Engineering Commons^™

Career: Advocating For Engineering Through Hidden Curricula: A Multi‐Institutional Mixed Method Approach, Idalis Villanueva

Funded Research Records

No abstract provided.

Vicarious Calibration Of Suas Thermal Imagery For Scientific Remote Sensing Applications [B53h-0607], Alfonso F. Torres-Rua

AggieAir Presentations

Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) have become an accessible technology for collection of spatially distributed temperature data at fine resolution. Nevertheless, lack of standard procedures for atmospheric temperature correction can have an adverse impact on the conclusions and replicability of studies using this technology. This work presents a vicarious calibration methodology for sUAS thermal imagery traceable back to NIST standards. For this methodology, a 3-yr. data collection campaign with a sUAS technology, called “AggieAir”, developed at the Utah Water Research Laboratory, was performed under different daytime conditions. A comparison between original and vicarious calibration for the sUAS thermal imagery is …

Adaptive Biasing Cell Association In Ffr Aided Multi-Tier Heterogeneous Networks Under Dynamic Load Variation, Didarul Alam, Tashikur Rahman, Shakil Ahmed, Mostafa Zaman Chowdhury

Electrical and Computer Engineering Student Research

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) adopting fractional frequency reuse (FFR) improves cell coverage, network capacity, efficiency, assures higher data rates, and better quality of service (QoS) for next generation wireless networks. However they fail to handle dynamic load variation. So we attempt biasing cell association (BCA) to offload user from macrocell to small cell base stations (SCBs) to overcome capacity reduction and throughput degradation. It is based on range expansion of SCBSs by adding a positive bias to the reference signal received power (RSRP). In this paper we propose a FFR aided twin layer HetNet with an adaptive biasing scheme for load …

Investigating The Highest Melting Temperature Materials: A Laser Melting Study Of The Tac-Hfc System, Omar Cedillos-Barraza, Dario Manara, K. Boboridis, Tyson Watkins, Salvatore Grasso, Daniel D. Jayaseelan, Rudy J. M. Konings, Michael J. Reece, William E. Lee

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Student Publications and Presentations

TaC, HfC and their solid solutions are promising candidate materials for thermal protection structures in hypersonic vehicles because of their very high melting temperatures (>4000 K) among other properties.  The melting temperatures of slightly hypostoichiometric TaC, HfC and three solid solution compositions (Ta1−xHfxC, with x = 0.8, 0.5 and 0.2) have long been identified as the highest known. In the current  research, they were reassessed, for the first time in the last fifty years, using a laser heating technique.  They were found to melt in the range of 4041–4232 K, with HfC having the highest and TaC the lowest. …

Ncer Assistance Agreement Annual Progress Report For Grant #83582401 - Assessment Of Stormwater Harvesting Via Manage Aquifer Recharge (Mar) To Develop New Water Supplies In The Arid West: The Salt Lake Valley Example, Ryan Dupont, Joan E. Mclean, Richard C. Peralta, Sarah E. Null, Douglas B. Jackson-Smith

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The aims of the original proposed project remain the same, that is, to test the hypothesis that Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) for stormwater harvesting is a technically feasible, socially and environmentally acceptable, economically viable, and permittable option for developing new water supplies for arid Western urban ecosystems experiencing increasing population, and climate change pressures on existing water resources. The project is being carried out via three distinct but integrated components that include: 1) Monitoring of existing distributed Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) harvesting schemes involving a growing number of demonstration Green Infrastructure (GI) test sites; 2) Integrated stormwater/vadose zone/groundwater/ ecosystem services …

Importance Of Heat And Pressure For Solubilization Of Recombinant Spider Silk Proteins In Aqueous Solution, Justin A. Jones, Thomas I. Harris, Paula F. Oliveira, Brianne E. Bell, Abdulrahman Alhabib, Randolph V. Lewis

Biology Faculty Publications

The production of recombinant spider silk proteins continues to be a key area of interest for a number of research groups. Several key obstacles exist in their production as well as in their formulation into useable products. The original reported method to solubilize recombinant spider silk proteins (rSSp) in an aqueous solution involved using microwaves to quickly generate heat and pressure inside of a sealed vial containing rSSp and water. Fibers produced from this system are remarkable in their mechanical ability and demonstrate the ability to be stretched and recover 100 times. The microwave method dissolves the rSSPs with dissolution …

Hydrodeoxygenation Of Pinyon Juniper Catalytic Pyrolysis Oil To Hydrocarbon Fuels, Hossein Jahromi, Foster Agblevor

