Engineering Commons^™

Design And Evaluation Of Processes For Fuel Fabrication, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

One of the primary concerns in selecting a fuel matrix for actinide-bearing fuels, such as those for transmutation systems, is fuel fabrication. Fuel fabrication technologies for the fabrication and re-fabrication processes must meet several technical considerations, such as minimizing secondary radioactive waste streams, economic viability, reasonable capital outlay, and must be easy to maintain over the transmuter core life cycle. Additionally, the fuel type chosen must be easily manufactured in a remote environment. The volatile behavior of americium during thermal processing further complicates these goals. Currently, the national program is investigating a number of candidate fuel matrices: metallic, ceramic, dispersion, …

Management Of Engineering Consulting Firms In Malaysia : Practices And Problems, Sherena S. Siva Ahnanthan

Student Works (2000-2009)

This is a study of engineering consulting firms in Malaysia that aspire to be major players in the competitive local and regional engineering and construction industry. Engineering consulting firms play an important role in the economic growth and development of a country. This is because of the direct contribution of the services to the design and implementation of investment projects, and together with the inter-linkages they produce between the different parts of the economy. The study identifies and evaluates some of the major management practices and problems faced by the industry in general and the companies in particular. A business …

Kalman Filtering With State Equality Constraints, Daniel J. Simon, Tien Li Chia

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Kalman filters are commonly used to estimate the states of a dynamic system. However, in the application of Kalman filters there is often known model or signal information that is either ignored or dealt with heuristically. For instance, constraints on state values (which may be based on physical considerations) are often neglected because they do not fit easily into the structure of the Kalman filter. A rigorous analytic method of incorporating state equality constraints in the Kalman filter is developed. The constraints may be time varying. At each time step the unconstrained Kalman filter solution is projected onto the state …

Modeling The Evolution Of Anisotropy In Al-Li Alloys: Application To Al–Li 2090-T8e41, Omar S. Es-Said, Hamid Garmestani, Surya R. Kalindi, L. Williams, Cristiane Maria Basto Bacaltchuk, C. Fountain, Eui W. Lee

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Works

It is widely reported in current literature that the precipitation hardened Al–Li sheet alloys exhibit extremely high anisotropy in yield (and ultimate tensile) strength, which is well beyond what can be explained as purely a consequence of the strong crystallographic texture in the material (e.g. J. Mater. Sci. Eng. A265, 1999, 100). This paper presents a crystal plasticity based modeling framework that will (i) facilitate the segregation of the contributions to the overall anisotropy from crystallographic texture and precipitation hardening, and (ii) correlate the contribution from precipitate hardening to either co-planar slip activity or the non-coplanar slip activity in the …

Automated Robotic Inspection System For Electronic Manufacturing, Roberto Alejandro Balderas

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

An automated robotic inspection system for electronic manufacturing has been developed to identify pin defects of IC packages mounted on printed circuit boards using surface mount technology. The automated robotic inspection system consists of two robots, a computer, a CCD camera with frame gabber for image acquisition, and a customized windows program using neural network for on-line defect identification. Gray scale images of the pins on IC packages are acquired using ambient light. The images are filtered and formatted to appropriate size, so that Matlab neural network tool could be used. The images are used to train neural networks using …

Designing Human-Centered Distributed Information Systems, Jiagie Zhang, Vimla L. Patel, Kathy A. Johnson, Jane Malin, Jack W. Smith

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Many computer systems are designed according to engineering and technology principles and are typically difficult to learn and use. The fields of human-computer interaction, interface design, and human factors have made significant contributions to ease of use and are primarily concerned with the interfaces between systems and users, not with the structures that are often more fundamental for designing truly human-centered systems. The emerging paradigm of human-centered computing (HCC)-which has taken many forms-offers a new look at system design. HCC requires more than merely designing an artificial agent to supplement a human agent. The dynamic interactions in a distributed system …

Modal Predicates And Coequations, Alexander Kurz, Jiří Rosický

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We show how coalgebras can be presented by operations and equations. This is a special case of Linton’s approach to algebras over a general base category X, namely where X is taken as the dual of sets. Since the resulting equations generalise coalgebraic coequations to situations without cofree coalgebras, we call them coequations. We prove a general co-Birkhoff theorem describing covarieties of coalgebras by means of coequations. We argue that the resulting coequational logic generalises modal logic.

Effect Of Cr3+ And So42- On The Structure Of Rust Layer Formed On Steels By Atmospheric Corrosion, Masato Yamashita, Hitoshi Uchida,, Desmond C. Cook .

