Engineering Commons^™

Performance Comparison Of Thermal Insulated Packaging Boxes, Bags And Refrigerants For Single-Parcel Shipments, S. P. Singh, Gary J. Burgess, Jay Singh

Industrial Technology and Packaging

A range of packaging solutions exists for products that must be kept within a specific temperature range throughout the supply-and-distribution chain. This report summarizes the results of studies conducted over a span of 2 years by the Consortium for Distribution Packaging at Michigan State University. Thermal insulation packaging materials such as expanded polystyrene, polyurethane, corrugated fibreboard, ThermalCor® and other composite packaging such as thermal insulating bags were studied. Phase change materials such as gel packs were also evaluated. Properties such as R-value, melting point and heat absorption were examined and are reported.

A Mobile Ecg Monitoring System With Context Collection, Jin Peng Li

Masters

An objective of a health process is one where patients can stay healthy with the support of expert medical advice when they need it, at any location and any time. An associated aim would be the development of a system which places increased emphasis on preventative measures as a first point of contact with the patient. This research is a step along the road towards this type of preventative healthcare for cardiac patients. It seeks to develop a smart mobile ECG monitoring system that requests and records context information about what is happening around the subject when an arrhythmia event …

A Comparison Of Filtering Approaches For Aircraft Engine Health Estimation, Daniel J. Simon

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Different approaches for the estimation of the states of linear dynamic systems are commonly used, the most common being the Kalman filter. For nonlinear systems, variants of the Kalman filter are used. Some of these variants include the LKF (linearized Kalman filter), the EKF (extended Kalman filter), and the UKF (unscented Kalman filter). With the LKF and EKF, performance varies depending on how often Jacobians (partial derivative matrices) are updated. In other words, we see a tradeoff between computational effort and filtering performance. With the unscented Kalman filter, Jacobians are not calculated but computational effort is typically high due to …

A Finite Element Study Of Piezoelectric Thin Films On Substrates, Bo Liu

Theses and Dissertations

The overall goal of this work has been mainly to advance the understanding of the degradation in the response of piezoelectric thin films after they are deposited on substrates. To have better understanding of the difference in the response between free standing piezoelectric films and those deposited on a substrate, we calculated the normalized "effective" piezoelectric coefficients for BT/MgO, PZT/STO and ZnO/STO respectively. We also studied the impact on the effective coefficients due to the components of the bulk material's piezoelectric coefficients. After studying the clamping effects of the substrate, lattice mismatch, stiffness of the films and the substrates, we …

Analytical Modeling With Decoupled Optimal Control Of Biomechanical Sit -To -Stand Movement, Asif Mahmood Mughal

Theses and Dissertations

Biomechanical movements with multiple degrees of freedom exhibit complex coordination and control mechanisms in the presence of physiological constraints. A human body biomechanical model which can mimic diverse 3D physiological movements is a challenging task. In this study, we develop a mathematical framework to study human sit-to-stand (STS) movement using 2D biomechanical models. This analytical framework models the physiological system for feedback controller design. A 2D 4-segment biomechanical model with optimal feedback controller design provides a motivation to extend this scheme for analytical 3D bipedal modeling. We used a newly developed mathematical modeling toolbox (Maple’s DynaFlexPro) to generate 3D 8-segment …

Low Noise, High Repetition Rate Semiconductor-Based Mode-Locked Lasers For Signal Processing And Coherent Communications, Franklyn Quinlan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation details work on high repetition rate semiconductor mode-locked lasers. The qualities of stable pulse trains and stable optical frequency content are the focus of the work performed. First, applications of such lasers are reviewed with particular attention to applications only realizable with laser performance such as presented in this dissertation. Sources of timing jitter are also reviewed, as are techniques by which the timing jitter of a 10 GHz optical pulse train may be measured. Experimental results begin with an exploration of the consequences on the timing and amplitude jitter of the phase noise of an RF source …

Ultrashort Laser Pulse Interaction With Photo-Thermo-Refractive Glass, Leo Siiman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Photo-thermo-refractive (PTR) glass is an ideal photosensitive material for recording phase volume holograms. It is a homogeneous multi-component silicate glass that demonstrates all the advantages of optical glass: thermal stability, high laser damage threshold, and a wide transparency range. Moreover the ability to record phase patterns (i.e. spatial refractive index variations) into PTR glass has resulted in the fabrication of volume holograms with diffraction efficiency greater than 99%. The conventional method of recording a hologram in PTR glass relies on exposure to continuous-wave ultraviolet laser radiation. In this dissertation the interaction between infrared ultrashort laser pulses and PTR glass is …

Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Photonic Crystal Lasers And Photonic Devices, Ying Zhou

