Engineering Commons^™

Artificial Olfactory System For Multi-Component Analysis Of Gas Mixtures., Alexander Aleksandrovich Larin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gas analysis is an important part of our world and gas sensing technology is becoming more essential for various aspects of our life. A novel approach for gas mixture analysis by using portable gas chromatography in combination with an array of highly integrated and selective metal oxide (MOX) sensors has been studied. We developed a system with small size (7 x 13 x 16 inches), low power consumption (~10 W) and absence of special carrier gases designed for portable field analysis (assuming apriori calibration). Low ppb and even sub-ppb level of detection for some VOCs was achieved during the analysis …

So2-Alcohol-Water Fractionation Of Sugarcane Straw, Asif Sharazi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Climate change resulting from fossil fuels combustion is motivating researchers to explore feasible routes to convert renewable biomass into biofuels and biochemicals for a sustainable society. Typically, biofuel is produced from corn or sugarcane but both feedstocks compete with human food supply. Thus, lignocellulosics as renewable feedstock represent a more ethical and ecofriendly approach. Sugarcane straw (SCS) is a cheap and abundantly available feedstock which potentially can be used for biofuels/biochemicals production. It can also help to mitigate environmental and health problems resulting from conventional practice of SCS burning in the fields.

There are different biomass conversion technologies for production …

Investigation Of Influential Factors On Selecting An Engineering Major., Paige A. Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis evaluates the factors that freshman engineering students at the University of Louisville are taking into consideration when deciding on their major within engineering. The outcome of the research is expected to help to shape the syllabus of the ENGR 110 course, which is a mandatory class for all freshman engineering students. ENGR 110 is comprised of course lectures, department presentations, and company presentations. Currently, both the department and company presentations are held outside of course times. The influential factors identified by this research may help shape the course so that these factors are discussed thoroughly about each major …

Performance Analysis Of Organizations As Complex Systems., William C. Harrington Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation provides a method for evaluating the difference in performance after an organization makes a change while considering the stochastic nature in which it operates. A procedure that uses simulation to estimate outcomes by adjusting controllable parameters and leaving uncontrolled parameters unadjusted is proposed. As healthcare organizations are considered as highly complex systems, a case study involving a scheduling tactic change in the mother-baby service line of a hospital is used to demonstrate application of this procedure. The goal in the case study was to reduce delays in transitioning care of mother patients from the labor and delivery unit …

A Multi-Period Facility Location Model For Service Organizations Operating In A Competitive Environment., Sven W. Brose

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis develops a multi-period, mathematical programming location model for facilities operating in a competitive environment. The objective is to maximize the profit in a variable demand environment. The solution of the problem can either be done in a robust or in a dynamic manner. A robust solution methodology forecasts the demand for all the periods in the planning horizon and provides a robust solution that may be suboptimal for any given period, but optimal when all the periods are taken into consideration. A problem with this approach is that it requires accurate forecast of demand for multiple periods into …

The Effect Of Role Assignment And Personality Subtypes In Simulation On Critical Thinking Development, Situation Awareness, And Perceived Self-Efficacy Of Nursing Baccalaureate Students., Dustin Travis Weiler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies have evaluated the effectiveness of high fidelity patient simulators (HFPS) on nursing training. However, a gap exists on the effects of role assignment and student personality subtypes in simulation scenarios. This thesis explored the effects of role assignment and personality on critical thinking, situation awareness, and self-efficacy in baccalaureate-level nursing students. Using researcher-developed tools and altering previously validated tools to fit the simulation scenario, the effects of role assignment and personality were determined. Role assignment and personality were found to have a significant effect on critical thinking and self-efficacy, but not situation awareness. It was determined that roles …

