Engineering Commons^™

Evaluation Of Critical Flare Rates For The Midwest Guardrail System, Cody S. Stolle, Karla A. Polivka, Ronald K. Faller, Robert W. Bielenberg M.S.C.E., E.I.T., Dean L. Sicking, John R. Rohde, John D. Reid

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

No abstract provided.

Investigation Of Dynamic And Steady State Calculation Methodologies For Determination Of Building Energy Performance In The Context Of The Epbd, Mervin Dean Doyle

Masters

The aim of this thesis was to investigate the ability of a dynamic and a quasi-steady state calculation methodology to capture the heating and cooling aspects of a buildings energy performance in the context of the requirements of the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). Chapters 1 and 2 provide a general background review and description of the implementation of the directive’s requirements in Ireland. Chapter 3 established the usefulness and relevance of building energy benchmarks, traditional approaches to building energy performance calculation methodologies. Chapter 4 established the ability of a sample of simplified and dynamic calculation tools to …

Statewide Wireless Communications Project, Volume 2: Inductive Loop Detection Of Bicycles And Inductive Loop Signature Processing For Travel Time Estimation, J. V. Krogmeier, Darcy M. Bullock

JTRP Technical Reports

The Statewide Wireless Communications Project was an umbrella project intended to support various INDOT activities in the area of wireless communications. As these activities were conducted independently the report for the project is organized into three volumes. Volume 1 contains the results of satellite and cellular communications field testing undertaken in support of INDOT’s SiteManager application. Volume 1 also contains the results of an evaluation of spread spectrum radios for long-range communications. Volume 2 contains the results of detection zone evaluation for loop detection of bicycles and the results of testing algorithms for travel time estimation using vehicle re-identification based …

Statewide Wireless Communications Project, Volume 1: Communication Field Tests For Satellite, Cellular, And Spread Spectrum Radio, J. V. Krogmeier, Darcy M. Bullock

JTRP Technical Reports

The Statewide Wireless Communications Project was an umbrella project intended to support various INDOT activities in the area of wireless communications. As these activities were conducted independently the report for the project is organized into three volumes. Volume 1 contains the results of satellite and cellular communications field testing undertaken in support of INDOT’s SiteManager application. Volume 1 also contains the results of an evaluation of spread spectrum radios for long-range communications. Volume 2 contains the results of detection zone evaluation for loop detection of bicycles and the results of testing algorithms for travel time estimation using vehicle re-identification based …

Bs News

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Perceptually Motivated Wavelet Packet Transform For Bioacoustic Signal Enhancement, Yao Ren, Michael T. Johnson, Jidong Tao

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

A significant and often unavoidable problem in bioacoustic signal processing is the presence of background noise due to an adverse recording environment. This paper proposes a new bioacoustic signal enhancement technique which can be used on a wide range of species. The technique is based on a perceptually scaled wavelet packet decomposition using a species-specific Greenwood scale function. Spectral estimation techniques, similar to those used for human speech enhancement, are used for estimation of clean signal wavelet coefficients under an additive noise model. The new approach is compared to several other techniques, including basic bandpass filtering as well as classical …

Gender Determination Using Fingerprint Features, Jen-Feng Wang, Chen-Liang Lin, Yung-Hsien Chang, Mark L. Nagurka, Chen-Wen Yen, Chinson Yeh

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Several previous studies have investigated the gender difference of the fingerprint features. However, regarding to the statistical significance of such differences, inconsistent results have been obtained. To resolve this problem and to develop a method for gender determination, this work proposes and tests three fingertip features for gender determination. Fingerprints were obtained from 115 normal healthy adults comprised of 57 male and 58 female volunteers. All persons were born in Taiwan and were of Han nationality. The age range was18-35 years. The features of this study are ridge count, ridge density, and finger size, all three of which can easily …

Frequency Regulation With Wind Power Plants, Badrul H. Chowdhury, Hong Tao Ma

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A new frequency regulation scheme is developed for the wind turbine/generator/converter trio that will provide the capability to participate in restoring frequency in a way similar to the droop response of conventional generators. Output active power adjustment can be realized by both converter and pitch angle control in addition to inertial response of the wind turbine. This helps in maintaining instantaneous power balance as well as in longer term frequency regulation.

Power Engineering Education: Challenges And Opportunities, Mariesa Crow

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a summary of the presentation given at the IEEE Power Engineering Society 2008 General Meeting in the Panel Session "Education of the Power Engineer of the Future." In this paper the author presents the challenges facing the current engineering student and the faculty who teach them. Challenges include declining student interest, volatile job markets, and the changing profile of the power and energy industry.

