Engineering Commons^™

Non-Planar Diamond Electrodes For Biomedical Neural Sensing And Stimulating, Jeffrey M. Halpern

Chemical Engineering

Abstract

Conductive diamond has exceptional chemical stability, making it an appealing candidate material for long-term medical device implants. This work describes the characterization, and fabrication of four diamond-based neural devices. A previously developed 30 µm diamond-disk in vitro needle electrode was characterized. The device could detect 1 nM concentration analytes in a flow cell using fast scan cyclic voltammetry, but the fabrication was not reproducible. A novel in vitro diamond device was developed with diamond selectively grown at the tip of a hollow quartz capillary, resulting in a 2-4 µm tip diameter. The diamond tip shape and size were geometrically …

Mini Cooper Ram-Air Duct System, Christopher Dirkes, Kyle Vanden Berg

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Due to extensive track use, Mini Cooper GP’s are notorious for having brake overheating problems. In the conceptual design stages of the car, BMW engineers intended to install brake ducts to prevent overheating, but due to time constraints, the cars were shipped without the ducts they were intended to have. The goal of this project was to design and manufacture a brake duct kit for the Mini Cooper GP. After a conceptual design of the system, make-buy decisions were made for each component. The components to be made were designed using computer-aided drafting, engineering, and manufacturing software. The components manufactured …

Small Business And Industrial Engineering Tools, Adib Behjat

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

UltraMed, a small distribution company located in the United Arab Emirates, faces high operations cost due to inefficiency in methods and concepts implemented in their business. Through the use of basic Industrial Engineering techniques, UltraMed and other small businesses can succeed in reducing their operational costs through the implementation of three major concepts of Industrial Engineering: Operations Research, Database Management, and Engineering Economic Modeling.

To succeed in implementing the design, it is important to have the right data and a cohesive foundation for the design; else, the results generated by the techniques will be invalid and could cause further complications …

Design Of A Low Cost Powered R/C Combat Airplane And Manufacturing Plan, Jonathan N. Bailey

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The goals of this project are to design a low cost powered remote control combat airplane capable of outdoor flight, named the Aero EX and to develop a manufacturing plan to produce each unit at a selling price of $200, while operating at a 25 vehicle batch rate inside a 1,000 square foot facility. These goals are achieved using: Aerospace fundamentals to design the vehicle, Design for Manufacturability to optimize the design for minimal use of labor, Design for Assembly to give consumers the ability to build the vehicle without fixtures, Pull production to eliminate scheduling and match customer demand. …

Layout And Procedure Re-Design Of Dcpp Receiving Warehouse, Nicole Elizabeth Riegel

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The receiving warehouse at Diablo Canyon Power Plant, owned by Pacific Gas and Electric, serves as a place to recognize the receiving of items into an ERP system, repackage and label items for long-term storage, and organize items for delivery inside the secured area. The warehouse managers would like to redesign the layout and procedures of the warehouse. Currently items are not received, scanned, or shipped in a timely manner. The flow of people and items in the receiving and shipping area is chaotic and space is limited especially during plant outages. The objective of this project is to: • …

Ernie Ball Guitars Woodshop Facilities Redesign, Cameron Lea Schlemer

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

This report details a facilities design for Ernie Ball’s guitar and bass guitar manufacturing facility in San Luis Obispo, CA. Specifically, this project will redesign the layout for the Woodshop, the largest of the 5 manufacturing cells in the facility. This project was completed using the Systematic Layout Planning procedure and focused mostly on phase II and III in which the specifics for a layout are determined, however, space requirements were not evaluated as it was not within scope.

The first step was to develop departments in the facilities; two master departments were identified for the neck manufacturing process and …

Non-Profit Management System For Friends Of The Elephant Seal, Matthew Justus, Robert Macasi, Jeff Zinn

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Friends of the Elephant Seal (FES) are a non-profit organization based in San Simeon, California. Their current method of tracking and reporting information is inefficient. A project was proposed to develop a new information management system for FES, install it at their office and provide training including a user manual. The project was divided into three parts: Database Design and Implementation; User Interface Design and Ergonomics; and User Manual & Help System.