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation discusses cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) and polymers based photonic devices including one-dimensional (1D) photonic crystal lasers and broadband circular polarizers. CLCs showing unique self-organized chiral structures have been widely used in bistable displays, flexible displays, and reflectors. However, the photonic band gap they exhibit opens a new way for generating laser light at the photonic band edge (PBE) or inside the band gap. When doped with an emissive laser dye, cholesteric liquid crystals provide distributed feedback so that mirrorless lasing is hence possible. Due to the limited surface anchoring, the thickness of gain medium and feedback length is …

Integrated Optical Spr (Surface Plasmon Resonance) Sensor Based On Optoelectronic Platform, Hyungseok Bang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Current major demands in SPR sensor development are system miniaturization and throughput improvement. Structuring an array of integrated optical SPR sensor heads on a semiconductor based optoelectronic platform could be a promising solution for those issues, since integrated optical waveguides have highly miniaturized dimension and the optoelectronic platform enables on-chip optical-to-electrical signal conversion. Utilizing a semiconductor based platform to achieve optoelectronic functionality poses requirements to the senor head; the sensor head needs to have reasonably small size while it should have reasonable sensitivity and fabrication tolerance. This research proposes a novel type of SPR sensor head and demonstrates a fabricated …

Extended Focus Range High Resolution Endoscopic Optical Coherence Tomography, Kye-Sung Lee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Today, medical imaging is playing an important role in medicine as it provides the techniques and processes used to create images of the human body or parts thereof for clinical purposes (medical procedures seeking to reveal, diagnose or examine disease) or medical science (including the study of normal anatomy and function). Modalities are developing over time to achieve the highest possible resolution, speed of image acquisition, sensitivity, and specificity. In the past decade, advances in optics, fiber, as well as laser technology have enabled the development of noninvasive optical biomedical imaging technology that can also be applied to endoscopy to …

Lidar Based Emissions Measurement At The Whole Facility Scale: Method And Error Analysis, Gail E. Bingham, Christian C. Marchant, Vladimir V. Zavyalov, Douglas J. Ahlstrom, Kori D. Moore, Derek S. Jones, Thomas D. Wilkerson, Lawrence E. Hipps, Randy S. Martin, Jerry L. Hatfield, John H. Prueger, Richard L. Pfeiffer

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Particulate emissions from agricultural sources vary from dust created by operations and animal movement to the fine secondary particulates generated from ammonia and other emitted gases. The development of reliable facility emission data using point sampling methods designed to characterize regional, well-mixed aerosols are challenged by changing wind directions, disrupted flow fields caused by structures, varied surface temperatures, and the episodic nature of the sources found at these facilities. We describe a three-wavelength lidar-based method, which, when added to a standard point sampler array, provides unambiguous measurement and characterization of the particulate emissions from agricultural production operations in near real …

The Effect Of Demand, Tank Parameters, And Pumping Stations On Energy Use In Municipal Drinking Water Distribution Systems, Santosh Raj Ghimire

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Two of the indicators of the UN Millennium Development Goals ensuring environmental sustainability are energy use and per capita carbon dioxide emissions. The increasing urbanization and increasing world population may require increased energy use in order to transport enough safe drinking water to communities. In addition, the increase in water use would result in increased energy consumption, thereby resulting in increased green-house gas emissions that promote global climate change. The study of multiple Municipal Drinking Water Distribution Systems (MDWDSs) that relates various MDWDS aspects--system components and properties--to energy use is strongly desirable. The understanding of the relationship between system aspects …

Fabrication And Characterization Of Room Temperature Operating Single Electron Transistors Using Focused Ion Beam Technologies, Prasanjit Santosh Karre

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The single electron transistor (SET) is a Coulomb blockade device, whose operation is based on the controlled manipulation of individual electrons. Single electron transistors show immense potential to be used in future ultra lowpower devices, high density memory and also in high precision electrometry. Most SET devices operate at cryogenic temperatures, because the charging energy is much smaller than the thermal oscillations. The room temperature operation of these devices is possible with sub- 10nm nano-islands due to the inverse dependance of charging energy on the radius of the conducting nano-island. The fabrication of sub-10nm features with existing lithographic techniques is …

Mse News 2008, Department Of Materials Science And Engineering, Michigan Technological University

Department of Materials Science and Engineering Annual Reports

Table of Contents

• MSE Department Welcomes New Assistant Professor
• Lee Retires
• Peter Moran
• Michigan Tech Honors Levy for Research Efforts in Magneto-Photonics
• Student Accomplishments
• Awards and Honors
• Alumni News

Electrical And Computer Engineering Research Report 2008, Department Of Electrical And Computer Engineering, Michigan Technological University

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Annual Reports

• Department
• Research
• New Chair
• Publications
• Enterprise

Pyrene Fate Affected By Humic Acid Amendment In Soil Slurry Systems, Y. Liang, D. Sorensen, Ronald C. Sims, Joan Mclean

Biological Engineering Faculty Publications

Background

Humic acid (HA) has been found to affect the solubility, mineralization, and bound residue formation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). However, most of the studies on the interaction between HA and PAH concentrated on one or two of the three phases. Few studies have provided a simple protocol to demonstrate the overall effects of HA on PAH distribution in soil systems for all three phases.

