Engineering Commons^™

Thermal Preconditioning Effects On Perforation Propensity Of Transvenous Implantable Cardiac Leads Used For Pacing And Defibrillation, Diane Muff

Master's Theses

Thermal preconditioning to simulate shipping, handling and storage conditions did not affect distal tip stiffness values for permanently implantable cardiac leads used for pacing and defibrillation. Leads that were subjected to extreme temperatures and temperature cycling did not show changes in buckle force values compared with control specimens which were maintained at ambient room conditions. Absolute differences between all measurements were small, generally under 0.05 N and were attributable to measurement variability.

Buckle force values are used to assess the propensity of leads to perforate the heart, a rare but potentially serious complication of implantable pacing and defibrillation systems. Since …

Fire Protection And Life Safety Analysis Of The Carlsbad Village Lofts, Nathaniel Cheung

Fire Protection Engineering: Culminating Experience Project Reports

This culminating project has been submitted as part of the graduate program in Fire Protection Engineering at Cal Poly. The building is a 221,000 square feet mixed-use residential apartment building comprising of 106 units. The report is split into two sections. The prescriptive based analysis considers the building’s compliance with the requirements found in the 2016 California Building and Fire Codes. The performance based section evaluated design fires to verify that the final building design and operating procedures met the life safety needs of its occupants.

The prescriptive based analysis was split into four main parts. The four parts were …

Fire And Life Safety Evaluation Western School Of Science And Technology, Brian Mosberian

Fire Protection Engineering: Culminating Experience Project Reports

This report evaluates the fire and life safety systems of the Western School of Science and Technology utilizing the prescriptive, and performance-based approach.

The Western School of Science and Technology is located in Phoenix, Arizona. The two- story building is 41,896 square feet and was designed and constructed with Type VB per a prescriptive based approach. The primary use of the building is for educational purposes for students grades 7 through 12 and classified as Educational (E) Occupancy.

The prescriptive based design evaluated the provisions of the building code and compliance with the egress, fire suppression, fire alarm, structural, and …

Fire Protection And Life Safety Analysis Report California State University Of Dominguez Hills, Jung Sub Kim

Fire Protection Engineering: Culminating Experience Project Reports

This report provides detailed fire and life safety analysis of the California State University of Dominguez Hills, Innovation and Instruction Building. The building is 4 stories high, accommodating an auditorium, classrooms, labs, and office spaces. Type of construction for the building is II-A. The building will have an aggregate floor area of 83,539 square feet of across four floors.

First half of the report includes prescriptive fire and life safety analysis conducted in accordance with 2021 Edition International Building Code and the applicable Standards, such as National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 13, Standard for the Installation of Sprinkler Systems, 2022 …

Project Buildings, Anthony Pamintuan

Fire Protection Engineering: Culminating Experience Project Reports

This report analyzes the prescriptive based design of a government-use high-rise building whose primary use is a business office building in California utilizing the California Building Code 2022 Edition. For security purposes, the name of the project will be the “Project Building.” The project site consists of a common podium underground parking garage with two high-rise buildings and an auditorium built on the parking garage. The project buildings that were analyzed consisted of the underground parking garage, the auditorium, and one of the high-rise buildings.

The parking garage is approximately 135,000 square feet consisting of mixed occupancies throughout. The mixed …

Fire & Life Safety Evaluation Of The Goff Health Sciences And Technology Building, Philip Bond

Fire Protection Engineering: Culminating Experience Project Reports

The purpose of this report is to practically apply the information conveyed in the Cal Poly Fire Protection Engineering Master of Science program by selecting a building and analyzing prescriptive and performance-based design features that accomplish the building’s life safety strategy. The selected building is the Goff Health Sciences and Technology Building located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The Goff Health Sciences and Technology Building is a three-story educational facility with business, education, and assembly occupancies. The fire safety strategy of the building depends on a fire alarm communication system, wet pipe sprinkler system, structural fire protection components, and egress elements …

Office Building, Grant Iwamoto

Fire Protection Engineering: Culminating Experience Project Reports

The purpose of this report is to conduct a prescriptive and performance-based fire and life safety analysis of a building. The chosen building is a five-story building with a basement and uses construction type IB, primarily with steel framing with concrete fill over metal deck. The use of the building is manufacturing, assembly area, open concept office space, and storage, and the total area is approximately 104,000 square feet.

