Engineering Commons^™

Pain Recognition Performance On A Single Board Computer, Iyonna L. Tynes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emotion recognition is a quickly growing field of study due to the increased interest in building systems which can classify and respond to emotions. Recent medical crises, such as the opioid overdose epidemic in the United States and the global COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the importance of emotion recognition applications is areas like Telehealth services. Considering this, this thesis focuses specifically on pain recognition. The problem of pain recognition is approached from both a hardware and software perspective, as we propose a real-time pain recognition system, from facial images, that is deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano single-board computer. We …

Formation Of Gas Jets And Vortex Rings From Bursting Bubbles: Visualization, Kinematics, And Fluid Dynamics, Ali A. Dasouqi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The bursting of bubbles at an air-liquid interface is an important physical process in many environmental and industrial applications. Bubble bursting has implications for climate (e.g. marine aerosol formation; Veron 2015), human respiratory health (e.g. aerosolization of harmful substances; Prather et al 2013), food science (e.g. beer and champagne bubbles; Liger-Belair et al 2009), industry (e.g. processes such as gas fluxing and electrowinning; Zhang et al 2011), and volcanology (e.g. Strombolian eruptions; Chojnicki et al 2015). Much of the previous research into bubble bursting has focused on the fluid dynamics of the liquid component, namely the bubble cap film rupture …

An Investigation Of Cross-Links On Crystallization And Degradation In A Novel, Photocross-Linkable Poly (Lactic Acid) System, Nicholas Baksh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Polymeric molecular structure consists of repeating units bonded together. Mechanicalproperties can be altered without affecting chemical makeup by altering the number of these units. Small molecules can be introduced and/or polymers can be modified to form bonds between molecular chains. Cross-linking, as this is called, also introduces mechanical variation with minimal effects on chemical composition. Lastly, polymer chains reorient themselves in response to intermolecular forces. This temperature dependent response is known as crystallization. Although chemistry is unaltered, mechanical properties can depend highly on the percent of the sample that is crystallized.

Cross-linking is known to enhance the mechanical properties of …

Piezoelectrically-Transduced Zno-On-Diamond Resonators With Enhanced Signal-To-Noise Ratio And Power-Handling Capability For Sensing And Wireless Communication Applications, Xu Han

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Microelectromechanical system (MEMS) resonators emerged a few decades ago, and now they have been well developed and commercially utilized as a core part in many radio frequency (RF) communication hardware as well as micro-sensing and detections for many different latest applications. Since MEMS-based devices are made small thanks to the microfabrication technology's improvement, the cost can be drastically reduced when mass-produced on wafer batches, and the devices still maintain a decent performance with negligible power consumption. This perfectly fits into the requirements of the newest internet-of-thing (IoT) and headset applications. Our previous research mainly focuses on designing and fabricating MEMS …

Multilayered Transmission Lines, Antennas And Phased Arrays With Structurally Integrated Control Electronics Using Additive Manufacturing, Merve Kacar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents high-performance transmission lines, antennas, and phased arrays with novel packaging techniques by harnessing design flexibilities of additive manufacturing (AM). AM enables realizing multilayered RF electronics with complex geometrical structures that are not practical using conventional fabrication methods. Design flexibilities offered by AM as customized dielectric shapes/thicknesses, dielectric properties, metallization on conformal surfaces, and structural packaging are harnessed for multilayered RF applications. Although several works demonstrated the viability of AM for antenna realizations, its capability for addressing the needs of wideband, high radiation efficiency antenna systems packaged with active RF circuit components remains relatively unexplored. The first major …

Designing Next-Generation Transportation Systems With Emerging Vehicle Technologies, Zhiwei Chen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent advances in computing and artificial intelligence have enabled the development of various emerging vehicle technologies, e.g., autonomous vehicles (AV) and modular autonomous vehicles (MAV). These technologies bring new scientific and engineering problems challenging transportation researchers and practitioners. This dissertation aims to develop a suite of scalable computational and analytical tools for designing and analyzing next-generation transportation systems with the MAV technologies. Also, we intend to empirically study the system impacts in terms of the quality of service, energy implications, and inequality impacts.

