Engineering Commons^™

Blend It Wine Blending Distribution System, Connor Clarry, Russell Temple, Matt Moren

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Design Of An Active Harmonic Rejection N-Path Filter For Highly Tunable Rf Channel Selection, Craig J. Fischer

Master's Theses

As the number of wireless devices in the world increases, so does the demand for flexible radio receiver architectures capable of operating over a wide range of frequencies and communication protocols. The resonance-based channel-select filters used in traditional radio architectures have a fixed frequency response, making them poorly suited for such a receiver. The N-path filter is based on 1960s technology that has received renewed interest in recent years for its application as a linear high Q filter at radio frequencies. N-path filters use passive mixers to apply a frequency transformation to a baseband low-pass filter in order to achieve …

Testimony Of Dr. George H. Baker, Senior Advisor To The Congressional Emp Commission, George H. Baker Iii

School of Integrated Sciences - Faculty Scholarship

This is the script of testimony before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It offers a vision for a future in which our electric power systems will be able to operate through or quickly recover from catastrophic failure due to electromagnetic pulse (EMP), cyber, and physical attacks. The scope of the term ‘EMP’ used in this testimony includes both naturally occurring solar storms and the more energetic man-made EMP hazards. The vision has been discussed with members of the electric power industry, and prominent EMP/cyber/physical protection advocates who find it to be supportable and actionable. The nature of EMP, cyber, and …

Baserock Bluetooth: Bi-Directional Bluetooth And 3.5 Mm Headphone Jack Compatibility Device, Jonathan A. Falco

Electrical Engineering

This project was proposed by a startup company from downtown San Luis Obispo called BaseRock. BaseRock sells a backpack containing subwoofers to allow the user to feel low frequencies of music. It is intended for concerts or personal use, listening to songs on an MP3. The main way the BaseRock backpack communicates with MP3s is via the headphone jack. With the introduction of the Apple iPhone 7 in September of 2016, BaseRock realized it was at a disadvantage. Millions of iPhone 7 owners and potential customers around the globe would no longer possess a headphone jack. BaseRock needs a Bluetooth-to-headphone …

Portable Dac And Headphone Amplifier For High Impedance Headphones, Kevin V. Thai

Electrical Engineering

The following paper contains an in-depth report on the design process of a portable DAC and Amplifier for high impedance headphones. The project brings portability into an audiophile’s world. This portable DAC and Class D amplifier takes USB data from a phone, converts it to analog, and amplifies the signal for high impedance headphones. First, the document contains motivations for the project: such as the necessity for such equipment, and who would use this product. Next, discussions of marketing considerations and customer needs bring together specifications. After, the report examines the project plan, overall functionality blocks, and estimated costs. Finally, …

Complex Filters As Cascade Of Buffered Gingell Structures: Design From Band-Pass Constraints, Nicole M. Hay

Master's Theses

Complex filters are multi-input, multi-output networks designed to discriminate based upon the relative phase difference between input signals. Complex filters find application in modern wireless systems for single sideband transmission and image-reject reception. This thesis presents one active complex filter implementation using two operational amplifiers per stage, termed “type-II” topology. The “type-II” originates from the passive RC-CR polyphase topology presented by Gingell in his 1973 paper, “Single sideband modulation using sequence asymmetric polyphase networks.” This new topology gains several advantages over existing complex filter implementations, namely “cascadability” (multiple sections placed in series to create a higher-order response) without altering the …

Dc-Dc Converter Control System For The Energy Harvesting From Exercise Machines System, Alexander Sireci

Master's Theses

Current exercise machines create resistance to motion and dissipate energy as heat. Some companies create ways to harness this energy, but not cost-effectively. The Energy Harvesting from Exercise Machines (EHFEM) project reduces the cost of harnessing the renewable energy. The system architecture includes the elliptical exercise machines outputting power to DC-DC converters, which then connects to the microinverters. All microinverter outputs tie together and then connect to the grid. The control system, placed around the DC-DC converters, quickly detects changes in current, and limits the current to prevent the DC-DC converters and microinverters from entering failure states.

