Engineering Commons^™

Development Of A Comprehensive Digital Avionics Curriculum For The Aeronautical Engineer, Thomas W. Hofer

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to develop a comprehensive digital avionics curriculum for aeronautical engineering students at AFIT. Due to the closing of the aeronautical engineering program at the Naval Postgraduate School, and the subsequent requirement to establish a digital avionics specialty course sequence at AFIT, a mature avionics curriculum does not yet exist that satisfies the needs of graduates who will serve as aeronautical engineers involved with the development, integration, testing, fielding, and supporting of military avionics systems as part of the overall aircraft system. Research was conducted through a comprehensive literature review and the use of a …

Predicting The Effects Of Contingency Contracting On Local Economies, Donald J. Wagoner

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, Air Force personnel have been deployed in support of contingency operations to various points on the globe. The Department of Defense spends millions of dollars to support and sustain forces during contingency operations. The Air Force deploys Contingency Contracting Officers (CCO) to support personnel during these operations. During a contingency operation contracting officers will normally establish short-term contracts as quickly as possible to meet mission requirements with little concern for the local economy. This research concluded that the actions of Air Force CCOs can affect the local economy in a deployed location. By providing contingency contracting officers …

Adaptive Evolution Of Chloroplast Genome Structure Inferred Using A Parametric Bootstrap Approach, Liying Cui, Jim Leebens-Mack, Li-San Wang, Jijun Tang, Linda Rymarquis, David B. Stern, Claude W. Depamphilis

Faculty Publications

Background
Genome rearrangements influence gene order and configuration of gene clusters in all genomes. Most land plant chloroplast DNAs (cpDNAs) share a highly conserved gene content and with notable exceptions, a largely co-linear gene order. Conserved gene orders may reflect a slow intrinsic rate of neutral chromosomal rearrangements, or selective constraint. It is unknown to what extent observed changes in gene order are random or adaptive. We investigate the influence of natural selection on gene order in association with increased rate of chromosomal rearrangement. We use a novel parametric bootstrap approach to test if directional selection is responsible for the …

Online Clustering With Single-Pass Topology Based Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm, Abhishek Jaiantilal

Theses

Online clustering is of significant interest for real-time data analysis. Generic offline clustering methods such as K-Means, C-Means and others are computationally expensive. The computational burden of these methods increases non-linearly with the size of the data set. In addition these methods usually require a good amount of supervised knowledge yielding a non-unique solution. For real-time data analysis, there is an important tradeoff between accuracy and computational efficiency. An unsupervised one-pass clustering method that efficiently adapts to data distribution and evaluation is proposed. This method, Topology-Based Fuzzy Clustering (TFC), uses the topology of data to discover clusters. TFC uses the …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 48 Number 3, Winter 2006, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

8 - WELCOME HOME, STEVE By Steven Boyd Saum. Basketball superstar Steve Nash '96 comes home to Santa Clara for a unique honor: a ceremony retiring his Bronco jersey. In a convocation address, he tells how Santa Clara changed his life. Now he wants the University to take its mission global.

12 - THE SCHOOL OF HOPE By Martha Ellen Stortz. Scholar and teacher Bill Spohn earned deep affection and the respect of the Santa Clara community in his years directing the Bannan Center for Jesuit Education. When he was stricken with cancer, he and his wife, Marty Stortz, looked …

Review Of The Book - Teaching About Technology: An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Technology For Non-Philosophers, Vincent Childress

Publications

Marc de Vries' latest book, Teaching about Technology: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Technology for Non-Philosophers, was interesting to the reviewer because it provided a link between philosophies of technology and the nature of the technology curriculum more than any other philosophy-related work he has read. The book is intended for use with pre-service teachers, graduate students, and others who are interested in teaching technology. Teaching about Technology is part of a series of books on science and technology that is edited by William Cobern of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The editorial board for the series is …

Why Renewables Need Nuclear?: A Brief Narrative, John Ratcliffe, Ruth Saurin

Articles

No abstract provided.

