survey was conducted alongside field and laboratory geotechnical tests at a field where mining activities are now promoted (Saudi Arabia Northern Borders Province). The paper presents correlations between the instantaneous amplitude of the reflected electromagnetic (EM) waves and rock quantification distributed (RQD), recovery rock parameter (REC), and uniaxial compressive strength (UCS). The GPR investigation proved to be an efficient nondestructive geophysical method for determining: 1) the …

“The New Normal”: California’S Escalating Wildfire Crisis, Alexandra Vasquez

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper addresses the current state of California's wildfire epidemic and how the increasing effects of climate change have worsened the fires, harming residents' health and the state's economy. The wildfires are shaped by factors such as climate change, land-use choices, and policy designs. California wildfires have worsened substantially in the 21st century, with the worst burns in the 2020 season setting a record of 4.2 to 4.5 million acres destroyed. Given current policies and the administration's disinterest in combating climate change, understanding wildfire history and data is essential to improving California's wildfire resilience, creating sustainable land management practices, and …

Green Building Certification And Global Warming: Between Environmental Performance And Greenwashing, Marcel Michalak

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper addresses the role of green building certifications in addressing global warming. The growing trend of pursuing certificates, such as LEED or BREEAM, can be perceived as a great symbol of resilience and desire to improve the quality of our environment. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, developers or companies use sustainable labels more as a marketing tool than a real commitment to environmental effectiveness. This paper explores whether green building certifications effectively reduce global warming and how they may serve as tools for greenwashing. Chapter One lays the foundation for why green building certifications exist and why they …

Undertaking Short-Term Finance Transactions In Brazil - An Historic And Modern Look At The Brazilian Economy And Associated Risks, Shawn M. D'Aversa

Student Research

The following report discusses the risks and construction of a hypothetical short-term trade finance transaction involving the five parties: Citibank N.A., Caterpillar Inc. (CAT), Banco Do Brasil, Paracatu Gold Mine and EXIM Bank. Fair warning: this is a long paper for a short-term transaction.

For the deal, Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) has approached Citibank N.A. in New York regarding a financing transaction for five 797F-400 short-ton haul trucks. The trucks are worth $5mn each, including the costs of training and spare parts, for a total of $25mn. Put simply, the trucks are beasts for mining. They will then be shipped to …

Not Retirement, But A Rewiring And Fresh Perspectives Post-Dbs, Says Piyush Gupta [Interview With Business Times], Su Shyan Lee, Piyush Gupta

Oral History Collection

In an interview with The Business Times, SMU Chairman Piyush Gupta discussed topics ranging from meditation and conservation to the future of education. On his role at SMU, he emphasised his desire to help shape tertiary education and noted that the rise of AI makes it critical to rethink how we learn. Mr Gupta believes that in an AI-driven world, students must move beyond domain knowledge to focus on interpreting information, "connecting the dots," and engaging others with genuine empathy. He is supportive of a more experiential curriculum at SMU — one that focuses on regional exposure through internships and …

Community Art Therapy: Opportunities Of Accessibility In Spaces And Materials, M Mahoney

Theses - ALL

Community art therapy offers opportunities to address inequities in access to therapeutic services by locating creative practices within shared, non-clinical spaces, and using nontraditional and everyday materials. This qualitative phenomenological study examined how community-based eco-art therapy, using found, foraged, recycled, and low-cost materials in a community studio, shapes participants’ experiences of accessibility, connection, and creativity. Eight adult participants attended two community-based workshops that included open-ended artmaking, a mindfulness-oriented material walk, and individual semi-structured interviews with response art. Data from interviews, field notes, and artworks were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings indicated that participants conceptualized accessibility as multi-dimensional, encompassing cost, transportation, …

Interdisciplinary Practices In The Band Room: Repertoire As A Tool To Enrich Student Learning, Ainsley L. Brouse

Theses - ALL

Interdisciplinary learning is an educational theory approach that emphasizes the importance of incorporating content from different subject areas into the teaching of one’s own topic of study. Research has presented that the use of interdisciplinary teaching practices can have several benefits on students' learning outcomes and overall academic success. Music has deep and rich historical roots that can provide students a more hands-on experience with the concepts and events they are learning in their history classes. The use of interdisciplinary practices through specific repertoire selections will not only provide students with a deeper, more meaningful experience with the music they …

Sage: Contention-Aware Sensitivity Adjustment For Spin Lock Exiting In Vms, Sam Thomas Stowers

