Engineering Commons^™

Physiological Telemetric Sensing Systems For Medical Applications, Lun-Chen Hsu

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

A batteryless, wireless, sensing system, suitable for biomedical applications, was studied in this dissertation. The sensing system contains a reader and a transponder and the working principle is based on passive RFID systems. The transponder harvests the RF energy from the reader to power up the frequency generator circuit which is modulated by sensor signals. Sensor signals are encoded into frequency shifts to provide the immunity to motion artifacts and the robust performances of sensing system are demonstrated. The sensing platform can also be used for multiple sensor integration for different medical applications. In this dissertation, the physiological measurements are …

Effects Of Voltage Unbalance And System Armonics On The Performance Of Doubly Fed Induction Wind Generators, Morgan Mozhgan Kiani

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Inherent difficulties in management of electric power in the presence of an increasing demand for more energy, non-conventional loads such as digital appliances, and non-sustainable imported fossil fuels has initiated a multi-folded effort by many countries to restructure the way electric energy is generated, dispatched, and consumed. Smart power grid is the manifestation of many technologies that would eventually transforms the existing power grid into a more flexible, fault resilient, and intelligent system. Integration of distributed renewable energy sources plays a central role in successful implementation of this transformation. Among the renewable options, wind energy harvesting offers superior engineering and …

Dynamic Scene Interpretation And Understanding From Two Views, Ninad Shashikant Thakoor

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Interpretation of a static or dynamic scene starts by segmenting the scene followed by recognition. Our work concentrates on the general problem of segmenting and recognizing animate and inanimate objects in a scene captured from two different views. The two views here refer to either a pair of frames captured by a stereo camera or two frames (with spatial overlap) captured with a moving camera.The work described in the dissertation starts with an iterative split-and-merge framework for segmentation of an unknown number of objects captured with stereo camera. The disparity of a scene is modeled by approximating various surfaces in …

A Novel Method For Major Harmonic Sources Identification In High Voltage Transmission Systems, Shun Liang

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Due to the proliferation of high-voltage power electronics devices and nonlinear loads connected to power systems, the penetration of produced harmonics into power transmission networks to pollute power quality of power systems has been a new concern. Recently, an electric utility company in Texas has observed that harmonic levels may exceed the recommended levels of IEEE Std. 519-1992 at some points in the 138 kV, 161 kV, and 345 kV transmission systems. In order to meet the requirement of the IEEE recommended practice and maintain the power quality of electricity delivered to consumers, identification of major harmonic sources to mitigate …

Electrodeposited Cuprous Oxide Solar Cells, Kunhee Han

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The electrochemically deposited cuprous oxide (Cu2O) as a photovoltaic absorber material is introduced in this work. The electrical, structural, and optical characteristics of electrodeposited Cu2O are well investigated. The pH of the deposition solution controls the flat band voltage of Cu2O. The variation of the flat band voltage by solution pH is related to oxygen incorporation in the film, which is controlled by the amount of oxygen precursor, OH-, in the solution. Hence, the high pH in the solution is preferable for producing a p-type Cu2O with copper vacancy, while the low pH in the solution is preferable for producing …

Mems Based Wireless Sensing And Therapeutic Systems For Biomedical Applications, Praveen Pandojirao-Sunkojirao

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Miniaturized devices in vivo for accurate diagnosis and prognosis in therapy to detect various physiological parameters inside human body have been a goal for efficient healthcare. In this perspective, microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices providing small size features and new transduction functions benefit such biomedical applications. The features in MEMS devices also allow integration of CMOS circuitry and wireless communication for electronic control as well as actuation functionalities for driving mechanical parts for scanning, moving and probing. In this work, feasibility studies for two novel sensing systems: an in vivo optical fiber based spectral optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging system and …

A Hybrid Method For Identifying And Estimating Key Dynamic Parameters For Exciters, Pss And Governors Based On Event-Recorded Measurements On-Line Measurements, Yunzhi Cheng

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Following the power market deregulation, power systems have become more complex and are found to be consistently operating closer to their stability limits. Power system dynamic modeling and studies which provide significant insight into the dynamic characteristics of the system are bound to play increasingly critical roles. The dynamic simulation results are highly dependent on certain key parameters that govern the dynamics of the power system such as governors and/or exciters in the case of generation facilities. However, the dynamic parameters in the system database maintained by the Independent System Operator (ISO) are not accurate due to numerous reasons ranging …

A Family Of Robust Second Order Training Algorithms, Sanjeev Sreenivasa Rao Malalur

