Engineering Commons^™

Theoretical Estimation Of Optical Absorption And Photoluminescence In Nanostructured Silicon; An Approach To Improve Efficiency In Nanostructured Solar Cells, Jaspreet S. Nayyar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Renewable energy is growing in demand, and thus the the manufacture of solar cells and photovoltaic arrays has advanced dramatically in recent years. This is proved by the fact that the photovoltaic production has doubled every 2 years, increasing by an average of 48% each year since 2002.

Covering the general overview of solar cell working, and its model, this thesis will start with the three generations of photovoltaic solar cell technology, and move to the motivation of dedicating research to nanostructured solar cell. For the current generation solar cells, among several factors, like photon capture, photon reflection, carrier generation …

Statistics Of The Received Power For Free Space Optical Channels, Stephen D. Lyke

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Free space optical (FSO) communication links can experience extreme signal degradation due to atmospheric turbulence induced spatial and temporal irradiance fuctuations (scintillation) in the laser wavefront. In addition, turbulence can cause the laser beam centroid to wander resulting in power fading, and sometimes complete loss of the signal. Spreading of the laser beam and jitter are also artifacts of atmospheric turbulence. To accurately predict the signal fading that occurs in a laser communication system and to get a true picture of how this affects crucial performance parameters like bit error rate (BER) it is important to analyze the probability density …

Multi-Node Toa-Doa Cooperative Los-Nlos Localization : Enabling High Accuracy And Reliability, Zhonghai Wang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This dissertation investigates high performance cooperative localization in wireless environments based on multi-node time-of-arrival (TOA) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimations in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios. Here, two categories of nodes are assumed: base nodes (BNs) and target nodes (TNs). BNs are equipped with antenna arrays and capable of estimating TOA (range) and DOA (angle). TNs are equipped with Omni-directional antennas and communicate with BNs to allow BNs to localize TNs; thus, the proposed localization is maintained by BNs and TNs cooperation.

First, a LOS localization method is proposed, which is based on semi-distributed multi-node TOA-DOA fusion. The proposed technique …

Spin-Strain Coupling In A 3-D Transition Metal Oxides, Ghous Bakhsh Narejo

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

ab-initio Hartree Fock (HF), density functional theory (DFT) and hybrid potentials were employed to compute the optimized lattice parameters and elastic properties of perovskite 3-d transition metal oxides. The optimized lattice parameters and elastic properties are interdependent in these materials. An interaction is observed between the electronic charge, spin and lattice degrees of freedom in 3-d transition metal oxides. The coupling between the electronic charge, spin and lattice structures originates due to localization of d-atomic orbitals. The coupling between the electronic charge, spin and crystalline lattice also contributes in the ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties in perovskites. The cubic and tetragonal …

Electrical And Computer Engineering Research Report 2009, Department Of Electrical And Computer Engineering, Michigan Technological University

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Annual Reports

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Pulse Polarization Radar For Determining Spatial And Material Information About A Target In Orbit, Nicholas D. Peterson

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

No abstract provided.

Estimation Of The Degree Of Polarization Through Computational Sensing, Wei Wang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The degree of polarization of a refected field from active laser illumination can be used for object identifcation and classifcation. The goal of this study is to investigate methods for estimating the degree of polarization for refected fields with active laser illumination, which involves the measurement and processing of two orthogonal field components (complex amplitudes), two orthogonal intensity components, and the total field intensity. We propose to replace interferometric optical apparatuses with a computational approach for estimating the degree of polarization from two orthogonal intensity data and total intensity data. Cramer-Rao bounds for each of the three sensing modalities with …

Development Of Room Temperature Operating Single Electron Transistor Using Fib Etching And Deposition Technology, Manoranjan Acharya

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The single-electron transistor (SET) is one of the best candidates for future nano electronic circuits because of its ultralow power consumption, small size and unique functionality. SET devices operate on the principle of Coulomb blockade, which is more prominent at dimensions of a few nano meters. Typically, the SET device consists of two capacitively coupled ultra-small tunnel junctions with a nano island between them. In order to observe the Coulomb blockade effects in a SET device the charging energy of the device has to be greater that the thermal energy. This condition limits the operation of most of the existing …

Electrical And Computer Engineering Research Report 2008, Department Of Electrical And Computer Engineering, Michigan Technological University

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Annual Reports

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Fabrication And Characterization Of Room Temperature Operating Single Electron Transistors Using Focused Ion Beam Technologies, Prasanjit Santosh Karre

