Engineering Commons^™

Stakeholder Perspective-Taking In Engineering Design: A Neurocognitive Approach, Megan C. Taylor

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Stakeholder engagement is a critically important yet overlooked phase of engineering design. While addressing stakeholders is known to lead to more thoughtful design outcomes, little work has been done regarding how stakeholder personas influence brain activity while designing. This study asks if the introduction of stakeholder personas- short overviews of people affected by a design problem- affects brain activation in undergraduate students during three design tasks: stakeholder identification, stakeholder needs generation, and stakeholder needs prioritization. To test this, 18 undergraduate mechanical engineering students were given a stormwater management design vignette; one group was given four stakeholder personas, while the control …

Pilot Age And Accident Rates In General Aviation: Analysis And Recommendations, Jackson E. Jolley

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

General aviation accounts for approximately 94% of all civil aviation accidents in the United States, highlighting the need to examine how pilot characteristics and operational factors influence accident risk. With the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) projecting continued growth in the general aviation pilot population, this study examines the relationship between pilot age, flight experience, and accident risk to inform training and safety interventions. Using the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident records from 2008–2024, along with FAA pilot registration data, we analyze age-related trends in accident likelihood, risk, and phase-of-flight distributions in general aviation operations.

Results show an approximately exponential …

Tribological Evaluation Of A Graphite Coating Using A Custom Miniature Conveyor, Shae Threlfall

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Reducing friction in conveyor systems has significant economic and environmental implications, as a substantial portion of energy losses originates at the belt-bed interface. This thesis outlines the design, construction, and validation of a miniature conveyor tribological test system. Unlike conventional tribometers, which impose concentrated point contacts, the miniature conveyor replicates the distributed load consistent with industrial conveyor systems. It can measure real-time mechanical responses of steel samples coated in a low friction coating.

The mini conveyor was validated by evaluating three materials: uncoated mild steel, PDA/graphite coated steel, and Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). Electrical power, temperature, sound, and acceleration were recorded. Electrical …

Turbulent Plenum Jet-Crossflow Validation Via Subgrid Scale Model Variation And Upstream Forcing Under Dynamic Hybrid Rans-Les, Cole W. Mccallum

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In modern gas turbine design, film cooling has become ubiquitous as a method for limiting heat transfer between high temperature gases post-combustion and the surface of downstream blades. This paper validates the use of various computational fluid dynamics techniques in recreating an experiment measuring adiabatic effectiveness over a surface downstream of a compound-angle N2 plenum jet incident on a turbulent-air boundary layer [1]. To do this, both RANS and Dynamic Hybrid RANS-LES (DHRL) methods are implemented and compared to previous research [2]. The latter method is then modified through implementation of a different subgrid scale (SGS) model and through addition …

A Review Of Ufgs And Ufc Specifications For The Mixture Design Process Of Military Airfield Concrete Pavements, Emaduddin Ahmad

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Military airfield concrete pavements require exceptional durability and performance, guided by the stringent criteria of the Department of Defense (DoD) Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC) 3-25-04 and Unified Facilities Guide Specifications (UFGS) 32 13 14.13. Currently, the mixture design approval contains severe pre-construction bottlenecks, primarily due to comprehensive requirements of testing all aggregate sources within six months of project commencement. This rigid approach forces redundant and time-consuming laboratory tests, such as the ASTM C666 freeze-thaw durability test, to be conducted even when utilizing consistent aggregate sources. This thesis reviews the current UFGS mixture design process to identify critical bottlenecks in the …

Mitigating Inertial Measurement Unit Drift In Quadcopter Trajectory Tracking Using Kalman Filter Sensor Fusion With Global Positioning Measurements, Juan Sandro Caballero Aguilar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) like quadcopters are widely used in civilian and military applications such as farming, photography, search and rescue missions, and autonomous navigation and motion. The performance and stability of these systems depend on accurate state estimation, which provides real-time information about the vehicle’s position, velocity, and orientation. However, achieving reliable state estimation is challenging due to sensor noise, measurement uncertainty, and inaccurate modeling. Common navigation sensors such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) and Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) exhibit complementary characteristics. GPS provides absolute position measurements but suffers from noise, multipath effects, and low update rates, while …

Engineering Silicone Magnetic Fluids For Localized Radiation Attenuation During Ocular Melanoma Brachytherapy, Zachary L. Caprow

All Dissertations

Ocular melanoma is commonly treated using plaque brachytherapy; however, radiation-induced damage to healthy ocular tissues frequently results in partial or complete vision loss. This work investigates the development of an injectable, magnetically responsive silicone magnetic fluid designed to localize adjacent to the tumor and attenuate low-energy gamma radiation during treatment.

