Engineering Commons^™

Algorithms For Library-Based Microbial Source Tracking, Aldrin Montana

Master's Theses

Pyroprinting is a novel, library-based microbial source tracking method developed by the Biology department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. This method consists of two parts: (1) a collection of bacterial fingerprints, called pyroprints, from known host species, and (2) a method for pyroprint comparison. Currently, Cal Poly Library of Pyroprints (CPLOP), a web-based database application, provides storage and analysis of over $10000$ pyroprints. This number is quickly growing as students and researchers continue to use pyroprinting for research. Biologists conducting research using pyroprinting rely on methods for partitioning collected bacterial isolates into bacterial strains. Clustering algorithms are commonly used …

Impact Of Photovoltaic System Penetration On The Operation Of Voltage Regulator Equipment, Abesh Sorab Mubaraki

Master's Theses

The growing popularity of photovoltaic (PV) generation systems leads to an increase in the number of residential and commercial grid-tied PV systems that interconnect to the distribution circuit. This affects the characteristics of the distribution circuit; for example, the assumption that the voltage profile of a radial line decreases down-stream becomes invalid because of the addition of the PV system on the line. This poses new challenges when setting the parameters of voltage regulating devices. Add to that the fact that PV systems are intermittent, especially on cloudy days, which make the line even more difficult to regulate, and the …

Microcapsule Containing Lactic Acid Bacteria For Treatment Of Peptic Ulcers, Brandon Jerome Hinkel

Master's Theses

Probiotics are marketed throughout the world to promote the health of the consumer by improving the microorganisms that normally occur in the intestinal tract (Tannock, 1997). It has also been suggested that probiotics can prevent pathogen infections by adhering to the intestinal mucosa (Lee, Lim, Teng, Ouwehand, Tuomola, & Salminen, 2000). While probiotics can be delivered to the infected areas in multiple fashions, microencapsulation is a newer form of delivering probiotics straight to the infected area. A whey protein microcapsule is thought to protect the probiotics from stomach acid and delivers the treatment to the affected area. To ensure this …

Point Based Approximate Color Bleeding With Cuda, Nicholas D. Feeney

Master's Theses

Simulating light is a very computationally expensive proposition. There are a wide variety of global illumination algorithms that are implemented and used by major motion picture companies to render interesting and believable scenes. Every algorithm strives to find a balance between speed and accuracy. The Point Based Approximate Color Bleeding algorithm is one of the most widely used algorithms in the field today. The Point Based Approximate Color Bleeding(PBACB) global illumination algorithm is based on the central idea that the geometry and direct illumination of the scene can be approximated by using a point cloud representation. This point cloud representation …

Matrix Remodeling Accompanies In Vitro Articular Cartilage Spherical Shaping, Nathan Thomas Balcom

Master's Theses

Introduction: Articular cartilage (AC) is a low friction load bearing material found in synovial joints. The natural repair of damaged tissue is difficult and often requires surgical intervention. With large defects it becomes necessary to match the original tissue geometry. We hypothesized that localized collagen (COL) and/or proteoglycan (PG) remodeling occurs during AC spherical reshaping. The objective of this study was to determine the presence, magnitude and depth dependence of COL and PG remodeling that accompanies AC reshaping. Methods: Full thickness AC blocks (7x7 mm² surface area) were harvested from the ridges of the patellofemoral groove of immature (1-3 …

Improvement Of Electromagnetic Railgun Barrel Performance And Lifetime By Method Of Interfaces And Augmented Projectiles, Aleksey D. Pavlov

Master's Theses

Several methods of increasing railgun barrel performance and lifetime are investigated. These include two different barrel-projectile interface coatings: a solid graphite coating and a liquid eutectic indium-gallium alloy coating. These coatings are characterized and their usability in a railgun application is evaluated. A new type of projectile, in which the electrical conductivity varies as a function of position in order to condition current flow, is proposed and simulated with FEA software. The graphite coating was found to measurably reduce the forces of friction inside the bore but was so thin that it did not improve contact. The added contact resistance …

