Engineering Commons^™

Wetting-Driven Formation Of Present-Day Loess Structure, Yanrong Li, Weiwei Zhang, Shengdi He, Adnan Aydin

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2020 The Authors Present-day loess, especially Malan loess formed in Later Quaternary, has a characteristic structure composed of vertically aligned strong units and weak segments. Hypotheses describing how this structure forms inside original loess deposits commonly relate it to wetting-drying process. We tested this causal relationship by conducting unique experiments on synthetic samples of initial loess deposits fabricated by free-fall of loess particles. These samples were subjected to a wetting-drying cycle, and their structural evolutions were documented by close-up photography and CT scanning. Analysis of these records revealed three key stages of structural evolution: initiation (evenly distributed cracks appear …

A Mathematical Framework For Estimating Risk Of Airborne Transmission Of Covid-19 With Application To Face Mask Use And Social Distancing, Rajat Mittal, Charles Meneveau, Wen Wu

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2020 Author(s). A mathematical model for estimating the risk of airborne transmission of a respiratory infection such as COVID-19 is presented. The model employs basic concepts from fluid dynamics and incorporates the known scope of factors involved in the airborne transmission of such diseases. Simplicity in the mathematical form of the model is by design so that it can serve not only as a common basis for scientific inquiry across disciplinary boundaries but it can also be understandable by a broad audience outside science and academia. The caveats and limitations of the model are discussed in detail. The model …

Comparative Analysis Of Simulation Models Of The Production Of Ethylbenzene, Osariemen Imafidon

Honors Theses

Process Engineering is all about making sure a raw material can become the desired product with as little variation as possible, while achieving the customer's specifications. Many equipment used for chemical processes cannot be physically inspected during operation at steady state, hence, the need for simulation software. The objective of this study was to compare the results of three different simulation packages to evaluate their efficacy within process design.

This study focused on the economic analysis of the production of Ethylbenzene using various models. The base case variables were inputted into each model to simulate the calculations for a fully …

Ultrasound-Assisted Post-Pyrolysis Magnetization Of Microporous Biochar For Effective Removal Of Heavy Metals, Ronish Shrestha

Honors Theses

Low cost and efficient adsorption of heavy metals from wastewater and thorough removal of adsorbent after water treatment have become the two essential needs for the commercial use of any adsorbent. Biochar (BC), the solid byproduct of pyrolysis with microporous carbonaceous structure, has been increasingly recognized as an efficient adsorbent for a vast number of pollutants. Magnetization, though eases the separation and reuse of BC, significantly reduces its adsorption capacity to a comparatively much higher extent. In this study, a hybrid post-pyrolysis magnetization was developed which sustained and even significantly increased the adsorption capacity of biochar. The process included i) …

Comparative Analysis Of The Results From The Ideal Gas Assumptions With More Rigorous Calculations From Pro/Ii Of The Production Of Pharmaceutical Grade Acetone, Soibifaa Frank-Briggs

Honors Theses

The Chemical engineering team was assigned by Landshark Inc to investigate the production of 30,000 tonnes/yr of pharmaceutical-grade acetone with a purity of 99.9 wt.% from the dehydrogenation of isopropanol (IPA). The team was tasked with determining the necessary process and unit operation criteria to ensure the economic feasibility of the proposed plant.

The major goal of this thesis is to provide a data comparison of the reactor in acetone production process when designed in Microsoft Excel and Pro/II. The first part of this thesis will introduce the base case briefly, transition into engineering optimizations and show the results found …

Load-Balancing Rendezvous Approach For Mobility-Enabled Adaptive Energy-Efficient Data Collection In Wsns, Jian Zhang, Jian Tang, Zhonghui Wang, Feng Wang, Gang Yu

Faculty and Student Publications

Copyright © 2020 KSII The tradeoff between energy conservation and traffic balancing is a dilemma problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). By analyzing the intrinsic relationship between cluster properties and long distance transmission energy consumption, we characterize three node sets of the cluster as a theoretical foundation to enhance high performance of WSNs, and propose optimal solutions by introducing rendezvous and Mobile Elements (MEs) to optimize energy consumption for prolonging the lifetime of WSNs. First, we exploit an approximate method based on the transmission distance from the different node to an ME to select suboptimal Rendezvous Point (RP) on the …

Revisiting Lightweight Encryption For Iot Applications: Error Performance And Throughput In Wireless Fading Channels With And Without Coding, Yazid M. Khattabi, Mustafa M. Matalgah, Mohammed M. Olama

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2013 IEEE. Employing heavy conventional encryption algorithms in communications suffers from added overhead and processing time delay; and in wireless communications, in particular, suffers from severe performance deterioration (avalanche effect) due to fading. Consequently, a tremendous reduction in data throughput and increase in complexity and time delay may occur especially when information traverse resource-limited devices as in Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. To overcome these drawbacks, efficient lightweight encryption algorithms have been recently proposed in literature. One of those, that is of particular interest, requires using conventional encryption only for the first block of data in a given frame being transmitted. …

Cooperative Relay Selection For Load Balancing With Mobility In Hierarchical Wsns: A Multi-Armed Bandit Approach, Jian Zhang, Jian Tang, Feng Wang

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2013 IEEE. Energy efficiency is the major concern in hierarchical wireless sensor networks(WSNs), where the major energy consumption originates from radios for communication. Due to notable energy expenditure of long-range transmission for cluster members and data aggregation for Cluster Head (CH), saving and balancing energy consumption is a tricky challenge in WSNs. In this paper, we design a CH selection mechanism with a mobile sink (MS) while proposing relay selection algorithms with multi-user multi-armed bandit (UM-MAB) to solve the problem of energy efficiency. According to the definition of node density and residual energy, we propose a conception referred to …

Timcc: On Data Freshness In Privacy-Preserving Incentive Mechanism Design For Continuous Crowdsensing Using Reverse Auction, Xiaoqiang Ma, Weiwei Deng, Feng Wang, Menglan Hu, Fei Chen, Mohammad Mehedi Hassan

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2013 IEEE. As an emerging paradigm that leverages the wisdom and efforts of the crowd, mobile crowdsensing has shown its great potential to collect distributed data. The crowd may incur such costs and risks as energy consumption, memory consumption, and privacy leakage when performing various tasks, so they may not be willing to participate in crowdsensing tasks unless they are well-paid. Hence, a proper privacy-preserving incentive mechanism is of great significance to motivate users to join, which has attracted a lot of research efforts. Most of the existing works regard tasks as one-shot tasks, which may not work very …