Biological Engineering Faculty Publications

As a renewable source, biomass is an essential option for diminishing dependence on conventional fossil fuel energy sources. Pyrolysis is a promising technology for the conversion of biomass into liquid fuels. However, several challenges associated with using pyrolysis oils such as their high acidity and low energy content inhibit their direct use as transportation fuels. We conducted a batch hydrodeoxygenation of pinyon juniper catalytic pyrolysis oil using Ni/SiO2-Al2O3 catalyst to improve the following properties of the oil: heating value, acidity, oxygen content, water content, and viscosity. During the hydrogenation process, the influence of four experimental factors; temperature, catalyst loading, residence …

Boostnoc: Power Efficient Network-On-Chip Architecture For Near Threshold Computing, Chidhambaranathan Rajamanikkam, Rajesh Jayashankarashridevi, Koushik Chakraborty, Sanghamitra Roy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

While near threshold design space provides a promising approach towards energy-efficient computing, it is plagued by sub-optimal performance. Application characteristics and hardware non-idealities of conventional architectures (optimized for the nominal voltage) prevent us from fully leveraging the potential of NTC systems. Further, the popular approach of increasing the computational core count to compensate for the performance loss severely burdens the on-chip communication fabric with an increased communication demand. In this work, we quantitatively analyze the performance bottleneck createdby a conventional NoC architecture in many-core NTC systems. To reclaim the performance lost due to a sub-optimal NoC, we propose BoostNoC - …

Survey Of Selected Additively Manufactured Propellant For Arc-Ignition Of Hybrid Rockets, Stephen A. Whitmore, Stephen L. Merkley, Louis Tonc, Spencer D. Mathias

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Results of a testing campaign to assess multiple commercially available three-dimensional printer materials for effectiveness in an arc-ignition system for hybrid rockets are presented. Previously, a form of additive manufacturing known as fused deposition modeling was used to fabricate high-density acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) fuel grains so that, when properly layered, they possess unique electrical breakdown properties. When subjected to an inductive charge, an electrical arc flows along the layered material surface and seeds combustion when the arc occurs simultaneously with the introduction of an oxidizing flow. This study investigates commercially available three-dimensional printable materials to search for equivalent or …

Hydroshare – A Case Study Of The Application Of Modern Software Engineering To A Large Distributed Federally-Funded Scientific Software Development Project, Ray Idaszak, David G. Tarboton, Hong Yi, Laura Christopherson, Michael J. Stealey, Brian Miles, Pabitra Dash, Alva Couch, Calvin Spealman, Jeffery S. Horsburgh, Daniel P. Ames

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

HydroShare is an online collaborative system under development to support the open sharing of hydrologic data, analytical tools, and computer models. With HydroShare, scientists can easily discover, access, and analyze hydrologic data and thereby enhance the production and reproducibility of hydrologic scientific results. HydroShare also takes advantage of emerging social media functionality to enable users to enhance information about and collaboration around hydrologic data and models. HydroShare is being developed by an interdisciplinary collaborative team of domain scientists, university software developers, and professional software engineers from ten institutions located across the United States. While the combination of non–co-located, diverse stakeholders …

Water Resources Systems Analysis Reading Assignments, Marcio Giacomoni

All ECSTATIC Materials

Read these articles:

https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%290733-9496%282000%29126%3A3%28118%29

https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%290733-9372%281990%29116%3A1%28182%29

https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%290733-9496%281986%29112%3A3%28339%29

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11269-015-0970-6

https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%290733-9496%282005%29131%3A6%28441%29

Answer the following questions:

1) Describe in your own words what is the problem that is being addressed? Why is it important?

2) What system is being modeled? Identify the system boundaries, processes, inputs and outputs.

3) How the system is being modeled? Identify the main state variables, parameters, initial conditions and boundary conditions.

4) What is the optimization method used to solve the problem. Describe the method.

5) What are the objective functions, constraints and decision variables?

