Engineering Commons^™

Optimizing Feeder Bus Network Based On Access Mode Shifts, Zhaodong Huang

Dissertations

The methodology introduced in this dissertation is to optimally find a feeder bus network in a suburban area for an existing rail system that connects the suburban area with the Central Business District (CBD). The objective is to minimize the total cost, including user and supplier costs. Three major access modes (walk, feeder bus, and auto) for the rail station are considered and the cost for all modes makes up the user cost. The supplier cost comes from the operating cost of the feeder bus network. The decision variables include the structure of the feeder bus network, service frequencies, and …

Blind Recognition Of Analog Modulation Schemes For Software Defined Radio, Haifeng Xiao

Dissertations

With the emergence of software defined radios (SDRs), an adaptive receiver is needed that can configure various parameters, such as carrier frequency, bandwidth, symbol timing, and signal to noise ratio (SNR), and automatically identify modulation schemes. In this dissertation research, several fundamental SDR tasks for analog modulations are investigated, since analog radios are often used by civil government agencies and some unconventional military forces. Hence, the detection and recognition of "old technology" analog modulations remain an important task both for civil and military electronic support systems and for notional cognitive radios.

In this dissertation, a Cyclostationarity-Based Decision Tree classifier is …

Graphene-Coated Substrates For Biochemical And Optoelectronic Applications, Amrita Banerjee

Dissertations

Graphene - monolayer or a few layers of graphite -- has proven to possess remarkable properties: large thermal conductivity, mechanical robustness, two-dimensional ultra large electronic mobility, chemical inertness and biochemical compatibility. Realization of some applications has been impeded by lack of a large area deposition method. By using a novel methodology to deposit graphene on solid and perforated substrates, various optoelectronic and biochemical elements have been demonstrated in this thesis: (1) graphene based transistors were fabricated and their characteristics were assessed. The mobility for such transistors exceeded 5000 cm2/V·s, much larger than their silicon based counterparts. Such attribute opens up …

High Aspect Ratio Electrodes For High Yield Electroporation Of Cells, Anil B. Shrirao

Dissertations

Electroporation is a widely used process in cell biology studies. It uses an electric field to create pores on the cell membrane in order to either insert exogenous molecules inside the cells or disrupt the cell membrane to kill the cells. Current micro-fluidic electroporation devices use the planar electrodes situated at the bottom of a microchannel. These planar electrodes i) require a high voltage and ii) generate a nonuniform electric field which result in low yield of the electroporation. The standard silicon microfabrication technologies are not suitable to fabricate non-planar electrodes required to increase the yield of electroporation.

In this …

Challenges Of Permitting Ballast Water Discharges From Commercial Vessels In U.S. Waters, Paul Rodriguez

Theses

On February 5, 2009, the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) issued the Vessel General Permit (VGP), under the Clean Water Act (CWA), for discharges incidental to the normal operation of vessels, including ballast water discharges. This set forth permit requirements for most commercial vessel discharges within 3 nautical miles of U.S. shore. Since it will expire in December 2013, the US EPA recently issued a draft 2013 VGP. One of the significant changes is the proposal of numerical ballast water discharge standards requiring most commercial vessels to install ballast water treatment systems onboard.

The objective of this thesis is …

Gpu Implementation Of Block Transforms, Boyan Zhang

Theses

Traditionally, intensive floating-point computational ability of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) has been mainly limited for rendering and visualization application by architecture and programming model. However, with increasing programmability and architecture progress, GPUs inherent massively parallel computational ability have become an essential part of today's mainstream general purpose (non-graphical) high performance computing system. It has been widely reported that adapted GPU-based algorithms outperform significantly their CPU counterpart.

The focus of the thesis is to utilize NVIDIA CUDA GPUs to implement orthogonal transforms such as signal dependent Karhunen-Loeve Transform and signal independent Discrete Cosine Transform. GPU architecture and programming model are examined. …

Driver Behavior Classification And Lateral Control For Automobile Safety Systems, Jing Yang

Dissertations

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) have been developed to help drivers maintain stability, improve road safety, and avoid potential collision. The data acquisition equipment that can be used to measure the state and parameter information of the vehicle may not be available for a standard passenger car due to economical and technical limitations. This work focuses on developing three technologies (longitudinal tire force estimation, driver behavior classification and lateral control) using low-cost sensors that can be utilized in ADAS.