Physics Faculty Publications

The effect of chromium ion (Cr³⁺) and sulfate ion (SO₄^2-) on the structure of the rust layer formed by thin electrolyte-film corrosion of low-alloy steels has been examined. By using X-ray diffraction spectroscopy, it was found that coexistence of Cr³⁺ and SO₄^2- in the electrolyte film covering the steel surface quickly forms the Cr-goethite (α-(Fe _1-X, Cr_X)OOH) layer which has been known as the final protective rust layer. Scanning vibrating electrode measurements showed that the rust layer formed under the electrolyte film containing Cr³⁺ and SO₄^{2- …}

A Comparative Study Of Just-In-Time (Jit) And Theory Of Constraints (Toc) Systems With Varying Constraint Locations And Operational Characteristics, Pirun Hemmondharop

Doctoral Dissertations

"Various researchers have extolled the benefits of Theory of Constraints (TOC), Just-in-Time (JIT), and other manufacturing strategies. Some supporters of JIT argue it is the least costly, while others point to the overall benefits of TOC. There are conflicting claims as to the best manufacturing philosophies which is compounded by the fact that no one system is best in every situation. The success of a production system truly depends on the manufacturing environment rather than the philosophy being used. This study uses computer simulations of differing manufacturing environments to compare Just-in-Time (JIT) and Theory of Constraints (TOC) philosophies over two …

Experimental Evaluation Of Control Fluid Fallback During Off-Bottom Well Control In Vertical And Deviated Wells, Fernando Sebastian Flores-Avila

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study measured the liquid fallback during simulated blowout conditions. The purpose of the study was to establish a basis for developing a procedure for controlling blowouts that relies on the accumulation of liquid kill fluid injected while the well continues to flow. The results from experiments performed with air, water, 10.5 ppg and 12.0 ppg mud in an experimental 48 ft flow loop at 0°, 20°, 40°, 60° and 75° deviation angles from the vertical, as well as results from full-scale experiments performed with natural gas and water based drilling fluid in a vertical 2787-foot deep research well, are …

Data Mining And Knowledge Discovery: A Guided Approach Base On Monotone Boolean Functions, Vetle Ingvald Torvik

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation deals with an important problem in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DM & KD), and Information Technology (IT) in general. It addresses the problem of efficiently learning monotone Boolean functions via membership queries to oracles. The monotone Boolean function can be thought of as a phenomenon, such as breast cancer or a computer crash, together with a set of predictor variables. The oracle can be thought of as an entity that knows the underlying monotone Boolean function, and provides a Boolean response to each query. In practice, it may take the shape of a human expert, or it …

Log-Derived Cation Exchange Capacity Of Shaly Sands : Application To Hydrocarbon Detection And Drilling Optimization, Gamze Ipek

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Researchers at Louisiana State University, LSU, have introduced several petrophysical models expressing the electric properties of shaly sands. These models, to be used for hydrocarbon detection, are based on the Waxman and Smits concept of supplementing the water conductivity with a clay counterions conductivity. The LSU models also utilize the Dual Water theory, which relates each conductivity term to a particular type of water, free and bound, each occupying a specific volume of the total pore space. The main difference between these models and the other shaly sand models is that the counterion conductivity is represented by a hypothetical sodium …

A Distributed Discrete-Time Neural Network Architecture For Pattern Allocation And Control, A.T. Chronopoulos, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Node Splitting Algorithms In Tree-Structured High-Dimensional Indexes For Similarity Search, Yongjian Fu, Jui Che Teng, S. R. Subramanya

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Content-based searches and retrievals in multimedia and image databases use high-dimensional indexing structures for organizing the features of the objects. Most of those index structures are tree-structured whose nodes have a limit on the number of entries describing the subtrees rooted at those nodes. When index trees are built by repeated insertion of entries, nodes need to be split and the tree balanced accordingly. Node-splitting algorithms eventually determine the final structure of the tree which will have a profound effect on the search performance. This paper presents a comparative study of several node splitting algorithms for a typical high-dimensional indexing …

An Analytical Hierarchy Process (Ahp) Assessment Of The Iso 14001-Based Environmental Management System In The Oil And Gas Industry In Malaysia, Vijayalakshmi Benjamin Samuel

Student Works (2000-2009)

Today's business world is changing due to the ever-increasing consciousness for environmental protection and sustainable development. Customers are taking into account environmental considerations in their supplier selection, and are increasingly buying products with identifiable environmental attributes. In this study, the critical decision criteria, sub-criteria and benefits of the adoption and implementation of the ISO 14001-based environmental management system (EMS) in the Malaysian oil and gas sector were studied using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) approach. An empirical study was performed to investigate the relative weights and priorities of these criteria and benefits. An AHP decision model of EMS adoption was …

Efficient Algorithms For Creation Of Linearly-Independent Decision Diagrams And Their Mapping To Regular Layouts, Marek Perkowski, Bogdan Jaroslaw Falkowski, Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske, Rolf Dreschler

