Engineering Commons^™

Quantifying The Surface Geometry Of Titanium Implant Material By Different Methods Of Analysis, Clara Pimienta, Rashad Tawashi

Cells and Materials

Biomaterial implant manufacturers have used rough surfaces to ensure better biocompatibility, less rejection and better adaptation of implants in the body. Proper characterization of biological interactions and biocompatibility of biomaterials requires a thorough understanding of surface complexity. Surface roughness has often been shown to be important in influencing biological reactions with the surface. Previous communications from our laboratory have described a dynamic active vision system (MVS camera) capable of measuring three-dimensional coordinates of titanium implant material surfaces. Fractal analysis, due to its straightforward relationship to texture, is used to characterize the degree of irregularity of a surface and is expressed …

Image Analysis And The Effect Of Molecular Orientation On Degrading Lactide Polymer Films, K. J. L. Burg, M. Laberge, D. L. Powers, S. W. Shalaby

Cells and Materials

Absorbable polylactide films were studied in order to observe the effect of orientation on the resulting hydrolytic degradation pattern. Two types of polylactide films with two levels of molecular orientation were studied, during a nine month exposure to a phosphate buffered solution at 37°C. The films were sectioned and quantified as to void area, birefringence area, and intensity of birefringence using a microscope and an image analysis software package. The results, obtained using an analysis of variance, showed that the orientation played a significant role in the degradation pattern of the polylactide films, either decreasing or causing no change in …

Biomimetic Habitats For Cells: Ordered Matrix Deposition And Differentiation In Gingival Fibroblasts Cultured On Hydroxyapatite Coated With A Collagen Analogue, Rajendra S. Bhatnagar, Jing Jing Qian, Anna Wedrychowska, Eric Dixon, Nancy Smith

Cells and Materials

In tissues, cells attach and migrate on collagen. Interaction with collagen modulates cell proliferation and differentiation. We propose that similar environments may be constructed by immobilizing collagen-derived cell-binding peptides in a three-dimensional (3-D) template. We identified a cell binding domain of type I collagen and showed that a 15-residue synthetic analogue (P-15) binds cells with high affinity. In the present study, we compared the behavior of human gingival fibroblasts (HGF) in culture on hydroxyapatite (HA) and on HA-P-15. HGF cultured on HA formed sparse monolayers with little order and deposited a scant matrix. HGF on HA-P-15 formed highly oriented 3-D …

Potential For Aquifer Storage And Recovery In Box Elder And Cache Counties, Mariush Kemblowski, Tom Lachmar, Richard Peralta

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Groundwater artificial storage and recovery (ASR) has become a favorable means in the arid west to store water produced in excess of need during winter months for use in drier times of the year. ASR may be accomplished by injection of suitable water into the groundwater system via wells to be pumped out later, or by recovery of seepage via wells from surface water impoundments or infiltration networks. This report will present pertinent hydrogeologic information for the location of an artificial groundwater storage and recovery project in Utah's northeastern Box Elder County.

Sinmap 2.0 - A Stability Index Approach To Terrain Stability Hazard Mapping, User's Manual, Robert T. Pack, David G. Tarboton, C. N. Goodwin

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

SINMAP 2.0 (Stability Index MAPping) is an ArcGIS 9.0 plug-in that implements the computation and mapping of a slope stability index based upon geographic information, primarily digital elevation data. This report describes the theoretical basis for the calculation of the stability index, describes the implementation, presents several case studies and describes use of the accompanying software. SINMAP has its theoretical basis in the infinite plane slope stability model with wetness (pore pressures) obtained from a topographically based steady state model of hydrology. Digital elevation model (DEM) methods are used to obtain the necessary input information (slope and specific catchment area). …

Potential For Aquifer Storage And Recovery In Box Elder And Cache Counties, Richard C. Peralta, Tom Lachmar, Mariush Kemblowski

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Groundwater artificial storage and recovery (ASR) has become a favorable means in the arid west to store water produced in excess of need during winter months for use in drier times of the year. ASR may be accomplished by injection of suitable water into the groundwater system via wells to be pumped out later, or by recovery of seepage via wells from surface water impoundments or infiltration networks. This report will present pertinent hydrogeologic information for the location of an artificial groundwater storage and recovery project in Utah's northeastern Box Elder County.

Conjunctive Use Of Surface Water And Groundwater For Sustainable Agricultural Production, Richard C. Peralta

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

This report is a guide to aid conjunctive water use in stream-aquifer systems. Conjunctive use refers to coordinated use of groundwater and surface water resources. This document discusses principles useful for field engineers and agricultural experts. It presents hydrologic and hydraulic principles and quantitative and qualitative parameters relating to sustainable conjunctive use. It provides tools and software.