6) What are the main conclusions and insights generated by the use of optimization? …

Analysis Of The Electric Vehicles Adoption Over The United States, Ali Soltani-Sobh, Kevin Heaslip, Aleksandar Stevanovic, Ryan Bosworth, Danilo Radiviojevic

Applied Economics Faculty Publications

Increasing the use of electric vehicles (EVs) has been suggested as a possible method to decrease fuel consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in an effort to mitigate the causes of climate change. In this study, the relationship between the market share of electric vehicles and the presence of government incentives, and other influential socio-economic factors were examined. The methodology of this study is based on a cross-sectional/time-series (panel) analysis. The developed model is an aggregated binomial logit share model that estimates the modal split between EV and conventional vehicles for different U.S. states from 2003 to 2011. The results …

Propulsion Theory Of Flapping Airfoils, Comparison With Computational Fluid Dynamics, Doug F. Hunsaker, W. F. Phillips

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

It is shown that the time-dependent aerodynamic forces acting on a flapping airfoil in forward flight are functions of both axial and normal reduced frequencies. The axial reduced frequency is based on the chord length, and the normal reduced frequency is based on the plunging amplitude. Furthermore, the time-dependent aerodynamic forces are related to two Fourier coefficients, which are evaluated here from computational results. Correlation equations for these Fourier coefficients are obtained from a large number of grid- and time-step-resolved inviscid computational-fluid-dynamics solutions, conducted over a range of both axial and normal reduced frequencies. The correlation results can be used …

Scale Effects In Physical Piano Key Weirs Models, Sébastien Erpicum, Blake Tullis, Maurine Lodomez, Pierre Archambeau, Benjamin Dewals, Michel Pirotton

Publications

With inertia and gravity representing the dominant forces for most open channel flow applications (e.g. weir flow), Froude similitude is commonly used for scaling hydraulic performance data from the model to prototype structures. With weir flow, as the upstream head decreases, however, the relevance of surface tension and viscosity forces can increase to the point when the model and prototype similitude is not fully achieved through Froude scaling. Such discrepancies are referred as size-scale effects, and among other things, can result in variations in the head–discharge relationship, nappe trajectory, and air entrainment. Published criteria for avoiding significant size-scale effects for …

Utilizing Electroencephalography Measurements For Comparison Of Task-Specific Neural Efficiencies: Spatial Intelligence Tasks, Benjamin J. Call, Wade Goodridge, Idalis Villanueva, Nicholas Wan, Kerry Jordan

Engineering Education Faculty Publications

Spatial intelligence is often linked to success in engineering education and engineering professions. The use of electroencephalography enables comparative calculation of individuals' neural efficiency as they perform successive tasks requiring spatial ability to derive solutions Neural efficiency here is defined as having less beta activation, and therefore expending fewer neural resources, to perform a task in comparison to other groups or other tasks. For inter-task comparisons of tasks with similar durations, these measurements may enable a comparison of task type difficulty. For intra-participant and inter-participant comparisons, these measurements provide potential insight into the participant's level of spatial ability and different …

Enhanced Thermal Conductance Of Polymer Composites Through Embedding Aligned Carbon Nanofibers, David S. Wood, Dale K. Hensley, Nicholas A. Roberts

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

The focus of this work is to find a more efficient method of enhancing the thermal conduc-tance of polymer thin films. This work compares polymer thin films embedded with randomly oriented carbon nanotubes to those with vertically aligned carbon nanofibers. Thin films embedded with carbon nanofibers demonstrated a similar thermal conductance between 40–60 µm and a higher thermal con-ductance between 25–40 µm than films embedded with carbon nanotubes with similar volume fractions even though carbon nanotubes have a higher thermal conductivity than carbon nanofibers.

Summer Ozone Concentrations In The Vicinity Of The Great Salt Lake, John Horel, Erik Crosman, Brian Blaylock, Seth Arens, Ansley Long, John Sohl, Randy S. Martin

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Residents near the Great Salt Lake in northern Utah, USA have been exposed to ozone levels during recent summers exceeding the current United States National Ambient Air Quality Standard. Accurately forecasting those exceedances has been difficult as a result of the complex meteorological and photochemical processes fostering them. To help improve such forecasts, a low-cost field study was conducted during summer 2015 to provide comprehensive observations of boundary-layer ozone concentrations in the context of the prevailing meteorological conditions. A network of surface ozone sensors was supplemented by sensors mounted on vehicles, a public transit light-rail car, news helicopter, tethered sonde, …

Methods For Culturing Retinal Pigment Epithelial Cells: A Review Of Current Protocols And Future Recommendations, Aaron H. Fronk, Elizabeth Vargis

Biological Engineering Faculty Publications

The retinal pigment epithelium is an important part of the vertebrate eye, particularly in studying the causes and possible treatment of age-related macular degeneration. The retinal pigment epithelium is difficult to access in vivo due to its location at the back of the eye, making experimentation with age-related macular degeneration treatments problematic. An alternative to in vivo experimentation is cultivating the retinal pigment epithelium in vitro, a practice that has been going on since the 1970s, providing a wide range of retinal pigment epithelial culture protocols, each producing cells and tissue of varying degrees of similarity to natural retinal pigment …

