Engineering Commons^™

2008 Directory Of Indiana State, County, City And Town Officials Responsible For Road And Street Work, Indiana Ltap

Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) Directory

Contact information for agency officials and employees responsible for Indiana’s local road infrastructure.

Shape-Based Recognition Of Targets In Synthetic Aperture Radar Images Using Elliptical Fourier Descriptors, Louis P. Nicoli, Georgios C. Anagnostopoulos

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper primarily investigates the use of shape-based features by an Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system to classify various types of targets in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. In specific, shapes of target outlines are represented via Elliptical Fourier Descriptors (EFDs), which, in turn, are utilized as recognition features. According to the proposed ATR approach, a segmentation stage first isolates the target region from shadow and ground clutter via a sequence of fast thresholding and morphological operations. Next, a number of EFDs are computed that can sufficiently describe the salient characteristics of the target outline. Finally, a classification stage based …

Implementing Mass Nutrient Balance Procedures On Swine Production Facilities, Richard Koelsch, Alan Sutton

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Whole Farm Nutrient Balance (WFNB) approaches have been used to provide a measure of environmental performance (Aarts et al., 1992; Lanyon and Beegle, 1993; Klausner, 1995). Whole farm balance concepts are used as part of the Netherlands Mineral Accounting System public policy that includes compulsory mineral input and output reports from livestock farms and levies for excess imbalances (Jongbloed and Lenis, 1998). Procedures for measuring WFNB will be followed in measurements made on commercial swine facilities for 2006 and 2007. The conclusions developed based upon data from 13 for 2006 include:

• On average, the participating swine producers import 1.5 units …

Nuclear Energy, Steve Kraft

Native American Forum on Nuclear Issues

Abstract:

-Why Nuclear Energy?

-The lesson of the last 20 years in U.S. electricity policy:

– Diversified fuel and technology portfolio is essential

– All fuels and technologies (nuclear, coal, natural gas, renewables, efficiency) have a legitimate role

-The challenge for the future:

– Preserving/restoring diversified portfolio

– Ensuring resource adequacy, particularly in competitive markets

-Expanded use of nuclear energy is part of the answer

– Integrated used fuel management supports nuclear competitiveness

Integral Channels In Metal Components And Fabrication Thereof, Rajiv S. Mishra

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

An internal channel in a metal body for use in applications where internal fluid flow within a metal body is desired, as in a heat exchanger. The internal channel is formed in the metal body by frictionally stirring with a pin plunged into the metal body, and traversing the metal body with the pin.

Ahata Solar Energy Resort Training Program, Florida Solar Energy Center, William Young

FSEC Energy Research Center®

The Florida Solar Energy Center/University of Central Florida developed a Solar Energy Resort Training Program at the request of Aruba Bucuti Beach Resort Association, Aruba (AHATA) in the Caribbean Islands. The Aruba Resort Association has been interested in learning about and applying renewable energy technologies to their resorts to reduce energy consumption and cost. This report describes the activities and implementation of Florida Solar Energy Center's support to the Association to assist in the consulting, education and implementation of solar energy technologies into the resort industry in the country.

Ceas E-News 04.03.2008, College Of Engineering And Applied Sciences

College of Engineering and Applied Sciences News

On Tues., April 15, senior engineering conference features 72 projects

Performance Study Of Mpls And Ds Techniques To Improve Qos Routing For Critical Applications On Ip Networks, Salim Alsharif, Mohammad Mehdi Shahsavari

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper aims to analyze the QoS performance of two main technology mechanisms, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Differentiated Services (DS). The introduction of both mechanisms to support throughput and delay sensitive real-time media traffic will have an impact on critical applications with respect to QoS and traffic engineering. MPLS is a traffic forwarding mechanism that allows traffic to use multiple paths and DS is a mechanism that provides for aggregate traffic to be classified and conditioned at the edge of the network routers. The two modeled techniques and their performance will be evaluated with respect to their end-to-end delay. …

Idma: Improving The Defense Against Malicious Attack For Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Based On The Artp Protocol, Chaorong Peng, Chang Wen Chen