A Differential Evolution Approach To Optimal Generator Maintenance Scheduling Of The Nigerian Power System, Yusuf Yare, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The goal of optimal generator maintenance scheduling is to evolve optimal preventive maintenance schedule of generating units for economical and reliable operation of a power system while satisfying system load demand and crew constraints. In this paper, the differential evolution (DE), an evolutionary computation algorithm that utilizes the differential information to guide its further search, is applied to effectively solve the generator maintenance scheduling (GMS) optimization problem. The proposed method can handle mixed integer discrete continuous optimization problems. Results are presented with the DE algorithm on two different case studies for Nigerian power system.

Image Processing Technique For Runway Segmentation Using Color Spaces, Naresh Reddy Reddy

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Aircrafts of the future now face the challenge of growing demand for safety which will require a more significant level of pilot assistance than is available today. During an approach to the airport runway, an algorithm that continuously segments the runway from the rest of the background with very little human intervention is very useful for both enhancing the landing safety and reducing the pilot's work load. This thesis presents a novel method for segmenting airport runways on a clear day and in poor visibility conditions using the color space components. In this thesis, collages were formed for both runway …

Congestion Mitigation In Wireless Sensor Networks Using Single-Hop Backpressure Algorithm, Vijay Shekar Mangilipalli Gangu Sham

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Wireless sensor networks consist of a group of small components with limited resources allocated to sense the environment and transmit data to the user or interpreter. This concept is technically evolved from Sensors that are basically used to sense the environment around and collect data based on the sensing application incorporated in them. An extension to functionality of the sensors leads to the concept of sensor networks, where, in addition to gathering information at individual sensors, the data is processed and transmitted to a central station or Base station. This concept of transmitting the information from one node to the …

Extending The Network Life Time In Wsn Using Energy Efficient Algorithm, Venkata Sesha Sai Koundinya Goparaju

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Wireless Sensor networks have many potential applications. These wireless sensor networks necessitate specific design requirements of which energy efficiency is vital. The sensor networks consist of sensor nodes that operate on battery power, and replacement of these batteries is very often a strenuous task, since networks are deployed in areas where the act of replacing the batteries proves impractical.

With the limited available energy of sensor nodes, most of the energy is drained during communication. An energy efficient routing algorithm can prolong the lifetime of the network by gradually depleting the nodes in the network. Many of the routing protocols …

Integer Ratio Logarithm Based Edge Detection For Runway Hazard Detection, Sri Satya Vardhan Gogineni

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

As air traffic is growing in leaps and bounds every day, flying safe has been a major concern in day to day life. Aviation safety is always dependent on the performance of the pilot and air traffic controllers. The very involvement of human discretion introduces judgment as a component of a safe takeoff and landing. A convenient and immediate alternative would be the use of technology to alleviate the problem. Several algorithms have been developed to solve this problem. However, most computer vision algorithms leave the task of interpreting the end data unaddressed. Juggling the myriad tasks during landing and …

Statewide Wireless Communications Project, Volume 3: Data Collection And Signal Processing For Improvement Of Road Profiling And Proof Of Concept Of A Vehicle-Infrastructure Based Road Surface Monitoring Application, J. V. Krogmeier, Darcy M. Bullock

JTRP Technical Reports

The Statewide Wireless Communications Project was an umbrella project intended to support various INDOT activities in the area of wireless communications. As these activities were conducted independently the report for the project is organized into three volumes. Volume 1 contains the results of satellite and cellular communications field testing undertaken in support of INDOT’s SiteManager application. Volume 1 also contains the results of an evaluation of spread spectrum radios for long-range communications. Volume 2 contains the results of detection zone evaluation for loop detection of bicycles and the results of testing algorithms for travel time estimation using vehicle re-identification based …

The 5 Ghz Airport Surface Area Channel: Part Ii, Measurement And Modeling Results For Small Airports, Indranil Sen, David W. Matolak

Faculty Publications

This paper describes results from a channel measurement campaign performed at several small airports in the U.S. in the 5-GHz band. This paper is a companion to another paper, which describes channel models for large airports. We classify the small airport surface channel into three propagation regions based upon different delay dispersion conditions. The channel characteristics of these regions in the delay and frequency domains are discussed with examples. We provide empirical stochastic channel models (of different bandwidths) to accurately represent the channel on the airport surface area for all propagation regions. The models are provided in the form of …

Nutrient And Microbial Transport From Feedlot Surfaces, John E. Gilley, Elaine D. Berry, Roger A. Eigenberg, David B. Marx, Bryan L. Woodbury

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Presentations and White Papers