Weighting Policies For Robust Unsupervised Ensemble Learning, Ramazan Unlu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The unsupervised ensemble learning, or consensus clustering, consists of finding the optimal com- bination strategy of individual partitions that is robust in comparison to the selection of an algorithmic clustering pool. Despite its strong properties, this approach assigns the same weight to the contribution of each clustering to the final solution. We propose a weighting policy for this problem that is based on internal clustering quality measures and compare against other modern approaches. Results on publicly available datasets show that weights can significantly improve the accuracy performance while retaining the robust properties. Since the issue of determining an appropriate number …

Improved Multi-Task Learning Based On Local Rademacher Analysis, Niloofar Yousefi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Considering a single prediction task at a time is the most commonly paradigm in machine learning practice. This methodology, however, ignores the potentially relevant information that might be available in other related tasks in the same domain. This becomes even more critical where facing the lack of a sufficient amount of data in a prediction task of an individual subject may lead to deteriorated generalization performance. In such cases, learning multiple related tasks together might offer a better performance by allowing tasks to leverage information from each other. Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a machine learning framework, which learns multiple related …

Fire Safety And Emergency Evacuation Training For Occupants Of Building Using 3d Virtual Simulation, Sayli Bhide

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With advancement in technology, building structures are becoming bigger and more complex. Incidences of horrifying fires that occur in such complex structures resulting in loss of property as well as lives are recorded worldwide. Emergency evacuation training can play a crucial role in mitigating damage not only in cases of fire, explosion or chemical spill but also in cases of natural calamities like floods and hurricanes. Conventional safety training provided in industries mostly comprises of unidirectional flow of information. Due to this passive learning style, response of employees in real life emergency situations is known to be ineffective. The proposed …

A Framework For Lean Transformation In Developing Countries: The Case Of Saudi Arabian Industry, Murad Andejany

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lean is a dynamic, knowledge-driven, and customer focused philosophy that continuously eradicates waste and generates value, with a goal to improve a company's productivity, efficiency, and quality. Successful implementation of lean does not only offer cost reduction and improved quality and productivity, but also provides efficient guidance for organizations to attain significant and continued growth. Although its adoption by companies has proven successful in developed countries, there is no sufficient evidence of its successful implementation in developing countries such as Saudi Arabia. A review of the literature indicates that there is a need to study lean transformation in developing countries …

Dynamic Job-Shop Scheduling Program (Djsp) Analysis For Preventive Military Helicopter Maintenance System (Pms), Kyungjin Park

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Republic of Korea Army(ROKA) has been founding new attack helicopter troops since last year by adopting US main attack helicopter, AH-64E Apache, and peripheral system like pilots and mechanics training systems and their organization. The AH-64E Apache is a major attack helicopter of the US Army and all of its systems are verified in terms of the effectiveness in real operations for several decades. However, ROKA still needs their own version of systems including tactics, template, and maintenance which are suitable for Korean terrain, climate, personnel, and so on. At least ROKA needs to have a chance to verify that …

Investigating The Impact Of Levels Of Experience On Workload During Nuclear Power Plant Operations, Jonathan Harris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The human-machine interface (HMI) of a Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) Main Control Room (MCR) is complex. Understanding HMI factors that influence Reactor Operator (RO) performance and workload when controlling an NPP is important. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) began a program of research known as the Human Performance Test Facility (HPTF) with the goal of collecting human performance data to better understand cognitive and physical elements that support safe control room operation. The HPTF team developed an experimental methodology to evaluate workload using perceived ratings, performance measures, and physiological correlates. This methodology focuses on tasks commonly performed during operations in …

A Framework For Measuring Return On Investment For Healthcare Simulation-Based Training, Hatim Bukhari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the healthcare sector, providing high-quality service in a safe environment for both patient and staff is an obvious and ultimate major objective. Training is an essential component for achieving this important objective. Most organizations acknowledge that employee simulation-based training programs are an important part of the human capital strategy, yet few have effectively succeeded in quantifying the real and precise ROI of this type of investment. Therefore, if the training is perceived as a waste of resources and its ROI is not clearly recognized, it will be the first option to cut when the budget cut is needed. The …

