Engineering Commons^™

Protonization Of Amino Functional Groups Confined In Nanochannels, Hong-Li Gao, Kai-Lin Zhou, Chen Wang, Su-Juan Li, Hui Zhang, Xing-Hua Xia

Journal of Electrochemistry

Protonization process is the key step of acid-base reaction and occurs in many biological processes. Study of the protonization process of molecules and/or functional groups in confined conditions would assist understanding in the acid-base theory and confinement effect of biomolecules. In this paper, we developed a novel approach to study protonization of functional groups in porous anodic alumina array nanochannels by measuring the flux of electrochemical active probes using an Au film electrochemical detector sputtered at the end of the nanochannels. The protonization status of the surface functional groups in nanochannels can change the surface charges and further modulate the …

Application Of First Principles Calculations In Anode Materials For Lithium Ion Batteries, Tian-Ran Zhang, Dai-Xin Li, Si-Qi Yang, Zhan-Liang Tao, Jun Chen

Journal of Electrochemistry

First principles calculations play an important role in the study and development of new materials for lithium batteries. In this paper, we review the application of first principles calculations in the design of anode materials, including the modeling of the interaction of lithium in the anode materials, capacity, voltage, electrochemical reaction process, diffusion, rate capability, the relationship between the structure and properties, and the experimental phenomena interpreting. Based on the discussions, we emphasize on the importance of first principles calculations and demonstrate their requirement for further development.

An Overview Of Electrode Materials In Microbial Fuel Cells, Su-Qin Ci, Na Wu, Zhen-Hai Wen, Jing-Hong Li

Journal of Electrochemistry

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are devices that can directly convert organic chemical energy into electrical energy with microbial as catalysts. MFCs are a promising bio-electrochemical system with the potential to degrade organic sewage and produce electricity. This article supplies a critical and comprehensive review for the electrode materials concerning about anode and cathode in MFCs, including the fabrications, functional modifications and surface constructions of electrode materials, as well as their applications in MFCs. Additionally, the existing problems of electrode materials in current MFCs have been demonstrated in order to provide the guideline for exploring the next-generation electrode materials for MFCs.

Preparation And Electrochemical Performance Of Tin@Mno Fibers By Coaxial Electrospinning, Chao-Qun Shang, Hai-Yan Yang, Xin-Hong Zhou, Zhong-Lei Man, Peng-Xian Han, Jian-Hua Yao, Yu-Long Duan, Guang-Lei Cui

Journal of Electrochemistry

In this study, the titanium nitride (TiN) @manganese oxide (MnO) core-shell structured fibers were prepared by the coaxial electrospinning using tetrabutyl titanate and manganese acetylacetonate as raw materials, and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as the template. And then the fibers were annealed in ammonia to finally obtain the coaxial TiN@MnO fibers. XRD, FESEM, TEM, EDX and physical adsorption instrument were used to characterize the phase structure, morphology, composition and specific surface areas and pore sizes of the samples. It was demonstrated that the as-synthesized TiN@MnO fibers possessed coaxial structure with a surface area of 16 m²·g^-1. As indicated …

Performnces Of Lini0.5Mn0.5O2 Thin Film Electrodes Prepared By Pulsed Laser Deposition, Yun-Hai Wan, Guo-Liang Yuan, Hui Xia

Journal of Electrochemistry

The all-solid-state thin-film Li-ion batteries with high energy density, power density and temperature stability are the ideal power sources for microelectronic devices. Developing new thin-film cathodes with large specific capacity is the key to their practical applications. The LiNi_0.5Mn_0.5O₂ with a layered structure has a higher reversible capacity and better structural stability compared with traditional LiCoO₂ cathode material. In this work, the LiNi_0.5Mn_0.5O₂ thin film cathodes were prepared by pulsed laser deposition. The effects of substrate material and temperature on the microstructure, surface morphology and composition of the thin …

College Of Engineering News, Georgia Southern University

College of Engineering & Computing: News & Publications (2010-2023)

• Game Design Program Ranked in Top 50

Computer Science News, Georgia Southern University

Computing: News & Publications (2012-2023)

• Game Design Program Ranked in Top 50
• Online Masters degree Ranked 9th “Best Buy”
• Dr. Wenjia Li, Dr. Andrew A. Allen Join Faculty in Fall 2011
• U.S. News & World Report ranks MSCS among the best

Geometric Variables Shock-Tunnel Configurations And Their Effects On Pressure-Time Waveforms, Chase W. Guengerich, Mark A. Faulhaber

Kaleidoscope

No abstract provided.

