Soil-Based Emissions And Context-Specific Climate Change Planning To Support The United Nations (Un) Sustainable Development Goal (Sdg) On Climate Action: A Case Study Of Georgia (Usa), Davis G. Nelson

All Theses

Soil-based emissions from land conversions are often overlooked in climate planning. The objectives of this study were to use quantitative data on soil-based greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the state of Georgia (GA) (USA) to examine context-specific (temporal, biophysical, economic, and social) climate planning and legal options to deal with these emissions. Currently, 30% of the land in GA has experienced anthropogenic land degradation (LD) primarily due to agriculture (64%). All seven soil orders were subject to various degrees of anthropogenic LD. Increases in overall LD between 2001 and 2021 indicate a lack of land degradation neutrality (LDN) in GA. …

Performance Of Inline Compression With Software Caching For Reducing The Memory Footprint In Pysdc, Emily Lattanzio

All Theses

The volume of data required for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications is growing faster than the memory storage available to store the required data, leading to performance bottlenecks in transferring data. Whether sending data from main memory to computation nodes or between parallel processes during runtime, the more data there is to send, the longer it will take to for that data to be sent from one location to the next. Hence the need for inline data compression, which reduces the amount of allocated memory needed by storing the largest data structures in a compressed format and decompressing/recompressing single variables …

Designing For Dignity: A Model For Women And Newborn Healthcare Settings In Honduras, Ana Sandoval Aguilar

All Theses

Many women and infants in Honduras, primarily those from low-income and minority populations, lack access to dignified healthcare spaces that support the provision of quality care. Whether it is due to an unreasonable distance to the nearest healthcare facility or poor quality of the infrastructure that results in bypassing behavior, women and infants in Honduras face serious barriers to accessing quality services. This, in turn, results in adverse outcomes such as maternal mortality, low patient and staff satisfaction, and low utilization. This thesis proposes that the culturally relevant, patient-centered, and efficient design of maternity and newborn centers in Honduras can …

Sacred Grounds: A Risk Assessment Framework Developed For Historic African American Cemeteries Threatened By Sea Level Rise In Georgetown, Sc, Jocelyn Patterson

All Theses

ABSTRACT

This study acknowledges historic African American cemeteries as vital cultural and historical landmarks that preserve the stories and traditions of often overlooked communities. However, coastal cemeteries, particularly in Georgetown, South Carolina, face increasing environmental threats. These burial sites risk severe damage or complete loss as climate change accelerates from sea level rise, flooding, storm surges, neglect, development pressure, and land development.

This research develops and considers a risk assessment framework to address the risks of cemeteries proximity to water, elevation, flood risk, and cultural significance. The research employs Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping, historical records, and site analysis to …

The Shift Of Western Power In The Anglo-American Relationship As Examined Through The Military Events Of World War Ii, Zaina A. Nait Omar

All Theses

How did the authority within the Anglo-American Alliance begin to shift toward the American domination that ruled the second half of the twentieth century? By examining the events of World War II, this thesis restructures the typical timeline with which historians have approached the dynamic of authority in the Anglo-American Relationship. Many historians claim that America was the perceived senior partner by 1941; however, this thesis demonstrates that by examining things from a military lens, that date must change. The British continued to operate under the intention of maintaining their global authority through 1945 and even into 1946. The thesis …

Tradespace Exploration With Statistical Modeling Techniques And Immersive Visual Representation In Virtual Environments, Nikhil Raj

All Theses

Statistical modeling techniques combined with virtual reality (VR) visualization offer powerful new approaches to tradespace exploration in engineering design. The research presented addresses the challenge of analyzing and communicating insights from complex multidimensional datasets, particularly for autonomous ground vehicle systems.

Beginning with a review of statistical methods—including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and correlation analysis—the study examines their applications in tradespace exploration. Building on this foundation, three distinct visualization pathways connecting MATLAB data to virtual environments are developed and evaluated: VRML representation, STL conversion, and Blender integration. Each approach is assessed for its ability to maintain data …

Biodegradable Active Packaging: Exploring The Antimicrobial Efficacy And Compostability Of Chitosan-Based Films, Rachel Mchugh

All Theses

The overarching purpose of this experiment is to create an active packaging component that has both antimicrobial and biodegradable properties specifically designed for poultry food products. For the scope of this study, the packaging component created would theoretically be used in conjunction with another material, such as a poultry tray which are commonly used for fresh poultry products. Based on the scope and purpose of this experiment, biopolymer films and coatings were considered after the initial literature review. Due to the goals of the packaging component, chitosan, a polysaccharide shown to have antimicrobial properties and an inherent ability to biodegrade, …