Changes In Manganese And Lead In The Environment And Young Children Associated With The Introduction Of Methylcyclopentadienyl Manganese Tricarbonyl In Gasoline—Preliminary Results, Brian Gulson, Karen Mizon, Alan Taylor, Michael Korsch, Jennifer Stauber, J. Michael Davis, Honway Louis, Michael Wu, Hilton Swan

United States Environmental Protection Agency: Publications

A 4-year longitudinal study is being conducted to evaluate potential changes to the environment and exposure of young children associated with the introduction of methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MMT) into Australia in 2001. The cohort consists of 57 females and 56 males, with an age range of 0.29–3.9 years. Samples are collected every 6 months from children in residences located at varying distances from major traffic thoroughfares in Sydney. Environmental samples include air, house, and daycare center dustfall, soil, dust sweepings, and gasoline; samples from the children include blood, urine, handwipes prior to and after playing outdoors, and a 6-day duplicate …

Evaluation Of Alternative Water Resources For Cape Coast And Its Environs In Ghana, Alex Kumah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cape Coast once a national capital of Ghana and its environs in recent years have constantly suffered perennial acute water shortage. The Brimsu dam which takes its supplies from the Kakum River with current production capacity of 1.4 × 104 m3/day cannot meet the water needs of the study area. The operating levels of the dam during crisis have reduced from 7.3 meters to 4.7 meters over the years with subsequent reduction in water production by 35%. Recently, the operating level has reduced further to about 3.5 meters with 60% reduction in water supply. This study evaluated alternative water resources …

Multimodal Congestion Control For Low Stable-State Queuing, Maxim Podlesny, Sergey Gorinsky

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

To discover an efficient fair sending rate for a flow, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) saturates the bottleneck link and its buffer until the router discards a packet. Such TCP-caused queuing is detrimental for interactive and other delay-sensitive applications. In this paper, we present Multimodal Control Protocol (MCP) which strives to maintain low queues and avoid congestion losses at network links. The multimodal MCP engages routers and hosts in limited explicit communication. A distinguishing property of MCP is stable transmission after converging to efficient fair states. To ensure convergence to fairness, MCP incorporates an innovative mechanism that enables a flow to …

Evaluation Of Prefermentation As A Unit Process Upon Biological Nutrient Removal Including Biokinetic And Wastewater Parameters, Terrence Mccue

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation was to provide a controlled comparison of identical continuous flow BNR processes both with and without prefermentation in order to provide a stronger, more quantitative, technical basis for design engineers to evaluate the potential benefits of prefermentation to EBPR in treating domestic wastewater. In addition, the even less understood effect of prefermentation on denitrification kinetics and anoxic phosphorus (P) uptake was studied and quantified. Other aspects of BNR performance, which might change due to use of prefermentation, will also be addressed, including anaerobic stabilization. Potential benefits to BNR processes derived from prefermentation are compared and …

Readjusting The Current Trend In Electrical Power Engineering, Johan Smit, Peter Morshuis, Edward Gulski

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In this paper the electrical power education curriculum is analyzed from the viewpoint of the electrical power industry and from the viewpoint of young people that contemplate their future academic study. From the perspective of young people in industrialized countries contemplating their future and the possibilities of an academic study, the current curriculum in (power) engineering lacks attraction. The number of freshmen still shows a decreasing trend. This paper is aimed to be a contribution towards readjusting this trend

Wind Power, Distributed Generation: New Challenges, New Solutions, Vladimiro Miranda

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper discusses some issues related with the growing importance of wind power and in modern power systems and some challenges raised by the emergence of distributed generation, and how computational intelligence and other modern techniques have been able to provide valuable results in solving the new problems. It presents some solutions obtained with a number of computational intelligence techniques and their application to real cases.

Investigating The Male-Driven Evolution Hypothesis Using Human AluRepeat Elements, Sridhar Ramachandran

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Thousands of copies of short interspersed repeats (SINEs) are scattered essentially ran-domly through the human genome. Although copies of each repeat subfamily are identical at the time of their insertion, they become subject to individual substitutions after insertion. As the relative time of insertion is known for many of these repeats, such "junk DNA" can be used to provide a sizeable number of time-series data points for studying substitution effects in a variety of genomic contexts. This dissertation specifically discusses the usefulness of the Alufamily of SINE repeats towards addressing open problems in genomics, population genetics, and biology in …

Coupling Of Hydrodynamic And Wave Models For Storm Tide Simulations: A Case Study For Hurricane Floyd (1999), Yuji Funakoshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents the development of a two-dimensional St. Johns River model and the coupling of hydrodynamic and wave models for the simulation of storm tides. The hydrodynamic model employed for calculating tides and surges is ADCIRC-2DDI (ADvanced CIRCulation Model for Shelves, Coasts and Estuaries, Two-Dimensional Depth Integrated) developed by Luettich et al. (1992). The finite element based model solves the fully nonlinear shallow water equations in the generalized wave continuity form. Hydrodynamic applications are operated with the following forcings: 1) astronomical tides, 2) inflows from tributaries, 3) meteorological effects (winds and pressure), and 4) waves (wind-induced waves). The wave …