The material system consists of iron oxide nanoparticles surface-functionalized with a siloxane polymer, in which the nanoparticles provide magnetic responsiveness and radiation attenuation, while the polymer coating ensures colloidal stability, injectability, and biocompatibility. A one-pot synthetic approach was developed wherein a functionalized siloxane polymer containing iron-affinitive groups was reacted with …

Sb 1953 Field Execution Under Hcai Oversight: Seismic Retrofit At Zsfg Building 5, Victor Lucas

Construction Management

Every hospital in California must be seismically compliant by 2030 under Senate Bill 1953, which is enforced by the Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI). HCAI approves and inspects all hospital construction in the state, and its authority reaches into the field, so a contractor cannot simply build to an approved drawing the way it would on a commercial job. This paper explains how that approval system governs the work, written for construction professionals entering hospital work in California whose experience to that point has been commercial. It uses the ZSFG Building 5 Voluntary Seismic Upgrade, a 1976 …

Preconstruction Services For Slo Youth Baseball Bull Pen And Batting Cage, Sofia E. Cuevas

Construction Management

San Luis Obispo Youth Baseball is a nonprofit organization servicing the local youth of San Luis Obispo, California. Offering recreational, all-star, and club programs, SLO Youth Baseball provides the experience of baseball to all levels of skill in the community. In preparation for the Spring 2026 season and beyond, SLOYB has proposed the construction of a bull pen and batting cage on the third base line at their very own Stockton Field. In order to service the community at large, this design came with a set of strict parameters: accessibility, longevity, and serviceability. In doing so, SLOYB has requested flexibility …

Sheep Pen Improvements At City Farm Slo, Ryan S. Bodmer

Construction Management

City Farm SLO is an urban non-profit educational farm located in San Luis Obispo, CA. It serves the community through offering farm learning programs, including hands-on experience in sustainable farming practices and livestock care. This project, completed over the winter and spring quarters, focused on delivering an upgraded sheep pen to improve access and safety for both volunteers and sheep. The project consisted of developing design plans, coordination of materials and allowable working times with the owner, where the animals were either moved out of the working area or when work would not jeopardize animal health, schedule creation, cost estimates, …

Skip The Grid: Turning Solar Planning Into Power For Navajo Nation Homes, Alexandr B. Miller

Construction Management

Skip the Grid is a cross-disciplinary experiential learning initiative that delivers clean energy infrastructure to households with school-age children residing in the Navajo and Hopi Nations. In March 2026, a cohort of 23 students drawn from five academic programs at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) joined forces with Heart of America (HOA), SOLV Energy, and NextPower to carry out the initiative's fifth consecutive year. The program aimed to enhance living standards and bolster academic achievement by ensuring dependable access to power, illumination, and food preservation in resource-limited communities. Participants were divided into five installation teams comprising Cal Poly students, …

Dirt Finder (Drtfndr): A Marketplace Application For Construction Earthwork, Evan A. Reed

Construction Management

The construction industry regularly produces a surplus of earthwork materials: clean fill, topsoil, gravel, and crushed concrete, that are disposed of at considerable cost. All the while, contractors actively seek those same materials, and no dedicated digital platform existed to connect these two groups efficiently. DrtFndr ("Dirt Finder") is a mobile-first web application developed to address this gap, providing a marketplace where contractors can post available or needed earthwork materials, browse geographically filtered listings by material type and proximity, and connect directly with other users. The application was built using Base44, an AI-powered application development platform, and includes real-time mapping, …

Automating Building Feature Recognition In Digital Twin Models Using Computer Vision, Jaron Harbison

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Standard 3D scans treat all surfaces as generic geometry, but Wi-Fi signals don't. A signal drops by a different magnitude through a wooden door than a concrete wall. Without labeling these materials, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) cannot accurately predict "dead zones". This project addresses that gap by creating a machine learning model that identifies structural and architectural features. This includes features such as walls, doors, windows, and columns directly from RGB-D (Red, Green, Blue, Depth) point cloud data. 