Identification And Environmental Impact Of 35 Different Cut Flower Retail Packages In The U.S.A., Mary Kathryn Gillespie

All Theses

Cut flowers represent 35-billion dollars of global spending with 10-million dollars per day in the U.S.A; each transaction involving packaging. Across the country, cut flower packaging is inconsistently sized, laminated, colored, and unlikely to be recycled. 35 unique cut flower packages were collected across 16 different marketplaces, representing 88% of top grocery retailers. Measuring the materiality of the predominately unlabeled and inconsistent packaging collected required calorimetry equipment, such as Fourier-transform Infrared Spectroscopy, Differential Scanning Calorimeter, and precision gauges. Results unveil five materials representing the cut flower collection: Oriented Polypropylene (OPP), High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE), Paper, Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), and Nonwoven Polypropylene …

Investigation Of Plm Utilities And Concepts In Engineering Curriculum: Challenges And Opportunities, Frederick Rowell

All Theses

The implementation of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools and concepts in engineering education has gained increasing significance as manufacturing and engineering industry shifts towards digital engineering workflows to enhance collaboration, efficiency, and innovation. Despite its typical application in engineering industries, many mechanical engineering programs have not integrated PLM software into their curriculums. The Product Lifecycle Management Center (PLMC) at Clemson University offers PLM workshops and research opportunities to students. Despite these initiatives, PLM education remains largely extracurricular and is not fully incorporated into required coursework within the mechanical engineering curriculum. The objective of this thesis is to explore the role …

Fully Bio-Based, Flexible, Non-Isocyanate Polyurethane Foams With High Lignin Content For Protective Packaging Applications, Kathryn N. Evancho

All Theses

Polyurethane foam is a valuable material with applications across the automotive, packaging, construction, appliance, and furniture industries. However, traditional polyurethane foams are made from petroleum-based precursors including harmful isocyanates. Isocyanates are the leading cause of workplace asthma and are made from toxic phosgene gas, representing a challenge to green chemistry principles such reducing risk and environmental footprint. To address these concerns, non-isocyanate polyurethane (NIPU) foams have been the focus of research for the past decade, but they still face significant challenges in achieving commercial viability. NIPUs replace the traditional polyurethane reaction with a safer, non-isocyanate process most often employing cyclic …

Silence In The Sound: Impacts Of Sound Exposure In Greenville, South Carolina, Grace Bowar

All Theses

The known environmental and health concerns have always been air, water, and dirt. Over time, human settlement introduced sound, impacting the environment and those within it. Transportation and daily interactions have continued to contribute to generated noise that is now an ever-present force. With urban planning grounded in health, safety, and well-being, the impact of sound on public health remains under recognized. This research explores the relationship between sound, health, and residential land use, with a focus on Greenville, South Carolina. This study seeks to address the gap between these variables by investigating whether elevated sound levels are present in …

Blockchain-Integrated Version Control For Secure And Transparent Software Supply Chains, Iwinosa W. Aideyan

All Theses

The software supply chain encompasses all stages of software development and delivery from initial coding and version control to integration and deployment. As development environments become increasingly distributed and reliant on external dependencies, ensuring the integrity, auditability, and consistency of code changes has become a pressing challenge. Traditional version control systems like Git, while effective for collaboration and tracking revisions, do not inherently provide tamper-evident commit histories. Features such as history rewriting (e.g., git rebase, git push --force) can be exploited to manipulate commit logs without detection, posing risks in security-sensitive domains. This thesis proposes a blockchain-integrated version control framework …

The Space Between: Engaging And Withholding The Self, Maya Mcdonald

All Theses

This thesis, The Space Between: Engaging and Withholding the Self, documents my journey in understanding the self through the act of oil-painted self-portraiture. Through an exploration of eye contact, body language, non-performative representations of self, and the tension between engagement and detachment, this body of work examines the complexities of visibility, agency, and self-perception. Using my own body as both subject and metaphor, I investigate the interplay between revealing and withholding, questioning the boundaries between what is seen and what remains obscured. Blending classical figure painting techniques with abstracted elements, my work engages in a dialogue between tradition and …

“Raise Your Keffiyeh:” Headdress As A Lens For Understanding The Arab Revolt In Mandatory Palestine, 1936-1939, Kathryn Kf Butler

All Theses

In the fall of 1938, approaching the apex of the most intensive period of violence during the Arab Revolt against the British government in Mandatory Palestine (1936-1939), a seemingly unassuming change occurred for Arab men in cities throughout the region: they donned a new headdress. Sartorial shifts in the early post-Ottoman period were not unique to Palestine. During the Interwar period, changes in male headgear occurred throughout the greater Middle East in Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Iraq, to name a few. These transformations of dress signaled a shift in something either societal or political and oftentimes both. I argue …