For the longitudinal tire force estimation, a low cost 1Hz positioning global system (GPS) and a steering angle sensor are used …

Advanced Intelligent Control And Optimization For Cardiac Pacemaker Systems, Wei Shi

Dissertations

Since cardiovascular diseases are major causes of morbidity and mortality in the developed countries and the number one cause of death in the United States, their accurate diagnosis and effective treatment via advanced cardiac pacemaker systems have become very important. Intelligent control and optimization of the pacemakers are significant research subjects. Serious but infrequently occurring arrhythmias are difficult to diagnose. The use of electrocardiogram (ECG) waveform only cannot exactly distinguish between deadly abnormalities and temporary arrhythmias. Thus, this work develops a new method based on frequency entrainment to analyze pole-zero characteristics of the phase error between abnormal ECG and entrained …

Investigation Of The Fracture Phenomena During The Milling Process Of Inorganic Particulates And Brittle Fracture Of Polymer Composites Using Fractal Theory, Zheng Qian

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the applicability and usefulness of applying Fractal mathematics and to the fracture of brittle particulates in Fluid Energy Mill devices, and in particular quantifying the resulting power law particle size distributions, examining the Surface Fractal Dimension of milled particulates, and relating the Izod Impact Strength values of composites of polypropylene and Calcium carbonate particulates which are large un-milled, small milled, as well as small and produced by the simultaneous milling and coating with nano-silica to the Surface Fractal Dimension of the impact fracture surfaces.

First, the dissertation examines the behavior of un-coated and micron-sized wax pre-coated particulates …

Inkjet Printing Of Resistive-Type Humidity Sensor For Harsh Environments, Hamed Kazerani

Dissertations

A flexible resistive-type humidity sensor for harsh environments is successfully designed and fabricated by an inkjet printing method using a Dimatix materials printer (DMP-2800 series from Fujifilm). Construction of the sensors is based on inkjet printed interdigitated silver electrodes on a polyimide flexible substrate along with an inkjet printable polyaniline (PANi) as humidity sensitive material. A copolymer of ethylene and vinyl alcohol (EVOH) is used as sensor protective coating. Double strand water- soluble PANi ink is synthesized by polymerization of aniline monomers with poly(4- styrenesulfonic acid) (PSSA) as a template.

Manufactured devices showed high sensitivity (/% @ 45%RH) to humidity …

The Incorporation Of Electrohydrodynamics And Other Modifications Into A Dry Spinning Model To Develop A Theoretical Framework For Electrospinning, Yuki Imura

Dissertations

The objective of this research was the development of a mathematical model of the electrospinning process using dry spinning modeling principles as a basis. This model is directed at the identification of parameters which influence final fiber characteristics, e.g., solvent concentration, temperature, spin line tension, and electric field. Preliminary computer simulations were performed; however, the generated data was inconclusive and was determined to be due in part to the complexity of the modeled system and the subsequent computational difficulties encountered. Although a comprehensive computational model of the electrospinning process has not yet been demonstrated, the theoretical development that was undertaken …

Virtual Reality Visual Feedback And Its Effect On Brain Excitability, Soha Saleh

Dissertations

This dissertation examines manipulation of visual feedback in virtual reality (VR) to increase excitability of distinct neural networks in the sensorimotor cortex. The objective is to explore neural responses to visual feedback of motor activities performed in complex virtual environments during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and to identify sensory manipulations that could further optimize VR rehabilitation of persons with hemiparesis. In addition, the effects of VR therapy on brain reorganization are investigated. An MRI-compatible VR system is used to provide subjects with online visual feedback of their hand movement. First, the author develops a protocol to analyze variability in …

