Engineering Commons^™

Dynamics Of Phase Transitions On Low-Index Metal Surfaces, Bo Lin

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The surface superheating and phase transitions at the low-index surface of metal were investigated using conventional continuous and 100-ps time-resolved reflection high-energy electron diffraction. Three metal surfaces, In(111), Au(110) and Pb(111), have been investigated in this work. The high temperature behavior of the In(111) surface was investigated using reflection high-energy electron diffraction with 100-ps temporal resolution. The change of surface vacancy density on In(111) is observed from 300 K to near the bulk melting point. The vacancy-formation energy of In(111) surface is estimated from experimental results. The surface vacancy density is observed to increase with temperature; however, the average random …

Parallel Implementation Of A Face Recognition [Sic] System Based On Modular Pca Approach, Rajkiran Gottumukkal

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This thesis describes research in automated methods for the recognition of human faces. The research is driven by the need to design a method, which would ensure high accuracy under the conditions of facial expression, illumination and pose variations. The resulting method is able to cope with uncontrolled nature of facial expression, illumination and head rotations. The main novelty of this work is the idea that some of the local facial features do not vary even when the facial expression, illumination and pose vary. This idea is applied to the existing principle component analysis lPCA) method to arrive at a …

A Pipelined Architecture For Real Time Correction Of Barrel Distortion In Wide-Angle Camera Images, Hau Trung Ngo

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Images captured by wide-angle cameras show barrel type spatial distortion due to wide-angle configuration of the camera lens where image regions farther from the center are compressed in a nonlinear fashion. The barrel distortion correction technique based on least squares estimation attempts to correct a distorted image by expanding it nonlinearly so that straight lines in the object space remain straight in the image space. The intensity value of a pixel in the expanded image is calculated by back mapping its position to the corresponding position in the distorted image and performing linear interpolation on the neighboring pixels. Distorted images …

Analysis Of Ingaassb/Aigaassb Photodetectors For Applications At The 2.0 Micron Wavelengths, Phani Pendyala

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The study of an InGaAsSb-based heterojunction avalanche photo detector has been carried out for 2-μm applications. A separate absorption and multiplication structure was used because it minimizes the tunneling component of the dark current in the absorption region, and also provides single-carrier injection into the multiplication region. This is a well-known requirement for reducing the multiplication noise. The primary goal was to evaluate the potential of InGaAsSb-AlGaAsSb photo-detectors for photodetection at the two-micron wavelength.

InGaAsSb is a relatively new material, and, therefore, characterization and photodetector response analysis based on this material are not available in the literature. In this thesis …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 19, Number 6, April 2003, College Of Engineering And Computer Science, Wright State University

BITs and PCs Newsletter

An eight page newsletter created by the Wright State University College of Engineering and Computer Science that addresses the current affairs of the college.

Sculpting: An Improved Inside-Out Scheme For All Hexahedral Meshing, Kirk S. Walton

Theses and Dissertations

Generating all hexahedral meshes on arbitrary geometries has been an area of important research in recent history. Hexahedral meshes have advantages over tetrahedral meshes in structural mechanics because they provide more accurate results with fewer degrees of freedom. Many different approaches have been used to create all-hexahedral meshes. Grid-based, inside-out, or superposition meshing all refer to a similar meshing approach that is a very common mesh generation technique. Grid-based algorithms provide the ability to generate all hexahedral meshes by introducing a structured mesh that bounds the complete body modeled, marking hexahedra to define an interior and exterior mesh, manipulating the …

Blackfingers A Sophisticated Hand Prothesis, Michele Folgheraiter, Giuseppina Gini, Marek Perkowski, Mikhail Pivtoraiko

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Our goal is to develop the low level control system for an artificial hand ”Blackfingers”. Blackfingers was thought to have two main applications: as humanoid robot’s hand or as a human hand prothesis. In this last application our intent is to realize a device more sophisticated respect the actual commerce prothesis. Also in our intention is to use some biological paradigms to create a human like reflex control easy to be interfaced also with the human nervous system. In this paper we illustrate the properties and the morphology of a human like neural reflex controller, used to set the stiffness …

Structural Evaluation Of The Historic John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, Wei-Xin Ren, Issam E. Harik, George E. Blandford, Michael Lenett, T. Michael Baseheart

