Engineering Commons^™

3d Printing, Open-Source Technology And Their Applications In Research, Chenlong Zhang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Open-source software received tremendous success as it drives down the cost of software and expand the distribution. Open-source hardware, as part of the open-source movement, has just risen into public attention for its potential to further drive down the cost of all kinds of manufacturing goods and reshape the manufacture chain. In this report we explores the history, development and the future of open-source hardware project, summarizing the opportunities, challenges and possible solutions. 3D printing is demonstrated as a booster to assist open-source hardware’s development. Low-cost 3D printer enables at-home and in-time fabrication, the download-print-use-improve-distribute cycle is established to encourage …

Monitoring System For Electric Motors, Sean Waples

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Induction motors are key to many applications and are one of the most commonly used electric devices. Currently, induction motor fault detection schemes are limited in features and computational power. With current technology, fault detection algorithms are operating in embedded systems and run on embedded processors. These processors do not have the computation power and functionality that more advanced computer systems have, which is the source of the issue. With the recent rise in cloud computing and connected devices, it is possible to build an induction motor monitoring system with a much greater set of features and possibilities.

Counting And Classification Of Highway Vehicles By Regression Analysis, Mingpei Liang, Xinyu Huang, Chung-Hao Chen, Alade Tokuta

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we describe a novel algorithm that counts and classifies highway vehicles based on regression analysis. This algorithm requires no explicit segmentation or tracking of individual vehicles, which is usually an important part of many existing algorithms. Therefore, this algorithm is particularly useful when there are severe occlusions or vehicle resolution is low, in which extracted features are highly unreliable. There are mainly two contributions in our proposed algorithm. First, a warping method is developed to detect the foreground segments that contain unclassified vehicles. The common used modeling and tracking (e.g., Kalman filtering) of individual vehicles are not …

The Ph Sensing Properties Of Rf Sputtered Ruo2 Thin-Film Prepared Using Different Ar/O2 Flow Ratio, Ali Sardarinejad, Devendra Kumar Maurya, Kamal Alameh

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The influence of the Ar/O₂ gas ratio during radio frequency (RF) sputtering of the RuO₂ sensing electrode on the pH sensing performance is investigated. The developed pH sensor consists in an RF sputtered ruthenium oxide thin-film sensing electrode, in conjunction with an electroplated Ag/AgCl reference electrode. The performance and characterization of the developed pH sensors in terms of sensitivity, response time, stability, reversibility, and hysteresis are investigated. Experimental results show that the pH sensor exhibits super-Nernstian slopes in the range of 64.33-73.83 mV/pH for Ar/O₂ gas ratio between 10/0-7/3. In particular, the best pH sensing performance, in …

Assessment Of Electrode Configurations Of Electrical Impedance Myography For The Evaluation Of Neuromuscular Diseases, Khondokar Mohammad Fazle Rabbi

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Electrical impedance myography (EIM) is a painless, noninvasive approach to measure the neuromuscular disease status. EIM parameters- resistance (R), reactance (X) and phase (θ) depend significantly on subcutaneous fat thickness, muscle size and inter electrode distance. The objective of this research is to find an electrode configuration which can minimize the effects on EIM parameters due to subcutaneous fat thickness variation. In this study, a model of human upper arm was developed using finite element method (FEM), which has already been established as an appropriate approach for the analysis of non-symmetrical shape for assessing alternations of muscle in disease-induced changes …

Enhanced Quality Of Experience Based On Enriched Network Centric And Access Control Mechanisms, Andreas Roos

Doctoral

In the digital world service provisioning in user satisfying quality has become the goal of any content or network provider. Besides having satisfied and therefore, loyal users, the creation of sustainable revenue streams is the most important issue for network operators [1], [2], [3]. The motivation of this work is to enhance the quality of experience of users when they connect to the Internet, request application services as well as to maintain full service when these users are on the move in WLAN based access networks. In this context, the aspect of additional revenue creation for network operators is considered …

Blind Area Target Aiming System And Preference Selection Training System Design, Zhine Kang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a system of leveraging computational elements controlling physical entities that is widely applied in our daily life for all kinds of purpose. It helps us build smart devices and make life become much easier. In this report, two projects were designed to show the idea that how cyber-physical system works in human daily life. The first project is designed for personal security, especially for one of the most dangerous job: security service. It helps user defend his back while he/she is in a tough situation while he or she is alone. First there will be …