Theses - ALL

To address the severe multi-threaded performance degradation caused by lock contention in oversubscribed cloud environments, this thesis examines and improves on the Pause Loop Exit (PLE) mechanism used by hypervisors to deschedule unproductive virtual CPUs (vCPUs). These oversubscribed environments introduce contention which frequently leads to Lock Holder Preemption (LHP), where a hypervisor preempts a vCPU holding a critical spinlock, causing waiting vCPUs to waste cycles spinning. To mitigate LHP, hardware mechanisms trigger PLE events to inform hypervisors of spinning vCPUs, relying on a PLE_gap parameter to differentiate spinlock instances. The PLE_gap dictates spinlock detection sensitivity—a component of the virtualization stack …

Who Gets Better Buses? Studentification, Bus Geographies, And Transit Privilege In Postindustrial Upstate New York, Carlos Jose Gonzalez

Theses - ALL

Decades of deindustrialization have forced several American cities to seek other sources of economic life for their shrinking populations and increasingly impoverished populations. One sector that has shown much potential for revitalization has been the “meds and eds” of hospitals and universities. The growth of higher education is fueled by a rise in enrollment that has transformed the demographic, economic, and social atmospheres of university neighborhoods. Yet an important transformation missed by these “studentification” scholars are the accompanying reconfigurations of public transit. Given that students, and young people generally, are less likely to own their own car, universities have to …

Data-Driven Approaches To Investigate Cardiotoxicity Using Hipscs High Throughput Screening, Danny Vu

Theses - ALL

Recent advances in human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) technology have enabled the development of high-throughput platforms for cardiotoxicity screening. However, conventional analytical approaches remain limited by time-intensive processing, manual annotation requirements, and reduced scalability for large datasets. To address these challenges, calcium fluorescence signals from human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC CMs) were analyzed using a high-throughput imaging platform and complementary machine learning frameworks. First, a feature-based supervised learning approach using engineered waveform descriptors and low-dimensional signal embeddings enabled rapid and interpretable screening of large chemical datasets, with combined features improving predictive performance relative to engineered features alone. …

Blue-Collar Belonging: How An Analysis Of Identity, Epistemics, And Stance Reveal Fluid Community Membership In Rural Upstate New York, Kennedy Reed Jones

Theses - ALL

This thesis examines how community membership is constructed in everyday conversations amongst rural blue-collar people in Upstate New York. Through a sociolinguistic approach, the data from this project was collected by recording naturally occurring conversations of rural blue-collar community over a year. These conversations were then transcribed and coded, seeking out pockets of blue-collar topics in the conversations. When doing this, blue-collar/blue-collar experiences were understood as manual work, typically not done in an office, and that does not often require a degree. Therefore, by drawing on sociolinguistic scholarship on identity, epistemics, and stance, this project argues that membership in this …

Beyond The Policy - Designing A Healing Campus For Xinhua's Children, Katharine Massey

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

To some people children are seen as a blessing, but for China, they were considered detrimental to the economy status of the country. For 35 years China implemented a policy that limited families to one child so they could curb their rapid population growth and keep their image of being an economic leader of the world. This thesis will look at the lasting impact the one-child policy had on the population of China and the results that have emerged since the law has ended, along with the 2024 stop on foreign adoption programs and who was most impacted by it. …

Talking To The Eyes: Paradoxes Of Ineffability And Effusivity In Mark-Making, Theodore Xavier Berg

Theses - ALL

Redefining mark-making as an active form of material signification has helped me understand my experience of the paradox of ineffability. This experience is as accurately described by the term effusivity as it is by ineffability, because it is not a matter of what cannot be expressed, but rather of what cannot not be expressed; of the experience that inescapably accompanies expression and signification. As our material means of expression and signification evolve digitally, the consequences of their contradictions become more discernible.

Polymer Concentration Driven Tuning Of Drug Release In Nano-In-Microparticle Systems For Immunomodulation, Jason Bae

Theses - ALL

Osteoarthritis (OA), a disease caused by the wearing and tearing of articular cartilage, affects over 32.5 million Americans. Synovial inflammation is now recognized as a major contributor to OA progression and pain. Activated synovial macrophages in an OA joint are believed to play a major role in low-grade inflammation found in OA. Bisphosphonates such as zoledronic acid (ZA) are known to induce apoptosis specifically in macrophages and several of them are being evaluated as a disease-modifying osteoarthritis drug in clinical trials. Zolendroic Acid (Zol) is a biphosphonate that is most commonly used for treatments in bone-related diseases. Previous research reported …

Simulated Intelligence, Surveillance, And Play, Atienah Cape

Theses - ALL

This MFA thesis explores modern panopticism and the feeling of being watched by creating and installing Four Real Friends, an interactive robotic artwork inspired by the 1998 Furby. The project looks at how surveillance technologies are not just outside forces, but part of daily life, often feeling familiar, playful, and even social. The installation uses hardware design, custom circuits, computer vision, and real-time data display to collect and process how visitors interact in the gallery. Its nostalgic and friendly look encourages people to take part, while still showing how data is collected and displayed as it happens. This makes surveillance …

Leading A Culture Of Success, Collin T. Ginnaty

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

An in depth look toward leadership in the private and public sectors with emphasis in Law Enforcement Leadership.