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

The John A. Roebling suspension bridge, formerly the Covington-Cincinnati suspension bridge over the Ohio River was completed in 1867 and is still serving the Northern Kentucky community. The objective of this study is to assess the bridge load capacity via the dynamics-based technique. The scope of research includes finite element modeling and modal analysis, field ambient vibration testing, finite element model calibration to field test results, and bridge load-capacity evaluation. It is demonstrated that stress stiffening of cable elements plays an important role in both static and dynamic analyses of the Roebling suspension bridge. Large deflection behavior has been shown …

Future Housing In The United States: Senior’S Housing Demand, Sandeep Singh

Masters Theses

In the United States, persons born between 1942 and 1964 are within 10 to 15 years of traditional retirement age and are identified as baby boomers. The data shows that the number of persons aged 65 years and older have grown from 10 percent of the population in 1970 to nearly 13 percent in 1996. Furthermore, the population that is 65 years old or older is projected to be 20 percent of the population in 2030. As a result, the demographic change nurtures a demand for senior’s housing.

On the other hand, the concern is for the elderly living in …

Development Of A Redesign Plan For Moore Hall Using Architectural Principles Of Green Building And Sustainable Design, Alkhaziam Saad

Masters Theses

An existing in-use office and classroom building on Western Michigan University's main campus was chosen for a redesign project which incorporated study of architectural principles of green building and sustainable design. The study emphasized the central importance of buildings themselves in modem life, their effects on building users and their work, their effects on user relationships with one another and the surrounding environment, and the need to enhance the building's positive, natural, and life-supporting relationship with the total environment including the users.

The redesign problem statement reflected issues and ideas from recent architectural and building construction literature, which emphasized green …

Flexible Electrical And Software Programmable Transceivers For Wireless Communications (Feast Ii), Mike Ellinger, James Etters, Eric Juntunen

Honors Theses

Flexible Electrical and Software Programmable Transceivers (FEAST) is a project aimed at advancing both research and educational opportunities in wireless communications. The development of high speed analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters has enabled the modulation/demodulation of communications signals via real-time data processing. These "software radios" will allow greater flexibility in the reception and transmission of wireless signals. The FEAST wireless transceiver is such a system consisting of analog RF signal down converters and upconverters, high speed analog-to-digital and digital-toanalog converters, hardware digital signal processing IC's and real time software signal processing.

Phase II of the project (FEASTII) project focuses is on …

User Interface Improvement For Mlpq System, Shasha Wu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis describes the experience of migrating the MLPQ constraint database system, a complex standalone Multiple Document Interface (MDI) application, to a server-based remote accessible application. Centralized, standalone MDI application is a common style for personal software products in Windows. For a database management system, server-based, thin-client computing is a more popular infrastructure. Migrating an existing standalone constraint database application to be a web accessible constraint database server is the main goal of this thesis. This migration process provides a method for the constraint database system to collaborate with other specific applications. We rebuild the desktop MLPQ constraint database system …

Application Of Speech Recognition To African Elephant (Loxodonta Africana) Vocalizations, Patrick J. Clemins, Michael T. Johnson

Dr. Dolittle Project: A Framework for Classification and Understanding of Animal Vocalizations

This paper presents a novel application of speech processing research, classification of African elephant vocalizations. Speaker identification and call classification experiments are performed on data collected from captive African elephants in a naturalistic environment. The features used for classification are 12 mel-frequency cepstral coefficients plus log energy computed using a shifted filter bank to emphasize the infrasound range of the frequency spectrum used by African elephants. Initial classification accuracies of 83.8% for call classification and 88.1% for speaker identification were obtained. The long-term goal of this research is to develop a universal analysis framework and robust feature set for animal …

Vertical Shear Wave Velocity Profiles Generated From Spectral Analysis Of Surface Waves: Field Examples, Neil Lennart Anderson, Genda Chen, Siasi Kociu, Ronaldo Luna, Thanop Thitimakorn, Alexi A. Malovichko, D. Malovichko, D. Shylakov

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Surface wave (Rayleigh wave) seismic data were acquired at six separate bridge sites in southeast Missouri. Each acquired surface wave data set was processed (spectral analysis of surface waves; SASW) and transformed into a site-specific vertical shear-wave velocity profile (SASW shear-wave velocity profile). The SASW shear-wave velocity profiles generated for each bridge site were compared to other geotechnical data including seismic cone penetrometer shear-wave velocity profiles, cross-borehole shear-wave velocity profiles, and borehole lithology logs. The geotechnical data presented herein indicate the SASW shear-wave velocity profiles correlate well with subsurface lithology logs and available cross-borehole shear-wave velocity control. More specifically, clays, …

Adenosine Type 1 (A ) Receptors Mediate Protection Against Myocardial 1 Infarction Produced By Chronic, Intermittent Ingestion Of Ethanol In Dogs, Franz Kehl, John G. Krolikowski, John F. Ladisa, Judy R. Kersten, David C. Warltier, Paul S. Pagel

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Background: Chronic consumption of small amounts of ethanol protects myocardium from ischemic injury. We tested the hypothesis that adenosine type 1 (A₁) receptors mediate these beneficial effects.