Optimization Approaches For Electricity Generation Expansion Planning Under Uncertainty, Yiduo Zhan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we study the long-term electricity infrastructure investment planning problems in the electrical power system. These long-term capacity expansion planning problems aim at making the most effective and efficient investment decisions on both thermal and wind power generation units. One of our research focuses are uncertainty modeling in these long-term decision-making problems in power systems, because power systems' infrastructures require a large amount of investments, and need to stay in operation for a long time and accommodate many different scenarios in the future. The uncertainties we are addressing in this dissertation mainly include demands, electricity prices, investment and …

Monopile Foundation Offshore Wind Turbine Simulation And Retrofitting, William A. Schaffer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Offshore wind turbines (OWT) provide a renewable source of energy with great proximity to many large cities. This has caused a major increase in OWT development and implementation, primarily in Europe, but spreading throughout the world. There are a multitude of different foundation options, each with their own benefits. The most common types are: monopile, jacket, TLP, Semi-Submersible, and SPAR. The monopile foundation OWT has been proven to be the most economic selection for water depths up to approximately 25m. This thesis has analyzed strictly monopile foundations due to their previous success and popularity. Three different chapters have been created …

Design Of A Framework For Sharing And Generating Combat Damage Assessment(Cda) Of A Hla/Rti Federation, Hongseon Park

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, a new framework for sharing Combat Damage Assessment(CDA) is proposed to find out the differences of each CDA system between military combat units belonging to their own federate in a HLA/RTI federation. When there are engagements in a battle among combat units belonging to their own federate in the HLA/RTI federation, each result of damage assessments is very different. This affects the HLA/RTI federation’s confidence and needed to be overcome because it is also one of the major issues to generate reliable engagement data. Also, a RTI can generate only qualitative data about combat damage while quantitative …

A Methodology For Internet Of Things Business Modeling And Analysis Using Agent-Based Simulation, Mohammed Basingab

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Internet of Things (IoT) is a new vision of an integrated network covering physical objects that are able to collect and exchange data. It enables previously unconnected devices and objects to become connected using equipping devices with communication technology such as sensors and radio frequency identification tags (RFID). As technology progresses towards new paradigm such as IoT, there is a need for an approach to identify the significance of these projects. Conventional simulation modeling and data analysis approaches are not able to capture the system complexity or suffer from a lack of data needed that can help to build a …

An Sos Conceptual Model, Lvc Simulation Framework, And A Prototypical Implementation Of Unmanned System Interventions For Nuclear Power Plant Disaster Preparedness, Response, And Mitigation, Matthew Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nuclear power plant disasters can have severe and far-reaching consequences, thus emergency managers and first responders from utility owners to the DoD must be prepared to respond to and mitigate effects protecting the public and environment from further damage. Rapidly emerging unmanned systems promise significant improvement in response and mitigation of nuclear disasters. Models and simulations (M&S) may play a significant role in improving readiness and reducing risks through its use in planning, analysis, preparation training, and mitigation rehearsal for a wide spectrum of derivate scenarios. Legacy nuclear reactor M&S lack interoperability between themselves and avatar or agent-based simulations of …

Quality By Design Procedure For Continuous Pharmaceutical Manufacturing: An Integrated Flowsheet Model Approach, Ashley Vezina

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pharmaceutical manufacturing is crucial to global healthcare and requires a higher, more consistent level of quality than any other industry. Yet, the traditional pharmaceutical batch manufacturing has remained largely unchanged in the last fifty years due to high R&D costs, shorter patent durations, and regulatory uncertainty. This has led regulatory bodies to promote modernization of manufacturing process to continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing (CPM) by introducing new methodologies including quality by design, design space, and process analytical technology (PAT). This represents a shift away from the traditional pharmaceutical manufacturing way of thinking towards a risk based approach that promotes increased product and …