Characterization And Modeling Of An O-Band 1310 Nm Sampled-Grating Distributed Bragg Reflector (Sg-Dbr) Laser For Optical Coherence Tomography (Oct) Applications, Desmond Charles Talkington

Master's Theses

In this project, the performance aspects of a new early generation 1310 nm Sampled-Grating Distributed Bragg Reflector (SG-DBR) semiconductor laser are investigated. SG-DBR lasers are ideal for Source Swept Optical Coherence Tomography (SS-OCT), a Fourier-Domain based approach for OCT, necessitating a tunable wavelength source. Three internal sections control the frequency output for tuning, along with two amplifiers for amplitude control. These O-band SG-DBR devices are now being produced in research quantities. SG-DBR lasers have been produced at 1550 and 1600 nm for some times. Fundamental questions regarding the performance of the 1310 nm devices must be quantified. Standard metrics including …

Affine Image Registration Using Artificial Neural Networks, Pramod Gadde

Master's Theses

This thesis deals with image registration of MRI images using neural networks. Image registration combines multiple images of the same subject that were taken at different points in time, from different sensors, or from different points of views into a single image and coordinate system. Image registration is widely used in medical imaging and remote sensing. In this thesis feed forward neural networks and wavelet neural networks are used to estimate the parameters of registration. Simulations show that the wavelet networks provide significantly more accurate results than feed forward networks and other proposed methods including genetic algorithms. Both methods are …

Paris: A Parallel Rsa-Prime Inspection Tool, Joseph R. White

Master's Theses

Modern-day computer security relies heavily on cryptography as a means to protect the data that we have become increasingly reliant on. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, methods of security must be better than ever. Validation tools can be leveraged to help increase our confidence and accountability for methods we employ to secure our systems.

Security validation, however, can be difficult and time-consuming. As our computational ability increases, calculations that were once considered “hard” due to length of computation, can now be done in minutes. We are constantly increasing the size of our keys and attempting to make computations harder …

Applying Sustainability From A Systems Perspective:, Timothy Brophy

Master's Theses

Becoming sustainable is no longer an option. Current industry methods will not be able to support the necessary changes our growing society demands. In order to keep up with ever increasing demands industry will be aimed toward making major system changes toward a fully sustainable model. As of right now only basic sustainability actions have been put in place. Industry needs to make a strategic change toward resilient systems with an end goal of evolving into fully biomimic systems. This thesis covers a brief history of production leading to the Industrial Revolution which created a need for increased sustainability efforts. …

The Bicycle-Powered Smartphone Charger, Chris Arntzen

Master's Theses

This thesis entails the design and fabrication of a smartphone charger that is powered by a bicycle dynamo hub. In addition to the design and validation of the charger prototype, this thesis involves the testing and characterization of the dynamo hub power source, the design and construction of specialized test equipment, and the design and prototyping of a handlebar-mounted case for the smartphone and charging electronics. With the intention of making the device a commercial product, price, aesthetics, and marketability are of importance to the design. An appropriate description of the charger circuit is a microcontroller-based energy management system, tailored …

Seismic Rehabilitation Of Steel Concentrically Braced Frames Vulnerable To Soft-Story Failure Through Implementation Of Rocking Cores, Francisco Sanchez-Zamora

Master's Theses

Recent research reports that steel Concentrically Braced Frames (CBFs) (even the code-compliant ones) may be susceptible to soft-story failures during strong earthquakes. Such a failure mode causes catastrophic outcomes and should be definitely avoided in practice. This thesis focuses on development and validation of a seismic retrofit strategy for low-rise and mid-rise steel CBFs vulnerable to soft-story failures. The considered retrofit strategy consists of a sufficiently stiff rocking core (RC) pinned to foundation and connected to the existing frame. For demonstration purpose, two representative benchmark steel CBF buildings, which are the three-and six-story CBFs designed forLos Angelesin the SAC Steel …