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Starting with the concept of equivalent networks, a framework for analyzing the effect of linear dependence on training of a multi-layer perceptron is established. Detailed mathematical analyses are carried out to show that training using backpropagation and Newton's method is different under the presence of linear dependence.Two effective batch training algorithms are developed for the multilayer perceptron. First, the optimal input gain algorithm is presented, which computes an optimal gain coefficient for each input, used to update the input weights. The motivation for this algorithm comes from using equivalent networks to analyze the effect of input transformation. It is shown …

Open Main Detection In Underground Distribution Network Using Statistical Approaches, Abedalgany Abedallah Athamneh

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The continuous increase for people dependency on electrical energy to run most of their industrial, commercial and residential activities makes it necessary to regularly improve the distribution systems. This Improvement does not involve served area and system capacity increase only, but also includes service quality and system reliability enhancement. Outage is the most serious challenge that might affect the reliability of the distribution system, especially in the congested areas like New York City, where the outage is a threat for continuity of service for a large number of customers or for the important world institutions there. Outage incident in distribution …

Objective Image And Video Quality Assessment With Applications, Qiang Li

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Objective Image and Video Quality Assessment (IQA/VQA) aims to automatically measure the quality degradation perceived by the human eyes. It is of fundamental importance to address a wide variety of problems in image and video processing. Based on the availability of the information about the reference image, IQA/VQA models can be classified into Full-reference (FR), Reduced-reference (RR) and No-reference (NR) IQA/VQA methods. This dissertation focuses on FRIQA/VQA, RRIQA/VQA, as well as their applications in perceptual image coding and video interpolation.First, we propose novel metrics for FRIQA/VQA based on Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) and the information theoretical weighting. The spatial information weights …

Performance Evaluation In Reverse Logistics With Data Envelopment Analysis, Ake Tonanont

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Good reverse logistics design can save cost, increase revenues, and gain competitive edges over the rivals. Design of the optimized reverse supply chain model is a very important task to help enterprises save cost and gain benefits from their supply chains. In this study, reverse logistics is considered as a part of the Closed Loop Supply Chain (CLSC). CLSC combines forward and reverse flow together in the supply chain. Each component in a forward and reverse supply chain results in the efficiency of CLSC. Therefore, considering forward and reverse supply chain together as a CLSC will result in more benefits …

Software Capacity Planning: A Methodology For A Portfolio Of High Technology Product Development Projects, Rajiv Malhotra

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

High technology product development projects make extensive use of engineering software during the product development process. The suite of engineering software tools deployed during product development represents a significant portion of the product development costs. The ability to forecast the engineering software license capacity required to support product development plans is crucial for budgeting, return on investment (ROI) calculations, contract negotiations with the software suppliers, and the provision of an IT infrastructure necessary to support the execution of the software tools. This research shows that the usage of engineering application software in high technology is cyclical due to the characteristics …

Multi-Port Power Electronic Interface For Renewable Energy Sources, Wei Jiang

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Energy intensive products and services are penetrating people's daily life as well as different sectors of industry during recent decades. Further effort to improve efficiency, reduce green house gas and hazardous particle emission lead to the emergence of the "more electric" concept in several industries including transportation. This trend, however, burdens the aging power system and existing local power networks. To offer a remedy to the problem and a smooth transition to a more reliable, more diverse, and more efficient power grid of the future, the concept of Multi-port Power Electronic Interface (MPEI) for localized power processing is introduced in …

Millimeter Scale Robots For The Nanofactory, Rakesh Murthy

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The top down approach is a commonly employed miniaturization pathway into micro and nanomanufacturing. Its popularity is due to the fact that it adapts traditionally engineered macro scale positioning, manipulation and processing technology with micro and nano scale precision and part sizes. However, state of the art top down systems such as the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) span four to five orders of magnitude larger than the parts being handled. This dissertation addresses the need for creating millimeter size robotic positioning technology that closes the size gap between equipment and part sizes. Such microrobot manufacturing methodology comprising of micro component-level …

Online Adaptive Optimal Control For Continuous-Time Systems, Draguna Vrabie

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

This work makes two major contributions. * First, in the field of computational intelligence, it develops reinforcement learning controllers (i.e. approximate dynamic programming algorithms) for continuous-time systems, whereas in the past, reinforcement learning has been mainly developed for discrete-time systems. * Second, in the field of control systems engineering, it develops on-line optimal adaptive controllers, whereas in the past, optimal control has been an off-line design tool, and on-line adaptive controllers have not been optimal. The online algorithms presented herein are reinforcement learning schemes which provide online synthesis of optimal control for a class of nonlinear systems with unknown drift …

Automated 3d Microassembly With Precision Adjusted Hybrid Supervisory Controller, Choudhury Aditya Narayan Das