Energy Harvesting-Aware Design Of Wireless Networks, Fabio Iannello

Dissertations

Recent advances in low-power electronics and energy-harvesting (EH) technologies enable the design of self-sustained devices that collect part, or all, of the needed energy from the environment. Several systems can take advantage of EH, ranging from portable devices to wireless sensor networks (WSNs). While conventional design for battery-powered systems is mainly concerned with the battery lifetime, a key advantage of EH is that it enables potential perpetual operation of the devices, without requiring maintenance for battery substitutions. However, the inherent unpredictability regarding the amount of energy that can be collected from the environment might cause temporary energy shortages, which might …

Adsorption Of Particles On Fluid-Liquid Interfaces, Bhavin Dalal

Dissertations

Particles floating on fluid-liquid interfaces are of considerable interest because of their importance in a range of physical applications and biological processes, e.g., self-- assembly of particles at fluid-fluid interfaces resulting in novel nano structured materials, stabilization of emulsions, formation of pollen and insect egg rafts, etc. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the mechanism by which particles are adsorbed at fluid-liquid interfaces. It is shown that the inertia of a particle plays an important role in its motion in the direction normal to a fluid-liquid interface, and in determining the particles adsorption trajectory and orientation in …

Synthesis, Molecular And Solid State Structures, And Magnetic Properties Of Sandwich Lanthanide Phthalocyanines Lacking C-H Bonds, Wycliffe A. Graham

Dissertations

A new class of sandwich phthalocyanine (Pc) compounds without C-H bonds was synthesized and characterized. They are the bis[octakis(perfluoro i-C₃F₇) octakis(perfluoro)phthalocyaninato(2−)]M(III) complexes, formulated as (F₆₄Pc)₂MH, M = Tb, Dy, Lu, Y. Single molecular magnetic (SMM) behavior in the (F₆₄Pc)₂TbH and (F₆₄Pc)₂DyH complexes was confirmed through slowed relaxation response of their magnetization in an applied time varying magnetic field during alternating current (AC) magnetic testing in the range 2 - 50 K. The energy barrier to magnetic reversal, Δ = 215 cm^-1 and …

Auger-Mediated Processes And Photoluminescence In Group Iv Semiconductor Nanostructures, Nikhil Modi

Dissertations

Group IV semiconductors (Si, Ge) are inefficient light emitting materials due to their indirect bandgap structure. Nanostructures of Si, Ge, and SiGe however, have shown relatively high photoluminescence (PL) quantum efficiency (QE) at low carrier concentrations. At higher carrier concentrations, the PL QE of these nanostructures is drastically reduced due to the onset of a fast non-radiative process attributed to Auger recombination. Moreover, this onset occurs earlier in structures with reduced physical dimensions, than in bulk material. The study of Auger-mediated processes in group IV nanostructures is therefore critical to understanding the physics of carrier recombination and photonic device limitations. …

Rational Design Of Hydrogen-Free Catalytic Active Sites, Andrei Ioan Loas

Dissertations

Materials that are organic-based and exhibit oxidative catalytic activity, including free-radical pathways, while being refractory to the activated oxygen species are not known. The synthesis of several classes of such materials, their electronic and structural characterizations as well as catalytic properties are reported. Their rational molecular design and biologically inspired reactivity are based on enzymatic active sites, which are reengineered into robust metal-organic fluoroalkylated scaffolds that, for the first time, exhibit structural asymmetry and tunable π-π interactions both in solution and solid state. In these complexes, labile C-H bonds are replaced with chemically and thermally resistant C-F bonds to create …

Vector Coprocessor Sharing Techniques For Multicores: Performance And Energy Gains, Spiridon Florin Beldianu

Dissertations

Vector Processors (VPs) created the breakthroughs needed for the emergence of computational science many years ago. All commercial computing architectures on the market today contain some form of vector or SIMD processing.