Multiple Statcom Allocation And Sizing Using Particle Swarm Optimization, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, J. C. Hernandez, Yamille Del Valle, Ronald G. Harley

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Digital Crime And Forensic Science In Cyberspace, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This issue presents the first Book Review column for the JDFSL. It is an experiment to broaden the services that the journal provides to readers, so we are anxious to get your reaction. Is the column useful and interesting? Should we include more than one review per issue? Should we also review products? Do you have suggested books/products for review and/or do you want to write a review? All of this type of feedback -- and more -- is appreciated. Please feel free to send comments to Gary Kessler ([email protected]) or Glenn Dardick ([email protected]).

Effect Of Seeding Materials And Mixing Strength On Struvite Precipitation, Jun Wang, Joel Gerard Burken, Xiaoqi Zhang

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Struvite Precipitation Has Increasing Interest as a Technology for Removing and Recovering Phosphorus from Wastewater Streams. Many Chemical Factors Have Been Studied, Such as Optimum PH Values and Component-Ion Molar Ratios, Yet, Understanding of Physical Aspects is Lacking. Two Physical Parameters Were Tested: (1) Seeding Material Addition and (2) Mixing. Objectives Were to Evaluate Three Seeding Materials and to Optimize Mixing Conditions for Struvite-Crystal Precipitation, Growth, and Subsequent Sedimentation. Results Confirm that Mixing Strength and Proper Seeding Materials Increase Crystal Size and Improve Settleability. for Unseeded Solutions, Optimum Phosphorus Removal Was Achieved at a Mixing Strength of G = 76 …

The Bioturbation Transport Of Chemicals In Surface Soils, Maria D. Rodriguez

LSU Master's Theses

Large quantities of chemicals, such as pesticides, fertilizers, and industrial wastes, have been found throughout the environment raising concerns due to their ecological impacts and implications to human health. Soil is the most important repository of many organic chemicals in the environment. The objective of the present study was to determine the importance of the soil solid phase in the transport of chemicals in soils, and yield quantitative information to better describe bioturbation and its role in the movement of soil particles. Vertical movement of chemicals in the soil solid phase occurs by mixing mechanisms, such as bioturbation, cryoturbation, and …

Digital Channelized Wide Band Receiver Implemented With A Systolic Array Of Multi-Rate Fir Filters, David M. Rodney

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This thesis proposes the use of a Systolic Array of Multi-Rate FIR Filters to improve performance by eliminating the requirement of the FFT and De-Multiplexer associated with the conventional receiver while achieving the same functionality. The FFT is a major bottle neck for improving system performance for the conventional DCWBR because many complex multiplications and additions are required. The proposed new architecture is designed and evaluated in MATLAB to illustrate its viability. Two approaches for improved channel arbitration are accessed in MATLAB, namely, channel bin’s rms comparison and parallelism of the Systolic Array Multi-Rate FIR Filters. The FIR filters (high-pass …

Performance And Spectral Analysis Of Q2psk And Ce Q2psk Systems In Ideal Bandlimited Channels, Milton I. Quinteros, Edit J. Kaminsky, Kenneth V. Cartwright

Electrical Engineering Faculty Publications

The authors present theoretical performance analysis and simulation results for Quadrature-Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (Q2PSK), Constant Envelope (CE) Q2PSK, and trelliscoded 16D CEQ2PSK in ideal bandlimited channels of various bandwidths. The performance of receivers with and without channel estimation is reported. Spectral analysis is presented for each system, in addition to MSK and expanded uncoded 16D CEQ2PSK. We show that the effects of bandlimiting are most severe for Q2PSK. Knowledge of the channel information aids 4D CEQ2PSK the least. Only 6.8 dB of SNR is needed for the TCM system for a bit error rate of 10−5 for the narrowest …

Digital Signal Processing (Second Edition), Jonathan Blackledge

Books/Book chapters

This book provides an account of the mathematical background, computational methods and software engineering associated with digital signal processing. The aim has been to provide the reader with the mathematical methods required for signal analysis which are then used to develop models and algorithms for processing digital signals and finally to encourage the reader to design software solutions for Digital Signal Processing (DSP). In this way, the reader is invited to develop a small DSP library that can then be expanded further with a focus on his/her research interests and applications.