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Unlike semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs), newer microsystems combine sensors, actuators, mechanical structures, electronics, and optics on a single substrate. In such a diversified system, heterogeneous manipulation of the components becomes unavoidable. In an effort to find a solution to reduced yields and speeds in manufacturing at the micro-scale, research initiated in 1990s has sought to understand top-down aspects of micromanipulation, sensor-based precision control of robots, self alignment effects using compliant micro structure designs, and so on. From these researches, automated microassembly emerges as an enabling technology for micro manufacturing that offers well-known pathways to building heterogeneous microsystems with a higher …

A Microfluidic Platform To Study Cell Migration, Smitha Malalur Nagaraja Rao

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Migration of cancer cells from the primary organ to distant sites is critical to the development of malignant metastasis. This is partly dependant on the various chemical factors present in the blood serum. Cell motility studies using conventional Boyden chamber assays require high volumes of reagents. The measurement provides only an end-point result and time-lapse study of the cell deformation and migration cannot be performed. We have designed and evaluated a poly-dimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic device in order to study cell migration in the presence of gradients. Photolithography and soft lithography processes were used to fabricate the PDMS devices from the …

Performance Analysis And Comparison Of Dirac Video Codec With H.264 / Mpeg-4 Part 10 Avc, Aruna Ravi

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

Dirac is a hybrid motion-compensated state-of-the-art video codec that uses modern techniques such as wavelet transforms and arithmetic coding. It is an open technology, designed to avoid patent infringement and can be used without the payment of license fees. It is well suited to the business model of public service broadcasters as it can be easily recreated for new platforms. Dirac is aimed at applications ranging from HDTV (high definition television) to web streaming.H.264, MPEG-4 part-10 or AVC, is the latest digital video codec standard which has proven to be superior than earlier standards in terms of compression ratio, quality, …

A Logistic Approximation To The Cumulative Normal Distribution, Shannon R. Bowling, Mohammad T. Khasawneh, Sittichai Kaewkuekool, Byung R. Cho

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper develops a logistic approximation to the cumulative normal distribution. Although the literature contains a vast collection of approximate functions for the normal distribution, they are very complicated, not very accurate, or valid for only a limited range. This paper proposes an enhanced approximate function. When comparing the proposed function to other approximations studied in the literature, it can be observed that the proposed logistic approximation has a simpler functional form and that it gives higher accuracy, with the maximum error of less than 0.00014 for the entire range. This is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the …

Implementing A Functional Iso 9001 Quality Management System In Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises, Andres Sousa-Poza, Mert Altinkilinc, Cory Searcy

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

This conceptual paper provides guidance for the implementation of a functional ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To help a SME understand its starting point, four initial states for QMS implementation are defined. Five paths for moving the QMS from the initial state to the desired state are described. To support the transition from the initial to the desired state, some key considerations in implementing a QMS in SMEs are discussed. The paper is based on site visits and implementation assistance the authors have provided to several SMEs. It is anticipated the paper will …

Rubric For Project Self-Evaluation, Paul Savory

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Instructional Materials

I have developed this rubric to allow each member of a project team to offer a self-assessment of their own performance on the projects. It is my attempt to develop a standardized evaluation linked to specified criteria, making the grading process simpler and more transparent.

Ruberic For Project Team Member Evaluation, Paul Savory

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Instructional Materials

I have developed this rubric to allow team members for course projects to offer an evaluation or assessment of the fellow members of their team. It is my attempt to develop a standardized evaluation linked to specified criteria, making the grading process simpler and more transparent.

Thin Films Formed By Selenization Of CuinXB1−X Precursors In Se Vapor, C. A. Kamler, Rodney J. Soukup, Natale J. Ianno, J. L. Huguenin-Love, J. Olejníček, S. A. Darveau, C. L. Exstrom

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Previous attempts in producing light absorbing materials with bandgaps near the 1.37 eV efficiency optimum have included the partial substitution of gallium or aluminum for indium in the CIS system. The most efficient of these solar cells to date have had absorber layers with bandgaps < 1.2 eV. It is logical that an even smaller substitutional atom, boron, should lead to a wider bandgap with a smaller degree of atomic substitution. In this study, copper–indium–boron precursor films are sputtered onto molybdenum coated glass substrates and post-selenized. In the selenized films, although X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements confirm that a CIS phase is present, Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) results indicate that boron is no longer homogeneously dispersed throughout the film as it was in the case of the unselenized precursor.