An artificial neural …

Cubesat Data Transmission And Storage Throughput Optimization Through The Use Of A Zynq Soc Based Cubesat Science Instrument Interface Electronics Board, Caleb Mosby Munsill

Master's Theses

The CubeSat standard sprang from the desire to create a satellite standard that would open the doors for universities and other lower budget research institutions by making it more feasible to get their work into space. Since then, many other institutions and industries have been adopting variations on the standard for their own use. As more people are seeking out to use the CubeSat standard as their main bus, the standards and practices of the community have grown and expanded and with this growth, new challenges have been created. One such challenge is the bandwidth limitation in the RF-downlink. When …

Undersampling Ga-Svm For Network Intrusion Detection, Zhenyu He

Theses

Network intrusion detection is one of the hottest issues in the world. An increasing number of researchers and engineers deal with this problem by using machine learning methods. However, how to improve the identification accuracy of all the attack classes remains unsolved since the dataset is an imbalanced one with high imbalance ratio. This thesis work intends to build a classifier to achieve high classification accuracy. It proposes an undersampling Genetic Algorithm-Support Vector Machine (GA-SVM) method to handle this problem. It applies an undersampling method in GA-SVM. To solve the multiclassification problem with a binary classifier, this work proposes to …

Field Oriented Control Of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor With Third-Harmonic Injection Pulse Width Modulation To Reduce Quadrotors’ Speed Ripples, Yuxi Shi

Theses

The world’s commercial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) industry has witnessed unprecedented boom in recent years. Delighted with an ample supply of this excellent high-tech product, global consumers are paying more attention on UAVs. Civilian UAVs now vastly outnumber military ones, with the estimate of over a million sold by 2016. An UAV has various degrees of autonomy as enabled by the use and precise control of motors. Traditional Direct Current (DC) motors are replaced by permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM) associated with the new power electronic inverters. Because of a PMSM’s higher power density than a DC motor, it reduces …

A Fuzzy Logic-Based Text Classification Method For Social Media, Keyuan Wu

Theses

Social media offer abundant information for studying people’s behaviors, emotions and opinions during the evolution of various rare events such as natural disasters. It is useful to analyze the correlation between social media and human-affected events. This study uses Hurricane Sandy 2012 related Twitter text data to conduct information extraction and text classification. Considering that the original data contains different topics, we need to find the data related to Hurricane Sandy. A fuzzy logic-based approach is introduced to solve the problem of text classification. Inputs used in the proposed fuzzy logic-based model are multiple useful features extracted from each Twitter’s …

Pvdf-Trfe Electroactive Polymer Mechanical-To-Electrical Energy Harvesting Experimental Bimorph Structure, William G. Kaval, Robert A. Lake, Ronald A. Coutu Jr.

Faculty Publications

Research of electrostrictive polymers has generated new opportunities for harvesting energy from the surrounding environment and converting it into usable electrical energy. Electroactive polymer (EAP) research is one of the new opportunities for harvesting energy from the natural environment and converting it into usable electrical energy. Piezoelectric ceramic based energy harvesting devices tend to be unsuitable for low-frequency mechanical excitations such as human movement. Organic polymers are typically softer and more flexible therefore translated electrical energy output is considerably higher under the same mechanical force. In addition, cantilever geometry is one of the most used structures in piezoelectric energy harvesters, …

Investigating The Classical And Non-Classical Mechanical Properties Of Gan Nanowires, Mohammad Reza Zamani Kouhpanji

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Study and prediction of classical and non-classical mechanical properties of GaN is crucial due to the potential application of GaN nanowires (NWs) in piezoelectric, probe-based nanometrology, and nanolithography areas. GaN is mainly grown on sapphire substrates whose lattice constant and thermal expansion coefficient are significantly different from GaN. These discrepancies cause mechanical defects and high residual stresses and strains in GaN, which reduce its quantum efficiency.

Specifically, for nanoscale applications, the mechanical properties of materials differ significantly compared to the bulk properties due to size-effects. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the mechanical properties of GaN NWs using the non-classical …

An Exact Analysis For Four-Order Acousto-Optic Bragg Diffraction Which Incorporates Both Incident Light Angle And Sound Frequency Dependencies, Adeyinka Sunday Ademola

Electrical Engineering Theses

This thesis extends the prior work which produced an exact solution to the four-order acousto-optic (AO) Bragg cell with assumed fixed center frequency and with exact Bragg angle incident light. The extension predicts the model that incorporates the dependencies of both the input angle of light and the sound frequency. Specifically, a generalized 4^th order linear differential equation (DE), is developed from a simultaneous analysis of four coupled AO system of DEs. Through standard methods, the characteristic roots, which requires solving a quartic equation, is produced. Subsequently, a derived system of homogeneous solutions, which absorbs the roots obtained using …

Project Pradio, Trigg T. La Tour

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper examines the design and manufacturing of a device that allows two or more users to share a wireless audio stream. Effectively, this allows a group of people to listen to the same audio in a synchronized manner. The product was unable to be completed in the allotted time. Regardless, significant progress was made and valuable insight into the circuit board design process was gained.