Bim-Based Automated System For Carbon Emissions And Construction Costs Estimation (Bas-Cc) In Modular Design And Production, Roshan Bandiwadekar

All Theses

Modular construction adopts a manufacturing-like construction process, enhancing the management of embodied carbon emissions in production and construction phases. However, estimating these emissions presents challenges due to the involvement of diverse stakeholders across various lifecycle stages. Additionally, cost considerations often influence design choices and material selections in modular constructions, neglecting the impact of embodied carbon emissions. To address these challenges, we present a proof-of-concept for an automated Building Information Modeling (BIM)-based system to estimate both carbon emissions and construction costs. This system automates the calculation of embodied carbon and cost implications of different modular designs and materials, enabling informed decision-making. …

Untethered And Unraveled: Isolated Motherhood In The Liminal Stage, Ashton K. Wronikowski

All Theses

In examining Kate Chopin’s The Awakening alongside anthropologic theories of liminality, this paper examines the becoming women traverse as they transition between various social roles: girl, woman, mother. Edna is a maternal character attempting to unweave herself from her roles as mother and wife, and she finds this desire to go backwards to the freedom she experienced as a girl is proven to be impossible. The unmooring of her psyche and her subsequent suicide is indicative of a failure, not of her own accord, but in the social preparation and support she receives within her new identity. Social anthropologists further …

"All The Songs I Stole": Ballad Collection And The Conditions Of Collective-Making In Johnny Cash's Prison Concert-Albums, Camryn J. Bruce

All Theses

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, singer-songwriter Johnny Cash recorded and released three live prison concert-albums composed of many ballads and songs drawing upon a ballad tradition. I question the degree to which these albums, as performed and commercialized ballad collections, create realities of unity between Cash and his audiences. Reviewing three ballads for their aspects of balladry and performance, this thesis finds that Cash’s albums echo and make echoes of isolating conditions and possible collectivities, demonstrating a fragility of “folk” in the shifting scenes of music and prison.

Algebraic Properties Of Boolean Models, Harrison Fisher

All Theses

Boolean models are n-tuples of polynomial functions in n variables over the finite field of order 2. These models define finite dynamical systems which are used for modeling many different biological systems such as gene regulatory networks. These systems can be defined by updating every function synchronously, or by updating one function at a time asynchronously. In this project, we discuss a method for reverse engineering the model space of all Boolean models which fit a set of partial asynchronous data. This method is a generalization of a known method for synchronous data. In addition, we show that given the …

Novel Methods For Assessing And Prioritizing Road-Stream Crossings For Aquatic Organism Passage, Lesley E. Twiner

All Theses

Anthropogenic barriers such as dams and culverts have led to riverine habitat fragmentation and decreased fish diversity worldwide. Low-head structures such as culverts are far more abundant than large dams and may have a larger cumulative impact on river connectivity. Many efforts to inventory road crossing barriers and prioritize removal and restoration efforts do not consider temporal variation in flow. We used cameras to gain continuous water level monitoring data to quantify the relationship between precipitation events and outlet drop height. In the spring of 2024, we selected 25 culvert sites in upstate South Carolina and set up cameras to …

Grief Is Isolating. The Elegy Is Not: An Exploration Of Loss And Grief In Poems, Jennifer Terry

All Theses

Grief is a messy, complicated process, one that can be all-consuming and isolating after a loss. Victoria Chang’s poetry in Obit and Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things both explore loss and grief by using forms and free verse to characterize the stakes that come with a loved one’s decline and the aftermath of death. Michelle Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart does similar work through the use of poetic elements in the memoir form. In my collection, Elegies of Home, I encounter the same struggles like the loss of identity, loss of a parent, and use the elegy as …

Gene Editing Combined With Apap Diet-Mediated Selection In A Ldlr-/- Mouse Model Of Familial Hypercholesterolemia, Pramita Suresh

All Theses

Cell-based gene therapy has garnered significant interest in treating familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), an autosomal co-dominant disorder characterized by elevated low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels. However, achieving a therapeutic threshold level of engraftment of gene-modified cells is a significant hurdle. In FH, as in most liver diseases, the transplantation of healthy gene-modified hepatocytes does not result in a selective advantage for the healthy hepatocytes over native hepatocytes for clonal expansion in the liver. In FH, as in most liver diseases, the transplantation of healthy gene-modified hepatocytes does not provide a selective advantage for the healthy hepatocytes over native hepatocytes regarding clonal …

