Engineering Commons^™

Core-Shell Copper And Nickel Nanofoam: Uniform Electroplating And Properties, Hassan Zbib, David Bahr

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Characterizing materials on the nanoscale is a key factor to enhance nanotechnology in diverse applications, ranging from electronics to energy fields. However, controlling the structure of the material at the nanoscale or mimicking the nanoscale features of a structure that already exists requires linking processing conditions to the nanostructure. This work focuses on solids that show porous patterns at the nano-micro scale; these are often called cellular solids and classified into two categories: honeycombs and foams. This study focuses on nanofoams; with ligament dimensions in the sub-micron scale. Electrospinning has been developed to produce nanofoam structures of polymers with controlled …

Modelling Of Phase Transforming Cellular Material (Pxcm), Chidubem N. Enebechi, Yunlan Zhang, David Restrepo Arango, Pablo Zavattieri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Phase transforming cellular materials (PXCMs) are a new class of materials that can go through large deformation and return to their original configuration. Currently, there are reliable cellular materials that can resist large deformation, for example, honey comb; however, when these materials are compared to PXCMs, they cannot stay in their elastic range. The biggest advantage about PXCMs is that they are not only inexpensive materials, but they are also highly-durable and they absorb and dissipate high amounts of energy. The main concept behind PXCMs is that they contain unit cells that have stable configurations. Each stable configuration of the …

Purdue Airsense: An Affordable Way To Measure And Study Air Pollution, Stephane Junior Nouafo Wanko, Shadi Tariq Azouz, Ruihang Du, Brandon Boor, Greg Michalski

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Air pollution is a major health hazard worldwide, accounting for one-eighth of all deaths in 2012 (World Health Organization). Globally, there is a severe lack of ground-based spatiotemporal monitoring of gaseous and particulate air pollutants, particularly in Africa, South and Central America, and the Middle East. This is in great part due to the high costs of air quality instrumentation that meet accuracy and reliability criteria set by monitoring agencies. The air quality data that is available is often not presented to the public in a user-friendly manner. Taking advantage of recent developments in low-cost sensing technologies, an integrated sensor …

Numerical Simulations Of Transcritical Natural Convection, Ruiwen Wei, Carlo Scalo, Mario Tindaro Migliorino, Kukjin Kim, Jean-Pierre Hickey

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In modern engineering applications, system overheating is a key issue that needs to be solved with efficient and reliable cooling technologies. Among the possible mechanisms that these are based on, natural convection cooling is one of the most frequently employed, with applications ranging from cooling of computer micro-components to large nuclear reactors. While many studies have been performed on natural convection employing supercritical or subcritical fluids, little attention has been given to fluids in their transcritical regime. The latter has the potential to yield high performances while avoiding detrimental effects of two-phase systems (e.g. cavitation). In the present study, 2D …

Surface Tension, Interfacial Tension And Phase Behavior: Interactions Of Surfactant/Polymer Solutions With Crude Oil, Michael A. Steinerd, Jaeyub Chung, Bryan W. Boudouris, Nathan C. Schultheiss, Elias I. Franses

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Advanced oil recovery techniques, beyond primary and secondary recovery, are required in order to produce additional oil in existing reservoir rock. Here, we evaluated a combination of polymer and surfactant aqueous solutions, in order to generate a working fluid capable of achieving high-performance enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In this recovery process, surfactant is added to the water flooding mixture in order to lower the interfacial tension between the oil and the water. If the interfacial tension can be decreased by ~1,000-fold, then the aqueous solution can mobilize and displace the oil. Moreover, a polymer is added to the aqueous solution …

Thermodynamics Of Coherent Structures Near Phase Transitions, Julia M. Meyer, Ivan Christov

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Phase transitions within large-scale systems may be modeled by nonlinear stochastic partial differential equations in which system dynamics are captured by appropriate potentials. Coherent structures in these systems evolve randomly through time; thus, statistical behavior of these fields is of greater interest than particular system realizations. The ability to simulate and predict phase transition behavior has many applications, from material behaviors (e.g., crystallographic phase transformations and coherent movement of granular materials) to traffic congestion. Past research focused on deriving solutions to the system probability density function (PDF), which is the ground-state wave function squared. Until recently, the extent to which …