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Malicious nodes are mounting increasingly sophisticated attacking operations on the Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). This is mainly because the IP-based MANETs are vulnerable to attacks by various malicious nodes. However, the defense against malicious attack can be improved when a new layer of network architecture can be developed to separate true IP address from disclosing to the malicious nodes. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to improve the defense against malicious attack (IDMA) that is based on a recently developed Assignment Router Identify Protocol (ARIP) for the clustering-based MANET management. In the ARIP protocol, we design the …

Thresholding For Higher-Order Statistical Denoising, Samuel Peter Kozaitis, Tim Young

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Hard thresholding seems to work well for denoising signals using higher-order statistics. We statistically examined the best values for hard thresholding and related this to the fraction of wavelet coefficients set to zero to obtain the minimum MSE. In addition, we found that the minimum MSE obtained was less sensitive to the threshold when implemented based on a third-order parameter rather than the noise power. Alternatively, we found that this approach to thresholding could be implemented by setting a fixed fraction of wavelet coefficients to zero.

Power Quality Measurements Of A Dc Motor Drive, Nikil Mulakken, Taufik, Makbul Anwari

Electrical Engineering

This paper presents the results of power quality measurements performed on a DC motor drive. The power quality measurements involve a laboratory setup to investigate how various loading conditions on DC drive affect the efficiency, input power factor and total harmonic distortion of output armature current of a DC drive. Through the capture of this information, ways to minimize losses associated with the DC motor drive could be achieved based on finding an optimal operating point or region.

Clustering And Its Application In Requirements Engineering, Chuan Duan

Technical Reports

Large scale software systems challenge almost every activity in the software development life-cycle, including tasks related to eliciting, analyzing, and specifying requirements. Fortunately many of these complexities can be addressed through clustering the requirements in order to create abstractions that are meaningful to human stakeholders. For example, the requirements elicitation process can be supported through dynamically clustering incoming stakeholders’ requests into themes. Cross-cutting concerns, which have a significant impact on the architectural design, can be identified through the use of fuzzy clustering techniques and metrics designed to detect when a theme cross-cuts the dominant decomposition of the system. Finally, traceability …

Acuta Enews April 2008, Vol. 37, No. 4

ACUTA Newsletters

ln This lssue

From the President..................Walt Magnussen, Texas A&N Univ., ACUTA President

Board Report.........................Riny Ledgerwood, San Diego State Univ., ACUTA Sec./Treasurer

Campus Safety Legislation Mulled in Wake of Shootings ......Raymond Thrower, Jr., IACLEA

Tech Talk: We'll Ask Again: ls This a Phone You Want on Your Network? Kevin Tanzillo, Dux PR

12th Annual Strategic Leadership Forum Topics

DC Update .............Jeanne Jansenius, Sewanee, The University of the South

Nominate Now for ACUTA Ruth A. Michalecki Award

lnfo Links ............. Randy Hayes, Univ. of Northern lowa

Welcome New Members

Check lt Out: RFls/RFPs, Job Postings, Press Releases

Sloth-Nfs And The Possibility Of Using Fuzzy Control To Optimize Cache Management, Ryan C. Spring, Eric Freudenthal

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Modern software systems are complex and increasingly vulnerable to malicious attack. In order to apply bug fixes and protect against security weaknesses, workstation administrators must continuously patch operating system and application program installations. To simplify this process, administrators generally configure systems into clusters with common installations of operating systems and application programs in a manner that patches and other routine maintenance can be applied en masse. Two widely used approaches offer complementary advantages: Installations and updates are particularly convenient when all data including operating system and programs is served by traditional centralized network-connected file servers (networked file systems) because administrators …

Asymmetric Paternalism: Description Of The Phenomenon, Explanation Based On Decisions Under Uncertainty, And Possible Applications To Education, Olga Kosheleva, Francois Modave

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In general, human being are rational decision makers, but in many situations, they exhibit unexplained "inertia", reluctance to switch to a better decision. In this paper, we show that this seemingly irrational behavior can be explained if we take uncertainty into account; we also explain how this phenomenon can be utilized in education.