Defining Fidelity For Tradespace Application, Aditya Agrawal

All Theses

This research proposes a definition of tradespace fidelity and presents a study on its effectiveness in the tradespace. Tradespace exploration helps evaluate various design options, allowing engineers to make informed decisions in early design stages. Fidelity generally refers to how closely a model approximates reality. However, the definition of fidelity has been inconsistently defined and interpreted in various contexts concerning particular problems. In some cases, it is a measure of accuracy; in others, information; in another, uncertainty; and in others, computational complexity. Fidelity is poorly and inconsistently defined in the literature. In general, higher fidelity models tend to be more …

A Parametric Study Of Compact Wind Borne Debris In Tornadoes, Akash Yadav

All Theses

Debris lofted and transported by tornadoes is a significant source of damage during these storms. Several approaches have been taken to model such debris flight, ranging in complexity from fine-scale CFD simulations to coupling the compact debris flight equations with simplified analytic models for the tornado vortex. Both approaches have their merits, though the latter comes with significantly lower computational costs. Despite the simplifications, this second approach has successfully captured details of debris flight events established in post-tornado forensic surveys. Herein, we take advantage of the low computational cost of the latter approach to undertake a detailed parametric study of …

Effects Of Common Herbicides On Organismal Interactions, Robert Chamberlin

All Theses

Pesticides are applied to agricultural lands to prevent undesirable weeds, animal pests, and fungi from harming crops and reducing crop yields. Pesticides are used in croplands at increasing rates around the world and have become an essential component of farming in recent decades. Often, rain, wind, and soil permeation move pesticides from farmlands to natural environments. Such contamination of natural environments by pesticides may threaten species by altering their behaviors, bodily functions, and the ways in which individuals interact. Atrazine and glyphosate are among the most widely used herbicides around the world and are useful in eliminating weeds, primarily in …

Divergence-Free Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics In A Stream Digital Twin, Austin Hartley

All Theses

Digital Twins (DT) are being explored by the South Carolina (SC) water community to simulate how SC streams will flow at various water levels. Currently, a DT called Gilligan simulates these streams utilizing weakly-incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). This method does not strictly enforce incompressibility, which leads to unrealistic water flows and unwanted visual artifacts that require post-processing effects to hide. To address these problems and simulate more realistic water flows, the Gilligan stream logic is updated and a state-of-the-art SPH method that enforces incompressibility—Divergence-Free SPH (DFSPH)—is implemented within the Gilligan framework. DFSPH is able to make use of two …

2022 Annual Operations And Maintenance Report, Butte Silver Bow

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Final Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit (Bpsou) Unreclaimed (Ur) Sites: Ur-35 Remedial Action Work Plan (Rawp), Pioneer Technical Services, Inc.

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Design Of A Novel Low-Cost Hybrid V-Shape Spoke-Type Ferrite Ipm-Synrm For Ev Traction Using Fem Software, Kenghao Cai

Master's Theses

This paper presents a hybrid V-shape spoke type ferrite Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Reluctance Machine (PMA-SynRM) for electric vehicle traction application. Ferrite or ceramic IPM-SynRMs compared to Neodymium (NdFeB) based IPM-SynRMs typically have lower torque, power density, and efficiency overall. Motivated by rising costs and international policies making it increasingly more challenging to obtain rare-earth metals, alternatives should be explored. With the help of finite element method (FEM) software, Ansys Maxwell, this study probes into a novel three-phase ferrite-only hybrid Spoke-type V-shaped IPM-SynRM using Tesla Model 3's neodymium powered V-shape interior permanent magnet machine as a benchmark. The proposed motor …

A Heuristic Approach To Portrait Segmentation And Its Application To Synthetic Bokeh Generation, Charles J. Snead

Master's Theses

Segmentation of portrait images is an important technique used to separate the foreground and background of an image. This separation of layers is useful for selectively applying post-processing techniques to enhance the quality of the image, such as blurring the background. Automatic portrait segmentation is a complex process that can be completed with a high degree of accuracy using deep learning with neural networks, but training and inference are often very computationally expensive. This thesis aims to take a heuristic approach to portrait segmentation by combining classical image processing and computer vision techniques into a solution that can be run …

Improved Management Strategies For Botrytis Fruit Rot, Macrophomina Root Rot, And Verticillium Wilt In California Strawberry Production, Joseph A. Ramirez

Master's Theses

Strawberry production in California is limited by plant diseases such as Macrophomina root rot (MRR) caused by Macrophomina phaseolina, Verticillium wilt (VW) caused by Verticillium dahliae, and Botrytis fruit rot (BFR) caused by Botrytis cinerea. Current disease management strategies are compromised due to fumigant regulations or ineffective disease management practices. This thesis investigated methods to potentially improve the management of these three diseases. Two host plant resistance evaluations for MRR and VW were conducted for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 growing seasons. Sixty-three strawberry genotypes were screened in both years. All plants were exposed to the pathogen via artificial …