Design Of A Folded Cascode Operational Amplifier In A 1.2 Micron Silicon-Carbide Cmos Process, Kyle Addington

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis covers the design of a Folded Cascode CMOS Operational Amplifier (Op-Amp) in Raytheon’s 1.2-micron Silicon Carbide (SiC) process. The use of silicon-carbide as a material for integrated circuits (ICs) is gaining popularity due to its ability to function at high temperatures outside the range of typical silicon ICs. The goal of this design was to create an operational amplifier suitable for use in a high temperature analog-to-digital converter application. The amplifier has been designed to have a DC gain of 50dB, a phase margin of 50 degrees, and a bandwidth of 2 MHz. The circuit’s application includes input …

Investigation Of Fes2 Nanoparticles For Use In Optoelectronic And Thermoelectric Applications, Rick Tefal Eyi Nkoghe

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Iron pyrite (FeS2) is the most abundant sulfide material on earth. This material has been widely investigated by researchers because of its optical properties. However, it has been difficult to produce High efficiency FeS2 based solar cells. This is due to many different impurities that arise when making the materials. The ability to synthesize pure pyrite FeS2 material is therefore critical for applications.

Pure Iron pyrite nanocrystals were synthesized using hot injection by mixing sulfur with an iron precursor in the presence of an amine. To improve the stability, shorter ligands replaced the native amines ligands. The stability of the …

Contactless Charging Adapter, Kevin Nguyen, Emmett Stetz, Joseph Pacheco

Electrical Engineering

Currently, most cell phones utilize wired adapters to charge, which cause a minor hassle when one frequently needs to unplug and replug their device whenever they pick it up to use while it is charging. The charging adapter is a pad that phones can be placed on to wirelessly charge the device. The charging adapter consists of two components: the wireless charging platform to supply and transmit the power, and the wireless charging receiver for phones that do not already have an internal receiver included, specifically targeting newer generation iPhones that utilize a lightning port (i.e. iPhone 5, 6, 6s, …

Impact Of Rram Read Fluctuations On The Program-Verify Approach, David M. Nminibapiel, Dmitry Veksler, J.-H. Kim, Pragya R. Shrestha, Jason P. Campbell, Jason T. Ryan, Helmut Baumgart, Kin P. Cheung

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The stochastic nature of the conductive filaments in oxide-based resistive memory (RRAM) represents a sizeable impediment to commercialization. As such, program-verify methodologies are highly alluring. However, it was recently shown that program-verify methods are unworkable due to strong resistance state relaxation after SET/RESET programming. In this paper, we demonstrate that resistance state relaxation is not the main culprit. Instead, it is fluctuation-induced false-reading (triggering) that defeats the program-verify method, producing a large distribution tail immediately after programming. The fluctuation impact on the verify mechanism has serious implications on the overall write/erase speed of RRAM.

Automation In Entertainment: Concept, Design, And Application, Ryan Thally

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The focus of this thesis is to explore the automation technology used in the modern entertainment industry. Upon completion of my thesis, I will deliver a working prototype of the chosen technology and present its capabilities in a choreographed show.

Smart Feedback Control For Fiber-Optics Acoustic Emission Sensor System, Xiangyu Luo

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Optical fiber sensors for ultrasonic detection have become a subject of much research in recent years. In this thesis, a fiber-optic acoustic emission (AE) sensor system that is capable of performing AE detection, even when the sensor is experiencing large quasi-static strains, is first described. The system consists of a smart selection of a wavelength notch to which a distributed feedback (DFB) laser is locked for high sensitivity AE signal demodulation. A smart feedback control unit for the DFB laser, which is the focus of this thesis, is designed and investigated. The smart control ensures that the AE signal is …

Hexarray: A Novel Self-Reconfigurable Hardware System, Fady Hussein

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Evolvable hardware (EHW) is a powerful autonomous system for adapting and finding solutions within a changing environment. EHW consists of two main components: a reconfigurable hardware core and an evolutionary algorithm. The majority of prior research focuses on improving either the reconfigurable hardware or the evolutionary algorithm in place, but not both. Thus, current implementations suffer from being application oriented and having slow reconfiguration times, low efficiencies, and less routing flexibility. In this work, a novel evolvable hardware platform is proposed that combines a novel reconfigurable hardware core and a novel evolutionary algorithm.