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A new kind of a decision diagrams are presented: its nodes correspond to all types of nonsingular expansions for groups of input variables, in particular pairs. The diagrams are called the Linearly Independent (LI) Decision Diagrams (LI DDs). There are 840 nonsigular expansions for a pair of variables, thus 840 different types of nodes in the tree. Therefore, the number of nodes in such (exact) diagrams is usually much smaller than the number of nodes in the well-known Kronecker diagrams (which have only single-variable Shannon, Positive Davio, and Negative Davio expansions in nodes). It is usually much smaller than 1/3 …

Term Trees In Application To An Effective And Efficient Atpg For And–Exor And And–Or Circuits, Lech Jozwiak, Aleksander Ślusarczyk, Marek Perkowski

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A compact data representation, in which the typically required operations are performed rapidly, and effective and efficient algorithms that work on these representations are the essential elements of a successful CAD tool. The objective of this paper is to present a new data representation—term trees (TTs)—and to discuss its application for an effective and efficient structural automatic test-pattern generation (ATPG). Term trees are decision diagrams similar to BDDs that are particularly suitable for structure representation of AND–OR and AND–EXOR circuits. In the paper, a flexible algorithm for minimum term-tree construction is discussed and an effective and efficient algorithm for ATPG …

Multiple-Valued Quantum Logic Synthesis, Marek Perkowski, Anas Al-Rabadi, Pawel Kerttopf

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper asks the question: is logic synthesis for quantum computers a practical research subject?

We would like to assume that any two quantum wires can interact, but we are limited by the realization constraints. Structure of atomic bonds in the molecule determines neighborhoods in the circuit. This is similar to restricted routing in FPGA layout - link between logic and layout synthesis known from CMOS design now appears in quantum. Below we are interested only in the so-called “permutation circuits” - their unitary quantum matrices are permutation matrices.

Generalized Inclusive Forms — New Canonical Reed-Muller Forms Including Minimum Esops, Marek Perkowski, Alan Mishchenko, Malgorzata Chzanowka-Jeske

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reed-Muller (AND/EXOR) expansions play an important role in logic synthesis and circuit design by producing economical and highly-testable implementations of Boolean functions [3–6]. The range of Reed-Muller expansions include canonical forms, i.e. expansions that create unique representations of a Boolean function. Several large families of canonical forms: fixed polarity Reed-Muller forms (FPRMs), generalized Reed-Muller forms (GRMs), Kronecker forms (KROs), and pseudo- Kronecker forms (PKROs), referred to as the Green/Sasao hierarchy, have been described [7–9]. (See Fig. 1 for a settheoretic relationship between these families.)

Penswastaan Kereta Turus Dan Utiliti Atm : Persepsi Terhadap Perkhidmatan Dan Juga Perbandingan Kos Antara Spanco Dan Atm, Mohamad Yusoff Yaacob, Shaiful Hisham Mahat, Daud Mohamed

Student Works (2000-2009)

Sejak awal penubuhan ATM pengurusan fleet kereta turus dan utiliti adalah dibawah tanggungjawab ATM sepenuhnya. Waiau bagaimanapun pada 30 Oktober 1993, perjanjian konsesi telah ditandatangani antara Kerajaan Malaysia dan Syarikat SPANCO Sdn Bhd. Dalam perjanjian ini, SPANCO telah diberi hak konsesi untuk memberi perkhidmatan kereta turus dan utiliti kepada ATM. Setelah hampir 9 tahun SPANCO memberi perkhidmatan kini timbul beberapa rungutan di kalangan pengguna ATM yang secara umumnya mempersoalkan keupayaan SPANCO dalam memberi perkhidmatan yang terbaik kepada ATM. Kos sewaan serta senggaraan yang terus meningkat dari tahun kesetahun juga turut menimbulkan persoalan mengapa pengurusan kereta turus dan utiliti ini perlu …

A Study On Technology Region Success Factors With Comparative Analysis On The Multimedia Super Corridor, Anand Solomon Mark

Student Works (2000-2009)

Technology regions refer to regions which have densely packed technology companies and their associated supporting industries with some of those companies having achieved immense success so that they can be considered world class. This paper firstly looks at Malaysia's economic evolution and underscores the case for Malaysia's need to transform itself from a low wage manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy. Competition from other low wage countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and China is diverting investment in the manufacturing sector and eroding Malaysia's competitiveness causing growth to slow. To counter the anticipated manufacturing slowdown, the country needs to move up …

Thermal Rheological Analysis Of Cure Process Of Epoxy Prepreg, Liangfeng Sun

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The cure process of epoxy prepreg used as composite pipe joints was studied by means of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), Bohlin Rheometer and other techniques. Isothermal DSC measurements were conducted between 110 and 220 oC, at 10 oC intervals. The results show that the complete cure reaction could be achieved at oC. The isothermal cure process was simulated with the four-parameter autocatalytic model. Except in the late stage of cure reaction, the model agrees well with the experimental data, especially at high temperatures. To account for the effect of diffusion on the cure rate, a diffusion factor was introduced into …