The prescriptive analysis covers the building and fire code requirements such as allowable height, stories, and area and all the fire protection systems in the building including the fire sprinkler system, …

Community Multipurpose Center, Cristian Cohen

Fire Protection Engineering: Culminating Experience Project Reports

This report is an analysis of fire protection and life safety features required for a Community Multipurpose Center (CMC).

Governing the construction of the building was the International Building Code (IBC). Throughout this report there are justifications for a call to redesign the CMC conceptual drawing.

The fire and life safety features were organized into five areas, otherwise known as the FPE core areas.

The first four core areas consist of (1) Structural Fire Protection, (2) Water-Based Fire Control and Suppression Systems, (3) Detection, Alarm and Notification Systems, and (4) Means of Egress System. These come straight out of codes …

Training Facility, Andrew Kuharski

Fire Protection Engineering: Culminating Experience Project Reports

The Training Facility is a two-story, 142,500 sq. ft. building constructed in 1994 at the Savannah River Site DOE complex. The facility primarily contains training rooms, office space, and a cafeteria. Fire protection features of the Training Facility are detailed in this report, including key life safety, suppression, alarm, and structural features. The building has several deficiencies; the second floor has an occupant load of 911 occupants but is only provided with an exit capacity of 800, and occupancy size per floor exceeds what is allowed for assembly occupancies on the first floor. The travel distance from the records storage …

Spring Rate Measurement Of A Pneumatic Mountain Bike Tire, Joseph D. Balderama, Alexandre Kachlakev, Duncan Wyke, Luki Rosen

Mechanical Engineering

The Final Design Review (FDR) presents a comprehensive overview of the spring rate measurement project for a pneumatic mountain bike tire. This report details the project's design, its implementation, and how it met all specified requirements. It also includes a discussion of the project's findings and recommendations for future work, assuming continuation of the project. The primary goal is to develop a device that allows professional race teams or experienced mountain bike riders to parameterize tires based on their spring rate in addition to internal pressure.

Since the Critical Design Review (CDR), the design has undergone significant changes due to …

Rapid Composter, Cate Seay, Clarisbet De Jesus, Lesley Milena Estrada, Reese Dennett

Mechanical Engineering

This Final Design Review documents the efforts of a team of mechanical engineering students from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo as they work towards completing their assigned senior design project. This team was tasked with designing and developing an onsite rapid composter for the Girl Scouts of California’s Central Coast. The selected design concept that will be explained focuses on creating a composter that is child-safe, portable, weatherproof, solar-powered, and requires minimal manual user input. This report will not only provide a detailed description of the chosen design but will also supply an extensive design justification. This mainly …

Cal Poly Bsae Brake Caliper, Carter Henry Foye, Benjamin Leistiko, Nathan Berger, Colin Williams

Mechanical Engineering

In the past, the Cal Poly Racing Baja SAE team has used off-the-shelf brake calipers for their vehicle. Off the-shelf calipers have been either oversized, resulting in a heavy and hard to package system, or undersized, resulting in an unreliable system that does not provide adequate braking power. The goal of this project was to provide a caliper that meets the requirements of Cal Poly’s Baja SAE team. Our final design consisted of a two piece CNC machined caliper that uses the complex piston seal geometry from an existing mountain bike brake caliper. Using an existing caliper as a reference …

Quarter Car Suspension Model, Jack Miller, Alexander Eckhardt, Jonathan Lam, Max Gardenswartz