There are of course many excellent books and software …

Alphaco: A Teaching Case On Information Technology Audit And Security, Hüseyin Tanriverdi, Joshua Bertsch, Jonathan Harrison, Po-Ling Hsiao, Ketan S. Mesuria, David Hendrawirawan

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Recent regulations in the United States (U.S.) such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 require top management of a public firm to provide reasonable assurance that they institute internal controls that minimize risks over the firm’s operations and financial reporting. External auditors are required to attest to the management’s assertions over the effectiveness of those internal controls. As firms rely more on information technology (IT) in conducting business, they also become more vulnerable to IT related risks. IT is critical for initiating, recording, processing, summarizing and reporting accurate financial and non-financial data. Thus, understanding IT related risks and instituting internal …

Towards Monitoring Galileo: The European Gnss Supervisory Authority In Statu Nascendi = Zur Künftigen Überwachungsagentur Des Galileo Systems, Vers Une Autorité De Surveillance Du Système Galileo, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

There is little doubt that one of the most interesting and revolutionary, but also complicated and challenging space projects of today is Galileo, Europe’s own full-fledged second-generation navigation satellite system. Developed jointly by the European Union through the Commission and the European Space Agency, Galileo should by the end of the decade have thirty operational satellites in middle-earth-orbits providing timing, positioning and navigation signals across the globe.

From the very beginning Galileo was envisaged in particular by the Commission as a public-private-partnership (PPP). On the one hand, a private concessionaire should operate the system as of full operational capability (originally …

Recurrent Neural Network Based Predictions Of Elephant Migration In A South African Game Reserve, Parviz Palangpour, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Kevin Duffy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A large portion of South Africa''s elephant population can be found on small wildlife reserves. When confined to enclosed reserves the elephant densities are much higher than observed in the wild. The large nutritional demands and destructive foraging behavior of elephants threaten rare species of vegetation. If conservation management is to protect threatened species of vegetation, knowing how long elephants will stay in one area of the reserve as well as which area they will move to next is essential. The goal of this study is to train a recurrent neural network (RNN) to continuously predict an elephant herd''s next …

Adaptive Critic Designs Based Coupled Neurocontrollers For A Static Compensator, Salman Mohagheghi, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Ronald G. Harley

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel nonlinear optimal neurocontroller for a static compensator (STATCOM) connected to a power system, using artificial neural networks, is presented in this paper. The heuristic dynamic programming (HDP) method, a member of the adaptive critic designs (ACD) family, is used for the design of the STATCOM neurocontroller. The proposed controller is a nonlinear optimal controller that provides coupled control for the line voltage and the dc link voltage regulation loops of the STATCOM. An action dependent approach is used, in which the controller is independent of a model of the network. Moreover, a proportional-integrator approach allows the neurocontroller to …

Adaptive Critic Design Based Neuro-Fuzzy Controller For A Static Compensator In A Multimachine Power System, Salman Mohagheghi, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Ronald G. Harley

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a novel nonlinear optimal controller for a static compensator (STATCOM) connected to a power system, using artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic. The action dependent heuristic dynamic programming, a member of the adaptive Critic designs family, is used for the design of the STATCOM neuro-fuzzy controller. This neuro-fuzzy controller provides optimal control based on reinforcement learning and approximate dynamic programming. Using a proportional-integrator approach the proposed controller is capable of dealing with actual rather than deviation signals. The STATCOM is connected to a multimachine power system. Two multimachine systems are considered in this study: a 10-bus system …

Fault-Tolerant Control For Sssc Using Neural Networks And Pso, Wei Qiao, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Ronald G. Harley

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Hdp Based Optimal Control Of A Grid Independent Pv System, Richard L. Welch, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents an adaptive optimal control scheme for a grid independent photovoltaic (PV) system consisting of a PV collector array, a storage battery, and loads (critical and non-critical loads). The optimal control algorithm is based on the model-free heuristic dynamic programming (HDP), an adaptive critic design (ACD) technique which optimizes the control performance based on a utility function. The HDP critic network is used in a PV system simulation study to train a neurocontroller to provide optimal control for varying PV system output energy and load demands. The emphasis of the optimal controller is primarily to supply the critical …

Hierarchical Control Scheme For Two Static Compensators In The Brazilian 45-Bus Power System, Salman Mohagheghi, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Yamille Del Valle, Ronald G. Harley

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.