A Novel High-Throughput, High-Content Three-Dimensional Assay For Determination Of Tumor Invasion And Dormancy, Mahera M. Husain, Theodore J. Puls, Sherry Voytik-Harbin

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Metastasis accounts for most cancer deaths, while dormancy of tumor cells leads to unexpected cancer recurrence. These two aspects of cancer remain relatively untreatable in part because current two-dimensional (2D) methods of high-throughput drug screening cannot quantify outcomes related to these phenotypes. Three-dimensional (3D) in-vitro tumor models are a promising alternative because they better recreate the tumor microenvironment and relevant phenotypes. However, outcome measures for high-throughput screening of these systems are often limited to single measures such as metabolic activity using assays that are not standardized or optimized for 3D models. To address this gap, the objective of this work …

Analytical Solution Of Microbes Interacting With Surfaces, Junyuan Li, Arezoo M. Ardekani

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Nowadays, there is a rising interest in studying the behavior of microbes and their interactions with flow and surfaces. In order to explore the velocity field, pressure and forces around the microbes, the solution of Stokes equations, which is called a Stokeslet, is used. This solution represents a singular velocity field due to a concentrated external force acting on fluid at a single point. This singularity could cause the expression of velocity not integrable. We use the Regularized Stokeslet Method and Method of Images to deal with this problem. The expression of force is replaced by a radially symmetric function, …

A Parametric Study Of The Mechanics Of Different Skin Flap Techniques, Steven J. Meza, Adrián Tepole Buganza

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In modern day plastic and reconstructive surgeries numerous skin flap designs have been developed and are used to close open wounds. Skin flaps are developed with the intention of imposing minimal tension in skin closure. Excessive tension can lead to poor blood flow that result in post-surgery complications such as necrosis. Currently there is no standard in choosing a skin flap design and a surgeon's choice is based personal experience. A comparison of the mechanical loading in these various designs has not yet been done. We have developed a parametric study, using finite element analysis, of two advancement skin flaps …

Pathogenic Dna Detection Using Dna Hairpins: A Non-Linear Hybridization Chain Reaction Platform, Lance Novak, Tamara L. Kinzer-Ursem

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Currently, 3.2 billion people are at risk of being infected with malaria, with 1.2 billion of those being at high risk (>1 in 1000 chance of getting malaria in a year). Thus, there is a need for a biosensor that is highly sensitive, cost effective, and simple to use for point-of-care diagnosis. The biosensing platform, PathVis, has achieved this by measuring changes in fluid properties after a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP). LAMP is a DNA amplification system that requires enzymes and a temperature of 65degrees C. LAMP currently limits PathVis by being costly, requiring refrigeration, and difficult to design. …

Verification Of Tfit Code Numerical Method For Flow Excursion Simulation, Patrick S. Foster, Subash Sharma, Martin L. Bertodano

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

This research is aimed towards accurately modeling and predicting the onset of the two-phase flow excursion instability using the code TFIT (Two Fluid Interfacial Temperature). In order to do this we first had to show that the numerical diffusion of the code’s finite difference equations could be reduced to an insignificant level by decreasing the mesh size.

Understanding and being able to accurately model flow excursion can help us understand how to prevent the potential negative effects of this instability. We are using a two-fluid model with physics-based closure relations. The results will be validated against the experimental data available …

Capsule-Based Dropwise Additive Manufacturing With Pharmaceutical Suspensions, Kaitlyn N. Buck, Andrew J. Radcliffe, Gintaras V. Reklaitis

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Current manufacturing of pharmaceutical products focuses on creating a standard dosage of the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API); however, dosages often need to be altered or customized to account for a patient’s age, weight, comorbidity, and other genetic factors. A potential method for dispensing precise dosages of API suspensions through dropwise addition is detailed in the following paper. By using a drop-on-demand printing rig, a series of suspensions comprised of varying volume fractions of a micron-scale API in a carrier fluid were printed, and individual drop volumes were analyzed using high-resolution imaging. From this, capsules with 1 mg dosages and 100 …

