Engineering Commons^™

Surface Modification Of Bricks By Chitosan Coatings, S Nilpairach, S T. Dubas

Journal of Metals, Materials and Minerals

Bricks were successfully modified by application of a chitosan coating in order to provide their surface with a water repellant character. The chitosan coating was prepared by depositing solutions of variable chitosan concentration (1% or 2.5% w/w) onto the brick surface and let to dry under ambient condition. In order to improve the water repellant property, the films were cross-linked with a 1% solution of sodium citrate, sodium sulfate or sodium tri - polyphosphate. The effect of the chitosan concentration on the morphology of the coating at the brick surface was observed by scanning electron microscope (SEM). It was found …

Ceas E-News 07.01.2008, College Of Engineering And Applied Sciences

College of Engineering and Applied Sciences News

Glycerol may benefit the autohydrolysis process of biomass

Optimization Using Differential Evolution, Vasan Arunachalam

Water Resources Research Report

The book explains in detail the working of Differential Evolution optimization algorithm. It also provides documentation for the use of Differential Evolution computer program to solve user-defined optimization problems. The computer program is written in C language for Windows environment. The book also demonstrates how to modify the program using an example optimization problem.

Flight Physician - July, 2008, Civil Aviation Medical Association

Browse all Civil Aviation Medical Association Newsletters

A sixteen page newsletter of the Civil Aviation Medical Association. The newsletter provided news about civil aviation medicine and information related to the organization.

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 50 Number 1, Summer 2008, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

10 - SPEED RACERS An interview by Gwen Knapp. Cycling legend Greg LeMond talks ethics and doping in sports.

14 - MEET THE NEW FATHER GENERAL By Steven Boyd Saum. Introducing Adolfo Nicols, S.J., the new Superior General of the Society of Jesus.

16 - NO SIMPLE HIGHWAY By Juan Velasco. The Casa de la Solidaridad is less a place than a journey—one that offers a new understanding of solidarity. And a new meaning of home.

22 - EXILES By Ron Hansen. A tale of a shipwreck, a priest, and a poet. Hansen tells the story behind his new novel, …

Climate Models: An Assessment Of Strengths And Limitations, David Bader, Curt Covey, William Gutowski, Isaac Held, Kenneth Kunkel, Ronald Miller, Robin Tokmakian, Minghua Zhang

United States Department of Energy: Publications

Scientists extensively use mathematical models of Earth’s climate, executed on the most powerful computers available, to examine hypotheses about past and present-day climates. Development of climate models is fully consistent with approaches being taken in many other fields of science dealing with very complex systems. These climate simulations provide a framework within which enhanced understanding of climate-relevant processes, along with improved observations, are merged into coherent projections of future climate change. This report describes the models and their ability to simulate current climate.
The science of climate modeling has matured through finer spatial resolution, the inclusion of a greater number …

Integrated Science Assessment For Oxides Of Nitrogen — Health Criteria, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

United States Environmental Protection Agency: Publications

National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) are promulgated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to meet requirements set forth in Sections 108 and 109 of the Clean Air Act (CAA). These sections require the EPA Administrator (1) to list widespread air pollutants that reasonably may be expected to endanger public health or welfare; (2) to issue air quality criteria that assess the latest available scientific information on the nature and effects of ambient exposure to the criteria pollutants; (3) to set “primary” NAAQS to protect human health with adequate margin of safety and to set “secondary” NAAQS to protect …

Matlab Report, Nancy Hale

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

The objective of this effort is to create a multidisciplinary approach to problem solving using technology. Through Thinkfinity, the Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems is collaborating with the science and quantitative faculty to create lessons that can be used by high school and first -year college students to work interactively with data to solve problems. MatLab is the tool of choice. It gives the user the ability to create visual models of large data sets and is used in the science and finance areas.

The key features of MatLab:

• Interactive tools for iterative exploration, design, and …

Nebraska Water Map

Nebraska Water Center: Administrative Materials

Nebraska Water is a full-color, 24"x36" poster, that is appropriate for educational use. The information presented on the maps is the best available as of July 2008. The content and level of detail of each map is based on available space and map scale.