Image Capture Using Integrated 3d Softchip Technology, Stefan Lachowicz, Alexander Rassau, Geoffrey Alagoda, Kamran Eshraghian, Myung-Ok Lee, Seung-Min Lee

Research outputs pre 2011

Mobile multimedia communication has rapidly become a significant area of research and development. The processing requirements for the capture, conversion, compression, decompression, enhancement, display, etc. of high quality multimedia content places heavy demands even on current ULSI (ultra large scale integration) systems, particularly for mobile applications where area and power are primary considerations. The system presented is designed as a vertically integrated (3D) system comprising two distinct layers bonded together using indium bump technology. The top layer is a CMOS imaging array containing analog-to-digital converters, and a buffer memory. The bottom layer takes the form of a configurable array processor …

A Cmos Imager With Pfm/Pwm Based Analog-To-Digital Converter, Amine Bermak

Research outputs pre 2011

An on-pixel analog-to-digital converter based on both PFM and PWM schemes is reported. The proposed architecture uses a limited number of transistors that can be implemented in a small silicon area resulting in a 23% fill-factor. The digital sensor can be externally configured in order to operate under either the PFM or PWM scheme. At high light intensities, the PFM scheme is replaced by the PWM scheme which proves to be much more efficient in terms of power consumption and clock frequency requirements. An in-built light adaptation mechanism has also been implemented which allows the sensor to better adapt to …

Applications Of Liquid Crystal Spatial Light Modulators In Optical Communications, Selam Ahderom, Mherdad Raisi, Kungmang Lo, Kamal E. Alameh, Rafie Mavaddat

Research outputs pre 2011

Advances in liquid crystal (LC) materials and VLSI technology have enabled the development of multi-phase spatial light modulators (SLM) that can perform high-resolution, dynamic optical beam positioning as well as temporal and spatial beam shaping in the 1550 nm optical communication window. These attractive features can effectively be used to achieve optical switching, optical spectral equalization, tunable optical filtering and many other functions that are important for future reconfigurable optical telecommunication networks. We review potential optical telecommunication applications based on LC-SLMs.

A Vhdl Implementation Of Bist Technique In Uart Design, Mohd. Yamani Idna Idris

Student Works (2000-2009)

No abstract provided.

Modelling Of Space Charge Effects In The Electrical Discharge Of Nitrogen Gas Laser, Chin Yang Chia

Student Works (2000-2009)

A computer model for the simulation of a nitrogen gas discharge has been built and studied. This model was based on the fluid description of the discharge plasma. The Phoenical SHASTA Flux-Corrected Transport (FCT) algorithm is used for the solution of the fluid equations and its accuracy has been tested. The distribution of the local electrical field was calculated by the Poisson equation. The internal discharge current was calculated by Sato's equation. The motion of the charge particles was taken into account. The electrical discharge behavior was simulated by the circuit equation and solved using the fourth order Runge-Kutta method …

A Power Scheduling Software Package For Planetary Habitats, Gary W. Huband

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations (1964–2006)

Mankind has established a permanent presence in space with the International Space Station. The next step is building habitats on the Moon or Mars. However, these habitats will have to be nearly self-sustaining because replenishment from Earth will be costly. Power for life support and other electrical devices will be limited and must be monitored and allocated. This thesis develops the framework for power scheduling software to perform these tasks.

The software includes a graphical user interface (GUI) to allow the user to interact with the power schedule, a database and server, and a simulation for the effects of device …

Malaysian Automotive Industry's Technological Capabilities In Meeting The Defence Requirements, Ahmad Marzuki Ahmad Nawawi

Student Works (2000-2009)

The end of cold war in late 1980s had totally changed the strategic outlook in the management of military crisis. The revolution in military affairs IRMA) that took place thereafter, had witnessed the importance of technology in determining the national resilience and military power. In modern warfare, technology is considered the main determinant in victory or defeat in the battlefield. The Malaysian Army, realising the need to prepare a lean and mean force to fight a conventional warfare, requires state-of-the-art equipment in order to provide the mobility, firepower and intelligence, which are vital in waging war. All these elements can …

Physical-Statistical Modeling And Optimization Of Cardiovascular Systems, Dongping Du

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heart disease remains the No.1 leading cause of death in U.S. and in the world. To improve cardiac care services, there is an urgent need of developing early diagnosis of heart diseases and optimal intervention strategies. As such, it calls upon a better understanding of the pathology of heart diseases.

Computer simulation and modeling have been widely applied to overcome many practical and ethical limitations in in-vivo, ex-vivo, and whole-animal experiments. Computer experiments provide physiologists and cardiologists an indispensable tool to characterize, model and analyze cardiac function both in healthy and in diseased heart. Most importantly, simulation modeling empowers the …