Nutrient and microbial transport by runoff may vary at different locations within a beef cattle feedlot. If the areas making the largest contributions to nutrient and microbial transport can be identified, it may be possible to institute site-specific management practices to reduce runoff nutrient and microbial transport. The objectives of this study were to: a) measure selected feedlot soil properties, and nutrient and microbial transport in runoff from various feedlot locations b) compare the effects of unconsolidated surface materials (USM) (loose manure pack) and consolidated subsurface materials (CSM) (compacted manure and underlying layers) on nutrient and microbial transport, and c) …

A New Contour Reconstruction Approach From Dexel Data In Virtual Sculpting, Kemal Yuksek, Weihan Zhang, Boryslaw Iwo Ridzalski, Ming-Chuan Leu

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a novel method of contour reconstruction from dexel data solving the shape anomalies for the complex geometry in virtual sculpting. Grouping and traversing processes are developed to find connectivity between dexels along every two adjacent rays. After traveling through all the rays on one slice, sub-boundaries are connected into full boundaries which are desired contours. The complexity of the new method has been investigated and determined as O(n). We also demonstrate the ability of the described method for viewing a sculpted model from different directions.

Development And Evaluation Of A Sub-Grid Combustion Model For A Landscape Scale 3-D Wildland Fire Simulator, Michael M. Clark

Theses and Dissertations

A mixture-fraction-based thermodynamic equilibrium approach for modeling gas-phase combustion was adapted and used in FIRETEC, a wildfire computational fluid dynamics model. The motivation behind this work was the desire to incorporate the features of complex chemistry calculations from the thermodynamic equilibrium model into FIRETEC without significantly increasing the computational burden of the program. In order to implement the mixture-fraction-based thermodynamic equilibrium approach, a sub-grid pocket model was developed to simulate the local mixture fraction of sub-grid flame sheets. Numerical simulations of wildfires were performed using FIRETEC with the new sub-grid, mixture-fraction-based pocket model to model gas-phase combustion. The thermodynamic equilibrium …

Investigation Of The Effects Of Aggregate Properties And Gradation On Pervious Concrete Mixtures, Andrew Neptune

All Theses

Pervious concrete is a concrete mixture prepared from cement, aggregates, water, little or no fines and in some cases admixtures. It has been considered a Best Management Practice by the EPA because of its ability to reduce storm water runoff and to initiate the filtering of pollutants. Because the hydrologic properties of pervious concrete has been the primary reason for its reappearance in construction, the focus of previous research has been on maximizing the drainage properties of the mix with single-sized aggregates. This research, however, investigates the effects of aggregate properties and gradation on the strength, as well as hydrologic …

Modeling Broadband Ocean Acoustic Transmissions With Time-Varying Sea Surfaces, Martin Siderius, Michael B. Porter

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Solutions to ocean acoustic scattering problems are often formulated in the frequency domain, which implies that the surface is "frozen" in time. This may be reasonable for short duration signals but breaks down if the surface changes appreciably over the transmission time. Frequency domain solutions are also impractical for source-receiver ranges and frequency bands typical for applications such as acoustic communications (e.g. hundreds to thousands of meters, 1-50 kHz band). In addition, a driving factor in the performance of certain acoustic systems is the Doppler spread, which is often introduced from sea-surface movement. The time-varying nature of the sea surface …

Generation Of Monthly Precipitation Under Limited Data And Climate Change: An Example From The Upper Blue Nile River Basin, U. Kim, Jagath J. Kaluarachchi, V. Smakhtin

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

This work develops a methodology to project the future precipitation in large river basins under limited data and climate change while preserving the historical temporal and spatial characteristics. The computationally simple and reliable conditional generation method (CGM) is presented and applied to generate reliable monthly precipitation data in the upper Blue Nile River Basin of Ethiopia where rain-fed agriculture is prevalent. The results showed that the temporal analysis with the CGM performs better to reproduce the historical long-term characteristics than other methods, and the spatial analysis with the CGM reproduced the historical spatial structure accurately. A 100-year time series analysis …

A Satisficing Approach To Aircraft Conflict Resolution, Wynn C. Stirling, James K. Archibald, Nicholas A. Jepsen, Richard L. Frost, Jared C. Hill

Faculty Publications

Future generations of air traffic management systems may give appropriately equipped aircraft the freedom to change flight paths in real time. This would require a conflict avoidance and resolution scheme that is both decentralized and cooperative. We describe a multiagent solution to aircraft conflict resolution based on satisficing game theory. A key feature of the theory is that satisficing decision makers form their preferences by taking into consideration the preferences of others, unlike conventional game theory that models agents that maximize self-interest metrics. This makes possible situational altruism, a sophisticated form of unselfish behavior in which the preferences of another …

Irradiation Of Varying Volumes Of Rat Lung To Same Mean Lung Dose: A Little To A Lot Or A Lot To A Little?, Vladimir A. Semenenko, Robert C. Molthen, Chunrong Li, Natalya V. Morrow, Rongshan Li, Swarajit N. Ghosh, Meetha Medhora, X. Allen Li

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose: To investigate whether irradiating small lung volumes with a large dose or irradiating large lung volumes with a small dose, given the same mean lung dose (MLD), has a different effect on pulmonary function in laboratory animals.