Testing The Value Of A Time-Based Language Model For Speech Recognition, Nisha Kiran, Nigel Ward

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Speech recognition relies on the language model in order to decode an utterance, and in general a better language model improves the performance of a speech recognizer. We have recently found that a time-based language model can improve on a standard trigram language model in terms of perplexity. This technical report presents the evaluation of this new language model in the context of speech recognition. First, a basic speech recognizer was built using the HTK tool. Then the recognizer was run using the standard language model and using the time-based one. On a testset of 39,147 words from the Switchboard …

Tin Dioxide Nanoparticle Based Sensor Integrated With Microstrip Antenna For Passive Wireless Ethylene Sensing, Mercyma Deeba Balachandran

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, we present the development and integration of a passive ethylene gas sensor with triangular microstrip patch antenna for wireless monitoring of climacteric fruit freshness. The existing ethylene sensors are mostly SnO2 resistor based active sensors, fabricated on rigid substrates requiring high fabrication temperatures and cannot be used for wireless applications. The proposed passive ethylene gas sensor is a novel nanoparticle based SnO2 capacitive sensor which, unlike the other existing SnO2resistor based active thick film and thin film sensors, consists of 10 nm to 15 nm SnO2 nanoparticles coated as a thin dielectric film of 1300 nm thickness. …

Comparison Of Cooling Performance Of Overhead And Underfloor Supply With Rear Door Heat Exchanger In High Density Data Center Clusters, Ravi K. Udakeri

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

The power trend for server systems continues to grow thereby making thermal management of Data centers a very challenging task. Although various configurations exist, the raised floor plenum with Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRACs) providing cold air is a popular operating strategy. In prior work, numerous data center layouts employing raised floor plenum and the impact of design parameters such as plenum depth, ceiling height, cold isle location, tile openings and others on thermal performance of data center was presented. The air cooling of data center however, may not address the situation where more energy is expended in cooling infrastructure …

Thermo-Mechanical Solutions In Electronic Packaging: Component To System Level, Aalok Trivedi

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Since the advent of the transistor and integrated circuit, the performance of electronic equipment has increased significantly while footprint of systems at all levels continues to decrease. Recently, the number of transistors on a high end microprocessor has exceeded a billion. All of the above has necessitated considerable improvement in cooling technology and associated reliability. In this era of high heat fluxes, air cooling still remains the primary cooling solution mainly due to its cost and ease of installation and operation. The primary goal of a good thermal design is to ensure that the chip can function at its rated …

Structural Optimization Using Matlab Partial Differential Equation Toolbox And Radial Basis Function Based Response Surface Model, Faisal Tanveer Mosharrof

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

As a decision making tool, optimization has become an inseparable part of the modern design process. However, in spite of the advances in computer capacity and speed, the computational time for some complex problems is too high to use conventional solution approach. In order to reduce the computational effort and the cost associated with such type of problems, approximation methods such as response surface methodology (RSM) along with design of experiments (DOE) are used in engineering design optimization. The main idea involves replacing the expensive simulation model during the design and optimization process with a simplified mathematical approximation of the …

Design Of Analog Correlator For 22-29ghz Uwb Vehicular Radar Systems In Ibm 90nm Cmos Process, Niranjan Karandikar

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

In this thesis analog correlator is designed for UWB vehicular radar system. Operating frequency of the correlator is 22-29GHz. IBM 90nm CMOS process is used for the design, Simulation are done in CADENCE Spectre and SpectreRF. UWB signal of 22-29GHz is generated in ADS. Gaussian mono-pulse is shaped with band-pass filter to meet FCC mask. Simulations are done by using this signal. Typical receiver of UWB system consists of LNA, analog correlator and ADC. Analog correlator is the matched filter which is a part of receiver. It is used to detect the incoming RF signal by maximizing signal to noise …

Simulation Of Tetrahedral Mesh Based Organ Deformation Using Parameter Optimized Spring Constants, Koyel Mukherjee

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

Virtual reality based surgical simulators are becoming increasingly popular for training doctors on minimally invasive surgery. For these simulators, it is necessary to generate 3D organ models and create virtual environments depicting visually realistic deformation response by tissues and organs to manipulations by surgical tools. For creating a 3D model, several different approaches have been used by the computer graphics community, among which polygonal/polyhedral meshes have gained popularity for real time virtual reality applications. This work investigates two problems in 3D organ modeling for virtual reality simulators. Firstly, we consider the use of unstructured 3D meshes for generation of organ …

Implementation And Evaluation Of Residual Color Transform For 4:4:4 Rgb Lossless Coding, Pooja Vasant Agawane