The Sinmap Approach To Terrain Stability Mapping, Robert T. Pack, David G. Tarboton, C. N. Goodwin

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

A promising approach to modeling the spatial distribution of shallow debris slides combines a mechanistic infinite slope stability model with a steady-state hydrology model. The spatial distribution of a “stability index” is governed primarily by specific catchment area (the upslope area per unit contour length) and slope. The model can be interactively calibrated to the unique characteristics of the topography, rainfall, and soils of a particular study area using simple parameters, graphs and maps. Once a landslide and terrain inventory is completed using aerial photographs, this approach is shown to have the capability of producing a stability classification map of …

Cooling Saber With A Miniature Pulse Tube Refrigerator, Scott M. Jensen, J. Clair Batty, William A. Roettker, Matthew J. Felt

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

Utah State University/Space Dynamics Laboratory (USU/SDL), teaming with NASA Langley Research Center, is currently building the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry(SABER) instrument. Stringent mass and power constraints, together with a greater than two year mission life, led to the selection of a TRW miniature pulse tube refrigerator to cool SABER's infrared detectors to the required temperature of 75 K.

This paper provides an overview of the SABER thermal management plan and the challenges encountered in matching the refrigerator characteristics with instrument performance requirements under the broadly variant space environments expected for this mission. Innovative technologies were developed …

Optimizing Conjunctive Water Use For Sustainable Production: Tools For The Management Spectrum, Richard C. Peralta, Shengjun J. Wu, H. J. Morel-Seytoux, Fernando Chanduvi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Making best use of water resources requires coordinating use of groundwater and surface waters--conjunctive use. Conjunctive water management is important on the regional (watershed or aquifer), water district and field scales. Goals might differ for the different administrative levels. A regionally optimal water management strategy is not necessarily optimal for water district managers and individual farmers. Interactions between levels are affected by laws, regulations, traditions and public pressure. To help each organizational level develop water management strategies that best achieve its goals, computer simulation/optimization (S/O) models are useful. Such S/O models couple water flow and transport simulation techniques with formal …

Remote Freedom, Dominic M. Florin

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Increasing mobility is a key to ensuring that a disabled child feels accepted and as normal as possible. The object of Remote Freedom is to provide an inexpensive design that will modify a toy vehicle so that it can run remotely. The case that we designed for was a child with cerebral palsy. Originally the toy vehicle on the market needed major modifications both for the safety of the child and the addition of the remote control The main components that were added were a safety harness, a roll bar and motors to control steering and speed.

It was discovered …

Poseidon American Society Of Civil Engineers/Master Builders Rocky Mountain Regional Concrete Canoe Competition, William Spencer Guthrie

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The concrete canoe team has been selected in behalf of the Utah State University Student Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers to prepare an entry for the 1998 ASCE Rocky Mountain Regional Concrete Canoe Competition. This event is co-sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers and Master Builders, Inc., and has become a tradition at annual ASCE regional conferences nationwide.

Research And Design Of A High L/D Aircraft, Blake Ashby, Gregory Nielson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This senior design team, consisting of Blake Ashby, Shelly Barlow, Greg Nielson, Deryl Snyder, and Chris Wright, designed, built, and flew an airplane that met the requirements of the Cessna/ONR Student Design/Build/Fly Competition sponsored by AIAA. This radio-controlled airplane was designed to fly the most laps around a course in seven minutes using only 2.5 pounds of NiCad batteries. A total of three senior design teams from Utah State University designed separate airplanes. Though all three teams designed, built, and tested complete airplanes, each emphasized a different aspect of a successful entry. This team emphasized theoretical and numerical analysis in …

Dual Adaptive Recumbent Trike, Jason V. Eastman

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The DART team's objective was to develop a tandem recumbent tricycle that would be economical, easy to build, and adaptable. This would involve designing, building and testing the tricycle.

Home Automation System, Joshua James Earl

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The home is the place where people should feel the most comfortable. Considerable technological development is dedicated to making the home more comfortable; smart appliances are a good example of this. There is always a market for products that provide easier control of home appliances and electrical devices. With this in mind, I have designed and implemented a PC-controlled Home Automation System (HAS). This HAS allows complete control of home appliances and electrical devices from the homeowner's IBM-compatible PC. make use of advanced technology in the transmission of the control signals by way of power-lines already present in the home. …

Hydrogen On-Orbit Storage And Supply: A Spacecraft Bus Design, Roy Gladden

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Spacecraft designers have two options when developing spacecraft for a particular mission. The bus, which is the primary structure and support system for the spacecraft, can be designed from an existing layout or a new design may be developed to meet specific mission needs. In recent years, the trend in small satellite design has been to employ a previously designed spacecraft bus in order to reduce cost and development time. However, these structures sometimes provide greater capability than is required for smaller, simple missions at a higher price. Therefore, it may be preferable to custom design a bus to meet …

