Engineering Commons^™

Evaluation Of Coding Scheme For Mimo Radar, Suresh Kumar Harikrishnan

Theses

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna systems have shown a great potential for wireless communication. These systems support high capacity, increased diversity and interference suppression. Recently it has been proposed MIMO constellations for Radar. MIMO Radar is not only a new research field, but also a very promising approach in terms of overcoming Radar Cross Section (RCS) fluctuations with diversity. This thesis explores the potential of coding schemes for MIMO Radar.

The ambiguity functions measures related to MIMO Radar are used to evaluate how much diversity gain can be coherently achieved with certain coding schemes. The results of this analysis …

Multifractal Analysis Of Heart Rate Variability Using Wavelet-Transform Modulus-Maxima Method, Chirag Jani

Theses

Physiological signals are complex and carry information of human health. Recent studies reveal that under normal conditions, the heart rate time series shows multifractal behavior. In contrast, HRV in the pathological state such as congestive heart failure exhibits more monofractal-like structure. Recent advances in the assessment of heart rate variability (HRV) uses a nonlinear dynamics approach. In this study, the main objective is to use the wavelet-transform modulus-maxima method for the multifractal analysis of the heart rate time senes.

The degree of the multifractality is defined by the singularities (a point in time series where a mathematical function is not …

In Vitro Evaluation Of Human Mesenchymal Stem Cell Neural Differentiation On Tyrsine-Derived Polyarylates And Polycarbonates, Yee-Shuan Lee

Theses

Present spinal cord injury treatments cannot restore motor and sensory functions caused by the injury. These functions can return in the hopes of repairing the neural cells with a tissue engineered designed scaffold complex. The scaffold complex will include cells to repair and replace the damaged cells.

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) are multipotent adult stem ells that are capable of differentiating along several lineage pathways. Neural stem cell and MSC differentiating along the neural lineage bave been investigated both in vivo and in vitro depicting its feasibility. MSC for neural differentiation can be achieved by microenvironmental signaling. Substrate surface characteristics …

A Gait Generation Mechanism For Leg Rehabilitation Therapy, Yazan Ahmad Manna

Theses

While most take their ability to walk for granted, some are unable to walk secondary to any number of pathologies, such as traumatic brain injury (TBI), spinal cord injury (SCI), cerebrovascular accidents (CVA), cerebral palsy (CP), multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson's disease, as well as various orthopedic conditions. Decreased activity has been shown to be associated with rapidly deconditioning and other co-morbidities. Rehabilitation techniques that afford patients the ability to begin reconditioning through walking sooner may ultimately enhance their return to a better quality of life.

The overall goal of this study is to design a gait generation mechanism for rehabilitation …

Wet-Spinning And Thermal Analysis Of Collagen Fibers Incorporating Hydroxyapatite In Mixed And Coated Form, Sandesh Nathaniel Prakash

Theses

The composition of natural bone comprises of collagen (Cg) as organic phase which acts as a matrix and inorganic calcium phosphate, particularly hydroxyapatite (HA), which is used as reinforcement. This study involved the wet-spinning of collagen fibers incorporating HA in mixed and coated form. The weight percent ratio of collagen and HA in the composite fibers was 95 to 5 respectively. HA coating on pure collagen fibers was achieved by immersing them in HA solution formed by mixing HA in water. With Thermomechanical analysis, the highest breaking point temperature was obtained for the composite fibers and the least with pure …

Deposition Of Tantalum Thin Films By Rf Sputtering With Substrate Bias, Savita Raina

Theses

The effects of energetic ion bombardment on the crystallographic structure of RF sputtered tantalum thin films on different substrates, particularly aluminum and silicon, have been studied. The effect of substrate biasing on ion current and film thickness has been investigated. The study included comparison between substrate ion current of DC sputtering and RF sputtering and also was aimed at finding the process parameters, which could influence the crystallographic phase of Ta film. The characterization of Ta films is carried by RBS and x-ray diffraction techniques.