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

The 4:4:4 video sampling format promises an excellent quality video. It is gaining a lot of attention due to its significance in the professional applications of multimedia processing. The use of the RGB color space for video processing is attracting, both, the industry and the academia. Extensive research is being undertaken to achieve better compression efficiency and high coding gain in the RGB (red, green, blue) color space. In contrast to typical consumer applications, high quality video is demanded in areas such as professional digital video recording, video post production and digital cinema. These latter applications demand all three color …

Diagnosis And Prognosis Of Electrical And Mechanical Faults Using Wireless Sensor Networks And A Two-Stage Neural Network Classifier, Akarsha Ramani

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

Diagnosis and isolation of electrical and mechanical problems in induction motors has always been a very challenging task. Some of the common problems in induction motors are: bearing, stator winding, and rotor bar failures. This thesis has three phases: The first one pertains to development of low-cost test-beds for simulating bearing faults and short circuit stator winding faults in a motor. Bearing fault is due to the failure of any of the components of the bearing and the stator winding fault is due to the failure of insulation between the windings. Bearing faults can be identified from the motor vibration …

Theoretical And Experimental Study Of Wide-Band Quasi-Planar Conical Antennas, Tsungyin Wu

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

Conical antennas are widely used in many applications because of their broad input impedance bandwidth and omni-directional radiation pattern. However, conical antennas usually have three-dimensional structures and are, hence, relatively difficult to fabricate and integrate. In this thesis, a quasi-planar conical antenna is proposed, where the simulation and measurement results indicate that dielectric loading could mechanically stabilize the antenna while keeping the input impedance invariant within a broad band. Also, the proposed antenna keeps the original wide-band and omni-directional properties. Specifically, a few configurations of the quasi-planar conical antenna are simulated, fabricated, and tested. The simulation and measurement results show …

Resource-Constrained Load Balancing Controller For A Parallel Database, John Chiasson, Z. Tang, J. D. Birdwell, C. T. Abdallah, M. Hayat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This brief documents experimental results using a deterministic dynamic nonlinear system for load balancing, previously reported by Tang et al. in a cluster of computer nodes used for parallel computations in the presence of time delays and resource constraints. While previous publications by the authors have provided theoretical analysis of this load-balancing strategy using an idealized model, and have documented experiments using a simulated database, experimental results using a complete database for DNA profiles are documented here. Evaluation of the proposed load-balancing strategy using an actual database was critical because of several characteristics of the database that cannot be accurately …

Fault-Tolerant Indirect Adaptive Neurocontrol For A Static Synchronous Series Compensator In A Power Network With Missing Sensor Measurements, Wei Qiao, Ronald G. Harley, Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Identification and control of nonlinear systems depend on the availability and quality of sensor measurements. Measurements can be corrupted or interrupted due to sensor failure, broken or bad connections, bad communication, or malfunction of some hardware or software (referred to as missing sensor measurements in this paper). This paper proposes a novel fault-tolerant indirect adaptive neurocontroller (FTIANC) for controlling a static synchronous series compensator (SSSC), which is connected to a power network. the FTIANC consists of a sensor evaluation and (missing sensor) restoration scheme (SERS), a radial basis function neuroidentifier (RBFNI), and a radial basis function neurocontroller (RBFNC). the SERS …

The Analysis Of Flight Operational Quality Assurance (Foqa) Data: Exploration Of A Proposed List Of Improved Safety Parameters, Giorge Marlon Lopes Tsuruta

Master's Theses - Daytona Beach

Several FOQA parameters that could enhance air carrier safety have not been recorded and/or analyzed. Airlines have traditionally chosen a limited number of parameters for analysis (thousands have been available for recording). No study in the U.S. had addressed FOQA parameters, leading to an exploratory mixed methods study. A conference call comprising FOQA industry experts was planned and completed to (a increase researcher knowledge and (b) discuss a list of improved safety FOQA parameters. A questionnaire, derived from the suggested list, was electronically sent to 40 FOQA professionals. The respondents represented 75% of the airlines with an FAA-approved FOQA program. …

Biodegradable Fluorescent Polymers, Santosh Gautam

Bioengineering Theses - Archive

Most of the works done on fluorescent polymers are focused on their potential applications in lighting industries. Much less interest has been paid for their potential application in the field of biology and biomedical engineering. Although multiple biological uses of green fluorescent proteins (GFPs) have been addressed by different groups, their potential for biomedical applications is hampered by their tendency to photobleach rapidly and their short fluorescence lifetime. Quantum dots have emerged as a potential substitute for those applications, but their cytotoxicity and lack of biodegradability restrict their use in a biological system. An ideal fluorescent material that could be …

