Engineering Commons^™

Mems 411: Waterproof Enclosure For Smart Shirt Microcontroller, Josh Towns, Eric Montufar-Morales, Jacob Williams

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The purpose of this project was to create an enclosure for a microcontroller for an electronic shirt, made by Dr. Mary Ruppert-Stroescu. The electronic shirt was made to help people with sleep apnea track their EKG, blood pressure, and heart rate in an easy and non-invasive way.

The current design being used has sharp edges and is not very secure. The goal of our new design was to make the enclosure comfortable to the wearer while also maintaining a water tight seal. This was done through multiple iterations of rounded enclosures with different gaskets. The end design was a two …

Mems 411: Smart Shirt Electronics Housing, Nickolas Allen, Aaron Deleon, Dominic Fulginiti

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Millions of Americans suffer from sleep apnea, a chronic condition that can impact the quality of sleep and livelihood of those impacted by it. The sleep tests that are performed to see if a patient has sleep apnea are very invasive to those that undergo them, but the WUSTL Smart Shirt removes the need for such tests. This biometric shirt contains electrodes that measure blood pressure, heart rates, and EKG diagnostics that create reports to determine if the patient has sleep apnea, removing the need for the invasive sleep tests for a diagnosis. We were tasked with making the electronics …

Mems 411: Piston Pong, Lauren Faust, Emma Kroll, Natalie Fisher, Caroline Ferry

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This report documents the design process of our ”Piston Pong” device. Our device was designed to be an educational demonstration of pneumatics and energy transformations using work and fluids models. The concept is that a bike pump will pump air into a holding container. After enough pressure is built up inside, the air will be released from the holding tank to a pneumatic cylinder. The cylinder will be released, hitting and launching a ball into the air. Additionally, force and pressure sensors would allow the energy to be calculated to fully understand the energy transformation. Our priorities for this design …

Mems 411: 3d Clay Printer, Nanami Mezaki, Isabelle Sasser, Garrett Radtke, Juliana Bush

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Washington University School of Architecture has a class called Digital Ceramics, that utilizes a 3D Printer that prints clay instead of plastic filament. Students use this device to make art projects. As interesting as this device is, it isn’t without problems. Our team decided to tackle some of the problems involved which we recognized to be: long set-up and tear-down times, and unsuccessful prints due to nozzle falling out.

Mems 411: Mini-Golf Robot, Matthew J. Sullivan, Jack Nanez, William Urdahl, Eli Cohen

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The following report details the design and construction of a mini-golf robot over
three months. The robot was designed under the standards provided by the
ASME Fall 2023 Design Challenge. The robot would need to traverse the mini-golf
course, completing it in under 10 minutes with the assistance of an attached striker
mechanism. It was necessary that the robot could position itself precisely with
respect to the goofball, while also staying stationary while striking the object. The
robot design timeline followed the guidelines of the engineering design process, with
concept generation, concept selection, prototype embodiment and design refinement
all playing …

Mems 411: Swing Energy Demo, Joshua Yoon, Owen Culver, Angel Wan, Gabriel Myong

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

A device to demonstrate the energy processes of a swing was created with the intention of display at the St. Louis Science Center.

Automatic Cardiac Mri Image Segmentation And Mesh Generation, Ziyuan Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Segmenting and reconstructing cardiac anatomical structures from magnetic resonance (MR) images is essential for the quantitative measurement and automatic diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases [1]. However, manual evaluation of the time-series cardiac MRI (CMRI) obtained during routine clinical care are laborious, inefficient, and tends to produce biased and non-reproducible results [2]. This thesis proposes an end-to-end pipeline for automatically segmenting short-axis (SAX) CMRI images and generating high-quality 2D and 3D meshes suitable for finite element analysis. The main advantage of our approach is that it can not only work as a stand-alone pipeline for the automatic CMR image segmentation and mesh …

Calculating The Difference In Stiffness Of Living T Cells Through Micropipette Aspiration, Minju Lee

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounted for 17.9 million deaths in 2019, with fibrosis contributing to nearly a quarter of these fatalities [1,2]. Fibrosis, characterized by excessive connective tissue formation, has been strongly linked to T cells, essential components of the immune system. This study explores the mechanisms of T cell activation and the subsequent changes in biophysical properties like diameter, stiffness, and elasticity, aiming to develop therapeutic strategies for fibrosis-related diseases, including CVD. Utilizing the micropipette aspiration technique, we accurately assessed T cell stiffness and observed a change in bulk cell stiffness upon activation. The results demonstrated increased fluid-like behavior in …

The Influence Of Facades On Outdoor Comfort And Behavior In Urban Spaces, Mingliang Li

Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design Theses & Dissertations

Global warming and rapid urbanization have intensified the urban heat island (UHI) effect, and its effect on human comfort in urban spaces has attracted widespread attention. The UHI effect increases the risk of heat-related mortality and building energy consumption and reduces outdoor human thermal comfort. A comfortable outdoor space supports sustainable urbanism by making the outdoor environment more comfortable and usable, thereby helping reduce the time spent indoors and the energy consumption of buildings.