A magnetron sputtering system with a matching network between the source and the RF generator …

The Creation And Testing Of A Mock Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility For Pain Patients, Gladstone Vincent Reid

Theses

Unfamiliarity with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) facilities leads to unwanted stress-related disturbances in the processing of fMRI data. A mock fMRI facility was developed to increase familiarization among subjects participating in fiviRI studies and to alleviate the time and cost of familiarizing each subject in an actual fMRI facility. A decommissioned Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) unit was remodeled to visually and aurally resemble the Siemens Magnetom Allegra 3 Telsa fMRI machine currently used at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), Newark, New Jersey. Instrumentation was developed using LabVIEW software which presented subjects with recreated sounds …

Quantification Of Regularity In Rr-Interval Time Series Using Approximate Entropy, Sample Entropy, And Multi-Scale Entropy, Nirvish Shah

Theses

Heart rate variability (HRV) has proven to be a useful noninvasive tool to study the neuronal control of the heart. Recently, nonlinear dynamic methods based on chaos theory and fractal dynamics have been developed to uncover the nonlinear fluctuations in heart rate. Approximate Entropy (ApEn), Sample Entropy (SampEn) and Multi-scale Entropy (MSE) are measures based on chaos theory that quantify the regularity in time series. This study has been designed to examine the ability of these measures to distinguish the RR-interval time series of normal subjects (NSR) from subjects with congestive heart failure (CHF). The study was conducted on the …

Multicodes For Improved Range Resolution In Radar, Rhiya Vitto

Theses

Third generation (3G) wireless systems are required to support a variety of communication services like voice, image, motion picture transmission, etc, each of which requires different transmission rates. Multi-code modulation has been introduced therefore as a means of supporting multi-rate services and operating in multi-cell environments [8, 9, 10]. This multi-rate multi-function capability may be used in Radar related applications, too. For example, a single transmitted waveform consisting of two orthogonal codes can be used to simultaneously track a target and obtain high range resolution. Tracking requires low bandwidth and high resolution needs a high bandwidth signal. Orthogonal codes like …

Combined Effects Of Prozac And Hypothalmic Mediated Response On Masseter Muscle Activity In The Cat, Chika P. Nwaorgu

Theses

The present study tested the hypothesis that infusion of Prozac would serve to suppress defensive rage elicited from the medial hypothalamus of the cat. Cats are known to exhibit certain kind of behavior, known as the "defensive rage response" such as unsheathing of the claws, retraction of the ear and vocalization (hissing).

Three adult cats (2 males and 1 female) weighing (2.8 - 3.4 kg) were utilized during the experiments. Cannula-electrodes were implanted into the medial hypothalamus for elicitation of defensive rage behavior. EMG activity was recorded with a bipolar electrode attached to the masseter muscle to establish baseline before …

Automated Liquid Dispensing Pin For Dna Microarray Applications, Suganya Parthasarathy

Theses

This thesis describes the research and development of a new liquid dispensing/aspiring system that is capable of producing micro sized spots/droplets for molecular biology research and analysis. In particular, the application is focused on DNA microarray fabrication with the goals of smaller spot size, higher yield, more efficient usage of biological materials, and capability to handle high viscosity liquids. The new system is based on active sensing and control and it is part of a fully integrated robotic microarray system for genomic and proteomic applications. The prototype system handles water as well as thick liquids such as 100% glycerol and …

Quantification Of Long-Range Power Law Correlations Among Healthy And Pathologic Subjects Using Detrended Fluctuation Analysis And Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis, Hardick Raval

Theses

The healthy heartbeat is traditionally thought to be regulated according to the classical principle of homeostasis whereby physiologic systems operate to reduce variability and achieve an equilibrium-like state. However recent studies reveal that under normal conditions, beat-to-beat fluctuation in heart rate display the kind of long-range correlations typically exhibited by the dynamical system far away from equilibrium. In contrast, heart rate time series from patients with severe congestive heart failure show a breakdown of this long-range correlation behavior. Two different non-linear dynamic methods namely Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) and Multifractal (MF) DFA are used for the quantification of this correlation …