Mechanical Engineering

Dr. Porumamilla, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cal Poly, needs a way to demonstrate the concept of base excitation to the mechanical engineering students in the Mechanical Vibrations (ME 318) Lab. A mass-spring-damper model represented by a quarter-car suspension has been selected to represent this concept. A team of four students was assigned to design such a model as a senior design project. This document will explain the testing procedures, how were the results, and if they achieved our requirements. Furthermore, the document will explain how we assemble our product and manufacturing steps. Additionally, Critical Design Report (CDR) design changes …

F56: Rocket Thrust Vector Control, Ethan Douglas Anderson, Yiming Trent Jia, Sahil Sampat

Mechanical Engineering

This Final Design Review (FDR) report compiles relevant information regarding the Rocket Thrust Vector Control senior project as sponsored by Ethan Anderson from Cal Poly Space Systems (CPSS). Documented in this report is our progress from the months following our Critical Design Review (CDR) completion. This consists of a brief overview of the design our thrust vector control (TVC) system and its subassemblies with design changes noted, a thorough walkthrough of our procurement, manufacturing, and assembly process for creating our verification prototype (including software), a breakdown of how we verified each of our specifications through inspection and testing and the …

Cal Poly Battle Bot (F41), Jyotaaver S. Nirula, Andrew D. Peterson, Johnathan W. Waldmire, Nathaniel Ab Davis

Mechanical Engineering

This senior project endeavored to design, construct, and optimize a 120lb robot combatant tailored for the competitive arena of combat robotics. The project is a collaborative effort between mechanical, computer, and electrical engineering students at Cal Poly, combining diverse expertise to achieve a unified goal. Our competition, RoboGames, was in April of this year in Northern California.

The mechanical engineering team assumed primary responsibility for the physical components of the battle bot, focusing on three pivotal components: a robust drivetrain, armor, and a highperformance vertical spinner. These elements constitute the foundation of the battle bot's offensive and defensive capabilities, crucial …

A Comparative Study Of The Npm, Pypi, Maven, And Rubygems Open-Source Communities, Saurav Gupta

Master's Theses

Open-source software (OSS) ecosystems, defined as environments composed of package managers and programming languages (e.g., NPM for JavaScript), are essential for software development and foster collaboration and innovation. Although their significance is acknowledged, understanding what makes OSS communities healthy and sustainable requires further exploration. This thesis quantitatively assesses the health of OSS projects and communities within the NPM, PyPI, Maven, and RubyGems ecosystems. We explore five research questions addressing project standards, community responsiveness, contribution distribution, contributor retention, and newcomer integration strategies. Our analysis shows varied documentation practices, insider engagement levels, and contribution patterns. Our findings highlight both strengths and different …

Design And Implementation Of A Vision-Based Deep-Learning Protocol For Kinematic Feature Extraction With Application To Stroke Rehabilitation, Juan Diego Luna Inga

Master's Theses

Stroke is a leading cause of long-term disability, affecting thousands of individuals annually and significantly impairing their mobility, independence, and quality of life. Traditional methods for assessing motor impairments are often costly and invasive, creating substantial barriers to effective rehabilitation. This thesis explores the use of DeepLabCut (DLC), a deep-learning-based pose estimation tool, to extract clinically meaningful kinematic features from video data of stroke survivors with upper-extremity (UE) impairments.

To conduct this investigation, a specialized protocol was developed to tailor DLC for analyzing movements characteristic of UE impairments in stroke survivors. This protocol was validated through comparative analysis using peak …

The Effect Of Watts-Strogatz And Barabási-Albert Graphs On Memory Formation, Ethan Irick Wolfe

Master's Theses

Understanding higher level cognitive processes is a central problem in neuroscience. The Neuroidal model provides a useful framework for posing these problems in a computer science context. There has been significant recent work trying to understand memory capacity in the Neuroidal model but this work was done assuming that the network of neurons was an Erdos-Renyi random graph. However the network of neurons in the brain has been shown to exhibit small-world properties, which are not present in Erdos-Renyi graphs. In this research we explore replacing Erdos-Renyi graphs with Watts-Strogatz and Barabasi-Albert graphs in order to more accurately model the …