Development Of Rigorous Electromagnetic Simulation Tools For Anisotropic Structures, Jose Luis Enriquez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Many times, mankind's creative nature has pushed the envelope beyond what was deemed physically possible at the time. People have engineered ways for us to fly, communicate across the globe in seconds, landed on the moon, and more recently discovered ways to make an object invisible. Unfortunately, there are times that this creativeness is hindered by funding, access to required tools or a combination of both. While this work cannot provide funding, it does provide a tool that one could use to model and simulate a variety of media. The media can vary from devices already being implemented to more …

Skin Detection In Hyperspectral Images, Stephanie Sanchez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Hyperspectral imagers collect information of the scene being imaged at close contiguous bands in the electromagnetic spectrum at high spectral resolutions. Hyperspectral images are organized in a data cube where the x and y axes contain spatial information and the z-axis contains spectral information. The number of applications for these imagers has grown over the years as they are now used in various fields (i.e. agriculture, surveillance, chemical imaging, environmental, medical, etc.). Many algorithms are described in the literature for skin detection in color imagery. However increased detection accuracy, in particularly over cluttered backgrounds, and of small targets and in …

Modeling Of The Response Of A Memcapacitor For An Impulse, Step, Ramp, And Sinusiodal Inputs, Ghassan Khalil Kachmar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, or MEMS, is a technology of very small scale devices. The dimensions of MEMS can vary from below one micron to several millimeters. MEMS have some mechanical functionalities such as the moving plate of a parallel plate capacitor (memcapacitor). MEMS researchers and developers have demonstrated an extremely large number of microsensors for almost every possible sensing modality including temperature, pressure, inertial forces, and chemical species. The equation of motion of the moving plate of a memcapacitor is governed by a non-linear differential equation with no known exact solution. Most research into determining the theoretical response of a memcapacitor …

Low Power Design Techniques For Data Acquisition, Praveen Kumar Palakurthi

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Semiconductor technology advancement continues to lead to smaller device geometries. Digital circuits have benefited from the technology scaling whereas analog circuits often suffer in terms of performance and noise immunity. As functionality continues to be integrated onto systems-on-chips, analog circuits consume increasingly more power than digital circuits and the objective of this Dissertation is to explore low power techniques in the context of both digital and analog circuits residing on the same silicon real estate.

As natural signals are in analog form, a necessity exists to convert these into digital form and then back again in order to exploit the …

Autonomous Robot Sphere, Robert Haver, Melissa Haver, Daniel Madden, Noah Robertson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Autonomous Robot Sphere is an interactive robot toy meant to entertain kids. The robot will locate its target and execute algorithms to autonomously evade or chase a child. The sphere will contain a platform equipped with four omni-wheels, which will allow the sphere to maneuver and change direction almost instantaneously. The robot will be configured to maintain a fixed distance from the transmitter, allowing it to chase or evade the child in response to their movement. The primary advantage of our design lies in its capability to quickly adapt to changes in direction.

Free-Range Pre-Programmed Rc Car, Alexander L. Aubihl, Andrew S. Hopwood, Benjamin J. Riggs, Tyler P. Vance

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

There is a growing interest in the capabilities and utilization of autonomous vehicles. The objective of this project is to design a small scale illustration of an autonomous vehicle driven by user input. An application will be designed that will allow a user to create a track that an RC car will accurately follow. As the car follows the track, a microcontroller on the vehicle will send movement information back to the application. This information is used by the application to process where the vehicle is currently at and where it needs to go. While in motion, on-board sensors will …

Modular Biped Robotic Base, Lawrence T. Chiavaroli, Andrew J. Forchione, Wesley A. Miller, Joseph M. Drockton

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report contains the final developments and research involved with the modular biped robotic base. A need was first identified in 2011 when President Obama announced the National Robotics Initiative, an initiative focused on the funding of robotic development to work alongside or cooperatively with humans. This scope of this project concerns building a robotic base modeled after human legs and hips, capable of interfacing with future modular subsystems depending on what tasks are trying to be accomplished. Firstly, a mathematical torque simulation of the hip, knee, and ankle joints was developed in MATLAB. Using this information, complimentary actuators and …

Electronic Learning Guitar, Justin Fiser

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

No abstract provided.