Scalable Advanced Control Of Building Hvac Systems Using Physics-Informed Machine Learning, Xuezheng Wang

Dissertations - ALL

Buildings account for approximately 40% of total energy consumption in the United States, with HVAC systems representing the single largest energy end-use. Advanced control strategies such as model predictive control (MPC), reinforcement learning (RL), and differentiable predictive control (DPC) have demonstrated significant energy savings in individual studies, yet their widespread adoption remains limited by the lack of scalable, control-oriented dynamic models, the absence of consensus on control strategy selection, and the gap between single-zone research and multi-zone real-building deployment. This dissertation addresses these barriers through an integrated research program spanning physics-informed machine learning (PIML) model development, advanced control evaluation, and …

Symmetries Of Legged Locomotion: Theory And Applications In Animals And Robots, Jiayu Ding

Dissertations - ALL

Legged locomotion in animals and robots is naturally modeled as a hybrid dynamical system: smooth body evolution is repeatedly interrupted by discrete contact events such as touchdown and liftoff. Although symmetry is a powerful organizing principle in smooth dynamical systems, a comparably systematic symmetry framework for hybrid legged locomotion remains underdeveloped. This dissertation develops such a framework for a scoped class of periodic hybrid locomotion models and uses it to relate theoretical gait analysis, animal locomotion studies, and robotic gait generation. The dissertation first extends symmetry notions from autonomous dynamics to hybrid legged systems and distinguishes symmetries of the hybrid …

Development Of Dual-Stimuli Responsive Polymer-Coated Gold Nanoparticles And Their Surface Engineering Via Polyelectrolyte Layer-By-Layer Assembly, Buddhini Chathurangi Nugaduwa Vithanage

Dissertations - ALL

The modification of nanoparticles with combinations of low critical solution temperature (LCST) polymers and polyelectrolyte (PE) layers is studied. Three n-isopropylacrylamide-co-acrylamide polymers were synthesized in which charges could be varied from neutral, to negative or positive by way of incorporating poly acrylic acid (pAAc) or poly 4-vinylpyridene (p4VP) units. Polymerization centered around a disulfide initiator, which when reduced produced two polymer chains and a convenient linkage to gold NPs (NPs). The resulting LCST-NPs conjugates possessed sharp phase changes at critical temperatures (TC), while the incorporation of pAAc or p4VP allowed for tuneable charges and pH sensitivity. Studies with 1H-NMR and …

The World Needs You — And You Are Ready, Eric F. Spina

President's Blog: From the Heart

Build community. Seek truth. Cultivate belonging. Model hope. "Together, these are powerful forces as we work toward peace, justice, and the common good," University of Dayton President Eric F. Spina told the Class of 2026 at spring undergraduate commencement.

Exploring The Benefits Of Yoruba Indigenous Knowledge And The Herbal Medicine System, Sunday Opene Ozonuwe 7317673, Ayobami Aderonke Ogungbade, Faith Ohwofasa

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The Yoruba people are one of the West African's main ethno-linguistic or ethnic groups. They have an impressive indigenous knowledge and herbal medicinal system. They pre-occupied Oyo, Osun, Ekiti, Kwara, Ondo, Lagos and Koji state. The researchers developed seven (7) research objectives and seven (7) research questions to investigate the nature, forms, benefits and methods of preparing and administering Yoruba Herbal Medicine. Descriptive research design was adopted for the study, interviews and observations were the instruments used for data collections. Eight (8) herbal medicine practitioners were interviewed in Oyo and Ogun state. The result of the interviews was also presented …

Nanoparticle-Based Therapy For Peripheral Artery Disease: Evaluation Of Collagen Reduction And Fibrosis Mitigation In Ischemic Tissue, Tresha Nguyen

2026 Spring Honors Capstones Projects

Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) is characterized by reduced blood flow, ischemic injury, and fibrosis, which collectively impair tissue function. Current treatment strategies are limited in their ability to target fibrotic tissue and restore normal function effectively. This study evaluates the therapeutic potential of drug-loaded nanoparticles to reduce fibrosis in ischemic tissue. Nanoparticles were synthesized and characterized for in vivo application. Tissue samples from experimental groups, including saline control, blank nanoparticles, free drug, and drug-loaded nanoparticles, were analyzed using Masson’s Trichrome staining to quantify collagen deposition. Histological images were processed using image analysis software to determine the percentage of collagen area. …