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The single electron transistor (SET) is a Coulomb blockade device, whose operation is based on the controlled manipulation of individual electrons. Single electron transistors show immense potential to be used in future ultra lowpower devices, high density memory and also in high precision electrometry. Most SET devices operate at cryogenic temperatures, because the charging energy is much smaller than the thermal oscillations. The room temperature operation of these devices is possible with sub- 10nm nano-islands due to the inverse dependance of charging energy on the radius of the conducting nano-island. The fabrication of sub-10nm features with existing lithographic techniques is …

Room Temperature Operational Single Electron Transistor Fabricated By Focused Ion Beam Deposition, P. Santosh Kumar Karre, Paul Bergstrom

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

We present the fabrication and room temperature operation of single electron transistors using 8nm8nmtungsten islands deposited by focused ion beamdeposition technique. The tunnel junctions are fabricated using oxidation of tungsten in peracetic acid. Clear Coulomb oscillations, showing charging and discharging of the nanoislands, are seen at room temperature. The device consists of an array of tunnel junctions; the tunnel resistance of individual tunnel junction of the device is calculated to be as high as 25.13GΩ25.13GΩ. The effective capacitance of the array of tunnel junctions was found to be 0.499aF0.499aF, giving a charging energy of 160.6meV160.6meV.

Electrical And Computer Engineering Research Report 2007, Department Of Electrical And Computer Engineering, Michigan Technological University

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Annual Reports

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A Joint Data Rate - Error Rate Analysis In Correlated Space-Time-Wireless Channels, Hui Tong

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

No abstract provided.

Localized Annealing Of Polysilicon Microstructures By Inductively Heated Ferromagnetic Films, Melissa L. Trombley

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The monolithic integration of dissimilar microsystems is often limited by conflicts in thermal budget. One of the most prevalent examples is the fabrication of active micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), as structural films utilized for surface micromachining such as polysilicon typically require processing at temperatures unsuitable for microelectronic circuitry. A localized annealing process could provide for the post-deposition heat treatment of integrated structures without compromising active devices. This dissertation presents a new microfabrication technology based on the inductive heating of ferromagnetic films patterned to define regions for heat treatment. Support is provided through theory, finite-element modeling, and experimentation, concluding with the demonstration …

Time-Domain Models For Power System Stability And Unbalance, Ramanathan Arunachalam

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

It is an important and difficult challenge to protect modern interconnected power system from blackouts. Applying advanced power system protection techniques and increasing power system stability are ways to improve the reliability and security of power systems. Phasor-domain software packages such as Power System Simulator for Engineers (PSS/E) can be used to study large power systems but cannot be used for transient analysis. In order to observe both power system stability and transient behavior of the system during disturbances, modeling has to be done in the time-domain. This work focuses on modeling of power systems and various control systems in …

Study Of And Design Procedure For Dual Circularly Polarized Waveguide Slot Arrays, Lee M. Paulsen

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

For the past sixty years, waveguide slot radiator arrays have played a critical role in microwave radar and communication systems. They feature a well-characterized antenna element capable of direct integration into a low-loss feed structure with highly developed and inexpensive manufacturing processes. Waveguide slot radiators comprise some of the highest performance—in terms of side-lobe-level, efficiency, etc. — antenna arrays ever constructed.

A wealth of information is available in the open literature regarding design procedures for linearly polarized waveguide slots. By contrast, despite their presence in some of the earliest published reports, little has been presented to date on array designs …

Reducing Main Memory Access Latency Through Sdram Address Mapping Techniques And Access Reordering Mechanisms, Jun Shao

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

As the performance gap between microprocessors and memory continues to increase, main memory accesses result in long latencies which become a factor limiting system performance. Previous studies show that main memory access streams contain significant localities and SDRAM devices provide parallelism through multiple banks and channels. These locality and parallelism have not been exploited thoroughly by conventional memory controllers. In this thesis, SDRAM address mapping techniques and memory access reordering mechanisms are studied and applied to memory controller design with the goal of reducing observed main memory access latency.

The proposed bit-reversal address mapping attempts to distribute main memory accesses …

Optimal Beam Forming For Laser Beam Propagation Through Random Media, Baoyong Liu

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Focusing optical beams on a target through random propagation media is very important in many applications such as free space optical communica- tions and laser weapons. Random media effects such as beam spread and scintillation can degrade the optical system's performance severely. Compensation schemes are needed in these applications to overcome these random media effcts. In this research, we investigated the optimal beams for two different optimization criteria: one is to maximize the concentrated received intensity and the other is to minimize the scintillation index at the target plane. In the study of the optimal beam to maximize the weighted …

Porous Silicon Technology For Integrated Microsystems, Jin Zheng Wallner

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

With the development of micro systems, there is an increasing demand for integrable porous materials. In addition to those conventional applications, such as filtration, wicking, and insulating, many new micro devices, including micro reactors, sensors, actuators, and optical components, can benefit from porous materials. Conventional porous materials, such as ceramics and polymers, however, cannot meet the challenges posed by micro systems, due to their incompatibility with standard micro-fabrication processes. In an effort to produce porous materials that can be used in micro systems, porous silicon (PS) generated by anodization of single crystalline silicon has been investigated.