Computational Electronics For The 21st Century: Reflections On The Past, Present, And Future, Mark S. Lundstrom

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The author’s career has coincided with the development of numerical simulation into an essential component of semiconductor device technology research and development. We now have a sophisticated suite of simulation capabilities along with new challenges for 21st Century electronics. This talk presents a short history of the field and a description of the current state of the art, but it concentrates on lessons learned and thoughts about how computational electronics can continue to contribute effectively to the development of new electronic device technologies. The author will argue that electronics is changing, and that computational electronics can play a key role …

Self-Balancing Two Wheeled Robot, David Laubli, Thomas Garabedian, Jordan Paul, Nikheel Patel, Michael Redle

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Automation is increasingly becoming a larger part of daily life. From automated telephone calls to machines in manufacturing, robots are generally an effective and efficient way to reduce overhead costs, increase consistency in products and services, and perform tasks that may be hazardous to humans. The successful design and building of a two-wheeled balancing robot demonstrates a knowledge of control systems and sensor interfacing that can translate to real world applications. Helping seniors live on their own, performing dangerous mining work, repeatedly screwing the same piece in an assembly line, are great examples of a controls automation system freeing time …

Led Learning Guitar, Kellen C. Reusser, Justin Fiser

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The goal of this project is to create an electric guitar that detects and displays chords in different tunings for learning and exploration purposes. A hexaphonic pickup will generate the required signals and a processor will detect the pitch. The computer software will apply the pitch information to determine the tuning and the voicings of chords. LEDs mounted on the fretboard of the guitar will indicate a note to be played.

An On-Orbit Calibration Procedure For Spaceborne Microwave Radiometers Using Special Spacecraft Attitude Maneuvers, Spencer Farrar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation revisits, develops, and documents methods that can be used to calibrate spaceborne microwave radiometers once in orbit. The on-orbit calibration methods discussed within this dissertation can provide accurate and early results by utilizing Calibration Attitude Maneuvers (CAM), which encompasses Deep Space Calibration (DSC) and a new use of the Second Stokes (SS) analysis that can provide early and much needed insight on the performance of the instrument. This dissertation describes pre-existing and new methods of using DSC maneuvers as well as a simplified use of the SS procedure. Over TRMM's 17 years of operation it has provided invaluable …

Implementation Of A Raptorq-Based Protocol For Peer To Peer Network, Yuzhu Bai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The object of this thesis is to develop and test a Ruby based implementation of the RaptorQP2P protocol. The RaptorQP2P protocol is a novel peer-to-peer protocol based on RaptorQ forward error correction. This protocol facilitates delivery of a single file to a large number of peers. It applies two levels of RaptorQ encoding to the source file before packet transmission. Download completion time using RaptorQP2P was found to be significantly improved comparing to BitTorrent. We developed a Ruby interface to the Qualcomm proprietary RaptorQ software development kit library. Then we achieved the two levels of RaptorQ encoding and decoding with …

Mcmc- Based Optimization And Application, Xiaobin Wu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the thesis, we study the theory of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and its application in statistical optimization. The MCMC method is a class of evolutionary algorithms for generating samples from given probability distributions. In the thesis, we first focus on the methods of slice sampling and simulated annealing. While slice sampling has a merit to generate samples based on the underlying distribution with adjustable step size, simulated annealing can facilitate samples to jump out of local optima and converge quickly to the global optimum. With this MCMC method, we then solve two practical optimization problems. The first problem …

Computation Offloading Decisions For Reducing Completion Time, Salvador Melendez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Mobile devices are being widely used in many applications such as image processing, computer vision (e.g. face detection and recognition), wearable computing, language translation, and battlefield operations. However, mobile devices are constrained in terms of their battery life, processor performance, storage capacity, and network bandwidth. To overcome these issues, there is an approach called Computation Offloading, also known as cyber-foraging and surrogate computing. Computation offloading consists of migrating computational jobs from a mobile device to more powerful remote computing resources. Upon completion of the job, the results are sent back to the mobile device. However, a decision must be made; …

Visualization Of 4d Q2psk And Ce Q2psk In Ideal Bandlimited Channels, Milton I. Quinteros, Edit J. Kaminsky, Kenneth V. Cartwright

Electrical Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper presents new visualization techniques for 4D Quadrature-Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (Q2PSK), Saha’s Constant Envelope (CE) Q2PSK, and Cartwright’s CEQ2PSK in ideal bandlimited channels. The signal diagrams analyzed are: time-signal eye patterns for 4D passband signals, 2D complex trajectory diagrams of baseband signals, and time-signal eye patterns for the 1D outputs of the baseband matched filter. These methods may be applied to other multidimensional modulation systems to obtain insight into the effects of noise, interference, and channel filtering.