42nd Conference On Senior Engineering Design Projects, College Of Engineering And Applied Sciences

Senior Engineering Design Conference

The 42nd Conference on Senior Engineering Design Projects was held on April 15, 2008 at the College of Engineering and applied Sciences on the Parkview Campus of Western Michigan University. The college sponsors the conference to showcase the work of its graduating seniors, who are required to complete a capstone project that puts into practice what they have learned. Many of the projects are sponsored by business and industry.

Ole Miss Engineer 2008

Ole Miss Engineer

No abstract provided.

Sustainable Portland: Implementation Series 1, New England Environmental Finance Center

Climate Change

When the Sustainable Portland Task Force Report was released in November 2007, under the leadership of Mayor Jim Cohen, Portland Councilor Kevin Donoghue had the idea that students at the Muskie School of Public Service might be able to help implement recommendations from the report. It may have helped that Kevin was himself a graduate of the Community Planning and Development Master’s program at the Muskie School, but it was a good idea nevertheless. He approached Professor Sam Merrill in the CPD program, who spoke with the new Mayor Ed Suslovic about a possible partnership between the City and the …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 49 Number 4, Spring 2008, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

14 - LET THE SUN SHINE IN By Steven Boyd Saum. In the international Solar Decathlon competition, a team from Santa Clara blazed a dazzling trail from almost-ran to third in the world.

20 - VISIONS FROM THE SIXTIES By Lisa Taggart. It was art that broke all the rules. And now an exhibit at the de Saisset Museum, curated by Santa Clara scholar Andrea Pappas, captures the sense of optimism and energy when the only limits were imagination itself.

26 - JORMA'S JOURNEY By Mark Purdy. With Jefferson Airplane, he helped define the San Francisco sound. With Hot Tuna …

Modeling And Characterization Of Adaptive Lanthanum-Modified Lead Zirconate Titanate (Plzt) Microlenses, Yasser A. Abdelaziez, Partha P. Banerjee

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We report the modeling and characterization of adaptive voltage controlled electro-optic microlenses. First, we utilize finite element analysis (FEA) to simulate the induced electro-optic effect in lanthanum-modified lead zirconate titanate (PLZT). FEA simulation provides microlens parameters such as phase and focal length. A simple z-scan method is developed to fully characterize the adaptive voltage controlled linear lens. Experimental z-scan results are shown to match the theoretical predictions from FEA.

Impact Of Checkpoint Latency On The Optimal Checkpoint Interval And Execution Time, Sarala Arunagiri, Seetharami Seelam, Ron A. Oldfield, Maria Ruiz, Patricia J. Teller, Rolf Riesen

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The massive scale of current and next-generation massively parallel processing (MPP) systems presents significant challenges related to fault tolerance. In particular, the standard approach to fault tolerance, application-directed checkpointing, puts an incredible strain on the storage system and the interconnection network. This results in overheads on the appliation that severely impact performance and scalability. The checkpoint overhead can be reduced by decreasing the checkpoint latency, which is the time to write a checkpoint file, or by increasing the checkpoint interval, which is the compute time between writing checkpoint files. However, increasing the checkpoint interval may increase execution time in the …

Program Synthesis From Workflow-Driven Ontologies, Leonardo Salayandia, Steve Roach, Ann Q. Gates

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

An approach that results in the development of Workflow-Driven Ontologies (WDO) (called the WDO approach) allows domain scientists to capture process knowledge in the form of concepts as well as relations between concepts. Program synthesis techniques can be employed to generate algorithmic solutions by transforming the process knowledge expressed in the WDO as concepts and relations to variables and functions and computing unknown variables from known ones based on the process knowledge documented by the domain scientist. Furthermore, the algorithmic solutions that are generated by program synthesis potentially can support the composition of services, which result in the creation of …

Opportunistic Checkpoint Intervals To Improve System Performance, Sarala Arunagiri, John T. Daly, Patricia J. Teller, Seetharami Seelam, Ron A. Oldfield, Maria Ruiz Varela, Rolf Riesen