In this work, the …

Magneto-Photonic Crystal Isolators, Miguel Levy

Michigan Tech Patents

A magneto-optical isolator (20) for an optical circuit. The isolator includes a substrate, and an optical channel (350) disposed next to the substrate. The optical channel and substrate are configured to transmit optical radiation within the optical channel. The isolator further includes a photonic- crystal rotator (24) formed with the substrate and the optical channel. The rotator has at least one defect (52) and magnetic (M) and non-magnetic (N) materials.

Soft-Decision Equalization Techniques For Frequency Selective Mimo Channels, Shoumin Liu

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technology is an emerging solution for high data rate wireless communications. We develop soft-decision based equalization techniques for frequency selective MIMO channels in the quest for low-complexity equalizers with BER performance competitive to that of ML sequence detection.

We first propose soft decision equalization (SDE), and demonstrate that decision feedback equalization (DFE) based on soft-decisions, expressed via the posterior probabilities associated with feedback symbols, is able to outperform hard-decision DFE, with a low computational cost that is polynomial in the number of symbols to be recovered, and linear in the signal constellation size. Building upon the probabilistic …

Control Algorithms For Large Scale Adaptive Optics, Piotr Piatrou

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

In this dissertation, the problem of creating effective large scale Adaptive Optics (AO) systems control algorithms for the new generation of giant optical telescopes is addressed. The effectiveness of AO control algorithms is evaluated in several respects, such as computational complexity, compensation error rejection and robustness, i.e. reasonable insensitivity to the system imperfections. The results of this research are summarized as follows:

1. Robustness study of Sparse Minimum Variance Pseudo Open Loop Controller (POLC) for multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO). The AO system model that accounts for various system errors has been developed and applied to check the stability and performance …

Reconstruction Of Anisoplanatic Adaptive Optics Images, Mathieu Aubailly

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

No abstract provided.

Design And Implementation Of A 3d Computer Game Controller Using Inertial Mems Sensors, Ali Pezeshk

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Though 3D computer graphics has seen tremendous advancement in the past two decades, most available mechanisms for computer interaction in 3D are high cost and targeted for industry and virtual reality applications. Recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) devices have brought forth a variety of new low-cost, low-power, miniature sensors with high accuracy, which are well suited for hand-held devices. In this work a novel design for a 3D computer game controller using inertial sensors is proposed, and a prototype device based on this design is implemented. The design incorporates MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes from Analog Devices to measure the three …

Bluetooth Enabled Ad-Hoc Networks: Performance Evaluation Of A Self-Healing Scatternet Formation Protocol, Rade Trimceski

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Bluetooth wireless technology is a robust short-range communications system designed for low power (10 meter range) and low cost. It operates in the 2.4 GHz Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) band and it employs two techniques for minimizing interference: a frequency hopping scheme which nominally splits the 2.400 - 2.485 GHz band in 79 frequency channels and a time division duplex (TDD) scheme which is used to switch to a new frequency channel on 625 μs boundaries. During normal operation a Bluetooth device will be active on a different frequency channel every 625 μs, thus minimizing the chances of continuous interference …

Parameter Estimation For Transformer Modeling, Sung Don Cho

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Large Power transformers, an aging and vulnerable part of our energy infrastructure, are at choke points in the grid and are key to reliability and security. Damage or destruction due to vandalism, misoperation, or other unexpected events is of great concern, given replacement costs upward of $2M and lead time of 12 months. Transient overvoltages can cause great damage and there is much interest in improving computer simulation models to correctly predict and avoid the consequences.

EMTP (the Electromagnetic Transients Program) has been developed for computer simulation of power system transients. Component models for most equipment have been developed and …

Fiber Optic Detector And Depth Sensor And Method For Doing Same, Lawrence W. Evers, Kenneth J. Jackson

Michigan Tech Patents

A fiber optic sensor for determining the presence and/or measuring the depth of a first substance capable of transmitting light. The fiber optic sensor includes a plurality of light receiving fibers, a plurality of light transmitting fibers surrounding the light receiving fibers and structure for refracting light from the light transmitting fibers at a predetermined angle for total internal reflection of the light from an interface of the first substance with a second substance.