Many high-performance and embedded applications, often dealing with streams of data, cannot efficiently utilize dedicated vector processors for various reasons: limited percentage of sustained vector code due to substantial flow control; inherent small parallelism or the frequent involvement of operating system tasks; varying vector length across applications or within a single application; data dependencies within short sequences of instructions, a problem further exacerbated without loop unrolling or other …

Design And Automated Operation Of A Condensation-Induced Depressurization System, Fen Du

Dissertations

Typical examples of the use of the vacuum environments in industry include vacuum coating, vacuum drying, vacuum packing, vacuum casting, vacuum heat treatment, vacuum cooling for food storage and leakage detection. Most of these applications require a comparatively small volume of vacuum environment. However, there are also many applications where enormous vacuum chambers are needed. For example, a large vacuum chamber is used to simulate the conditions of space.

This study investigates the design and the automated operation of a vacuum generation system based on the idea of the condensation-induced depressurization with prefilled condensable medium in a confined, adiabatic chamber. …

Desalination Of Brine And Produced Water By Membrane Distillation At Lower As Well As Higher Temperatures And Pressures, Dhananjay Singh

Dissertations

Direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD)-based desalination process is a thermally- driven separation process where a hydrophobic microporous membrane separates a hot brine feed and a cold distillate which condenses the water vapor from the hot brine passing through the membrane pores. So far, DCMD has been explored for hot brines and other aqueous solutions below 100oC. For feed solutions above 100oC, DCMD has an extra advantage over other conventional separation processes like reverse osmosis (RO) which requires cooling of the feed solution costing additional energy; further, RO can not utilize the heat available in the feed solution. Produced water obtained …

Image Statistical Frameworks For Digital Image Forensics, Patchara Sutthiwan

Dissertations

The advances of digital cameras, scanners, printers, image editing tools, smartphones, tablet personal computers as well as high-speed networks have made a digital image a conventional medium for visual information. Creation, duplication, distribution, or tampering of such a medium can be easily done, which calls for the necessity to be able to trace back the authenticity or history of the medium. Digital image forensics is an emerging research area that aims to resolve the imposed problem and has grown in popularity over the past decade. On the other hand, anti-forensics has emerged over the past few years as a relatively …

Upper Extremity Rehabilitation Using Interactive Virtual Environments, Qinyin Qiu

Dissertations

Stroke affects more than 700,000 people annually in the U.S. It is the leading cause of major disability. Recovery of upper extremity function remains particularly resistant to intervention, with 80% to 95% of persons demonstrating residual upper extremity impairments lasting beyond six months after the stroke. The NJIT Robot Assistive Virtual Rehabilitation (NJIT-RAVR) system has been developed to study optimal strategies for rehabilitation of arm and hand function. Several commercial available devices, such as HapticMaster™, Cyberglove™, trakSTAR™ and Cybergrasp™, have been integrated and 11 simulations were developed to allow users to interact with virtual environments. Visual interfaces used in these …

Energy-Efficient Multi-Criteria Packet Forwarding In Multi-Hop Wireless Networks, Komlan Egoh

Dissertations

Reliable multi-hop packet forwarding is an important requirement for the implementation of realistic large-scale wireless ad-hoc networks. However, packet forwarding methods based on a single criterion, such as the traditional greedy geographic forwarding, are not sufficient in most realistic wireless settings because perfect-reception-within-rangecannot be assumed. Furthermore, methods where the selection of intermediate relaying nodes is performed at the transmitter-side do not adapt well to rapidly changing network environments. Although a few link-aware geographic forwarding schemes have been reported in the literature, the tradeoffs between multiple decision criteria and their impact on network metrics such as throughput, delay and energy …

Hydrodynamic Effects Of An Arch-Shaped Fiber Optic Probe In A Dissolution Testing Apparatus 2, Yiran Zhang

Theses

Dissolution testing is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry to evaluate newly developed drug formulations and as a quality control method to insure that solid dosage forms have consistent dissolution property. Typically, samples are manually drawn from the dissolution vessel prior to analysis. An approach to overcome the limitations of manual sampling consists in the use of sampling probes, such as fiber optic probes, permanently inserted in the dissolution medium and continually sampling the drug concentration in it as the solid dosage form dissolves. Despite their advantages, permanently inserted fiber optic probes can alter the normal fluid flow within the …

Experimental Evaluation Of Near Infrared Light Penetration Into Neural Tissue, Ujwal Anil Parikh