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The massive scale of current and next-generation massively parallel processing (MPP) systems presents significant challenges related to fault tolerance. For applications that perform periodic checkpoints, the choice of the checkpoint interval, the period between checkpoints, can have a significant impact on the execution time of the application. Finding the optimal checkpoint interval that minimizes the wall clock execution time, has been a subject of research over the last decade. In an environment where there are concurrent applications competing for access to the network and storage resources, in addition to application execution times, contention at these shared resources need to be …

Selfish Wavelength Assignment In Multifiber Optical Networks, Evangelos Bampas, Aris Pagourtzis, George Pierrakos, Katerina Potika

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

No abstract provided.

Impulse, Kyle Johnson, Cindy Rickeman

Impulse (Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering Publication)

Features:
[Page] 2 Department of Defense research: An alternative power technology project is part of a $7.8-million DoD grant awarded to the college.
[Page] 4 Weapons wear and tear: A storage room has been renovated to do fatigue testing on military weapons.
[Page] 6 Staying at State: An increasing number of alums are finding there is no place like their alma mater to get an advanced degree.
[Page] 8 Record enrollment: Math, mechanical engineering, and construction management are among the programs helping to push the college to record enrollment.
[Page] 10 A new home: Fund-raising has not finished, but …

Electric Motor Efficiency Under Variable Frequencies And Loads, Charles M. Burt, Xianshu Piao, Franklin Gaudi, Bryan Busch, Taufik

Electrical Engineering

This paper details a study performed by the Irrigation Training and Research Center to determine motor performances under varying speeds [induced by a variable frequency drives (VFD) controller]and loads. A further goal of the study was to provide sufficient information to designers so that they could estimate total pumping plant power usage with a VFD-controlled installation. Motors were tested with a VFD as well as across-the-line. On average, the relative efficiency of the electrical system with a VFD may be approximately 8% lower than the relative efficiency of a properly designed, full-load across-the-line system. If one considers actual field operating …

Real-Time Telemetry Options For Ocean Observing Systems, Bridget Benson, G. Chang, F. Spada, D. Manov, R. Kastner

Electrical Engineering

Ocean observing systems provide a means to monitor oceanic variables on a variety of temporal and spatial scales. Data from ocean observing systems are most useful when they are collected in real-time; real-time data allow the detection of important events as they occur. Various real-time telemetry options exist for transferring data from sea to shore and from the subsurface to the surface. We survey these telemetry options to highlight the research problems associated with subsea to surface to shore networking and include a comparison of existing real-time technologies for three specific ocean observing system network topologies with respect to data …

Proactive Planning Will Make Most Of Regional Differences, Lorcan Sirr, Conor Skehan

Media

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Transverse Mode Coupling And Optical Confinement Factor On Gallium-Nitride Based Laser Diode, Xiaomin Jin, Zhang Bei, Dai Tao, Zhang Guo-Yi

Electrical Engineering

We have investigated the transverse mode pattern and the optical field confinement factor of gallium nitride(GaN) laser diodes (LDs) theoretically. For the particular LD structure, composed of approximate 4 μm thick n-GaN substrate layer, the maximum optical confinement factor was found to be corresponding to the 5th order transverse mode, the so-called lasing mode. Moreover, the value of the maximum confinement factor varies periodically when increasing the n-sideGaN layer thickness, which simultaneously changes and increases the oscillation mode order of the GaN LD caused by the effects of mode coupling. The effects of the thickness and the average composition of …

Numerical Prediction Of Primary And Secondary Flows In A Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube, Ronan Oliver

Masters

The primary aim of this project is to obtain a fundamental understanding of the fluid dynamics and thermodynamics of the primary and secondary flows in a Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube (RHVT). These flows are highly complex and are three dimensional, compressible and viscous in nature. To obtain an understanding of these, a state of the art Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software package is applied for flow prediction with advanced turbulence models, and is employed to predict the primary and secondary flows in a RHVT. The models that are used include : the k-e model, the SST model by Menter, and the …