There are thermal, visual, and acoustic features that influence outdoor comfort in terms of human physical, psychological, and social behaviors. Building façades, a common component of …

A Novel Approach To Detect Modified Cytosines In A Nanopore Sequencer, Benjamin Davidorf

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Epigenetic changes, such as DNA methylation, have been seen in various types of cancers, diseases, and neurological disorders. A common form of methylation occurs when a methyl group is added to the C-5 position of a cytosine, which is called 5-methyl-cyosine (5- mC). Hydroxymethylated is a type of methylation where 5mC is oxidized to 5-hydroxy-methyl- cytosine (5hmC), which has been linked to normal brain development. Current methods to sequence DNA methylation patterns (5-mC and 5-hmC) at a genome-wide level have several limitations, so there remains a need for a method to efficiently map DNA methylation. The state- of-the-art method for …

Watch: A Distributed Clock Time Offset Estimation Tool On The Platform For Open Wireless Data-Driven Experimental Research, Cassie Jeng

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The synchronization of the clocks used at different devices across space is of critical importance in wireless communications networks. Each device’s local clock differs slightly, affecting the times at which packets are transmitted from different nodes in the network. This thesis provides experimentation and software development on POWDER, the Platform for Open, Wireless Data-driven Experimental Research, an open wireless testbed across the University of Utah campus. We build upon Shout, a suite of Python scripts that allow devices to iteratively transmit and receive with each other and save the collected data. We introduce WATCH, an experimental method to estimate clock …

Performance And Emissions Study Of N+3 And N+4 Engine Models With Several Fuel Types Using Npss, Abel Solomon

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The aviation industry is known to be one of the major contributors to greenhouse gases accounting for 4.9% of the global greenhouse emissions. With the ever-increasing threat of climate change to the overall survival of the planet, the exploration of new technologies and alternative energy sources that minimize greenhouse gas emissions are of paramount importance. In this regard, the development of propulsion systems well suited for the performance and emissions requirements of future commercial aircraft plays a crucial role. This thesis investigates N+3 and N+4 technology-level propulsion systems that are proposed by NASA as possible propulsion systems for advanced single-aisle …

Design Of Microwave Superconducting Resonators For Materials Characterization, Xinyi Zhao

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

A resonator is a specialized device capable of storing and transferring energy at precise frequencies. Resonators find widespread use in various fields, such as electrical engineering, physics, and material science, owing to their exceptional ability to accurately measure, filter, and amplify signals. Different types of resonators exist, but coplanar waveguide (CPW) and coupled coplanar waveguide (CCPW) resonators are popular due to their high-frequency operation and easy integration into microfabrication processes.

Mirror Position Detection In A Catoptric Surface, Run Zhang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The Catoptric Surface research project is a pioneering exploration of controlling daylight effects within built environments. In this thesis, we focus on the mirror position detection problem, which plays a vital role in achieving dynamic control over the direction of reflected light within a space. To address the challenge of mirror position detection, we employ computer vision techniques, specifically edge detection and the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm. Edge detection is utilized to identify significant changes in intensity or color, corresponding to object boundaries, while RANSAC is applied for ellipse fitting. By iteratively selecting minimal subsets of points and fitting …

Jme 4110: Gearbox Design, Nichols Drabb, Steven Nelson, Brian Sniezak

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

This team was tasked with designing or replacing an external gearbox for an electric-motor driven train car. A suitable replacement was sought for, but none was found; so, a complex set of gears, or compound gear train was designed. This gear train allowed for a smaller electric motor to drive the large rail car at appreciable speeds.

Jme 4110: Automated Railway Decoupler, Optimized, Robert Murphy, Grace Stonner, Adam Young, Matt Stokes

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

Disconnecting freight cars from one another in trains that may be many thousands of feet long involves the dangerous and inefficient operation of manual decoupling. We have produced a system that enables freight cars to disconnect remotely, streamlining rail operations and boosting efficiency.