Filter: Framework For Integrated Legislative Transparency And Exploratory Research, Kenny Lau

Master's Theses

Digital Democracy, established at Cal Poly's Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy, initially provided users access to a distinctive dataset, including state legislative committee hearings, transcripts, videos, and more. However, the discontinuation of funding ended operations for the project and emphasized the need for a streamlined application independent of third-party dependencies and capable of offering real-time and organized access to the invaluable Digital Democracy dataset. We introduce FILTER, a cloud-hosted API designed for read access to the Digital Democracy dataset through twelve distinct endpoints. The system contains two databases: the Digital Democracy Database (DDDB) and the Digital Democracy Knowledge …

Automatic Mass Balancing Of A Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics Simulator With Six Sliding Masses, Amelia J. Gilman

Master's Theses

The goal of this thesis is to investigate automatic mass balancing methods for spacecraft attitude dynamics simulators, create a hardware design for a mass balancing system, and assemble the hardware on the Cal Poly Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics Simulator (SADS). Spacecraft attitude dynamics simulators replicate the torque-free environment of space with ground-based hardware. The SADS is mounted on a spherical air bearing, and includes a pyramid of four reaction wheels. The air bearing allows frictionless, unbounded rotation about the vertical axis, and 30 degrees about the horizontal axes. The torque-free configuration of the SADS can be used to test spacecraft attitude …

Improving Aerospace System Robustness Integration Of Singular Value Decomposition And Network Centrality, Ricardo S. Contreras

Master's Theses

This thesis presents an approach to understanding and enhancing the robustness of aerospace systems through the integration of network analysis, Design Structure Matrix (DSM), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and robustness simulation techniques. This methodology called the Importance Hierarchy method, provides a comprehensive framework for decomposing the interactions of aerospace systems, focusing on identifying and evaluating critical components and interactions.

The Importance Hierarchy method was used to study the Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (AFTU) by analyzing its components and interdependencies. The AFTU was selected because it recently completed a Preliminary Design Review (PDR), and its design and operational functions were well-known. …

Harmonic Flow Modeling And Analysis Of A Green Hybrid Ac/Dc Seaport Power System, Krishan Kaushal Ram, Taufik, Helen Yu, Siddharth Vyas

Master's Theses

This thesis aims to design and develop a model for a proposed Green Seaport power system and perform harmonic analysis. The model was developed using MATLAB Simulink and tests were performed by dividing the system into several Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) operating modes such as simultaneous charging and discharging, simultaneous charging, and simultaneous discharging. For each mode, BESS state of charge and other factors such as solar irradiance for the PV system, load levels and power factor were varied to observe the impact on system’s voltage Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) level and current Total Demand Distortion (TDD). 62 separate …

Smart Cushion Device For Elderly Aging In Place, Anna Dion, Nate Colley, Leonardo Bravo

Biomedical Engineering

Our task at hand is to develop a consumer-focused solution for improving elder care to provide additional peace of mind for seniors and caregivers using technology to extend independent living. We intend to create a device that will improve the quality of life of elderly individuals living alone by encouraging periodical movement throughout the day, along with monitoring pressure distribution and alerting when pressure concentration is potentially harmful. It will also alert users to the presence of moisture which can arise from spills or incontinence. The key stakeholders of this project include elderly adults over the age of 65 who …

Masonry Column Analysis Through Python, Ali Sherief Saleh

Architectural Engineering

This project serves as a study of Masonry Column Analysis and Design through the lens of the TMS 402 (22) Code: mimicking in-firm tools without using finite-element analysis. Chapter 9 of the TMS 402 (22) code provides the outline of the process taken to analyze these columns.