Bi-Directional Flyback Dc-Dc Converter For Battery System Of The Dc House Project, Austin J. Luan

Master's Theses

The DC House project strongly relies on renewable energy sources to provide power to the house for various loads. However, when these sources are unable to provide power at a certain time, a back-up energy source from a battery must be readily available to fulfill the house’s power needs. This thesis proposes a bi-directional flyback power converter to allow a single-stage power path to charge the battery from and to discharge the battery to the DC House 48 V system bus. The design, simulation, and hardware prototype of the proposed flyback bi-directional converter will be conducted to demonstrate its feasibility. …

Accurate Hardware Raid Simulator, Darrin Kalung Weng

Master's Theses

Computer data storage is growing at an astonishing rate. With cloud computing and the growth of the Internet enterprise storage has been predicted to grow at rates as high as 300\% per year. To fulfill this need technologies such as Redundant Array of Independent Disks or RAID are being used in industry today. Not only does RAID increase I/O performance but also provides redundancy measures to protect against hardware failure. Even though RAID has existed for some time now and is well understood, proprietary optimizations such as command scheduling and cache strategies that are employed by current RAID controllers are …

Comparing Class A Compressed Air Foam Systems (Cafs) Against Plain Water Suppression In Live Fire Gas Cooling Experiments For Interior Structural Firefighting, Sean Carter Mitchell

Master's Theses

Wildland fire services have successfully integrated compressed air foam systems (CAFS) into their fire suppression arsenal over the last few decades to effectively increase the firefighting ability of water. Many urban fire departments have done the same, but far more still rely on plain water to extinguish Class A fires. Many claims have been made about the advantages and disadvantages of firefighting foams, but only limited research has been conducted on the subject to date. Fire departments need more information, beyond that provided by foam suppliers and CAFS equipment manufacturers, to make an independent decision on whether or not to …

Eye "R" Glasses: Development Of An Infrared Sensor System For Detecting The Human Body, Rick Wong

Master's Theses

Throughout the years, sensors have been an integral part of automation, alert, and medical systems. Many of these systems measure physiological characteristics of the human body to alert themselves of their current conditions. Drowsy driver systems, for instance, measure the eyes and facial movements with a camera to determine if the driver is falling asleep at the wheel. Electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), and electromyography (EMG) employ electrodes on the human body to measure electrical activity of a patient’s REM sleep cycle patterns. Pulse oximeters use optical light through a process called photoplethysmography (PPG) to measure heart rate.

As diverse as …

Tracking Points On A Pacing Lead In A Beating Heart, Avinash Ramesh Varma

Master's Theses

Heart failure is a common condition during which the pumping action of the heart is affected because the heart does not contract or relax properly. Heart failure affects about 5 million Americans, with 550,000 new cases diagnosed each year. Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is used to treat symptoms and other complications associated with a heart failure. While performing CRT, Implantation of a pacing lead in the left ventricle of the heart is a very challenging surgical procedure performed with fluoroscopy. The target location is often difficult to reach through the tortuous coronary venous anatomy, which varies greatly among individuals. Placement …

Design Of Portable Dc Light Bulb For The Dc House Project, Jan Marvin Perez Macairan

Master's Theses

This thesis focuses on the design and implementation of the Portable DC Light Bulb system for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s DC House Project. The DC Portable Light Bulb highlights the NiMH battery charging circuit, buck converter, and boost converter. The system is intended as a flashlight adaptor placed in between the dimmable DC light bulb and its screw base. The adaptor adds a portability feature to the DC light bulb to provide lighting wherever the user pleases. The Portable DC Light Bulb system is designed to operate with an input range of 24V-60V and regulate an output voltage of …

Seismic Design Manual For Interlocking Compressed Earth Blocks, Nicholas Edwards Kennedy