Nanostructured Semiconductor Device Design In Solar Cells, Hongmei Dang

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

We demonstrate the use of embedded CdS nanowires in improving spectral transmission loss and the low mechanical and electrical robustness of planar CdS window layer and thus enhancing the quantum efficiency and the reliability of the CdS-CdTe solar cells. CdS nanowire window layer enables light transmission gain at 300nm-550nm. A nearly ideal spectral response of quantum efficiency at a wide spectrum range provides an evidence for improving light transmission in the window layer and enhancing absorption and carrier generation in absorber. Nanowire CdS/CdTe solar cells with Cu/graphite/silver paste as back contacts, on SnO₂/ITO-soda lime glass substrates, yield the …

Explorations For Efficient Reversible Barrel Shifters And Their Mappings In Qca Nanocomputing, Ke Chen

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

This thesis is based on promising computing paradigm of reversible logic which generates unique outputs out of the inputs and. Reversible logic circuits maintain one-to-one mapping inside of the inputs and the outputs. Compared to the traditional irreversible computation, reversible logic circuit has the advantage that it successfully avoids the information loss during computations. Also, reversible logic is useful to design ultra-low-power nanocomputing circuits, circuits for quantum computing, and the nanocircuits that are testable in nature. Reversible computing circuits require the ancilla inputs and the garbage outputs. Ancilla input is the constant input in reversible circuits. Garbage output is the …

Multifrequency Averaging Of Hysteresis-Current-Controlled Dc-Dc Converters, Yingying Liu

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Multifrequency averaging is one of the widely used modeling and simulation techniques today for the analysis and design of power electronic systems. This technique is capable of providing the average behavior as well as the ripple behavior of power electronic systems. Hysteresis current control has fast response and internal current stability through controlling switches to maintain the current within a given hysteresis band of a given current command. However the state space variables in a hysteresis controlled system cannot be directly approached by multifrequency averaging method because of time varing switching frequency. In this thesis, a method of applying multifrequency …

Average-Value Modeling Of Hysteresis Current Control In Power Electronics, Hanling Chen

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Hysteresis current control has been widely used in power electronics with the advantages of fast dynamic response under parameter, line and load variation and ensured stability. However, a main disadvantage of hysteresis current control is the uncertain and varying switching frequency which makes it difficult to form an average-value model. The changing switching frequency and unspecified switching duty cycle make conventional average-value models based on PWM control difficult to apply directly to converters that are controlled by hysteresis current control.

In this work, a new method for average-value modeling of hysteresis current control in boost converters, three-phase inverters, and brushless …

Integrating Emerging Cryptographic Engineering Research And Security Education, Mehran Mozaffari Kermani, Reza Azarderakhsh

Articles

Unlike traditional embedded systems such as secure smart cards, emerging secure deeply embedded systems, e.g., implantable and wearable medical devices, have larger “attack surface”. A security breach in such systems which are embedded deeply in human bodies or objects would be life-threatening, for which adopting traditional solutions might not be practical due to tight constraints of these often-battery-powered systems. Unfortunately, although emerging cryptographic engineering research mechanisms have started solving this critical problem, university education (at both graduate and undergraduate level) lags comparably. One of the pivotal reasons for such a lag is the multi-disciplinary nature of the emerging security bottlenecks …

Autonomous Small Scale Data-Logger For Temperature Mapping, Ahmed Gamal Eldin Tawfik

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modern manufacturing processes require minimal human intervention and a high degree of automation to meet industry demands. Due to variability in industrial process conditions, custom systems are often sought for these applications. These systems must be compact, economical, and capable of operating under different environmental conditions. This work presents the development, fabrication, testing, and validation of a low cost small scale temperature data-logger used as a monitoring system for automated applications. The proposed system is battery powered and packaged in a manner able to operate in temperatures up to 100^oC, with exposure to chemicals such as Isopropyl Alcohol, …

Iii-V Nitride Based Microcantilever Heaters For Unique Multimodal Detection Of Volatile Organic Compounds At Low Temperature, Ifat Jahangir

Theses and Dissertations

Detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are widely used in industrial processes and household products, is very important due to significant health hazards associated with them. VOCs are commonly detected using photo-ionization detectors (PIDs), suspended hot bead pellistors, or heated metal oxide semiconductor functionalization layers. However, these techniques used for detecting VOCs often suffer from one or more of the following issues - high power consumption, limited selectivity, complicated functionalization technique and expensive characterization tools. On the other hand, microcantilevers offer excellent avenues for molecular sensing that arises out of their high sensitivity to various physical parameter changes induced …