Jme 4110: Upgraded Refrigeration Door Cycling System, Keenan Bland, Kelvin Woods, Tyler Mclaughlin

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

This project focuses on improvements to a door cycling system. Both a fortified rope for the pulley system, ensuring extended operation, and the integration of a support track. This track is designed to bolster the clevis linked to an air piston that facilitates smooth piston rod travel without deflection. With these advancements, our door cycling system attains a new level of reliability, durability and functionality.

Jme 4110: Door Cycling Station, Briana Kagy, Alexander Clark, William Todd, Seth Flamm

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

The objective of this project was to design and build a door cycling station to be used for fatigue testing commercial refrigerator doors, including the door gaskets, hinges, and handles. The system must be low maintenance and reliable for at least two million cycles, and it must fit within the provided budget. The design concept includes a rodless pneumatic cylinder and a system of wear-resistant ropes, eyebolts, and pulleys.

The Effect Of Spinal Cord Stimulation And Video Games Training On Body-Machine Interface Control, Jie Fei

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Damage to the spinal cord causes long-lasting loss of motor and sensory function, and currently, there is no ‘cure’ for paralysis. However, even people with severe spinal cord injuries (SCI) have some residual mobility. Studies have shown that transcutaneous electrical spinal cord stimulation (tSCS) combined with functional training targeting residual mobility can further improve the motor function of individuals with SCI. In this study, we present a technical framework that aims to enhance rehabilitation outcomes by targeting residual mobility through a motor training-based approach. Our technical framework centers around a non-invasive body-machine interface (BoMI) that relies on the use of …

Novel Microfluidic Devices To Model The Interactions Between Lymphatics And Breast Cancer, Jade Weber

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The lymphatic system is responsible for immune circulation and fluid balance in the body. It accomplishes this by draining interstitial fluid from local tissue and transferring it to lymph nodes and back into blood circulation. However, this process is implicated in many pathologies, one of the most dangerous being breast cancer metastasis to the lymph nodes. The largest factor in breast cancer patient mortality is metastasis. Lymphangiogenesis, the growth of new lymphatic vessels, has been thought to play a dynamic role in aiding breast cancer metastasis. Breast cancer tumor cells have been shown to remodel the functionality of local lymph …

Targeted Adversarial Attacks Against Neural Network Trajectory Predictors, Kaiyuan Tan

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Trajectory prediction is an integral component of modern autonomous systems as it allows for envisioning future intentions of nearby moving agents. Due to the lack of other agents' dynamics and control policies, deep neural network (DNN) models are often employed for trajectory forecasting tasks. Although there exists an extensive literature on improving the accuracy of these models, there is a very limited number of works studying their robustness against adversarially crafted input trajectories. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a targeted adversarial attack against DNN models for trajectory forecasting tasks. We call the proposed attack TA4TP for …

Single-Molecule Super-Resolution Imaging Of Geobacter Sulfurreducens Under Anaerobic Conditions, Ziyi Hu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Geobacter sulfurreducens are anaerobic bacteria capable of making electrical contacts with other organisms and extracellular electron acceptors. The challenge of imaging live Geobacter bacteria is maintaining anaerobic conditions during the imaging process. In this thesis, we augment a single-molecule localization microscope (SMLM) with a home-built anaerobic imaging chamber and use constant argon bubbling to maintain oxygen-free imaging conditions. To validate the imaging protocol, we use the transient binding of Nile red to resolve the spherical morphology of lipid-coated glass spheres with nanoscale resolution. However, when imaging Geobacter, the distribution of Nile red localizations is non-uniform, both between different cells …

Adversarial Patch Attacks On Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms, Peizhen Tong

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Adversarial patch attack has demonstrated that it can cause the misclassification of deep neural networks to the target label when the size of patch is relatively small to the size of input image; however, the effectiveness of adversarial patch attack has never been experimented on deep reinforcement learning algorithms. We design algorithms to generate adversarial patches to attack two types of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, including deep Q-networks (DQN) and proximal policy optimization (PPO). Our algorithms of generating adversarial patch consist of two parts: choosing attack position and training adversarial patch on that position. Under the same bound of total …

Development Of A Multispectral Vis-Swir Imaging Modality For Cutaneous Water Assessment, Quinlan Mcgrath