The objective of the project was to design a user-friendly interface specifically for the FES worker that allowed for easy access to data entry functions, reporting functions and …

5-S And The Facility Redesign For A Cleaning Products Manufacturing Company, Jonathan Eipper

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

This project deals with a “green” cleaning products company in Southern California. Business has increased 38% in the past year along with changes in production capacity and capability, so the company has identified a need for a sustainable model of manufacturing at their new and expanded facility. Goals of promoting sustainable waste management, minimizing types of lean waste, properly storing inventory, improving workplace communication, and defining production tasks will be addressed in this facilities redesign through 5S. The biggest component and outcome of the facility design will be organization. This leads to a goal of eliminating waste, which will in …

Alleviation Of Spindle Transfer, Blake Ochs, Whitney Bone

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Haas Automation, Inc. is one of the largest CNC machine tool builders in the world. They produce an assortment of machines that come in many different sizes, however, all machines have in common the central tool that allows them to perform their surfacing and bore functions, the spindle. As with the machines themselves, the spindles can also range in size depending on the type of machine they are going into. These spindles are assembled step by step and as components are added to them, several models become so heavy that it is not feasible to have operators lift them by …

Design For Manufacturing Of Sports Equipment, Cedrick Bit, Christopher L. Head

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The purpose of this project was to validate industrial designs for a product in its conceptual stage and suggest/implement design changes that suit the contracting company’s needs while assuring the product maintains its basic functional requirements. Techniques and methods used to validate the design include 3‐D solid modeling, physical product application using rapid prototyping to produce the product. Methods of design for manufacturing were analyzed in the design. Processes used in the validation and verification of the design include solid modeling design, methods of measurements, fixture design and manufacturing processes. Full design specifications and solid model files were finalized and …

Digester Selection And Operation For Heybeli Island, Spencer Fackler, Joseph Violetti

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The Heybeli Digester project originated with Sema Alptekin in her personal research and was incorporated into a Senior Project opportunity at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The aim of this project was to select and design a plan for the use of a digester for the island of Heybeli, Turkey. The objective of this plan was to incorporate economic, social, and environmental justifications to evaluate if a digester would be a benefit to the community.

Systems Engineering analysis is a vital tool when working with complicated projects that include multiple systems interfacing with one another. Through the use …

Determining A Reliability Factor For Photovoltaic's In San Luis Obispo, Ryan S. Roach

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

This project will analyze raw photovoltaic (PV) solar panel performance data in order to determine a reliability factor for solar panels in San Luis Obispo. This project is a subset of a larger project being performed by SLO RESCO, which is funded by a grant from the California Energy Commission. Their project will explore the use of solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass renewable resources. The scope of this project is limited to a small section of RESCO's analysis of solar panel technology and implementation in which a reliability factor will be generated.

The objective is to determine a reliability factor …

Application Of Radio Frequency Identification To An Asset Checkout System, Ma'ayan K. Bennaim

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a growing technology which is increasingly utilized throughout industry. This senior project identifies an RFID alternative to the checkout system in the tool crib of the Cal Poly Aero Hanger. A new database is designed and built to interface with an RFIDeas AIR enroll reader. The system realizes vast time savings in check in times and increases student accountability for the tools which are checked out by tagging tools.

The Optimal Warehouse Location For Cal Poly's Campus Dining, Robert Buie

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The Cal Poly Corporation and Campus Dining face the challenge of meeting the growth of students and dining venues on campus with the limited space capacity of their warehouse in building 19. Given a $250,000 budget, Campus Dining has an option to keep the warehouse at the current location at building 19 or moving the warehouse to building 82 off Mt. Bishop Road. Each warehouse location has its benefits as building 19 is in the center of campus and building 82 has much more shelving space than building 19. The objective of this project was to select the better choice …

Visual Representations Of Queried Database Results Using Google's Mapping Technologies, Steven Michael Kilbert

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Database queries have been used in business applications throughout the world to filter out specific information which is often used as a basis for making a decision. Despite the broad use of queries, there are only a limited number of ways to represent results, the most common being a dynaset, or results table. This paper describes the investigation of methods to create more visual representations of results using maps to show queried geospatial data. From these methods, applications were successfully developed to create customized maps in Google Earth and Google Maps based on queried geographical data from Microsoft Access databases. …

Mixi Thruster Tungsten And Thoriated Tungsten Testing, Jesse R. Miller

Aerospace Engineering

The purpose of this project is to build and evaluate a tungsten filament cathode for the 3-cm Miniature Xenon Ion (MiXI) thruster. The filament is to be used for future tests within the CP 3-cm MiXI and thoriated tungsten is to be examined as a possible alternative. No testing of these filaments was conducted, but the preparatory work has been conducted for future testing.