For MAV system design, we develop a methodological framework centering at theoretical properties of the optimal system …

Reading And Programming Spintronic Devices For Biomimetic Applications And Fault-Tolerant Memory Design, Kawsher Ahmed Roxy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the triumph of conventional computing architectures till today, there emerges a lotof computing problems that are solved poorly by them. The reason behind this are twofold: i) the computing algorithm is incompetent in solving those problems, and ii) non-ideal effects of the traditional device technologies outperform the benets of using them. Hence, extensive research eorts have been put to devise novel algorithms as well as new devices. Among them spintronic devices demonstrate better performance in traditional architectures as well as offers way better solution to a lot of new problems when bundled with unconventional computing algorithms. Apart from being …

Micro-Architectural Countermeasures For Control Flow And Misspeculation Based Software Attacks, Love Kumar Sah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Embedded system applications in diverse sectors such as transportation, healthcare, homeautomation, etc., have been gathering, processing, and transporting data using embedded computers connected to vast networks. As the usage of these embedded devices in daily life is increasing exponentially, security of these devices is a growing concern amongst the users. An alarming rise in recent cyber-attacks has deepened such concern. In the recent past, software-based attacks are more sophisticated and larger in scale than previously known. An embedded processor depends on a compiler to use the architecture efficiently. The compiler generates object code to efficiently utilize the micro-architecture for storage …

Isolation Of Specific Phospholipids From Nannochloropsis Oculata Microalga For Cosmetic Applications, Ahmet Yener Manisali

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Algae, photosynthetic aquatic organisms, have recently caught the attention of the food, cosmetic, pharmaceutical, and nutraceutical industries due to the variety of natural compounds in their cellular bodies such as carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins. Specifically, microalgae-derived natural compounds such as phospholipids are extensively utilized in cosmetics as part of liposome formers, emulsifiers, solubilizers, and wetting agents. Although phospholipids are currently extracted from food sources, this practice raises sustainability concerns. Hence, growing microalgae on the provision of macronutrients such as nitrates and phosphates will serve as a more sustainable source of the several specific phospholipids such as phosphatidylcholine (PC), phosphatidyl-ethanolamine (PE), …

Experimental Investigation Of Liquid Height Estimation And Simulation Verification Of Bolt Tension Quantification Using Surface Acoustic Waves, Hani Alhazmi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, two separate applications that are related to surface acoustic waves in a solid media are presented. The first study concerns simulating and validating an experimentally study for quantifying the bolt tension in the bolted joints using the surface acoustic wave. The second study experimentally investigates measuring the level of a liquid existing on a solid surface via surface acoustic waves and exploring the effect of liquid existence on the propagation of surface acoustic waves over the solid surface.

Quantifying bolt tension and ensuring that bolts are appropriately tightened for large-scale civil infrastructures are crucial. This study investigates …

Conversion From Metal Oxide To Mof Thin Films As A Platform Of Chemical Sensing, Meng Chen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chemical sensor is working as a widely used device which can be applied to the detection of specific chemicals that are existing in the environment especially in gas phase. The detection of combustible and toxic chemicals can be extremely important in the field of both industrial and civil activities. The chemical sensor is commonly operating by utilizing a chemical or physical interaction between the specific chemical compound and the sensing functional unit, to obtain an electronic signal caused by the property change and realize the chemical detection. Traditional chemical gas sensors such as catalytic gas sensor, thermal conductivity gas sensor, …