Parameter Estimation Using Artificial Neural Network And Genetic Algorithm For Free-Product Migration And Recovery, J. Morshed, Jagath J. Kaluarachchi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Artificial neural network (ANN) is considered to be a universal function approximator, and genetic algorithm (GA) is considered to be a robust optimization technique. As such, ANN regression analysis and ANN-GA optimization techniques can be used to perform inverse groundwater modeling for parameter estimation. In this manuscript the applicability of these two techniques in solving an inverse problem related to a light-hydrocarbon-contaminated site is assessed. The critical parameters to be evaluated are grain-size distribution index α and saturated hydraulic conductivity of water Ksw, since these parameters control free-product volume predictions and flow. A set of published data corresponding to a …

The Fm Radio Program, Andrew Olsen

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The PC FM Radio program allows a PC user to listen to FM radio stations while using a PC. The application includes controls that will let the PC user select different FM stations, preset a favorite FM station, select a preset station, and record the current station. The FM hardware is an ISA expansion card that provides the audio signal to the PC through the auxiliary input jack in the sound card. The supporting software runs on Windows 95 machines. A help file is included for simple instructions. The software runs in the background and doesn't use much of the …

Design Of The Guidance, Navigation, And Control Subsystem For The Proposed Firebird Spacecraft, Erin Robinson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Firebird spacecraft is a space mission to gather scientific and physical data on the effects of atmospheric deceleration, commonly called aerobraking. The objective of the Firebird mission is to measure specified aerobraking parameters over a range of reentry velocities to provide a database sufficient to construct and validate mathematical models of such aerobraking mission maneuvers. The Firebird senior design team designed the first spacecraft in the mission series to look at aerobraking at an altitude of 160 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. This paper looks specifically at the design of the subsystem that provides the guidance, navigation, …

Impedance Of A Dipole Antenna In Ionospheric Plasma, Pavel Nikitin

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Different approaches to evaluating the behavior of the impedance of an electrically short dipole antenna in the ionosphere as a function of the driving frequency are discussed. The induced EMF method in quasi-static approximation is chosen for evaluating the impedance and explained in great detail. The E-region of the ionosphere is considered and the cold collisional plasma model is used.

The influence of a density gradient in plasma on the impedance is explored, and the possible current distributions on the surface of the antenna are considered, including the current distribution for the antenna with a gap. The conclusions are drawn …

Optimizing Separate Phase Light Hydrocarbon Recovery From Contaminated Unconfined Aquifers, G. S. Cooper, Richard C. Peralta, Jagath J. Kaluarachchi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

A modeling approach is presented that optimizes separate phase recovery of light non-aqueous phase liquids (LNAPL) for a single dual-extraction well in a homogeneous, isotropic unconfined aquifer. A simulation/regression/optimization (S/R/O) model is developed to predict, analyze, and optimize the oil recovery process. The approach combines detailed simulation, nonlinear regression, and optimization. The S/R/O model utilizes nonlinear regression equations describing system response to time-varying water pumping and oil skimming. Regression equations are developed for residual oil volume and free oil volume. The S/R/O model determines optimized time-varying (stepwise) pumping rates which minimize residual oil volume and maximize free oil recovery while …

A Review On The Documentation For The South Florida Water Management Model (Sfwmm), Daniel P. Loucks, Wendy D. Graham, Conrad D. Heatwole, John W. Labadie, Richard C. Peralta

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Early in February 1998, the South Florida Water Management District asked Professors Wendy D. Graham, Comad D. Heatwole, John W. Labadie, Daniel P. Loucks, and Richard C. Peralta to serve on a panel to

• Review the Draft Documentation for the South Florida Water Management Model (SFWMM),

• Develop a series of questions, issues and areas for discussion during a site visit,

• Visit the District for a model familiarization session, and

• Prepare and submit a written evaluation of the model, with emphasis on the documentation that will include criticisms, specific recommendations for improvement, and responses to questions posed.