I constructed the model on a custom U-Net architecture featuring a symmetric encoder-decoder structure with skip connections, trained on the StructScan3D dataset …

Tau Beta Pi Engineering Mentorship Program, Tyler Black

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project is to design and implement a student-led engineering mentorship program directed by the members of the Utah Gamma Chapter of Tau Beta Pi on the Utah State University (USU) Logan campus. Retention data show that many undergraduate students who start engineering programs change their degree before graduation due to academic and social challenges that may be mitigated by the support of a peer mentor. The Tau Beta Pi Engineering Mentorship Program selects and trains upperclassman mentors to effectively mentor underclassman engineering students.

The design of the mentorship program is an application of backward design, where …

Analysis Of Oscillating Flow Over A 2-D Airfoil With Flow Reversal, Colter Couillard-Rodak

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Finite-state models are useful tools in modeling the aerodynamics of rotorcraft in flight simulators. 2-D and 3-D finite-state models have been developed and compared to closed form solutions, however these models are currently unable to handle situations where the freestream changes directions and the rotor re-enters its own wake. A 2-D finite state model was previously developed that includes a parameter that accounts for the change in free stream. This model, however, contains an inherent stability issue at the instant that the velocity changes direction.

The effects of this instability can be mitigated in certain flow conditions. A purely oscillatory …

Side-To-Side Differences In Three-Dimensional Femoral Head Coverage Associated With Initial Symptom Development In Patients With Bilateral Developmental Dysplasia Of The Hip, Jiayi Sun

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) is characterized by insufficient acetabular coverage of the femoral head and is a recognized cause of hip pain, instability, and early osteoarthritis. Although bilateral deformity is common, symptoms often first develop in only one hip. The purposes of this study were: (1) to determine whether, in patients with bilateral DDH, side-to-side differences in three-dimensional (3D) femoral head coverage vary according to radiographic symmetry defined by the lateral center-edge angle (LCEA); and (2) to determine whether hips that appear radiographically symmetric still demonstrate focal 3D asymmetry.

This retrospective imaging-based study included patients with bilateral DDH …

Board-Level Operating System Infrastructure In Rust, Lydia Klaus

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Memory and multi-threading problems are the cause of many exploits and security vulnerabilities, and errors of this nature are easy to cause in programming languages such as C and C++. Despite this, these languages are still heavily used for systems programming and underpin the majority of operating system kernels. This is partially due to a lack of suitable replacements; however, Rust is becoming more prominent as an option for systems programming. This language features a much more stringent approach to memory and multi-threading safety. It also aims to support a wide range of hardware targets, including microcontrollers, which have long …

Learning Adaptive Control For Safe Collaborative Autonomous Driving, Fabian Alexis Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

Connected autonomous vehicles improve urban driving through collaborative perception via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. Frameworks such as V2Xverse leverage this collaboration for planning and perception, yet their controllers rely on fixed parameters that cannot adapt to varying traffic. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) enforce safety by constraining actions within a safe set, but a fixed barrier gain imposes a single operating point: conservative settings reduce throughput while permissive settings under-react to hazards.

This research proposes an adaptive CBF framework that learns state-dependent, class-specific barrier gains via constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL). A compact policy outputs separate gains for vehicles, pedestrians, and bicycles, parameterizing …

Exit Topology Effects On Low-Mach Jet Impingement, Alejandro Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

Planar PIV characterizes a low‑Mach (M = 0.05) air jet impinging normally on a plate at fixed spacing H/D = 4.0. Four nozzles of equal hydraulic diameter (D = 50.8 mm) are compared: circular, rectangular (AR 3), diamond, and elliptical (AR 2); asymmetric exits are tested in major and minor orientations. Mean velocity, azimuthal vorticity, and turbulence kinetic energy reveal that exit topology strongly modulates the stagnation footprint and shear‑layer growth. The circular jet forms the canonical toroidal wall jet and a narrow stagnation core (dₛ = 0.9D). Orienting the rectangular major axis toward the plate elongates the core to …