Cost Efficient Algorithms And Methods For Spectral Efficiency In Future Radio Access, Murat Karabacak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The growing interest in data-hungry wireless applications of mobile devices has led the cellular industry to look for new frequencies and new techniques for utilization of next-generation wireless technologies. As millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication becoming a promising solution, It can provide greater bandwidth and higher data rates in future radio access. While in the hostile environment of mmWave bands, the signals suffer from high propagation loss, the smaller wavelengths of mmWave frequencies make it possible to practically pack a large number of antennas with reasonable form factors. Thus, mmWave communication can provide directional transmission with high gain antenna arrays to penetrate …

Design And Implementation Of Solid/Solid Phononic Crystal Structures In Lateral Extensional Thin-Film Piezoelectric On Silicon Micromechanical Resonators, Abdulrahman Alsolami

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Achieving high quality factor in MEMS resonator devices is a critical demand for today’s wireless communication and sensing technologies. In order to reach this goal, several dedicated prior works have been conducted based on published literature at different frequency ranges. Particularly, piezoelectrically transduced resonators, which are widely deployed in commercial wireless communication systems, could benefit from greatly improved qualify factor. So far, their development has evolved from thin film bulk acoustic resonators (FBAR’s) using surface attached piezoelectric thin-film transducers with moderate Q factors to high Q resonators equipped with a side-supporting tether (anchor) attached vibrating resonators that allow the devices …

The Utilization Of Shared Energy Storage In Energy Systems: Design, Modeling And Optimization, Rui Dai

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Energy storage (ES) plays a significant role in modern smart grids and energy systems. With the advances of ES technologies, efficiently applying ES to energy systems has become the bottleneck for achieving the benefits of ES. The traditional approach of utilizing ES is the so-called distributed framework in which there is a separate ES for each individual user. Due to the inherent limits in the distributed framework such as cost inefficiency and space limitations, many studies have promoted to utilize a shared ES in energy systems to further exploit the potentials of ES. However, current studies always focus on maximizing …

Tuning Degradation And Cell Adhesion In Next Generation Resorbable Implants, Ufuomaroghene Ikoba

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Osteoarthritic and bone degenerative diseases are expected to grow immensely as the aging population, 65 years and older increases. Orthopedic implants are one sub-class of medical devices that are used to treat bone breaks and fractures. Traditionally, internal fixation implants are manufactured using titanium or stainless steel. Magnesium, a bioresorbable and biodegradable material, has been proposed as an alternative to titanium and stainless steel. The goal of this research is to control the degradation behavior of magnesium implants by developing crystallized thin poly(lactic acid) copolymer films as protective coatings. To do this, this work was divided into two aims. Aim …

Hybrid Rf Acoustic Resonators And Arrays With Integrated Capacitive And Piezoelectric Transducers, Adnan Zaman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the past few decades, the usage of mobile communication devices such as smartphones, laptop computers, tablets has grown significantly. Clearly, smartphones and other mobile gadgets have been leading the current and emerging market thanks to the fast growing of wireless communications. Therefore, the wireless communications market is constantly looking for new ways to miniaturize the RF front-ends, while reducing the size, cost, and power consumption. Radio frequency microelectromechanical systems (RF MEMS) is widely viewed as a potential enabling technology for the multi-standard monolithic transceivers on a single chip with high reliability, high performance, and very low DC power consumption. …

Opto-Fluidic Manipulation Of Microparticles And Related Applications, Hao Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary biomedical technologies introduce many new instruments that are important for diagnosis and treatment of the patients. Instrument that can do rapid detection of bacterial infections, and further direct medical practitioner to prescribe optimal antibiotics is highly desirable. But unfortunately, this instrument is not available yet. Ideally, this instrument has to be portable to be used at point-of-care. This means it has to be small and inexpensive, but still highly accurate. Another critical requirement for the instrument is that the test results have to be available promptly. Because in case of such complications of bacterial infections as sepsis, each additional …

Design And Implementation Of Intuitive Human-Robot Teleoperation Interfaces, Lei Wu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We have designed and implemented a novel human-robot teleoperation interface based on an intuitive reference frame and hybrid inverse kinematics to perform activities of daily living(ADL) using multiple input devices.