Methods and Materials: WAG/Rij/MCW male rats were exposed to single fractions of 300 kVp X-rays. Four treatments, in decreasing order of irradiated lung volume, were administered: (1) whole lung irradiation, (2) right lung irradiation, (3) left lung irradiation, and (4) irradiation of a small lung volume with four narrow beams. The irradiation times were chosen to accumulate the same MLD of 10, …

Using Agile Software Development Practices In A Research Oriented Distributed Simulation, Douglas James Mielke

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Although sometimes controversial, agile methodologies have proven to be a viable choice for some software development projects. Projects suited to agile methodologies are those that involve new technology, have requirements that change rapidly, and are controlled by small, talented teams. Much literature about agile software development leans towards business products and non-government entities. Only a handful of literature resources mention agile software development being used in government contracts and even fewer resources mention research projects. NASA's Airspace and Traffic Operations Simulation (ATOS) is a research oriented simulation that doesn't follow the traditional business project mold. In an effort to gain …

Searching Blogs And News: A Study On Popular Queries, Aixin Sun, Meishan Hu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Blog/news search engines are very important channels to reach information about the real-time happenings. In this paper, we study the popular queries collected over one year period and compare their search results returned by a blog search engine (i.e., Technorati) and a news search engine (i.e., Google News). We observed that the numbers of hits returned by the two search engines for the same set of queries were highly correlated, suggesting that blogs often provide commentary to current events reported in news. As many popular queries are related to some events, we further observed a high cohesiveness among the returned …

Bag-Of-Visual-Words Expansion Using Visual Relatedness For Video Indexing, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bag-of-visual-words (BoW) has been popular for visual classification in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel BoW expansion method to alleviate the effect of visual word correlation problem. We achieve this by diffusing the weights of visual words in BoW based on visual word relatedness, which is rigorously defined within a visual ontology. The proposed method is tested in video indexing experiment on TRECVID-2006 video retrieval benchmark, and an improvement of 7% over the traditional BoW is reported.

Effects Of Yttria Concentration And Microstructure On Electric Breakdown Of Yttria Stabilized Zirconia, O Jongprateep, V Petrovsky, F Dogan

Journal of Metals, Materials and Minerals

Ceramic materials have great potentials for capacitor application. However, low breakdown strength of the materials remains a key challenge for development of high performance capacitors. In this study, yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) were fabricated and tested for breakdown strength. YSZ samples with 3, 8, and 10 mol% yttria were carefully processed to control grain size and porosity level. Experimental results revealed that breakdown strength as high as 2 MV/cm could be achieved. The breakdown strength was not significantly affected by porosity level, but it was by yttria concentration. Relationship among yttria concentration, residual porosity and breakdown strength is discussed in …

Nano-Size Hydroxyapatite Powders Preparation By Wet-Chemical Precipitation Route, N Monmaturapoj

Journal of Metals, Materials and Minerals

In this study, wet-chemical process was performed to prepare nano-size hydroxyapatite (HA) powders (≈10 nm) by varying concentration (low, medium and high) of the starting solutions in order to increase the amount of as-dried HA powders with different process conditions. Particle sizes and density were analyzed and differential thermal analysis was used to determine the glass transition (Tg) and the onset crystallization (Tc) temperatures. XRD and SEM were performed to identify phases and microstructure. The wet-chemical precipitation using low concentration of starting solution under reflux environment could be the optimize process to induce the formation of hydroxyapatite rather than tricalcium …

Linear Relaxation Techniques For Task Management In Uncertain Settings, Pradeep Varakantham, Stephen F. Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of assisting a busy user in managing her workload of pending tasks. We assume that our user is typically oversubscribed, and is invariably juggling multiple concurrent streams of tasks (or work flows) of varying importance and urgency. There is uncertainty with respect to the duration of a pending task as well as the amount of follow-on work that may be generated as a result of executing the task. The user’s goal is to be as productive as possible; i.e., to execute tasks that realize the maximum cumulative payoff. This is achieved by enabling …