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Inflammatory skin diseases are estimated to impact 20% of the global population and are the fourth leading cause of nonfatal disability worldwide. Diagnosis and management are predominantly based on clinician visual assessment of disease related changes in skin morphology. The qualitative nature of this method can result in misdiagnosis and underdiagnoses of treatable diseases. There persists systematic undertreatment of skin of color patients given the more subtle presentation of erythema against pigmented skin. There exists a clinical need for a quantitative and objective inflammation assessment tool that meets the needs of a diverse patient population. The accumulation of interstitial fluid …

3-Dimensional Visualization Of Cardiac Plaque Mapping Data, Phan Ly Vy Nguyen

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) of one of the most prevalent cardiac arrythmia in humans, and also the most studied arrythmias due to its high association with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Diagnosis of AF, which is highly dependent on the observation of the irregular signal in the atria, is often challenging since AF is often asymptomatic at the onset. There has been a lot of effort in exploring different cardiac mapping techniques to understand the dynamics of AF for better intervention. This study aims at developing a MATLAB interface that assists the development of a cardiac plaque mapping data acquisition system in …

Data-Driven Platform And Digital Operations, Bing Bai

Olin Business School Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation is to study the emerging operations issues on data-driven platforms and digital operations. With the increasing availability of data and the development of information technologies, platforms process a large amount of data in order to efficiently make daily operational decisions. Understanding human behaviors and the human-algorithm connection is instrumental to the success of this process. In my research, I implement field experiments and use structural models to study in-warehouse worker behavior and out-of-warehouse customer behavior in the last mile of logistics.

In Chapter 1, “The Impacts of Algorithmic Work Assignment on Fairness Perceptions and Productivity: …

Reflectance Quantitative Polarized Light Imaging For Microstructural Evaluation Of Musculoskeletal Soft Tissues, Leanne Elizabeth Iannucci

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Musculoskeletal soft tissue injury is common and can lead to debilitating pain, loss of tissue function, and overall decrease in quality of life. Proper biomechanical function of musculoskeletal soft tissues is dictated by their hierarchically organized collagenous extracellular matrices, which are disrupted in periods of disease or injury. To best understand dynamic structure-function relationships of these tissues in normal and pathological conditions, it is imperative to be able to visualize collagen microstructure using a quantitative, high spatiotemporal resolution imaging modality. The innate birefringence associated with collagen fibers permits the use of biomedical polarimetry techniques to probe collagen in a specific …

A Novel Mrna Delivery Strategy Employing Adenovirus Piggyback Mrna Binders Via Catcher/Tag Molecular Glue, Kexin Geng

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

mRNA-based therapeutics open a new era for the prevention and treatment of a wide range of diseases. However, existing mRNA delivery vehicles have limited repertoires for dendritic cell targeting and intranasal administration which are two paramount delivery pathways of significant advantages for treating cancer and infectious respiratory diseases. Adenovirus (Ad) with well-deciphered viral genomes and intensive-studied structure biology has been developed for DCs-targeted cancer vaccines and intranasal COVID vaccines. In light of these virtues, Ad presents as the “off-the-shelf” tool possessing well-defined manufacturable capabilities and translatable feasibility that perfectly complements the current limitations of mRNA delivery. In this study, we …

Two-Dimensional Field Effect Transistor, Yimeng Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

As silicon-based field-effect transistors (FETs) approach their physical limits with channel lengths approaching 5 nm, the search for new semiconductor materials that can surpass this limit has become urgent. Two-dimensional layered semiconductor nanomaterials, represented by graphene, have emerged as promising candidates due to their unique physical, mechanical, and chemical properties. Unlike traditional silicon-based FETs, two dimensional (2D) layered nanomaterials are held together by van der Waals forces between layers, with no dangling bonds on the material surface, which can effectively address the short-channel effect issue faced by traditional silicon-based FETs. However, unlike traditional silicon-based FETs, which have matured fabrication systems, …

Robust Analog Circuit Parameter Optimization With Sampling-Efficient Reinforcement Learning, Jian Gao

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Design automation of analog circuits has been a longstanding challenge in the integrated circuit field. Recently, multiple methods based on learning or optimization have demonstrated great promise in automating device sizing for analog circuits. However, they often ignore the strong susceptibility of analog circuits to process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations or suffer from low sampling efficiency to train algorithms. To address these critical limitations, this thesis proposes RoSE, the first Robust analog circuit parameter optimization framework with high Sampling Efficience by synergistically combining Bayesian Optimization (BO) and reinforcement learning (RL). Its core is to use the fast convergence of …