Persons with disabilities often rely on caregivers or family members to assist in their daily living activities. Providing robotic assistants with easy and intuitive user interfaces to assist with ADL can improve their quality of life and lift some of the burdens on caregivers and family members. Current human-robot interface solutions, such as joysticks, Kinect based gesture recognition, and touchscreen-based solutions, including smartphones, are still far from being able to …

Coral Reef Restoration In The Tropical West Atlantic Amid The Covid-19 Pandemic, Linden Cheek

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is increasing threats to coasts, both from storm surge and sea level rise. Healthy coral reefs provide reduction in storm surges, wave energy, coastal flooding and everyday erosion, and are found across a variety of spatial scales. Given the state of coral reefs worldwide, active Coral Reef Restoration (CRR) in emerging as a necessary component of coastal protection. CRR can be classified as a nature-based solutions (NbS) for coastal protection that also provides a multitude of ecosystem-based services to both humans and other life. Nearly all literature on coral restoration efforts assume a steady-state of human-ecological interactions, but …

A Framework For Assessing The Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, And Safety (Rams) Of Decentralized Sanitation, Adefunké Adeosun

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In established industry sectors, Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety (RAMS) risk assessments are normally used to compare the risks associated with different technologies on process units. Sanitation solutions are split into traditional wastewater treatment which is centralized treatment and can be classified as an established industry, and decentralized treatment such as pit latrines and septic tank systems which are on much smaller scales. Also they can be classified as non-conventional methods such as reinvented advanced decentralized non-sewered sanitation solution techniques exist mainly in two forms as “Single-User Reinvented Toilet (SURT)” systems or “Multiple-User Reinvented Toilet (MURT)” systems. Advanced decentralized non-sewered …

Efficient Neural Architecture Search With Multiobjective Evolutionary Optimization, Maria Gabriela Baldeón Calisto

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Deep neural networks have become very successful at solving many complex tasks such as image classification, image segmentation, and speech recognition. These models are composed of multiple layers that have the capacity to learn increasingly higher-level features, without prior handcrafted specifications. However, the success of a deep neural network relies on finding the proper configuration for the task in hand. Given the vast number of hyperparameters and the massive search space, manually designing or fine-tuning deep learning architectures requires extensive knowledge, time, and computational resources.

There is a growing interest in developing methods that automatically design a neural network´s architecture, …

Laser-Induced Modifications In Two-Dimensional Materials, Tariq Afaneh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials have attracted a growing interest in the lastdecade from the fundamental point of view as well as their potential applications in functional devices. Due to their high surface-to-volume ratio, the physical properties of 2D materials are very sensitive to the environmental factor such as surrounding media and illumination conditions (e.g. light-mater interaction). In the first part of this dissertation I will present recent advances in developing laser-assisted methods to tune the physical properties of 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). We demonstrate laser-assisted chemical modification ultrathin TMDs, locally replacing selenium by sulfur atoms. The photo-conversion process …

Sustainable Non-Noble Metal Based Catalysts For High Performance Oxygen Electrocatalysis, Swetha Ramani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current energy crisis has dramatically shifted the focus of technological advancements towards clean and renewable forms of energy. Continued dependence and utilization of fossil fuels has created global awareness on harmful greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. A need for sustainable technology has gained a lot of significance in the recent years. This has led to the development of devices and technologies that rely on environmentally friendly electrochemical conversion and storage of energy. One such advancement that generates electrical energy from chemical reactions is known as fuel cell technology. While fuel cells have demonstrated potential in replacing the conventional technologies …

Edge Computing For Deep Learning-Based Distributed Real-Time Object Detection On Iot Constrained Platforms At Low Frame Rate, Lakshmikavya Kalyanam