Master's Theses

Seismic Design Manual for Interlocking Compressed Earth Blocks

Nicholas Edwards Kennedy

This thesis presents a comprehensive seismic design manual to be used to design and construct simple Interlocking Compressed Earth Block (ICEB) structures in seismically active regions. ICEBs are earth blocks made primarily of soil and stabilized with cement. They have female and male stud mechanisms designed to interlock when stacked, eliminating the need for mortar. The blocks can accept reinforcement and grout after they are placed. While ICEB construction is similar to conventional masonry construction, current design code standards for masonry only partially capture the actual behavior of ICEB …

Early Wildfire Detection Using Temporal Filtering And Multi-Band Infrared Analysis, Ansel John Boynton

Master's Theses

Every year wildfires threaten or destroy ecological habitats, man-made infrastructure and people’s lives. Additionally millions of dollars are spent each year trying to prevent and control these fires. Ideally if a wildfire can be detected before it rages out of control it can be extinguished and avoid large scale devastation. Traditional manned fire lookout towers are neither cost effective nor particularly efficient at detecting wildfire. It is proposed that temporal filtering can be used to isolate the signals created at the beginnings of potential wildfires. Temporal filtering can remove any background image and any periodic signals created by the camera …

A Novel Unit Cell Antenna For Highly Integrated Phased Arrays In The Shf Band, Timothy Bryan Ogilvie

Master's Theses

Phased arrays are electromagnetic antenna systems comprised of many radiating elements and processing electronics. Radiating elements are typically positioned in an orderly grid within the antenna aperture. In the receive mode of operation, radiating elements capture some of the signal energy from incoming radiation and guide these signals to processing electronics. Signals are filtered and amplified to maintain the desired sensitivity and complexly weighted using circuits with reconfigurable amplification gain and phase delay. Finally, all signals are combined. The summation of these complexly weighted spatial samples forms a spatial filter in the same way complexly weighted temporal samples establish a …

Comparison Of Biofilm Media In Reciprocating Biofilters Treating Dairy Flushwater, Kyle Keoki Tatsuo Fooks

Master's Theses

Reciprocating biofilters known as ReCip is a viable technology to manage nutrients, mainly nitrogen, problems at livestock operations such as swine farms and dairies. Past studies have demonstrated that ReCip is more adept at total nitrogen (TN) removal than traditional subsurface flow wetland systems. The traditional substrate used to attach biomass was rock aggregate; this media may be hard to obtain for some agricultural projects, so alternate substrates are tested and compared with the rock aggregate. The purpose of the study was twofold: first, different biofilm media were tested and compared in terms of treatment performance and, second, the long-term …

Settling Performance In Wastewater Fed High Rate Algae Ponds, Elliott Blake Ripley

Master's Theses

Although high rate algae ponds (HRAPs) are a proven wastewater treatment technology with numerous environmental, social, and economic benefits, their widespread use has been hindered by inconsistent and unreliable settling performance. Hence, the goal of this thesis is to investigate how specific operational parameters affect the settling performance of HRAPs. Nine HRAPs (30 m² surface area, 0.3 m depth) were operated as three triplicate sets, with each set run on either a 2, 3, or 4 day HRT continuously from January 25, 2012 through April 11, 2013. Settling performance was determined (i) by measuring the TSS of Imhoff cone …

Cuda Enhanced Filtering In A Pipelined Video Processing Framework, Austin Aaron Dworaczyk Wiltshire

Master's Theses

The processing of digital video has long been a significant computational task for modern x86 processors. With every video frame composed of one to three planes, each consisting of a two-dimensional array of pixel data, and a video clip comprising of thousands of such frames, the sheer volume of data is significant. With the introduction of new high definition video formats such as 4K or stereoscopic 3D, the volume of uncompressed frame data is growing ever larger.