A Tool For Downscaling Weather Data From Large-Grid Reanalysis Products To Finer Spatial Scales For Distributed Hydrological Applications, Avirup Sen Gupta, David G. Tarboton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

A downscaling tool was developed to provide sub-daily high spatial resolution surfaces of weather variables for distributed hydrologic modeling from NASA Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications reanalysis products. The tool uses spatial interpolation and physically based relationships between the weather variables and elevation to provide inputs at the scale of a gridded hydrologic model, typically smaller (∼100 m) than the scale of weather reanalysis data (∼20–200 km). Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) measures greater than 0.70 were obtained for direct tests of downscaled daily temperature and monthly precipitation at 173 SNOTEL sites. In an integrated test driving the Utah Energy …

Deposition Of Carbon Nanotube Films On Polyamide And Polypropylene Substrates: A Computer Simulation Approach, Alejandro Heredia, Maria Colin-Garcia, Maria Del Pilar Carreon-Castro, Debarati Mukherjee, Bruno Abreu, David William Britt, Joana Catarina Mendes

Biological Engineering Faculty Publications

In this work we study hydroxylated carbon nanotube (CNT) assembly on polyamide (PA) and polypropylene (PP) polymers activated by UV radiation from a theoretical and experimental perspective. Molecular computer simulation was done to understand the stable conformations and bulk properties (molecular dynamics) of the polymers before and after exposure to UV radiation at the molecular level. Our experiments suggest that PA presents more -OH active groups, producing a more hydrophilic surface, whereas PP exhibits less potential UV activation. These results suggest that it is possible a facile covalent functionalization method to tune organic polymer surface properties through SWCNT anchoring for …

Catching The Flu: Emerging Threats From A Third Party Power Management Unit., Rajesh Jayashankarashridevi, Chidhambaranathan Rajamanikkam, Koushik Chakraborty, Sanghamitra Roy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Power management units (PMU) have come into the spotlight with energy efficiency becoming a first order constraint in MPSoC designs. To cater to the exponential rise in power events, and to meet the demands of tight power and energy budgets, PMUs are evolving to more complex and intelligent designs. In an era defined by energy efficient computing, a malicious circuit embedded in a third party PMU can adversely affect the operation of the entire MPSoC. This work presents and evaluates two covert security threats, P-VIRUS and DROWSY, designed using a malicious third party PMU. Further, we propose a non-invasive IP …

Swiftgpu: Fostering Energy Efficiency In A Near-Threshold Gpu Through A Tactical Performance Boost, Prabal Basu, Hu Chen, Shamik Saha, Koushik Chakraborty, Sanghamitra Roy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we investigate the challenges of preserving energy-efficiency in a Near-Threshold Computing (NTC) GPU. Two key factors can significantly undermine the efficacy of GPUs at NTC: (a) elongated delays at NTC make the GPU applications severely sensitive toMulti-cycle Latency Datapaths (MLDs) within the GPU pipeline; and (b) process variation (PV) at NTC induces a substantial performance variance. To address these emerging challenges, we propose SwiftGPU - -an energyefficient GPU design paradigm at NTC. SwiftGPU dynamically adjusts the degree of parallelization, and the speed of the MLDs within each stream core of the GPU. The proposed scheme achieves an …

Characterization Of Geolocation Accuracy Of Suomi Npp Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder Measurements, Yang Han, Fuzhong Weng, Xiaolei Zou, Hu Yang, Deron Scott

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) onboard Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite has 22 channels at frequencies ranging from 23 to 183 GHz for probing the atmospheric temperature and moisture under all weather conditions. As part of the ATMS calibration and validation activities, the geolocation accuracy of ATMS data must be well characterized and documented. In this study, the coastline crossing method (CCM) and the land-sea fraction method (LFM) are utilized to characterize and quantify the ATMS geolocation accuracy. The CCM is based on the inflection points of the ATMS window channel measurements across the coastlines, whereas the LFM collocates …

Estimation Of Surface Soil Moisture In Irrigated Lands By Assimilation Of Landsat Vegetation Indices, Surface Energy Balance Products, And Relevance Vector Machines, Alfonso F. Torres-Rua, Andres M. Ticlavilca, Roula Bachour, Mac Mckee

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Spatial surface soil moisture can be an important indicator of crop conditions on farmland, but its continuous estimation remains challenging due to coarse spatial and temporal resolution of existing remotely-sensed products. Furthermore, while preceding research on soil moisture using remote sensing (surface energy balance, weather parameters, and vegetation indices) has demonstrated a relationship between these factors and soil moisture, practical continuous spatial quantification of the latter is still unavailable for use in water and agricultural management. In this study, a methodology is presented to estimate volumetric surface soil moisture by statistical selection from potential predictors that include vegetation indices and …