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the era of IoT (Internet of Things) and edge computing, there is a rising need for real-time applications in the domain of computer vision. The increase in hardware computing capabilities gave rise to applications of neural networks in various fields. Implementing IoT with neural networks in domains such as image and video recognition has shown promising performance when deployed in complex environments. There is an emerging demand for applications that require data computation in real-time with low latency. In an effort to address these issues, while keeping in mind the computing capabilities of IoT devices, we seek to develop …

Spatial Stereo Sound Source Localization Optimization And Cnn Based Source Feature Recognition, Cong Xu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the process of propagating as a carrier of information in space, in addition to transmitting the information itself, the acoustic signal also contains the position information of the sound source itself and its related physical characteristics. Acoustic signal uses the medium (such as air, water, steel, etc.) in the space to transmit mechanical vibration and longitudinal waves from the sound source to the outside world. The traditional single audio collection device cannot collect position information and sound source characteristic information. Therefore, the signals processed in the audio signal processing process are all mixed source acoustic signals after spatial reverberation. …

Architecture Design And Optimization Of Edge-Enabled Smart Grids, Adetola B. Adeniran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of modern monitoring, communication, computation, and controlequipment into power systems has made them evolve into smart grids that can be thought of as the electric grid of things. This evolution has enhanced the efficiency of the power systems through the availability of a large volume of system data that can help with system functions, nevertheless, it has intensified the communication and computation burden on these systems. While many of such computations were traditionally deployed in central servers, new technologies such as edge computing can provide unique opportunities to address some of the computational challenges and improve the responsiveness …

Use Of Sugarcane Bagasse Ash As Partial Cement Replacement In Interlocking Stabilized Soil Blocks (Issbs), Adah Shair

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Global infrastructure needs for adequate housing, water provision and improved sanitation are on the rise. UN-Water estimates that 1 in 3 people still lack access to safe drinking water and about 4.2 billion people across the globe lack access to safely managed sanitation services. Rapid urbanization and the global refugee crisis have also increased the demand for adequate and efficient housing. UN Sustainable Development Goals cannot be achieved until these needs are met. Given the high environmental impact and cost of cement-heavy construction, alternate construction techniques like appropriate earth technologies need to be adopted. Interlocking stabilized soil blocks (ISSBs), a …

Strength Restoration Of Corrosion Damaged Piles Repaired With Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer Systems, Jethro Clarke

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Of the 12,741 bridges accounted for by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), approximately 50% were built between the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, bridges were typically constructed in coastal environments using pile bents. Now, the main threat to bridges in these environments is corrosion, which occurs in the splash zones of most bridge piles. These zones contain high concentrations of chlorides, oxygen and moisture, the corner stones of a highly corrosive environment. Corrosion compromises steel reinforcement in these areas leading to cracking, spalling and an inevitable loss of capacity.

In recent years, significant strides have been made in …

Roboat - Rescue Operations Bot Operating In All Terrains, Akshay Gulhane

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Natural calamities are on a rise with each passing year. Disasters like floods and fire take many lives all around the world, especially in remote areas or less developed countries. One such incident was the Kerala Floods in India where rescue services had difficulty reaching to all the people on time since a huge landmass (more than 9 districts) was flooded and hence villagers or other people risked their lives to save others in danger without proper safety equipment. Amazon Rainforest Fires was another example for a major destruction of an ecosystem. The main reason for lack of facilities in …

Mitigation Of Electromigration In Metal Interconnects Passivated By Ångstrom-Thin 2d Materials, Yunjo Jeong

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Electromigration in metal interconnects remains one of the most prominent challenges in the state-of-the-art semiconductor industry. A phenomenon defined as the momentum transfer from electrons in an electric current to the metal atoms in a conductor, electromigration creates voids and hillocks that ultimately cause failures in nanoelectronics due to short or open circuits. Additionally, electromigration induces undesirable diffusion of metal atoms into the dielectric material, forcing the need for a barrier material that can mitigate such adverse effects of the phenomenon. However, extremely tight dimensional control of modern transistor designs imposes reduced dimensions of the interconnects in order to accommodate …