Examination Of Ordering Effects In Sound Evaluations, Yiyun Zhang, Patricia Davies, Daniel Carr

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

It is difficult to predict sound annoyance responses because annoyance is an inherently subjective concept and the evaluation standard could be different from each person. Usually, annoyance models are functions of strengths of sound characteristics only, and these models can help engineers to improve sounds that machines make and minimize annoyance levels, but other factors can also influence annoyance ratings of products. The main goal of this research was to investigate ordering effects in sound evaluations when people are hearing a set of sounds in sequence. Of particular interest is how the response to a sound influences the response to …

A Chronically Implanted, Continuous Ph Monitoring System For Rats, Ryan B. Budde, Pedro P. Irazoqui

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Many body systems operate within a strict pH range, and any deviation can cause harm. pH measurement systems are used in many biomedical research fields. Measurement systems have been able to continuously record pH for a short period of time wirelessly, or over a long period of time with wires, but no system is currently capable of long term, wireless, continuous pH recording. This paper proposes a new pH measurement system that is capable of such measurement. The system is composed of inexpensive, micro-scale, and easy to manufacture pH sensitive and reference electrodes and a data acquisition and transmission module …

Buckling Of Cylindrical Shells Under Wind Loading, Tianlong Sun, Eyas Azzuni, Sukru Guzey

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Cylindrical shells such as aboveground steel storage tanks are widely used to store gases, chemicals and fuels. Stiffener rings are introduced to prevent cylindrical shells from buckling due to wind loads. The current top wind stiffener design rules used in the USA for such cylindrical storage tanks are specified in API 650. However, the design methodology of top stiffener rings is overly conservative. Therefore, relaxation of the design rules for the top stiffener is investigated in this study. The API 650 mandated top stiffener size was reduced to the same size as the mandated intermediate stiffener ring in this study. …

Pursuit Evasion With Multiple Pursuers : Capturing A Ground Vehicle On A Road Network With Multiple Drones, Blake Wilson, Shreyas Sundaram, Amritha Prasad

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have many military and civilian applications, one of which is monitoring a given area (such as a road network) for threats. An important question in this application is to determine the latest time to dispatch UAVs for the guaranteed capture of threats attempting to travel through the network. In this work, we consider a pursuit evasion scenario with multiple pursuers (UAVs) trying to catch a single evader (ground vehicle), where information about the evader’s path is provided by ground sensors. In this scenario, we consider the problem of finding the maximum delay with which the pursuers …

Post-Earthquake Fire Assessment Of Steel Buildings, Yi Li, Rachel Chicchi, Amit H. Varma

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Resilience of structural systems after hazardous events is a crucial concern of building design. An abundance of research has focused on hazards such as seismic and fire separately. This project conducted a multi-hazard study on steel buildings considering both seismic and fire damage. A literature review of the behavior of steel-framed buildings due to fires after earthquakes, known as post-earthquake fires (PEF), is offered. The new PEF methodology, delivered in this study, starts with creating a three dimensional (3D) model of the examined steel building using the finite element method software, ABAQUS. Next, varying intensities of seismic and fire hazards …

Analysis Of The Flow Behaviors Of Corn Meal During Extrusion, Daniel N. Hauersperger, Martin R. Okos, Troy Tonner

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Food extrusion can be used to make many products we consume today, including pasta, cereals and more. The ability to predict the characteristics of the final product from an extruder using raw material characteristics and operating conditions is vital to the extrusion process. In order to answer this need, the flow behavior of corn meal was measured in a lab viscometer (off-line) and compared to the flow behaviors from an extruder (in-line) at three different moisture contents (32.5%, 35%, 37.5% wet basis). The extruder and product are heated through the friction of the corn meal passing through the barrel not …