The Role Of Operational Context In Shaping Energy Management Portfolios: A Comparative Case Study Of Two Manufacturing Facilities, Cynthia Aranda

Theses and Dissertations

Using two facilities as illustrative examples, this research investigates how a manufacturing plant's operational and financial context may influence its investment decisions in energy-efficiency measures. This challenges the primacy of the simple payback period (SPP) as a screening tool and instead demonstrates the role of operational context in investment decision-making. To this extent, this study is anchored to a qualitative comparative case study analysis of two ITAC energy assessments for two manufacturing plants in Texas: a higher value-added aerospace MRO plant (GE Aerospace, TR0060) versus a cost-sensitive automotive stamping plant (UMP Metal Stamping, TR0061). The two cases illustrate two different …

Sub-Ghz Propagation Along Freight Trains For Wireless Onboard Communications, Dario Hinojosa

Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing length of freight trains, maintaining reliable wireless communication for onboard sensors has become increasingly challenging. Sub-GHz communication bands are a promising solution due to their long-range capability and suitability for rural railway environments. This study analyzes radio wave propagation around freight railcars to evaluate path loss and determine how antenna polarization affects wireless communication performance.

Time-domain full-wave electromagnetic simulations were performed using simplified railcar models and later validated through field testing using a vector signal generator, vector network analyzer (VNA), and spectrum analyzer. Various antenna polarization configurations were evaluated within the Sub-GHz Long Range (LoRa) frequency band …

Faster Than The Speed Of Bram: In-Memory Computing For Next Generation Fpgas On The Edge, Nathaniel Joseph Fredricks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Traditional computer systems are hitting the Memory Wall as machine learning applications are bottlenecked by the bandwidth between separate memory and compute units. Current FPGA architectures are able to bypass this bottleneck with block RAMs (BRAMs) that provide on-chip, in-fabric storage. However, their potential as the foundation of computing components is often overlooked; machine learning accelerators implemented on FPGAs face additional delays when transferring data between memory and compute units. These penalties arise from BRAM bandwidth limitations and movement of data through the reconfigurable fabric. To support FPGA-based accelerators on the edge and break the Memory Wall, reconfigurable architectures must …

Design And Optimization To Advance Silicon Carbide Modules For Medium Voltage High Power Applications, Ahmed Ismail

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The commercial availability of the first 10 kV silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET removes the principal semiconductor barrier to medium-voltage power conversion, enabling converter topologies that are structurally inaccessible to silicon IGBT solutions at this voltage class. This dissertation presents the characterization infrastructure, device-level data, and preliminary system-level validation needed to advance the deployment of the third-generation 10 kV SiC MOSFET in converter applications. A custom-built 10 kV double-pulse test platform is developed with a fully documented component-sizing methodology, custom medium-voltage magnetics, and a measurement infrastructure capable of high bandwidth waveform capture at kilovolt common-mode potentials. On this platform, the third-generation …

Development And Characterization Of 1200v And 1700v Sic Schottky Barrier Diode For Power Electronics Applications, Nur-E-Afra Anika

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The growing demand for energy-efficient, high performance power electronics in applications such as renewable energy systems, electric vehicles, industrial motor drives, and aerospace has accelerated the development of wide bandgap semiconductors like Silicon Carbide (SiC). This thesis focuses on the development and characterization of 1200V and 1700V SiC Schottky Barrier Diodes (SBDs), focusing on their performance optimization for power electronics applications. The key parameters and figure of merits for SiC Schottky barrier diode (SBD) is discussed. Commercially available 1200V and 1700V SBDs are characterized and key design parameters like drift region length, active area, and carrier concentration are extracted. The …

A Novel Approach To Creativity Assessment: Forced Pairwise Ranking With Large Language Models, Phillip R. Gregory Jr