The Systemic Correlation Between Mental Models And Sustainable Design: Implications For Engineering Educators, Linda Vanasupa, Roger Burton, Jonathan Stolk, Julie B. Zimmerman, Larry J. Leifer, Paul T. Anastas

Materials Engineering

Many studies have illuminated our understanding of the kinds of competencies and behaviors exhibited by effective designers. Against the backdrop of global challenges made more urgent by unintentional negative impacts of engineered products and systems, however, we are left to deduce that our ways of educating engineering designers is fundamentally flawed. We assert that one can trace the cause of our collective, unintended negative consequences to the mental models of reality that we consciously or unconsciously carry. In this paper, we present the case for developing awareness and facility with mental models. We also suggest an alternate mental model as …

Where Is All That Water Going?, Charles M. Burt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

Some have proposed to conserve 4-6 Million AF/yr in Agriculture with pragmatic, economical measures. All we need to do is find the inefficiencies. Then we'll get rid of them.

Live Video Database Management Systems, Rui Peng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the proliferation of inexpensive cameras and the availability of high-speed wired and wireless networks, networks of distributed cameras are becoming an enabling technology for a broad range of interdisciplinary applications in domains such as public safety and security, manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare. Today’s live video processing systems on networks of distributed cameras, however, are designed for specific classes of applications. To provide a generic query processing platform for applications of distributed camera networks, we designed and implemented a new class of general purpose database management systems, the live video database management system (LVDBMS). We view networked video cameras as …

Computational Models Of Thermal Cycling In Chemical Systems, Carl Barratt, Dante Lepore, Matthew Cherubini, Pauline Schwartz

Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Faculty Publications

Computational models of chemical systems provide clues to counterintuitive interactions and insights for new applications. We have been investigating models of chemical reaction systems under forced, thermal cycling conditions and have found that some hypothetical processes generate higher yields under thermal cycling than under single, fixed temperature conditions. A simple kinetic model of an actual process, the two-temperature polymerase chain reaction that replicates DNA, is used to simulate the important features of a chemical system operating under thermal cycling. This model provides insights into the design of other chemical systems that may have important applications in chemistry, biochemistry and chemical …

Hot Water, Dry Streams: A Tale Of Two Trout, Jack R. Tuholske

All In-stream Flows Material

Norman Maclean’s timeless memoir A River Runs Through It begins with the reflection that in his household “there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”¹ That zeal remains today; nearly 30 million Americans call themselves fishermen.² Anglers devoted an aggregate of 517 million user-days pursuing their passion in 2006 and spent billions of dollars to support it.³ Fishing in the western United States holds a special place in fishing lore the world over and for good reason. From the great trout waters of Montana, to the salmon-laden rivers of the west coast, to the sparkling …

A Comparative Guide To The Western States' Public Trust Doctrines: Public Values, Private Rights, And The Evolution Toward An Ecological Public Trust, Robin Kundis Craig

All In-stream Flows Material

In the arid West, balancing private needs for fresh water to consume against the public values-recreational, aesthetic, and ecological-served by leaving fresh water in situ has tended to favor the private use side. Evidence of this result is both massive and minor, ranging from California's multi-billion-dollar water transportation system,¹ to the routine de-watering of the Colorado River so that little to no water reaches the Sea of Cortez,² to water-related Endangered Species Act lawsuits in dozens of watersheds. ³

Design Assessment: Consumer Reports Style, Todd R. Kelley

Publications

The article analyzes a design assessment-based activity, in which students are asked to evaluate an existing technology through a Consumer Reports-style approach. According to H. Petroski, the exposure of students to several design examples is important to start learning the basic elements needed in the design process. It claims that the activity will enable students to sharpen their knowledge in several areas including identifying design constraints and criteria, training via study of open designs, and practicing engineering design methods for optimization. It suggests that these are important skills for creating the student's capacity to undertake bigger design activities.