Apparatus Of Relief: On Sustained Exhaustion, Jiayue Yu

Theses - ALL

This thesis examines how contemporary capitalism manages a shared condition of exhaustion—the accumulation of stress, alienation, and mental fatigue—by offering calibrated forms of relief that leave its underlying causes intact. Approaching exhaustion as a collective and structurally produced condition, I make photographs that trace how it is softened and normalized within the spaces we inhabit and move through in our daily lives. Central to the project are what I describe as “apparatuses of relief”: infrastructural features embedded in public and semi-public spaces that are designed to regulate affect and soothe nerves. Operating beneath the surface, these elements promise momentary relief …

Quasiparticle Poisoning Of Superconducting Fluxonium Qubits, Kesavan Manivannan

Dissertations - ALL

Superconducting qubits based on Josephson junctions have emerged as a leading hardware platform in the quest to realize large-scale quantum computers. However, qubit decoherence remains a major hurdle on the path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. In particular, excess quasiparticle (QP) excitations constitute a significant source of dissipation in superconducting quantum devices. The empirically observed QP density in these systems is orders of magnitude larger than that predicted by Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory. Moreover, QP poisoning due to high-energy particle impacts can cause correlated errors that simultaneously affect multiple qubits, thereby impeding quantum error correction. Although QP-induced decoherence has been extensively studied …

Help-Seeking Behaviors In Artificial Intelligence - Mediated Programming: Impacts On Performance And Computational Literacy, Michael A. Fudge

Dissertations - ALL

Large language models (LLMs) represent a disruptive innovation in programming education, acting as both a supportive tutor and a mechanism for cognitive offloading. This multi-method study investigated how specific student engagement patterns with a custom, course-provided LLM chatbot influenced learning performance and computational literacy among novice programmers (N = 87). Through categorical content analysis of 1,024 chatbot interaction sessions, student behaviors were classified into adaptive (learning-oriented) and maladaptive (task-completion) help-seeking strategies. Quantitative analysis revealed a mutual suppression effect, demonstrating that while aggregate usage volume was an unreliable predictor of success, the type of engagement was highly significant. Findings indicated that …

Breaking Ground: Educational Identity Formation Among First-Generation Students During The Transition To College, Carrie Sue Ingersoll-Wood

Dissertations - ALL

This mixed-methods research study examined the educational identity formation of first-generation college students during the transition into higher education through participation in a six-week summer bridge program. Drawing on Community Cultural Wealth and Self-Determination Theory, the study situated identity development at the intersection of institutional entrance, cultural capital, and motivation. Survey data from 135 participants were analyzed descriptively to examine patterns of identity signaling and motivational orientation. Qualitative interviews with a purposive subsample of participants were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory methods to examine meaning-making related to transition, autonomy, belonging, and academic self-concept. Autoethnographic excerpts and brief reflexive statements clarified …

Identity-Based Philanthropy In Higher Education: Investigating The Information Contexts Of Black Greek Letter Organization Collective Giving, Rachel Elizabeth Vassel

Dissertations - ALL

There is a need to increase philanthropic donations at Predominately White Institutions (PWIs) to remain competitive and meet increasing operational costs. Diverse and underrepresented alumni of these institutions are a growing constituency of potential donors who are not always cultivated through the traditional fundraising pipeline and efforts. To address the need to increase institutional donations, it is incumbent upon advancement operations in higher education to consider incorporating identity and culturally based strategies as part of their cultivation efforts. Building upon identity-based philanthropy theories, particularly Drezner’s Philanthropic Mirroring Framework, I extend prior work in this space by examining the information contexts …

“The Fluid Archive” Innovating The Past, Protecting The Future (Virtual Reality And Cultural Preservation), Umar Bashir

Theses - ALL

ABSTRACT This thesis repositions cultural preservation as an experiential and interpretive practice rather than a purely documentary one. Centered on selected Mughal-era monuments of the Walled City of Lahore—structures increasingly affected by environmental decay and urban transformation—it investigates how the sensory and atmospheric dimensions of heritage can persist beyond material deterioration. Rather than reconstructing these sites through strict architectural fidelity, the project proposes The Fluid Archive, an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment that prioritizes embodied experience, spatial perception, and memory-driven reconstruction. Acknowledging that history is a constructed narration of the past, the project engages digital technologies as active agents in …