Disaggregation Procedures For Stochastic Hydrology Based On Nonparametric Density Estimation, David G. Tarboton, Ashish Sharma, Upmanu L. Lall

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Synthetic simulation of streamflow sequences is important for the analysis of water supply reliability. Disaggregation models are an important component of the stochastic streamflow generation methodology. They provide the ability to simulate multiseason and multisite streamflow sequences that preserve statistical properties at multiple timescales or space scales. In recent papers we have suggested the use of nonparametric methods for streamflow simulation. These methods provide the capability to model time series dependence without a priori assumptions as to the probability distribution of streamflow. They remain faithful to the data and can approximate linear or nonlinear dependence. In this paper we extend …

Controlled Environment Potentiostat To Study Solid-Aqueous Systems, R A. Petrie, P. R. Grossl, Ronald C. Sims

Biological Engineering Faculty Publications

We designed a redox apparatus that controls electropotenial (Eh), pH, and temperature. The apparatus is fully automated and can be assembled from equipment found in most soil analytical laboratories. The reactor can maintain environmental conditions used to evaluate the chemical fate of contaminants under natural conditions (natural attenuation) or adjust them to a new steady state to evaluate the effect of engineered remediation on a subsurface system. It can operate within a wide range of redox potential values (−400 to 400 mV) and at any pH value. The stability and accuracy of the instrument was tested by performing Eh-pH titrations …

Remax: Software For Optimizing Ground-Water Management, Conjunctive Water Management, And Remediation Design, Richard C. Peralta, Alaa H. Aly

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

REMAX is a software package designed to assist water managers in developing optimal ground water or coordinated ground water/surface water strategies for a wide range of management problems. REMAX uses MODFLOW, MT3D, and other simulation models to develop the response matrix or response surface equations employed in the final optimization model. To address nonlinear systems (e.g., unconfined aquifers) accurately, REMAX uses a modified response-matrix method. REMAX several nonlinear functions to represent a wide variety of nonlinear response surfaces. REMAX can be used for deterministic or reliability-based optimization problems. Decision variables are ground-water extraction/injection rates and/or surface water diversion rates. State …

Modification Of Flow Model And Optimal Pumping Strategies For Capturing Tce And Dce Plumes Near Mission Drive, Wurtsmith Air Force Base, Michigan: Feasibility Study, Alaa H. Aly, Richard C. Peralta

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Utah State University (USU) and Parsons Engineering Science (PES) were tasked by the Air Force Center for Environmental Excellence to:

( 1) Modify the three-dimensional basewide ground-water flow model for Wurtsmith Air Force Base (WAFS), Michigan (PES, 1997) based on recent investigation by ICF Kaiser (ICF).

(2) Develop contaminant transport models for OT-24 area TCE and DCE plumes. These models will use the same parameters that were used by ICF in their feasibility study ..

(3) Use the flow and transport models to develop optimal pumping strategies to achieve cleanup and capture of the plumes

Luke Afb Water Rights Ramifications Of The Survey Report For The Gila River Indian Reservation, Richard C. Peralta

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The subject Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) report is a thorough preliminary effort at determining how much water is needed to irrigate all practicably irrigable acreages (PIA) on the Gila River Indian Reservation (GRIR). ADWR identified 178,880 acres suitable for irrigation. An existing Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) Master Plan previously identified 146,330 acres suitable for irrigation (requiring 771 ,600 acre-feet of water per year). ADWR compared the two sets of acreages, and identified 129,030 acres common to both.

1997 Calibration Of Flow Model And Optimal Pumping Strategies To Capture Tce Plume At Travis Afb, Ca, Richard C. Peralta, A. H. Aly, J. Atkinson, J. Williams

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The objective of this study was to develop a ground-water model that can be used in conjunction with an optimization model to optimize the containment and remediation of ground water contaminated with organic compounds at Travis AFB, California (TAFB). Based on studies by WESTON (Roy F. Weston, Inc.), RADIAN (Radian Corporation), and others, the major ground-water quality problem is a plume of TCE that originates at the Oil Spill Area (OSA) and bas migrated to the south and east under the runway. The immediate remediation objective is to stop the movement of the plume.

Freezing Point Mobile Munitions Assessment Sytem: Thermal Chamber Redesign, Sara Gifford, Preston Harris

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The Army is actively investigating non-intrusive methods to identify six chemical weapons agents. The chemical munitions in question are often found scattered across military bases and other facilities. These non-stockpile munitions are specifically targeted for identification using the mobile munitions assessment system. This program is being administered by the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory.

Optimizing Conjunctive Use And Groundwater Yield, Richard C. Peralta, Rahman Rahimzadegen, Narendra K. Tyagi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Advances in computer power and mathematical optimization procedures can improve planning and developing sustainable irrigation systems. Simulation and optimization models can help plm1 groundwater and conjunctive use strategies to best achieve management goals while satisfying mm1agement a11d physical constraints. Simulation/optimization models that couple calibrated flow and transport simulation models with optimization algorithms can help design the best water management strategies. Mm1agers can be relatively sure that the groundwater system will respond acceptably when appropriate procedures are employed to develop the water management strategies. Presented case studies illustrate situations in which developed strategies simultaneously address conflicting management goals such as: maximizing …