Predictive Modeling Of Sulfide Removal In Tray Aerators, Jumoke O. Faborode

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hydrogen sulfide is commonly found in many Florida potable groundwater supplies. Removing sulfur species, particularly hydrogen sulfide is important because if left untreated, sulfide can impact finished water quality, corrosivity, create undesirable taste and odor, and oxidize to form visible turbidity and color. This document presents the results of a study designed to investigate the removal efficiencies of a variety of tray aerators in Central Florida in order to develop a predictive mathematical model that could be used to determine tray effectiveness for sulfide removal. A literature review was performed that indicated there was limited information regarding the removal of …

Fast-Response Liquid Crystal Displays, Meizi Jiao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After about five decades of extensive material research and device development, followed by massive investment in manufacturing technology, thin-film-transistor liquid-crystaldisplay (TFT-LCD) has finally become the dominant flat panel display technology. Nowadays, LCD performances, such as viewing angle, contrast ratio, and resolution, have reached acceptable levels. The remaining major technical challenges are response time, light efficiency, and sunlight readability. Fast response time is desired to reduce motion blur and to enable field sequential color displays using red (R), green (G), and blue (B) LEDs (light emitting diodes) without noticeable color breakup. Sequential RGB colors would eliminate the commonly used spatial color …

Impact Of Woven Fabric: Experiments And Mesostructure-Based Continuum-Level Simulations, Ethan M. Parsons, Tusit Weerasooriya, Sai Sarva, Simona Socrate

United States Army: Publications

Woven fabric is an increasingly important component of many defense and commercial systems, including deployable structures, restraint systems, numerous forms of protective armor, and a variety of structural applications where it serves as the reinforcement phase of composite materials. With the prevalence of these systems and the desire to explore new applications, acomprehensive, computationally efficient model for the deformation of woven fabrics is needed. However, modeling woven fabrics is difficult due, inparticular, to the need to simulate the response both at the scale of the entire fabric and at the meso-level, the scale of the yarns that compose the weave. …

Chemisorption Of A Thiol-Functionalized Ruthenium Dye On Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles: Implications For Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells, Jagdeep Singh, Jisun Im, James E. Whitten, Jason W. Soares, Diane M. Steeves

United States Army: Publications

ZnO is an alternative to TiO₂-based dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). Adsorption of cis-rutheniumbis [2,2'-bipyridine]-bis[4-thiopyridine] onto ZnO nanorods has been studied using X-ray and ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopies (XPS and UPS). XPS indicates chemisorption with a surface density of ca. 1 × 10¹⁵ molecules/cm², confirming the possibility of using thiol-terminated dyes for ZnO-based DSSC devices. The energy level diagram, based on UPS and absorbance spectroscopy, indicates that the LUMO of this dye is lower in energy than the ZnO conduction band edge, providing minimal enthalpic driving force for photovoltaic electron injection. However, optimization of thiol-functionalized Ru …

Genome-Scale Metabolic Analysis Of Clostridium Thermocellum For Bioethanol Production, Seth B. Roberts, Christopher M. Gowen, J. Paul Brooks, Stephen S. Fong

Chemical and Life Science Engineering Publications

Background

Microorganisms possess diverse metabolic capabilities that can potentially be leveraged for efficient production of biofuels. Clostridium thermocellum (ATCC 27405) is a thermophilic anaerobe that is both cellulolytic and ethanologenic, meaning that it can directly use the plant sugar, cellulose, and biochemically convert it to ethanol. A major challenge in using microorganisms for chemical production is the need to modify the organism to increase production efficiency. The process of properly engineering an organism is typically arduous.

Results

Here we present a genome-scale model of C. thermocellum metabolism, iSR432, for the purpose of establishing a computational tool to study the …

A Signal Processing Method To Explore Similarity In Protein Flexibility, Simina Vasilache, Nazanin Mirshahi, Soo-Yeon Ji, James Mottonen, Donald J. Jacobs, Kayvan Najarian

Computer Science Publications

Understanding mechanisms of protein flexibility is of great importance to structural biology. The ability to detect similarities between proteins and their patterns is vital in discovering new information about unknown protein functions. A Distance Constraint Model (DCM) provides a means to generate a variety of flexibility measures based on a given protein structure. Although information about mechanical properties of flexibility is critical for understanding protein function for a given protein, the question of whether certain characteristics are shared across homologous proteins is difficult to assess. For a proper assessment, a quantified measure of similarity is necessary. This paper begins to …

On Some Recent Applications Of The Coanda Effect To Acoustics, Caroline P. Lubert

Department of Mathematics and Statistics - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.