The proposed reconfigurable hardware core is a …

Sensory Interfaces: Intelligent Surgical Box Trainer, Krystal York

Honors Theses

The Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) box trainer currently offers medical students the opportunity to practice their dexterity with laparoscopic surgical tools and accustom themselves to the disconnect between their actions and their visible frame of reference. However, at this stage the box trainer offers few ways to test, practice, or improve upon important factors in laparoscopic surgery including disturbance of and pressure applied to patient tissue. The purpose of this project was to add sensory interfaces to the FLS box trainer to offer more concrete feedback for medical students practicing the required tasks, consolidate the information gathered by the …

Development Of A Bio-Inspired, Low-Cost, Piezoelectric Airflow Sensor, Evan Unruh

Research Horizons Day Posters

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Power Supply Ramp Time On Sram Puf's, Abdelrahman T. Elshafiey Mr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are security primitives that exploit the device mismatches. PUFs are a promising solution for hardware cryptography and key storage. They are used in many security applications including identification, authentication and key generation. SRAM is one of the popular implementations of PUFs. SRAM PUFs offer the advantage, over other PUF constructions, of reusing resources (memories) that already exist in many designs.

In this thesis, for the first time, it is demonstrated that the start-up value of an SRAM PUF could be different depending on the SRAM power supply rising time. An analytical model has been developed to …

The Design And Optimization Of Cooperative Mobile Edge, Xueqing Huang

Dissertations

As the world is charging towards the Internet of Things (IoT) era, an enormous amount of sensors will be rapidly empowered with internet connectivity. Besides the fact that the end devices are getting more diverse, some of them are also becoming more powerful, such that they can function as standalone mobile computing units with multiple wireless network interfaces. At the network end, various facilities are also pushed to the mobile edge to foster internet connections. Distributed small scale cloud resources and green energy harvesters can be directly attached to the deployed heterogeneous base stations.

Different from the traditional wireless access …

Forensic Research On Detecting Seam Carving In Digital Images, Jingyu Ye

Dissertations

Digital images have been playing an important role in our daily life for the last several decades. Naturally, image editing technologies have been tremendously developed due to the increasing demands. As a result, digital images can be easily manipulated on a personal computer or even a cellphone for many purposes nowadays, so that the authenticity of digital images becomes an important issue. In this dissertation research, four machine learning based forensic methods are presented to detect one of the popular image editing techniques, called ‘seam carving’.

To reveal seam carving applied to uncompressed images from the perspective of energy distribution …

Laser Microphone, Michael Mckee

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

The laser microphone is a multifaceted project. The main objective of this project is the design and construction of a laser microphone. This device is able to detect sound via variations in light waves. Production of this device being one obvious outcome of the project, observation and experimentation comprise the primary focus of the venture. Experiments reveal exactly how well this device is able to function and if it is able to be used in specific engineering applications. To function appropriately, this device should handle the translation from soundwaves to light waves with little to no alteration. Full signal analysis …

Design Verification Of Mems Resonators With Fem Simulator, Joshua Wiswell

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

The purpose of this project was to use COMSOL, an advanced FEM (finite element modeling) software, to analyze a Coupled Thermal Resonator. This Coupled Thermal Resonator was previously constructed in L-Edit, but when analyzed in COMSOL, it produced undesirable results. This project focused on improving the design and model of the Resonator to improve simulation results and evaluating the actual response of the MEMS device to determine if simulated results were accurate for the actual device. Many different factors may have contributed to producing the double peak seen in the simulation, including the weak coupling between the two resonators. These …

Rural Broadband Mobile Communications: Spectrum Occupancy And Propagation Modeling In Western Montana, Erin Wiles

Graduate Theses & Non-Theses

Fixed and mobile spectrum monitoring stations were implemented to study the spectrum range from 174 to 1000 MHz in rural and remote locations within the mountains of western Montana, USA. The measurements show that the majority of this spectrum range is underused and suitable for spectrum sharing. This work identifies available channels of 5-MHz bandwidth to test a remote mobile broadband network. Both TV broadcast stations and a cellular base station were modelled to test signal propagation and interference scenarios.