A Multi-Factor Model For Evaluating Manufacturing Defect Opportunities In Six Sigma Analysis, Karthikeyan Sundaram

Theses

Six Sigma Quality Analysis provides a structured method for manufacturing quality problems and defect opportunities to be defined, measured, analyzed, improved, and controlled. The technique is now being widely used in both the manufacturing and service industries to evaluate the classical "defects per million" metric. An underlying assumption of classical Six Sigma Analysis is that all defects contribute equally to the derivation of the defect rate. In the thesis, it is proposed that this assumption skews and often distorts the derived defect rate. Using classical Six Sigma the user is able to list a large number of often border-line defect …

Optimization Of Sequential Purification Of Beta-Glucosidase From Tricoderma Reesei In Aqueous Two-Phase System, Shalini Gautam

Dissertations

A novel sequential technique was developed for the purification of a valuable enzyme, beta-glucosidase, from microorganism Tricoderma reesei. The fungus T. reesei produces cellulose degrading enzymes, called cellulases: beta-glucosidase, endo-glucanase and exo-glucanase and low molecular weight proteins. For specific applications, the enzyme must be separated from other contaminants. The sequential technique, that included affinity precipitation with chitosan followed by separation with an aqueous two-phase system (ATPS), was implemented for the purification of beta-glucosidase from the culture filtrate of T. reesei.

The cultivation medium (nutrient) was optimized for the production of betaglucosidase from T. reesei cell culture. Treatment of the …

Nanostructured Composite Materials Based On Carbon Nanotubes And 3-D Photonic Crystals, Jing Chen

Dissertations

Carbon nanotubes (CNT) and in particular, single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) have been extensively studied, in large part, due to their unique one-dimensional crystalline structures and related electronic and optical properties. Various polymeric composite materials, which were based on carbon nanotubes, have been also developed in an attempt to combine the properties of polymer and CNT in a single film. Such composites were mainly formed by mixing carbon nanotubes within the polymer without special emphasis on the structure and thereby, the nanoscopic properties of the resultant material.

Photonic crystals belong to a class of man-made structures aimed at manipulating the propagation …

Communications Over Fading Channels With Partial Channel Information : Performance And Design Criteria, Xinmin Deng

Dissertations

The effects of system parameters upon the performance are quantified under the assumption that some statistical information of the wireless fading channels is available. These results are useful in determining the optimal design of system parameters. Suboptimal receivers are designed for systems that are constrained in terms of implementation complexity.

The achievable rates are investigated for a wireless communication system when neither the transmitter nor the receiver has prior knowledge of the channel state information (CSI). Quantitative results are provided for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian signals. A simple, low-duty-cycle signaling scheme is proposed to improve the information rates …

Development Of Adsorption Filtration Process For Virus Removal For Drinking Water Treatment, Vishal Vijay Gawarikar

Dissertations

Recent monitoring studies have indicated that many ground water (GW) sources would benefit from the development of effective technologies for removing viruses. Although reverse osmosis can achieve high log removal it is not economical. The main objective of this study is to test and validate a novel adsorption filtration (AF) technology for removing viruses from GW sources for drinking water production in New Jersey.

The convective diffusion of viruses to adsorbent particle surfaces in flow packed beds (FPB) enhances their removal efficiency if the adsorbent particle size can be decreased to about 100 microns. The development of effective virus removal …

Mechanics Of Biocell Landfill Settlements, Chamil Hiroshan Hettiarachchi

Dissertations

Prediction of landfill gas generation and settlements are of concerns in design and maintenance of biocell landfills. Accurate settlement prediction is essential for design of piping systems used for the delivery of re-circulated leachate and recovery of landfill gas. Landfill settlement is the result of change in overburden stresses and biodegradation of waste. Biodegradation-induced settlement results from the re-arrangement of waste skeleton in response to the decomposition of waste mass.