Structure-Force Field Generator For Molecular Dynamics Simulations, Carlos M. Patiño, Lorena Alzate, Alejandro Strachan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Atomistic and molecular simulations have become an important research field due to the progress made in computer performance and the necessity of new and improved materials. Despite this, first principle simulations of large molecules are still not possible because the high computational time and resources required. Other methods, such as molecular dynamics, allow the simplification of calculations by defining energy terms to describe multiple atom interactions without compromising accuracy significantly. A group of these energy terms is called a force field, and each force field has its own descriptions and parameters. The objective of this project was to develop a …

Modeling The Aqueous-Phase Copper Ion-Exchange Behavior Onto Ssz-13 Zeolites, Brian N. Bayer, Rajamani Gounder, Trevor M. Lardinois

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Copper-exchanged zeolites are utilized as catalysts for the selective catalytic reduction of nitrogen oxides, which are atmospheric pollutants found in diesel engine exhaust. The total amount of copper ions and the types of copper species (Cu(II) or Cu(II)OH) exchanged onto a zeolite can be varied. Copper is exchanged onto SSZ-13 (an aluminosilicate zeolite with the chabazite topology) during a process known as aqueous ion exchange, where the zeolite is mixed in a copper-containing solution. The distribution of copper on SSZ-13 is influenced by exchange conditions, including the molarity, temperature, and pH of the copper solution. The effect of exchange conditions …

Cylindrical Shell Based Phase Transforming Cellular Materials: Designing A Recoverable Energy Dissipating Material, Gordon F. Jarrold, David Restrepo, Nilesh Mankame, Pablo Zavattieri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Energy dissipating materials are used in a variety of impact events to protect more important parts of a system; one example of this is a football player’s helmet protecting a brain. A major drawback to classic energy dissipating materials however is that they dissipate energy through plastic deformation, meaning that after a single use, permanent deformations will prevent the material from being reusable to the same capacity as initially. We have designed a 1D cellular material in which geometric phase transformations in cylindrical shell elements are the primary energy dissipating mechanism, allowing for recoverability after use while keeping high energy …

Fret Biosensors: Engineering Fluorescent Proteins As Biological Tools For Studying Parkinson’S Disease, Nathan J. Leroy, Jacob R. Norley, Saranya Radhakrishnan, Mathew Tantama

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease with over 200,000 new cases each year. In general, the cause of the disease is unknown, but oxidative stress inside of neurons has been associated with the disease’s pathology for some time. Currently, techniques to study the onset of PD inside of neurons are limited. This makes treatments and causes difficult to discover. One solution to this has been fluorescent protein biosensors. In short, these proteins can be engineered to glow when a certain state is achieved inside a cell. The present research discusses the engineering of a genetically-encoded fluorescent protein (FP) …

Virtual-Source Based Accurate Model For Predicting Noise Behavior At High Frequencies In Nanoscale Pmos Soi Transistors, Vaibhav R. Ramachandran, Saeed Mohammadi, Sutton Hathorn

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology at the nanometre scale is an excellent platform to implement monolithically integratedsystems because of the low cost of manufacturing and ease of integration. Newly developed CMOS Silicon on Insulator (SOI) transistors that are currentlydeveloped are suitable for use in radio frequency circuits. They find applications in many areas such as 5G telecommunication systems, high speed Wi-Fi andairport body-scanners. Unfortunately, the models for CMOS SOI transistors that are currently used in these circuits are inaccurate because of their complexity.The models currently used require the optimization of more than 200 variables. This paper aims to accurately …

Effect Of Particle Interactions On Powder Flow Behavior, Ivana A. Penagos, Carolina P. Mora, Teresa Carvajal

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The study of powder flow behavior is essential for the development of processing technologies in many industries. In fact, powders have a major function in diverse types of manufacturing, such as pharmaceuticals, foods, chemicals, materials, minerals and cosmetics. This leads to an increasing demand for the development of reliable methods to assess powder flow problems in industry. This research intends to provide a general insight into how surface interactions and particle properties may alter powder flowability. The materials used for this study were lactose, starch, milk powder, cocoa and chocolate. These vary in their interparticle forces as well as on …

Finite Element Analysis And Biological Growth Realization Using Robot Swarms, Cody W. Dorbin, Adrian Buganza-Tepole