Master's Theses

Assessing creativity at scale remains a persistent challenge in cognitive science, as human raters are costly, slow, and often inconsistent in their judgments. This thesis introduced a novel framework for automated scientific creativity assessment using forced pairwise ranking, in which fine-tuned large language models compared response pairs and determined which was more creative. Five empirical studies were conducted using Llama-2-7B and Llama-2-13B models adapted via LoRA fine-tuning and benchmarked against human scored responses from the Scientific Creative Thinking Test. A regression baseline achieved Pearson �� = .74 on the test set, matching the human inter-rater ceiling reported in the literature. …

Spatial And Seasonal Concentrations Of Atmospheric Halogens Around The Great Salt Lake (2023/2024), Himalaya Sapkota

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

The Great Salt Lake (GSL), located in northern Utah, is one of the world's saltiest lakes and an essential resource for industry. It is also a significant hotspot for halogen emissions, including chlorine (Cl) and bromine (Br) from both natural and human sources. Although their concentrations in the atmosphere are low, they influence tropospheric chemistry by forming criteria pollutants such as ozone and particulate matter. These pollutants are detrimental to air quality, impacting public health and property. This study investigates the spatial and seasonal variability of halogen species (gas- and particulate-phase of Cl and Br) in the Northern Wasatch Front …

From Data Digitization To Personalized Care: Deep Learning And Decision Analytics In Healthcare Systems, Ahla Ko

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces a progression from foundational data infrastructure to individualized clinical decision-making, developing and evaluating three computational frameworks that advance healthcare efficiency and personalization through deep learning and decision analytics. The first study presents an end-to-end pipeline for automated recognition of handwritten medical forms, addressing persistent challenges in health data digitization. Integrating a YOLO-based field detection model, a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) for text transcription, and a confidence-based human-in-the-loop quality assurance framework, the system achieved 99.75\% Exact Match Accuracy and a 0.13\% Character Error Rate on medical forms collected from a tuberculosis research project in Moldova. A GPU-accelerated …

Investigation Into The Effects Of Moderate-Dose Radiation On Ligament Biomechanics, Andrew Landefeld

All Theses

Recent advances in arthritis treatment pin ionizing X-ray radiation as a useful tool in reducing joint pain and immune response. However, due to a lack of fundamental research in the effects of low-dose ionizing radiation on tendon and ligament biomechanics, the safety of these studies is rather unknown. While most related studies investigated cellular response to low dose treatment, surrounding tissue physiology is left out of the picture. Additionally, moderate range doses of irradiation are rarely studied, as most uses of radiation on tendons and ligaments are for sterilization of cadaver tendons for allografts. This study provides a preliminary investigation …

Feasibility Study Of Transitioning From Thick Plates (0.250”) Mounted On 30-Point Pvc Carriers To Thinner Plate Technologies Mounted On Recyclable Foam And Pet (0.155”) For Post-Print Corrugated, Nathaniel J. Poole

All Theses

In the United States, the most common press configuration for brown-box printing is a 0.280” undercut press. These press configurations have long relied on thick 0.250” plates mounted on 0.030” PVC sheets to print onto corrugated substrates. Each year, around twenty million pounds of waste are produced by the printing industry, through paper waste, plate waste, among other materials. One large factor of that waste is flexographic plate waste, which either ends its life in a landfill or is repurposed into other products. This study establishes a comparison between traditionally used 0.250” plates on 30pt PVC versus 0.155” plates mounted …

Robust Hardware Trojan Detection Leveraging Dual‑Domain Features And Stacked Ensemble Learning, Sefatun-Noor Puspa

All Theses

In Cyber-physical systems rely on sensors, communication, and computing, all powered by integrated circuits (ICs). These ICs are vulnerable to malicious hardware attacks, with hardware Trojans being one of the stealthiest threats. Trojans are malicious implants in the circuitry, which are often inserted during design or fabrication stages. This stealthy addition remains dormant until triggered and might cause functional disruptions or sensitive information leakage once triggered. Traditional IC validation methods, such as functional testing and logic analysis, usually fail to capture these subtle anomalies because hardware Trojans are intentionally designed to mimic normal circuit behavior. They often remain dormant under …