Methods: Dogs (n=37) were fed with ethanol (1.5 g/kg) or water mixed with dry food twice per day for 12 weeks, fasted overnight before experimentation, and instrumented for measurement of hemodynamics. Dogs received intravenous drug vehicle (50% polyethylene glycol in 0.1 N sodium hydroxide and 0.9% saline over 15 min) or the selective A₁ receptor antagonist 8-cyclopentyl-1,3-dipropylxanthine (DPCPX, 0.8 mg/kg over 15 min) and were subjected …

Adaptive Segmentation Techniques For Object Region Extraction From Images With Complex Lighting Environment, Deepthi P. Valaparla

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Automated image segmentation of objects in complex lighting environments is a difficult task since it is not possible to pre-define a threshold to distinguish the object from the background. It is ascertained that an effective threshold citation for such objects depends on the negative binomial distribution of the object region with respect to the background lighting. Based on this concept, a novel adaptive threshold selection method for automatic segmentation of the lumen region in endoscopic images is presented in this thesis. More precise lumen region and boundary are obtained by an integrated neighborhood search based region growing procedure whose speed …

Implementation And Testing Of Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes And Detached Eddy Simulation Using An Implicit Unstructured Multigrid Scheme, Juan A. Palaez

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Investigation and development of the Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) technique for the computation of unsteady flows on unstructured grids are presented. The motivation of the research work is driven by the ultimate goal of predicting separated flows of aerodynamic importance, such as massive stall or flows over complex non-streamlined geometries. These cases, in which large regions of massively separated flow are present, represent a challenge for conventional Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) models, that in many cases, cannot produce solutions accurate enough and/or fast enough for industrial design and applications. A Detached Eddy Simulation model is implemented and its performance compared …

Field Emission Based Sensors Using Carbon Nanotubes, Changkun Dong

Physics Theses & Dissertations

A number of sensitive applications would be greatly benefited by the development of better cold cathodes that employ the electron field emission process. Among the many kinds of field emitters that could be tried, carbon nanotubes (CNT) have a number of distinct advantages because of their unique geometrical structure, chemical inertness, mechanical stiffness, and high thermal and electrical conductivities. This dissertation describes research in which CNT cathodes were fabricated and their emission characteristics were measured.

Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNT) were grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on various substrates: Ni and Hastelloy gauze, 304 stainless steel (SS) plates, and Ni-coated …

A Combinatorial Technique For Face Detection Based On Color And Statistical Analysis, Harishwaran Hariharan

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Automatic detection of faces from video sequences is an important task in security applications. The number, location, size and orientation of human faces in a video frame are unpredictable and can vary from frame to frame. A face detection algorithm for color images in the presence of varying lighting conditions and complexity in background relying upon color and statistical analysis is presented in this thesis. The new method detects skin regions over the entire image and then classifies the skin regions as faces and non-faces. Segmentation of skin regions is performed by a novel color space merging procedure named Integrated …

Creating Enterprise Simulations Using High Level Architecture, Anton R. Lidums

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Despite an established need, there are two remaining roadblocks to building distributed simulations and enterprise simulation systems. First, commercial simulation packages and engineering modeling tools are not readily distributable across multiple computers and have traditionally had very little impetus for utilizing a distributable format. Second, although HLA simulations have been built and there are tools to facilitate those efforts, very little has been done or written that specifically describes a "non-standard" integration implementation in sufficient detail to make the process reusable or repeatable. This thesis introduces a proof of concept prototype that was developed to integrate simulations. The paper presents …

Improving The Performance Of Single Chip Image Capture Devices, Barbara E. Marino, Robert L. Stevenson