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Our understanding of growth and remodeling of biological systems has increased in the past two decades; however, this knowledge has not yet been used in human-designed systems or engineering applications. This project studies designing and building a network of robots that mimics the biological behavior of growth driven by cell-cell communication and control networks. The objective of this research is to harness the principles that govern tissue adaptation and morphogenesis, where peer-to-peer local communication determines global properties, to create human-made engineering systems with life-like capabilities. We used Arduino microcontrollers to control an individual robot in an expandable 3d-printed cuboid shell. …

Enhancing The Performance Of A Transportable Environmental Control Unit (Ecu) Operated In High-Temperature Climates, Quan Jun Sun, Ammar M. Bahman, Eckhard A. Groll

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Numerous people live or venture into environments, such as the Middle East, where the temperatures can skyrocket as high as 54°C. This leaves many air conditioners unable to operate efficiently. Although much research has been conducted for incorporating vapor injection processes into refrigeration systems, such as ones used in supermarkets, little has been researched regarding the application in extreme heat environments. While most basic air conditioning units do not require the addition of a vapor injection process along with an economizer, this project requires the air conditioning (AC) unit to operate under extreme high temperature conditions. The project investigates the …

Multi-Color Ultra-High Resolution Imaging, David A. Miller, Michael Mlodzianoski, Sheng Liu, Fang Huang

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Fluorescence microscopy, which allows multiple-color imaging, plays an important role in observing structures inside cells with high specificity. The advent of super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, or nanoscopy techniques such as single-molecule switching nanoscopy (SMSN), has extended the application range of fluorescence microscopy beyond the diffraction limit, achieving up to 10-fold improvement in spatial resolution. At the same time, the recent development of expansion microscopy (ExM) allows samples to be physically expanded by 4-fold in the lateral dimensions providing another independent method to resolve structures beyond the diffraction limit. When combined, ExM-SMSN makes it possible to achieve another significant leap in resolution …

Bacterial Motility And Its Role In Biofilm Formation, Clayton J. Culp, Arezoo M. Ardekani, Adib Ahmadzadegan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Bacterial biofilms are known to cause millions of dollars in damage in the medical industry per year via infection of central venous catheters, urinary catheters, and mechanical heart valves. Unfortunately, there are some characteristics of biofilm formation that are yet to be fully understood. Recently much work has been done to investigate the motility characteristics of bacteria with hopes of better understanding the phenomena of biofilm formation. Still, one of the least understood stages is bacterial attachment or adhesion, a process designed to anchor bacteria in an advantageous environment. Providing a better understanding of bacterial motility near solid interfaces will …

Metabolic Comparison Of Wild-Type And Transgenic Synechocystis Pcc 6803 Cyanobacteria, Ian A. Mcluckey, John A. Morgan, Joel Yu King Hing

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The Calvin-Benson (CBB) cycle is an essential part of nature. This phenomenon allows carbon molecules in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to be converted into useful energy in the form of sugars. Cyanobacteria are single-celled organisms capable of utilizing energy from sunlight to drive this cycle and are also readily engineered. In hopes of improving this cycle, we compared a wild-type version of the Synechocystis PCC6803 cyanobacteria to an engineered version overexpressing the enzyme FBA (fructose-biphosphate aldolase), called 70 glpX, to deduce how the overexpressing strain is able to be more photosynthetically efficient. To do this, comparative metabolomics were done …

3d-Printed Microswimmers With Nanostructures For Color Tracking, Cara Koepele, Maria Guix, David Cappelleri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Two-Photon Polymerization (TPP) is a fabrication technique based on the localized linking of photosensitive materials resulting from femtosecond – a quadrillionth of a second – exposure to a laser. Such materials are based on building blocks named monomers that combine under certain stimuli (i.e. light) to form chains or complex networks. Utilization of TPP as a method for micro-3D printing has expanded the field of microrobotics, which presents medical solutions for minimizing procedure invasiveness as well as increasing treatment and diagnosis accuracy. One of the challenges in achieving desired accuracies is designing trackable features onto a microrobot. With the capabilities …