Current practice of landfill settlement modeling is predominantly empirical, thus most of the available techniques make no attempt to simulate the real mechanisms of waste settlement. Traditionally compressibility index is …

Evaporating Cross Flow Spray Jets In Gas-Solid Circulating Fluidized Bed, Tong Hoon Lee

Dissertations

Three-phase flow of solid-gas suspension with liquid spray is found in many industrial applications, including fluidized catalytic cracking in petroleum refinery process, and wet scrubbing process. This dissertation study is aimed to understand the gas-solid-liquid three-phase flow structure, phase interactions and transport in a gas-solid circulating fluidized bed where an evaporating cross-flow liquid spray jet from a rectangular nozzle with a fan angle is injected. The investigation is based on both numerical and experimental approaches. The numerical study is for detailed field descriptions of the flow structure, phase interaction and distributions whereas the experimental study is for simulation validations. The …

Fluid-Phase Thermodynamics From Molecular-Level Properties And Interactions Based In Quantum Theory, Steven G. Arturo

Dissertations

A methodology to predict the thermodynamics of macroscopic fluid systems from quantum chemistry and statistical thermodynamics has been developed. This work extends the group-contribution concepts most utilized in chemical engineering. Computational chemistry software is used to define the geometries and electron density profiles of target molecules. Atoms in Molecules theory and associated software packages are used to calculate rigorous properties of the functional groups within molecules of interest. These properties are incorporated into an intermolecular potential energy function which describes interactions between entire molecules as a set of interactions between functional groups. This information is applied to a lattice-fluid model …

Direct Numerical Simulations And Experimental Investigation Of Dielectrophoresis, Arun Thankamony John-Kadaksham

Dissertations

This dissertation deals with the numerical and experimental studies of the phenomenon of dielectrophoresis, i.e., the motion of neutral particles in nonuniform electric fields. Dielectrophoresis is the translatory motion of neutral particles suspended in a dielectric medium when they are subjected to an external nonuniform electric field. The translatory motion occurs because a force called the dielectrophoretic force, which depends on the spatial variation of the electric field, acts on the particles. As the generation of force involves no moving parts and the particles can be moved without touching them, dielectrophoresis can be used in many applications, including manipulation and …

Analysis And Characterization Of The Integrated Dielectric Slab Waveguide-Wedge Antenna Using Iterative Mode-Matching Technique, Chairat Pinthong

Dissertations

A rigorous solution for the TB and TM polarization to the dielectric wedge antenna fed by a slab waveguide of the same material is presented. The method of solution involves modeling the wedge as a sequence of step discontinuities and using an iterative procedure to track forward and backward partial wave fields, expressed as modal expansions, to obtain the rigorous field solution. Radiation patterns of directive gain are presented. All patterns smoothly decrease from a maximum in the endfire direction and exhibit very low side lobes. Longer length wedges are shown to produce higher directivity and smaller half-power beamwidths (HPBW). …

Virtual Transshipments And Revenue-Sharing Contracts In Supply Chain Management, Zhaoqiong Qin

Dissertations

This dissertation presents the use of virtual transshipments and revenue-sharing contracts for inventory control in a small scale supply chain. The main objective is to maximize the total profit in a centralized supply chain or maximize the supply chain's profit while keeping the individual components' incentives in a decentralized supply chain.

First, a centralized supply chain with two capacitated manufacturing plants situated in two distinct geographical regions is considered. Normally, demand in each region is mostly satisfied by the local plant. However, if the local plant is understocked while the remote one is overstocked, some of the newly generated demand …

Simulation Of Creep In Nickel Based Single Crystal Superalloys, Yunhong Pang

Dissertations

Nickel based single crystal Superalloys are finding wide spread use in high temperature gas turbines and other similar applications because of their superior high-temperature strength and creep properties as compared to the other materials. This is due to two factors: solid solution and precipitation strengthening of the gamma (γ) and gamma prime (γ') phases, and the elimination of grain boundaries. Creep of Nickel based single crystal Superalloys are caused by two primary mechanisms, dislocation creep and diffusion creep. Several factors that affect the creep life of Nickel based single crystal Superalloys are the specific microstructure, stress, temperature and rafting. Also, …