Modern CPUs offer performance enhancements for processing digital video through SIMD instructions such as SSE2 or AVX. However, even with these instruction sets, …

Characterization Of The Effects Of A Sun-Synchronous Orbit Slot Architecture On The Earth's Orbital Debris Environment, Connor David Noyes

Master's Theses

Low Earth orbit represents a valuable limited natural resource. Of particular interest are sun-synchronous orbits; it is estimated that approximately 44% of low Earth satellites are sun-synchronous. A previously developed sun-synchronous orbit slot architecture is considered. An in-depth analysis of the relative motion between satellites and their corresponding slots is performed. The long-term evolution of Earth's orbital environment is modeled by a set of coupled ordinary differential equations. A metric for quantifying the benefit, if any, of implementing a sun-synchronous architecture is developed. The results indicate that the proposed slot architecture would reduce the frequency of collisions between satellites in …

Synthetic Aperture Radar Rapid Detection Of Range And Azimuth Velocities Implemented In Matlab, Cheuk Yu David So

Master's Theses

The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) algorithm processes multiple radar returns from the target space to generate a single high-resolution image. Targets moving through the target space during the capture sequence will appear distorted on the final image. In addition, there is no velocity information that is calculated as part of the processing. The objective of this thesis is to develop techniques to determine the azimuth and range velocities of moving objects in the target space in the early stages of SAR processing. The typical SAR processing steps are Range Compressed, Range Doppler, and final image generation. The range velocity of …

Uav Formation Flight Utilizing A Low Cost, Open Source Configuration, Christian W. Lopez

Master's Theses

The control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a swarm or cooperative team scenario has been a topic of great interest for well over a decade, growing steadily with the advancements in UAV technologies. In the academic community, a majority of the studies conducted rely on simulation to test developed control strategies, with only a few institutions known to have nurtured the infrastructure required to propel multiple UAV control studies beyond simulation and into experimental testing. With the Cal Poly UAV FLOC Project, such an infrastructure was created, paving the way for future experimentation with multiple UAV control systems. …

Early Forest Fire Heat Plume Detection Using Neural Network Classification Of Spectral Differences Between Long-Wave And Mid-Wave Infrared Regions, Raul-Alexander Aldama

Master's Theses

It is difficult to capture the early signs of a forest fire at night using current visible-spectrum sensor technology. Infrared (IR) light sensors, on the other hand, can detect heat plumes expelled at the initial stages of a forest fire around the clock. Long-wave IR (LWIR) is commonly referred to as the “thermal infrared” region where thermal emissions are captured without the need of, or reflections from, external radiation sources. Mid‑wave IR (MWIR) bands lie between the “thermal infrared” and “reflected infrared” (i.e. short-wave IR) regions. Both LWIR and MWIR spectral regions are able to detect thermal radiation; however, they …

Analysis Of Bimetallic Adhesion And Interfacial Toughness Of Kinetic Metallization Coatings, Alec D. Guraydin

Master's Theses

Due to their ability to confer enhanced surface properties without compromising the properties of the substrate, coatings have become ubiquitous in heavy industrial applications for corrosion, wear, and thermal protection, among others. Kinetic Metallization (KM), a solid-state impact consolidation and coating process, is well-suited for depositing industrial coatings due to its versatility, low substrate heat input, and low cost. The ability of KM coatings to adhere to the substrate is determined by the quality of the interface. The purpose of this study is to develop a model to predict the interfacial quality of KM coatings using known coating and substrate …

Analysis And Mitigation Of The Cubesat Dynamic Environment, Steve M. Furger

Master's Theses

A vibration model was developed for CubeSats inside the Poly-Picosatellite Orbital Deployer (P-POD). CubeSats are fixed in the Z axis of deployers, and therefore resonate with deployer peaks. CubeSats generally start fixed in the X and Y axes, and then settle into an isolated position. CubeSats do not resonate with deployers after settling into an isolated position. Experimental data shows that the P-POD amplifies vibration loads when CubeSats are fixed in the deployer, and vibration loads are reduced when the CubeSats settle into an isolated position. A concept for a future deployer was proposed that isolates CubeSats from the deployer …