Potential Effects Of Climate Change On Ecologically Relevant Streamflow Regimes, Sulochan Dhungel, David G. Tarboton, Jiming Jin, Charles P. Hawkins

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

We assessed the climate-driven changes in ecologically relevant flow regimes expected to occur by the year 2100 in streams across the conterminous United States. We used long-term daily flow measurements from 601 gauged streams whose watersheds were in relatively natural condition to characterize spatial variation in 16 flow regime variables selected for their ecological importance. Principal component analysis of these 16 variables produced five uncorrelated factors that described patterns of spatial covariation in flow regimes. These five factors were associated with low flow, magnitude, flashiness, timing, and constancy characteristics of the daily flow regime. We applied hierarchical clustering to the …

Automatic Surface Crack Detection In Concrete Structures Using Otsu Thresholding And Morphological Operations, Sattar Dorafshan, Marc Maguire, Xiaojun Qi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Concrete cracking is a ubiquitous phenomenon, present in all types of concrete structures. Identifying and tracking the amount and severity of cracking is paramount to evaluating the current condition and predicting the future service life of a concrete asset. Concrete cracks can indicate reinforcement corrosion, the development of spalls or changing support conditions. Therefore, monitoring cracks during the life span of concrete structures has been an effective technique to evaluate the level of safety and preparing plans for future appropriate rehabilitation.

One growing technique are unmanned inspections using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). UAVs are drones equipped with cameras, sensors, GPS, …

Ag Nanoparticles Generated Using Bio-Reduction And –Coating Cause Microbial Killing Without Cell Lysis, Gade A. Adams, Joan E. Mclean, J. Adams, D. W. Britt, Fenann Shen, A. Jacobson, Y. C. Kim

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Cost-effective “green” methods of producing Ag nanoparticles (NPs) are being examined because of the potential of these NPs as antimicrobials. Ag NPs were generated from Ag ions using extracellular metabolites from a soil-borne Pythium species. The NPs were variable in size, but had one dimension less than 50 nm and were biocoated; aggregation and coating changed with acetone precipitation. They had dose-dependent lethal effects on a soil pseudomonad, Pseudomonas chlororaphis O6, and were about 30-fold more effective than Ag+ ions. A role of reactive oxygen species in cell death was demonstrated by use of fluorescent dyes responsive to superoxide anion …

Differences In Nutrient And Metal Uptake Among Plant Species In Stormwater Bioretention Systems., M. R. Borecki, Ryan Dupont, Joan E. Mclean

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Overview Of Current Applications, Challenges, And Future Trends In Distributed Process-Based Models In Hydrology, Simone Fatichi, Enrique R. Vivoni, Fred L. Ogden, Valeriy Y. Ivanov, Benjamin Mirus, David Gochis, Charles W. Downer, Matteo Camporese, Jason H. Davison, Brian Ebel, Norm Jones, Jongho Kim, Giuseppe Mascaro, Richard Niswonger, Pedro Restrepo, Riccardo Rigon, Chaopeng Shen, Mauro Sulis, David G. Tarboton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Process-based hydrological models have a long history dating back to the 1960s. Criticized by some as over-parameterized, overly complex, and difficult to use, a more nuanced view is that these tools are necessary in many situations and, in a certain class of problems, they are the most appropriate type of hydrological model. This is especially the case in situations where knowledge of flow paths or distributed state variables and/or preservation of physical constraints is important. Examples of this include: spatiotemporal variability of soil moisture, groundwater flow and runoff generation, sediment and contaminant transport, or when feedbacks among various Earth’s system …

The Use Of Microfluidics And Dielectrophoresis For Separation, Concentration, And Identification Of Bacteria, Cynthia Hanson, Michael Sieverts, Karen Tew, Annelise Dykes, Michaela Salisbury, Elizabeth Vargis

Biological Engineering Faculty Publications

Traditional bacterial identification methods take one to two days to complete, relying on large bacteria colonies for visual identification. In order to decrease this analysis time in a cost-effective manner, a method to sort and concentrate bacteria based on the bacteria's characteristics itself is needed. One example of such a method is dielectrophoresis, which has been used by researchers to separate bacteria from sample debris and sort bacteria according to species. This work presents variations in which dielectrophoresis can be performed and their associated drawbacks and benefits specifically to bacterial identification. In addition, a potential microfluidic design will be discussed.