Methods

In this study, three doses of standard Elliott soil HA (ESHA), 15, 187.5, and 1,875 μg ESHA/g soil slurry, were amended to soil slurry systems. ¹⁴C-pyrene was added to the systems along …

The Power Of Soil: Using It To Our Advantage, Judith L. Sims, R. Otis

Biological Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Holistic Approach To Decentralized Structural Damage Localization Using Wireless Sensor Networks, Gregory Hackmann, Fei Sun, Nestor Castaneda, Chenyang Lu, Shirley Dyke

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become an increasingly compelling platform for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications, since they can be installed relatively inexpensively onto existing infrastructure. Existing approaches to SHM in WSNs typically address computing system issues or structural engineering techniques, but not both in conjunction. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach to SHM that integrates a decentralized computing architecture with the Damage Localization Assurance Criterion algorithm. In contrast to centralized approaches that require transporting large amounts of sensor data to a base station, our system pushes the execution of portions of the damage localization algorithm onto the …

Flexible Service Provisioning For Heterogeneous Sensor Networks, Chien-Liang Fok, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Chenyang Lu

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper presents Servilla, a highly flexible service provisioning framework for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Its service-oriented programming model and middleware enable developers to construct platform-independent applications over a dynamic set of devices with diverse computational resources and sensors. A salient feature of Servilla is its support for dynamic discovery and binding to local and remote services, which enables flexible and energy-efficient in-network collaboration among heterogeneous devices. Furthermore, Servilla provides a modular middleware architecture that can be easily tailored for devices with a wide range of resources, allowing even resource-limited devices to provide services and leverage resource-rich devices for in-network …

Scheduling Design And Verification For Open Soft Real-Time Systems, Robert Glaubius, Terry Tidwell, William D. Smart, Christopher Gill

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Open soft real-time systems, such as mobile robots, experience unpredictable interactions with their environments and yet must respond both adaptively and with reasonable temporal predictability. New scheduling approaches are needed to address the demands of such systems, in which many of the assumptions made by traditional real-time scheduling theory do not hold. In previous work we established foundations for a scheduling policy design and verification approach for open soft real-time systems, that can use different decision models, e.g., a Markov Decision Process (MDP), to capture the nuances of their scheduling semantics. However, several important refinements to the preliminary techniques developed …

Faster Optimal State-Space Search With Graph Decomposition And Reduced Expansion, Yixin Chen

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Traditional AI search methods, such as BFS, DFS, and A*, look for a path from a starting state to the goal in a state space most typically modelled as a directed graph. Prohibitively large sizes of the state space graphs make optimal search difficult. A key observation, as manifested by the SAS+ formalism for planning, is that most commonly a state-space graph is well structured as the Cartesian product of several small subgraphs. This paper proposes novel search algorithms that exploit such structure. The results reveal that standard search algorithms may explore many redundant paths. Our algorithms provide an automatic …

Analysis And Optimization Of Mobile Phone Antenna Radiation Performance In The Presence Of Head And Hand Phantoms, Erdem Ofli, Chung-Huan Li, Nicolas Chavannes, Niels Kuster

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

A commercial clam shell phone CAD model is used to numerically investigate the effect of a hand phantom on mobile phone antenna radiation performance. The simulation results show that the grip of the hand phantom is the most important parameter to antenna performance. The antenna is converted into a parameterized form, then optimized to achieve the targeted multi-band performance in real-usage conditions.