Theses

Near infrared (NIR) lasers find applications in medicine both for diagnostic and treatment purposes. Penetration depth into the tissue is a critical parameter to be considered in these NIR laser applications. Published data on the optical properties of rodent neural tissue are rare, despite the frequent use of rats as animal models. The aim of this study was to directly measure the light intensity profile inside the rat brain gray matter that is illuminated by an NIR laser beam. The local light intensities were sampled using an optical fiber inserted into the brain. The intensity profile in the axial direction …

Simulation Of Polymer Solar Cell Characteristics By Amps-1d, Lu Zhang

Theses

Simulation of polymer solar cell characteristics is presented in this study. The solar cells are made of materials such as the following: Poly (3-hexylthiophene): [6, 6]-phenyl C61- butyric acid methylester (P3HT: PCBM) and poly[2,1,3-benzothiadiazole-4,7-diyl[4,4- bis(2-ethylhexyl)-4H-cyclopenta[2,1-b:3,4-b']dithiophene-2,6-diyl]]: [6, 6]-phenyl C₆₁- butyric acid methylester (PCPDTBT: PCBM) are used as active layer materials. Analysis of Microelectronic and Photonic Structures One Dimension (AMPS-1D) is a computer simulation tool for solar cell device characteristics. The first part of this study focuses on the performance and comparison of current-voltage (I-V) simulations of indium oxide (In₂O₃) and tin oxide (SnO₂) …

Analysis Of Tissue Engineering Strategies For Bone-Related Applications, Timothy Buirkle

Theses

Over the past few decades, tissue engineering approaches have pushed their way to the forefront of biotechnological research and development, serving a wide variety of applications. This research utilizes quantitative methods to analyze the outcome of two bone tissue engineering studies. In an in vivo study, the use of Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (NPWT) in combination with stem cell-loaded scaffolds was investigated for the repair of large bone defects. Quantitative histological analysis was performed by determining both the percentage of cells proliferating (BrdU), as well as cells expressing bone-specific markers of alkaline phosphatase (A L P) in the defect. Total …

Three-Dimensional Magnetic Field Sensor In Ibm 0.18Μm Cmos Technology, Gang Wang

Theses

This work presents a compact three-dimensional Magnetic Field Sensor (MFS) designed in standard Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology. A circular Vertical Hall Device (VHD) for horizontal magnetic field detection and a split- drain Horizontal Hall Device (HHD) for the vertical magnetic field detection are integrated to implement the three-dimensional M FS. This merged design has the advantage of smaller area and lower power consumption. The sensitivity of the vertical hall device (ring-shaped magneto-resistor) and the horizontal hall device (Split-Drain Magnetic Field-Effect Transistor (SD-MAGFET)) is estimated as 0.11V/T and 2.88V/T respectively. The vertical direction of the magnetic field detection demonstrates a higher …

Quantifying Prehension In Persons With Stroke Post Rehabilitation, Saumya Sara Puthenveettil

Theses

This study describes the analysis of reaching and grasping abilities of the hemiparetic arm and hand of patients post stroke after a series of interactive virtual reality (VR) simulated training sessions and conventional physical therapy of similar intensity. Six subjects participated in VR training and five subjects in clinical rehabilitation for two weeks. Subjects’ finger joint angles were measured during a kinematic reach to grasp test using CyberGlove® and arm joint angles were measured using the trackSTARTM system prior to training and after training. Downward force applied to the object during grasping was assessed using Nano17TM, a force/torque sensor system …

Alterations In Brain Connectivity After Spinal Cord Injury Using Functional Mri, Yamin Ahmed Noor

Theses

Every year, approximately 50 people per million of inhabitants are inflicted by Spinal Cord Injury (SCI). The long-term impairment of the SCI patients has led researchers to investigate different rehabilitation and treatment efforts that require careful observations to be made on reliable markers. Presently, a number of neuropsychological assessments are used for SCI rehabilitation and research purposes. However, there is a need for the discovery of sensitive biomarkers that can be used to characterize SCI. Altered functional connectivity in the brain has been observed in a number of neurological patient populations. Hence, it was hypothesized that such alterations in brain …