Security Information Management With Frame-Based Attack Presentation And First-Order Reasoning, Wei Yan

Dissertations

Internet has grown by several orders of magnitude in recent years, and this growth has escalated the importance of computer security. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is used to protect computer networks. However, the overwhelming flow of log data generated by IDS hamper security administrators from uncovering new insights and hidden attack scenarios. Security Information Management (SIM) is a new growing area of interest for intrusion detection. The research work in this dissertation explores the semantics of attack behaviors and designs Frame-based Attack Representation and First-order logic Automatic Reasoning (FAR-FAR) using linguistics and First-order Logic (FOL) based approaches. Techniques based on …

Transceiver Design And System Optimization For Ultra-Wideband Communications, Hongshan Sheng

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the potential promises and proposes possible solutions to the challenges of designing transceivers and optimizing system parameters in ultra-wideband (UWB) systems. The goal is to provide guidelines for UWB transceiver implementations under constraints by regulation, existing interference, and channel estimation.

New UWB pulse shapes are invented that satisfy the Federal Communications Commission spectral mask. Parameters are designed to possibly implement the proposed pulses. A link budget is quantified based on an accurate frequency-dependent path loss calculation to account for variations across the ultra-wide bandwidth of the signal.

Achievable information rates are quantified as a function of transmission …

Quality-Of-Service Provisioning In High Speed Networks : Routing Perspectives, Gang Cheng

Dissertations

The continuous growth in both commercial and public network traffic with various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements is calling for better service than the current Internet's best effort mechanism. One of the challenging issues is to select feasible paths that satisfy the different requirements of various applications. This problem is known as QoS routing. In general, two issues are related to QoS routing: state distribution and routing strategy. Routing strategy is used to find a feasible path that meets the QoS requirements. State distribution addresses the issue of exchanging the state information throughout the network, and can be further divided into two …

Gas Fluidization Of Nanoparticles, Qun Yu

Dissertations

The primary objective of this study is to perform a systematic investigation on the gas fluidization of various nanoparticle agglomerates. Firstly, the gas fluidization characteristics and regime classifications without any additional external force fields are identified using both experimental measurements and modeling. Secondly, the effect of introducing certain external force fields on nanoparticle fluidization is experimentally investigated. Two external force fields were applied: sound waves from a loud speaker (acoustic assistance) and in-bed magnets that were excited by an external oscillating magnetic field (magnetic assistance). Thirdly, exploratory experimental research on the use of nanoparticle agglomerates as a granular filtration media …

On Rate Capacity And Signature Sequence Adaptation In Downlink Of Mc-Cdma System, Jianming Zhu

Dissertations

This dissertation addresses two topics in the MC-CDMA system: rate capacity and adaptation of users' signature sequences. Both of them are studied for the downlink communication scenario with multi-code scheme.

The purpose of studying rate capacity is to understand the potential of applying MC-CDMA technique for high speed wireless data communications. It is shown that, to maintain high speed data transmission with multi-code scheme, each mobile should cooperatively decode its desired user's encoded data symbols which are spread with different signature sequences simultaneously. Higher data rate can be achieved by implementing dirty paper coding (DPC) to cooperatively encode all users' …

A Versatile Programming Model For Dynamic Task Scheduling On Cluster Computers, Dejiang Jin

Dissertations

This dissertation studies the development of application programs for parallel and distributed computer systems, especially PC clusters. A methodology is proposed to increase the efficiency of code development, the productivity of programmers and enhance performance of executing the developed programs on PC clusters while facilitating improvement of scalability and code portability of these programs. A new programming model, named the Super-Programming Model (SPM), is created. Programs are developed assuming an instruction set architecture comprised of SuperInstructions (SIs). SPM models the target system as a large Virtual Machine (VM); VM contains functional units which are underlain with sub-computer systems and SIs …