Decision And Control In Distributed Cooperative Systems, Prasanna Mohan Ballal

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation presents novel matrix-based approaches for decision and control in distributed cooperative systems such as wireless sensor networks. A novel matrix-based Discrete Event Controller has been implemented for task planning and resource dispatching in a network consisting of stationary ground sensors and mobile agents also known in the literature as mobile wireless sensor networks. The use of shared resources in such systems can sometimes cause a phenomenon called system deadlock, where all the processes in the system come to a standstill. This work presents a new matrix-based algorithm that has been implemented for deadlock avoidance in a system with …

Hardware Platform For Research In Helicopter Uav Control, Petru Emanuel Stingu

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

The topic discussed in this work addresses the current research being conducted at the Automation & Robotics Research Institute in the areas of UAV helicopter instrumentation targeted towards aerobatic flight control and heterogenous multi-vehicle cooperation. A modular electronic control system is designed which includes sensors communicating over a CAN bus and an on-board computer that runs a special real-time Linux kernel. The majority the electronics is developed by the author, including the electronic schematics, PCB design, component soldering and the supporting software. Commercially available modules are used for the radio transceivers or the on-board computer. The same control system is …

Visible Versus Near-Infrared Light Penetration Depth Analysis In An Intralipid Suspension As It Relates To Clinical Hyperspectral Images, Tinsy John Perumanoor

Bioengineering Theses - Archive

We determine the penetration depth of near-infrared and visible light in a tissue phantom model using various image processing techniques and chemometrics and use these results to demonstrate the application of a multimodal hyperspectral imaging system for monitoring blood perfusion in amputation wounds. It is capable of performing a noninvasive, in vivo, quantitative analysis of human tissue in a clinical environment, in terms of the percent saturation of oxyhemoglobin. The instrument majorly consists of near-infrared and visible charge coupled devices (CCDs), lenses, liquid crystal tunable filters (LCTFs) for both the CCDs attached to their respective lenses, and a broad band …

Analytical Study On Rotational Restraint Of Sheathing, Y. Guan

American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) Specifications, Standards, Manuals and Research Reports (1946 - present)

No abstract provided.

Application Of Kalman Filtering To Real-Time Flight Regime Recognition Algorithms In A Helicopter Health And Usage Monitoring System, Rachel Elizabeth Rajnicek

Master's Theses - Daytona Beach

The purpose of this study is the application of Kalman filters to real-time Flight Regime Recognition (FRR) algorithms to identify the regime flown and observe transitions between flight regimes. Rotor fault identification, a technique that is somewhat similar to flight regime recognition, successfully used Kalman filters to determine fault types and damage locations. Recently developed FRR algorithms successfully applied Hidden Markov Models, which are similar to Kalman filters. The selected regime set for this study derives from a study performed by Bell Helicopter Textron, Inc. The selected parameter set for this study is modified from the Schweizer 300 Flight Test …

Novel Algorithms For Medium/Low-Voltage Arcing Faults In Switchgear & Motor Coils: From Concept To Realization, Mandhir Singh Sahni

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Switchgear arcing faults have been a primary cause for concern for the manufacturing industry and safety personnel alike. The deregulation of the power industry being in full swing and ever-growing competitiveness in the distribution sector calls for the transition from preventive to predictive maintenance. Switchgear forms an integral part of the distribution system in any power system set-up. Keeping in mind the switchgear arcing faults, the transition mentioned above applies most of all to the switchgear industry. Apart from the fact that it is the primary cause of serious injuries to electrical workers worldwide, switchgear arcing faults directly affect the …

Image Mirroring, Rotation And Interpolation In The Wavelet Domain, Theju Isabelle Jacob

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

JPEG2000, the international standard for still image compression, uses the wavelet transform. The filters used in JPEG2000 for transformation are the 9/7 Daubechies filters and the 5/3 Le Gall filters. At present, to achieve image mirroring or rotation for images, one has to convert them back to spatial domain and proceed. This thesis presents methods by which it can be implemented in the wavelet domain, without extra computational complexity. To do so, one manipulates the transform domain coefficients so that the condition of perfect reconstruction still holds true. The thesis also discusses a method to achieve image interpolation, which would …