Investigation compares columns using the Python program to hand-calculations designs as to show additional capability that is lost due to approximation. PM-interaction for the columns is computed by a stress-strain approach. This report expands on the python design and approach to User Interface and inputs that are needed to analyze multiple datatypes with …

High-Power Microwave Antenna Design, Luke C. Chase

Electrical Engineering

High-power microwave antennas are essential for defense industry radar systems, cyber warfare, and power transmission. The US Department of Defense a SBIR proposal specifying the need for a high-power phased-array microwave antenna for the US Air Force.

Vivaldi antennas, invented in 1978 by Peter Gibson, have been widely adopted for radar applications due to their high bandwidth and gain performance. Considerable amounts of research exists on designing Vivaldis for different applications ranging from radar to communications. Using antenna theory and past research, a new Vivaldi antenna was designed to meet the requirements mandated by the DoD research contract.

This project …

Exploration Of Software Defined Radios To Increase Capabilities Of Affordable Mesh Networks, Liam K. Mccarthy

Electrical Engineering

Project OWL is developing a LoRa mesh network “DuckLinks” for emergency communications, and the current LoRa protocol the Clusterduck Protocol is based on is severely limited in data rate. OWL plans to use Raspberry Pi computers to develop the next phase of Duck radios, which greatly opens the computing potential and flexibility of the system the Ducks run on. Using LimeSDR and GNU Radio, an open source SDR programming environment, this project seeks to develop a simple SDR-based packet transmission system that allows for communication with Duck radios as well as the use of a different modulation scheme for higher …

Motor Controller Board For Cubesat Reaction Wheels, Tanner Ehlers

Electrical Engineering

Reaction wheels are crucial for CubeSats, providing precise attitude control and stability in the environment of space, enabling successful mission execution. The ‘Reaction Wheels’ project in the Cal Poly CubeSat Lab is in need of a new motor controller board due to the current board’s malfunction and inefficiencies in terms of size, complexity, power usage, and cost. Previously, other students have completed work on the mechanical design of the system, but little work has been done for the electrical components. The goal of this project is to design and test a new motor controller board that is compact, lightweight, power …

Prosthetic Forearm Controller, Claire Tylutki, Kevin Lopatka, Sofia Zaletel, Hardit Singh

Electrical Engineering

The EMG controlled prosthetic arm project represents a significant advancement in upper limb prosthetics, leveraging cutting-edge technology to address critical user needs. With over two million individuals in the United States living with limb loss, a substantial portion being upper limb amputees, the demand for accessible and functional prosthetic solutions is pressing. This project focuses largely on refining prosthetic limb control through the integration of electromyography (EMG) signal processing and control. Using surface electrodes, this project employs non-invasive means of data collection combined with modern digital signal processing methods to implement faster and more accurate control. The control system also …

Battery Energy Storage System, Alec C. Maclean, Kaylen H. Schwartz, Kyle A. Begley

Electrical Engineering

The project is a continuation of part 1 of the “Reliability Measurement for Grid-Connected Solar System” project. The goal is to continue where the previous design failed. This project will configure an ITECH IT-6000C and Tabuchi Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) to the small-scale microgrid at the Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo EE Department. Initially, a system was designed to connect an ITECH IT-M3633 as a PV solar source emulator to the Tabuchi BESS within a grid-connected microgrid system in Room 20-102 at Cal Poly. A Photovoltaic Thevenin equivalent model was developed for the ITECH IT-M3633, but this setup failed …

Ross Dam Micro Hydro Project, Marirose Evenden, Tyler Reents, Elena Ryan, Tevan Kim

Mechanical Engineering

The Ross Dam and reservoir in Angels Camp needs a reliable power source for powering its SCADA system which monitors its water level and flow rate. Currently, the existing hydro power supply is very unreliable and needs to be replaced with a micro hydro generator system that can consistently produce power to charge the onsite batteries. This paper details the design and implementation of a micro hydro Pelton wheel replacement system designed by our senior project team.

Outlined in this report is our design overview of the system and how our project will redesign and optimize the use of the …