Engineering Commons^™

Modeling Streambed Heating In Shallow Streams, Robert Leslie Annear Jr.

Dissertations and Theses

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality is developing Total Maximum Daily Loads to address water quality concerns and threatened and endangered species habitat requirements. Approximately 940 water body segments are listed as water quality limited for temperature in Oregon. CE-QUAL-W2 Version 3 is a two-dimensional water quality and hydrodynamic model capable of modeling rivers, reservoirs and estuaries. An important aspect of modeling stream temperature is handling the short-wave solar radiation that penetrates the water surface and impacts the streambed, which can affect water temperatures under low-flow conditions. The Bull Run River-Reservoir system is a 264 km2 watershed 42 km east …

Prediction Of Traditional Chinese Medicine Diagnosis From Psychosocial Questionnaires, Scott David Mist

Dissertations and Theses

Astonishingly, most Traditional Chinese Medicine (CM) research in the West proceeds without CM diagnoses, perhaps because CM diagnosis is time consuming or not considered relevant. One way to improve the feasibility of incorporating CM diagnosis would be to prescreen participants using questionnaires. This would allow cost savings in recruitment, and balancing of treatments by CM diagnosis. Consequently, the hypothesis of this research was that pre-treatment questionnaires can predict CM diagnosis.

Baseline questionnaires from 195 participants with temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD) were examined to test the hypothesis. Two methods, logistic regression (LR) and reconstructability analysis (RA), were used in conjunction to …

Ultra Reliable Computing Systems, Chong Ho Lee

Dissertations and Theses

For high security and safety applications as well as general purpose applications, it is necessary to have ultra reliable computing systems. This dissertation describes our system of self-testable and self-repairable digital devices, especially, EPLDs (Electrically Programmable Logic Devices). In addition to significantly improving the reliability of digital systems, our self-healing and re-configurable system design with added repair capability can also provide higher yields, lower testing costs, and faster time-to-market for the semiconductor industry.

The digital system in our approach is composed of blocks, which realize combinational and sequential circuits using GALs (Generic Array Logic Devices). We describe three techniques for …

Shift Work In The Long-Termcare Industry : An Examination Of Organizational And Individual Factors That Influence Employee Outcomes, Kristin Elizabeth Charles

Dissertations and Theses

The long-term care (LTC) industry provides medical and social services in facility-based settings to the elderly, chronically ill, and disabled. With the aging of the United States population, the need for LTC workers is expected to drastically increase in the next decade. However, the industry faces a significant staffing shortage. One potential cause of staffing problems in LTC is working non-standard work schedules. Because of the need to provide around the clock care, LTC employees often work non-standard shifts, long hours, night work, and over weekends and holidays. Although many studies have examined health and sleep-related outcomes associated with non-standard …

Sensitivity Analysis For Hierarchical Decision Models, Hongyi Chen

Dissertations and Theses

In this dissertation, a comprehensive algorithm is developed to analyze the sensitivity of hierarchical decision models (HDM), which include the well-known analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and its variants, to single and multiple changes in the local contribution matrices at any level of the decision hierarchy. The algorithm is applicable to all HDM that use an additive function to derive the overall contribution vector. It is independent of pairwise comparison scales, judgment quantification techniques and group opinion combining methods. The direct impact of changes to a local contribution value on decision alternatives' overall contributions, allowable range/region of perturbations, contribution tolerance, operating …

Improving Monitoring And Diagnosis For Process Control Using Independent Component Analysis, Thaddeus Taylor Shannon

Dissertations and Theses

Statistical Process Control (SPC) is the general field concerned with monitoring the operation and performance of systems. SPC consists of a collection of techniques for characterizing the operation of a system using a probability distribution consistent with the system's inputs and outputs. Classical SPC monitors a single variable to characterize the operation of a single machine tool or process step using tools such as Shewart charts. The traditional approach works well for simple small to medium size processes. For more complex processes a number of multivariate SPC techniques have been developed in recent decades. These advanced methods suffer from several …

Distributed Cooperative Framework And Algorithms For Wireless Network Performance Optimization, Emily Hong Qi

Dissertations and Theses

In Wireless Local Access Networks (WLANs), the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is the primary element that determines the efficiency of sharing the limited communication bandwidth of the wireless channel. IEEE 802.11 MAC uses the contention-based Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) as a fundamental medium access mechanism. However, the dynamic nature of the wireless environment creates mobility challenges of maintaining maximum channel capacity, of obtaining optimal throughput and latency, and of retaining good security in a distributed wireless network.

This dissertation first introduces a set of parameters to characterize the medium status and radio environment, and a mechanism for mobile devices …

A Multilevel Analysis Of Individual And Organizational-Level Effects On Staff Attitudes Towards Use Of Medication In Substance Abuse Treatment, John Patrick Fitzgerald

Dissertations and Theses

Studies consistently indicate a general lack of support for use of medications in the treatment of substance abuse disorders by clinicians, patients, and other stakeholders involved in treatment. Both individual and organizational factors have been shown to influence attitudes towards medications, but the relative contribution of each of these factors remains unclear. Whereas previous studies, by their very design, have generated multilevel data structures, they nevertheless have employed analytic strategies that ignore the multilevel dependencies inherent in such data sets.

To address these limitations, this study took a multilevel approach to investigate the influence of individual and organizational factors on …

Using Building Energy Simulation And Geospatial Modeling Techniques In Determine High Resolution Building Sector Energy Consumption Profiles, Shem C. Heiple

Dissertations and Theses

A technique is presented for estimating hourly and seasonal energy consumption profiles in the building sector at spatial scales down to the individual taxlot or parcel. The method combines annual building energy simulations for cityspecific prototypical buildings and commonly available geospatial data in a Geographical Information System (GIS) framework. Hourly results can be extracted for any day and exported as a raster output at spatial scales as fine as an individual parcel (