Computer Science Faculty Works

Single chip charge-coupled devices (CCDs) coupled with filters for isolating red, green, and blue color content are commonly used to capture color images. While this is more cost effective than multiple chip systems, best results are obtained when full RGB color information is obtained for every point in an image. The process of color subsampling in a single chip system degrades the resulting image data by introducing artifacts such as blurry edges and false coloring. We propose an algorithm for enhancing color image data that were captured with a typical single chip CCD array. The algorithm is based on stochastic …

The Design Of A Cnc Mill For Product Prototyping, Haasan Rabe

Masters Theses

Rapid prototyping is widely used to reduce time to market in product design and development. Today's systems are used by engineers to better understand and communicate their product designs as well as to make rapid tooling to manufacture those products. Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) milling machines are part of this technology. This project will present the design of a small CNC machine, and production, and analysis of a small CNC machine. This machine has the characteristics demanded by the industrial and academic designers. Studying the existing machines aided in setting specifications for the new design. Comparing the performance of the …

Bs News

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

2003 (Spring) Ensi Informer Magazine, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the spring of 2003.

Screw Dislocation Interacting With Interface And Interfacial Cracks In Piezoelectric Bimaterials, Xiangfa Wu, Steve Cohn, Yuris A. Dzenis

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Faculty Publications

Interface and interfacial cracks interacting with screw dislocations in piezoelectric bimaterials subjected to antiplane mechanical and in-plane electrical loadings are studied within the framework of linear piezoelectricity theory. Straight dislocations with the Burgers vector normal to the isotropic basal plane near the interface or interfacial crack are considered. The dislocations are characterized by a discontinuous electric potential across the slip plane and are subjected to a line-force and a line-charge at the core. An explicit solution for the screw dislocation in piezoelectric bimaterial with straight interface is found based on the solution of a similar problem for infinite homogenous medium. …

The Effect Of Plasma Shielding On Dust Particle Interaction In Low Pressure Plasmas, M. E. Marks, P. F. Williams

P. F. (Paul Frazer) Williams Publications

The interaction of charged dust particles in plasma is often modeled assuming a constant charge on each particle with the particle charge determined by requiring zero net current to the particles when they are far apart. In this paper the variation in particle charge is calculated for two-body encounters of dust particles taking into consideration mutual electrostatic shielding and a finite Debye length λ_D . Results are reported for particle radii between 0.0105λ_D and 0.349 λ_D. Work is also calculated as a function of particle separation, and it is shown that dust particle energies greater than …

Upper Spokane River Model In Idaho: Boundary Conditions And Model Setup For 2001, Scott A. Wells, Robert Leslie Annear, Chris Berger

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Spokane River in Idaho originates in Coeur d’Alene Lake (Figure 1 and Figure 2). The section of the Spokane River from Coeur d’Alene Lake to the Washington state line is the subject of a water quality study for the US Environmental Protection Agency. The objective of this study is to create a water quality and hydrodynamic model of the Spokane River in Idaho using CE-QUAL-W2 Version 3.1 (Cole and Wells, 2002).

Since the Spokane River is water quality limited, a hydrodynamic and water quality model for the Spokane River in Washington was developed by Portland State University for the …

Reconfigurable Vibration Table (Rvt), Muhammad Ali

Masters Theses

A system was designed and manufactured to determine the modal, harmonic and transient behaviors of vibrating masses. The initial design was optimized by design for manufacture and assembly, and dynamic behaviors of the system were verified with finite element analysis. Small rods were used to reconfigure the table from one degree of freedom to two degrees of freedom and vice versa to provide data comparison for forced and free responses. Aluminum base plates containing oblong boles were used to allow the table to work with the two different types of existing vibration test systems.

Inside Unlv, Gian Galassi, Jennifer Vaughan, Fred Bachhuber

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

Study About High Influence Doping To Base Resistance And Bandgap Narrowing At Si/Si1-Xgex/Si Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor, Achmad Fadhol

Makara Journal of Technology

Study About High Influence Doping to Base Resistance and Bandgap Narrowing at Si/Si1-xGex/Si Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor. Heterojunction is a link formed bedween two semiconductor materials and differend bandgap which has thinness under 50nm and grow the mixture of plate SiGe as bases. The link is an abrupt link or graded one. In this research learnt formulation of doping concentration influence to basis resistance and bandgap narrowing through Si/Si1-xGex/Si Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor with abrupt emitter-basis link, besides taking care to mobility and basis wide to basis resistance, it is also influence of mole fraction to bandgap power. From the result shows …