Method Of Moments Solution By Using Sinc-Type Basis Functions For The Scattering From A Finite Number Of Conducting Strip Gratings, Taner Oğuzer, Fadil Kuyucuoğlu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

A numerical method of moments (MoM) solution is applied to the electromagnetic scattering from a periodic finite conducting strip array when the incident electromagnetic plane wave E and H polarizations illuminate the grating. For such grating strip geometry, we deal with singular integral equations arising from Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions. MoM is applied using band-limited sinc functions as basis and testing functions. The Galerkin approach is followed in MoM formulation. The properties of the sinc function, with the infinite integral, are exploited in the computations of the main matrix elements. Also, the error in our approach goes to zero …

Zero Crossing Counter For Accuracy Improvement Of Fmcw Range Detection, Si̇nan Kurt, Şi̇mşek Demi̇r, Altunkan Hizal

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

For civil and military purposes FMCW radars are widely used. The theoretical background is well-established. Nevertheless, improvement of various aspects of these radars is still required. Signal processing is one of the crucial points of the system which determines the capabilities of the radar. In this study a zero crossing detector implementation, which can be efficiently used for target detection and range calculation in short range FMCW range detector is proposed. The duration between consecutive zero-crossings are used as the data instead of the number of cycles per unit time. Experimental evaluation of its performance is also given.

Comparison Of Basic Linear Filters In Extracting Auditory Evoked Potentials, Serap Aydin

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In the present study, the performances of two well-known linear filtering techniques are compared for extraction of auditory Evoked Potential (EP) from a relatively small number of sweeps. Both experimental and simulated data are filtered by the two algorithms into two groups. Group A consists of Wiener filtering (WF) applications, where conventional WF and Coherence Weighted WF (CWWF)) have been assessed in combination with the Subspace Method (SM). Group B consists of the well-known adaptive filtering algorithms Least Mean Square (LMS), Recursive Least Square (RLS), and one-step Kalman filtering (KF). Both groups are tested with respect to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) …

Biomedical Circuits And Systems Dedicated For Sensing And Neurostimulation: Case Study On Urinary Bladder Dysfunctions, Mohamad Sawan, Aguibou Ba, Faycal Mounaim, Jacques Corcos, Mostafa Elhilali

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper covers circuits and systems techniques for the construction of high reliability biosensing and neurostimulation smart medical devices. Such microsystems are dedicated for interconnections through the peripheral neural systems. Case study related to applications such as bladder control is discussed. Available electrical neurostimulation techniques for the rehabilitation of urinary bladder functions do not allow an adequate voiding due to dyssynergia between the bladder and the sphincter. A new implantable stimulator, built with commercially available electronic components, was designed to overcome these difficulties. The proposed system performs two types of stimulations: Selective Stimulation for bladder voiding and Permanent Stimulation to …

Role Of Artificial Intelligence In The Reliability Evaluation Of Electric Power Systems, Chanan Singh, Lingfeng Wang

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Every reliability analysis effort, in some way, involves searching the state space of the system for those states that represent the events of interest, typically failure of the system or a given node to meet the demand. This essentially translates into a search procedure to efficiently identify states to be examined and then using a mechanism to evaluate these states. Traditionally, reliability analysis methods are based either on an implicit or explicit enumeration process or Monte Carlo sampling. More recently, methods based on artificial intelligence have been investigated both as an alternative to Monte Carlo for the search process as …

Dispersion Analysis Of The Adi-Fdtd And S-Fdtd Methods, Mehmet Kuşaf, Abdullah Y. Öztoprak

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Numerical dispersion performances of ADI-FDTD and S-FDTD methods have been compared. It has been shown that for time steps below the stability limits of the S-FDTD method it has much better dispersion performance compared with the ADI-FDTD method and that the S-FDTD method can be usefully employed for space increments in the order of \lambda/25 to \lambda/50.

Pattern Synthesis With Uniform Circular Arrays For The Reduction Of Wcdma Intercell Interference, Mohammed Al-Husseini, Elias Yaacoub, Karim Y. Kabalan, Ali El-Hajj

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The deployment of advanced antenna arrays at the base stations of cellular systems is a key technique in reducing intercell interference, and thus increasing the number of served users. Uniform circular arrays (UCAs) provide 360 degrees of coverage, their patterns are steering-invariant and their sidelobe levels are controllable. This paper investigates the use of UCAs having specially synthesized patterns at the base stations of WCDMA cellular systems. The decrease in the ratio of intercell interference to intracell power resulting from the use of these arrays in a beam-steering scheme will be assessed, and the advantages and disadvantages of each pattern …

Distance Relaying Algorithm For Double-Circuit Transmission Line With Compensation For Reactance Effect Under Standard Availability Of Measurements, Jan Izykowski, Marcin Bozek

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper deals with non-pilot distance protection of a double-circuit transmission line. Negative impact of the reactance effect, appearing in measuring a fault loop impedance, on operation of the relay is discussed. An adaptive algorithm allowing one to prevent the relay from mis- or mal-operation caused by the reactance effect is introduced. The algorithm is designed for a standard availability of measurements from one end of the double-circuit line, i.e. when three-phase voltage and current from the faulted line circuit, and additionally zero-sequence current from the healthy line circuit, are provided as the relay input signals. The algorithm is based …