Influence Of Magnesium Nitrate On The Corrosion Performance Of Sol-Gel Coated Aa2024-T3 Aluminium Alloy, Rajath Varma, Brendan Duffy, John Cassidy

Articles

Traditional anti-corrosion technology has relied heavily on using reducible metal species, predominantly hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)), for protecting reactive metal alloys such as aluminium which is extensively used in the aerospace sector. However, the impending changes in the use of Cr(VI) in Europe and the United States have forced aerospace manufacturers to examine alternative materials for protecting aluminium. One of the most promising alternatives being investigated are organosilane based sol-gels containing anticorrosion additives. In this work the anti-corrosion properties of magnesium (II) nitrate (Mg(NO3)2) as a inhibitor was investigated at different concentrations (0.1% - 1.0 wt %) in a methyltriethoxysilane (MTEOS) …

Membrane Properties Of Intact Rock Cores Of Burlington Limestone, Jefferson Dolomite, Darrington Phyllite, And Low Permeability Concrete, Megan Hart

Doctoral Dissertations

"A number of laboratory studies have shown that clays exhibit membrane properties. However, little research has been performed on lithologies outside of pure clays. Recently, research focusing on mixed sand and clay membrane properties for engineering applications was performed. Still, literature only suggests the possibilities of membrane properties, osmotic or reverse-osmotic, associated with other naturally occurring 'tight' rock types. Therefore, the objectives of this research was to perform a series of hyperfiltration experiments using actual rock discs of Quarry Ridge Jefferson Dolomite, Darrington Phyllite, Lower Burlington Limestone, and low permeability concrete to determine if tight lithologies can function as membranes"--Abstract, …

Guidance, Navigation And Control System For Autonomous Proximity Operations And Docking Of Spacecraft, Daero Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

"This study develops an integrated guidance, navigation and control system for use in autonomous proximity operations and docking of spacecraft. A new approach strategy is proposed based on a modified system developed for use with the International Space Station. It is composed of three "V-bar hops" in the closing transfer phase, two periods of stationkeeping and a "straight line V-bar" approach to the docking port. Guidance, navigation and control functions are independently designed and are then integrated in the form of linear Gaussian-type control. The translational maneuvers are determined through the integration of the state-dependent Riccati equation control formulated using …

Final Design Report: Hand-Drive Rear Wheel Drive Wheelchair Project, Colin Neunuebel, Bjorn Sorenson, Lazer Vandenhoek

Mechanical Engineering

The project described herein is a senior design project for mechanical engineering students. This report details the design, build, and test process for the development of a wheelchair hand cycle attachment that drives the wheels of the wheelchair, rather than the wheel of the attachment. The sponsor of the project, Mr. Greg O’Kelly is interested in such a device for his own use as well as having a working prototype as a “proof of concept”, should the design be successful enough to manufacture. From the sponsor’s perspective, in addition to acquiring a product he can use, this is also an …

Rational Construction By Molecular Dynamics Modeling And Simulations Of Porous Adsorbent Media For Bioseparation, Enrico Riccardi

Doctoral Dissertations

"Ion-exchange chromatography employing porous adsorbent particles or monoliths in which charged ligands are immobilized onto polymeric extender molecules grafted on the pore surfaces of a base matrix has become a very important method for bioseparations. In this dissertation, a novel fundamental and systematic methodology has been developed that uses the molecular dynamics (MD) modeling and simulation approach to rationally design, construct, and characterize polymeric porous adsorbent media and study the transport and adsorption of a charged biomolecule (desmopressin) in a representative adsorbent medium. The MD results have also been utilized in a macroscopic model to study the large-scale dynamic behavior …

On Unified Computational Intelligence: Neural Networks, Dynamic Programming, And Applications To Economics And Finance, John E. Seiffertt Iv

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation introduces the concept of unified computational intelligence and encompasses algorithm design, applications, theoretical developments, and the identification of new frontiers for multidisciplinary research. It presents a new way to look at unified learning systems and presents a novel Adaptive Resonance Theory-based unified learning architecture. An application to robotic security and sensor fusion is given in detail.

Work on the theoretical developments of unified computational intelligence is also presented. A new theorem in the time scales calculus is proven and theorems on the Hamilton-Jacobi-Ballman equation of dynamic programming and the dynamic programming algorithm are presented, both for various general …

Anti Wetting Additives For Aluminosilicate Refractories In Molten Aluminum Contact Applications, Devdutt Pramod Shukla

Doctoral Dissertations

"Aluminosilicate based refractories are widely used in furnace installations for melting aluminum because they are inexpensive, readily available and generally exhibit the properties desired from a refractory material. However, they face severe corrosion and degradation issues due to the extremely reducing nature of molten aluminum alloys. Isothermal static cup testing is widely used as a tool to evaluate the performance of refractories against penetration by molten aluminum alloys. Various testing methods were reviewed and an upgraded static cup test was recommended. Commercially available aluminosilicate refractories were tested using this method and their results were studied in order to understand the …