Does The Low Hole Transport Mass In <110> And <111> Si Nanowires Lead To Mobility Enhancements At High Field And Stress: A Self-Consistent Tight-Binding Study, R. L. Kotlyar, T. D. Linton, R. Rios, M. D. Giles, S. M. Cea, K. J. Kuhn, Michael Povolotskyi, Tillmann Kubis, Gerhard Klimeck

Birck and NCN Publications

The hole surface roughness and phonon limited mobility in the silicon h100i, h110i, and h111i square nanowires under the technologically important conditions of applied gate bias and stress are studied with the self-consistent Poisson-sp3d5s*-SO tight-binding bandstructure method. Under an applied gate field, the hole carriers in a wire undergo a volume to surface inversion transition diminishing the positive effects of the high h110i and h111i valence band nonparabolicities, which are known to lead to the large gains of the phonon limited mobility at a zero field in narrow wires. Nonetheless, the hole mobility in the unstressed wires down to the …

Load Transfer Assembly, Herbert F. Southgate, Kamyar C. Mahboub, Alireza Zeinali

Civil Engineering Faculty Patents

A load transfer apparatus accommodates movement between adjacent concrete slabs. The load transfer apparatus includes a spine in a form of an elongated hinge having a longitudinal axis A. A first dowel and a second dowel project radially from the spine and are located at two spaced points along said longitudinal axis A.

Knott, James Proctor, 1830-1911 (Sc 640), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 640. Letter from James Proctor Knott, Washington, D.C., to Adolph Sutro, (Virginia City, Nevada?) the mining engineer who directed the construction of a tunnel for more efficient mining into the Comstock Lode after receiving the right of way through public lands by an act of Congress. Knott, U.S. Representative from Kentucky, affirms that Sutro has his support.

Piezoelectrically-Induced Guided Wave Propagation For Health Monitoring Of Honeycomb Sandwich Structures, Fei Song

Theses and Dissertations

Honeycomb sandwich structures have been widely used in marine and aerospace applications due to their high strength/stiffness-to-weight ratio. However, an excessive load or repeated loading in the core tends to induce debonding along the skin-core interface, threatening the integrity and safety of the whole structure. This dissertation focuses on development of guided wave strategies for health monitoring of honeycomb sandwich structures, based on a piezoelectric actuator/sensor network. The honeycomb sandwich panels, which are composed of aluminum alloy (T6061) skins and hexagonal-celled Nomex core, are specifically considered in the study. First, elastic wave propagation mechanism in honeycomb sandwich structures is numerically …

Novel Metamaterial Based Antennas For Flexible Wireless Systems, Haider Khaleel

Theses and Dissertations

Recent years have witnessed a great deal of interest from both academia and industry in the field of flexible electronic systems. This research topic tops the pyramid of research priorities requested by many national research agencies. Consistently, flexible electronic systems require the integration of flexible antennas operating in specific frequency bands to provide wireless connectivity which is highly demanded by today's information oriented society. On the other hand, metamaterials have become very popular in the design of contemporary antenna and microwave devices due to their wide range of applications derived from their unique properties which significantly enhances the performance of …

Semantic Search And Information Retrieval Techniques For Text Repositories, Lisham L. Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Most organizations keep details of events as electronic documents. Repositories of such documents collected over the time are often used for various purposes, including critical decision making. These documents are generally used to garner information related to a specific event, or for trending or predictive analysis. This could be done manually by going through one document at a time, provided the size of repository is small and there is no time limit for the task. However, in most practical scenarios, the repository size is huge and available time is limited. Such documents typically have multiple fields, each carrying certain information, …

A Systems Engineering Approach To The Design And Integration Of Microstrip Antennas With Wearable Wireless Devices, Daniel Gilbert Rucker

Theses and Dissertations

Modern wireless systems for implantable and wearable Body Area Network (BAN) applications have reached an advanced stage of design and development not possible in previous generations. Systems engineering techniques allow for modern wireless devices to be developed in a top-down approach to meet the necessary design requirements while utilizing modular architectures. A modular systems architecture is developed to form a platform for BAN systems design. The BAN systems architecture defines the requirements, physical architecture, and operational architecture. The antenna component of the system is researched in detail and prototypes are developed to meet the requirements of implantable and wearable BAN …

Application Of An Energy-Vorticity Turbulence Model To Fully Rough Pipe Flow, E. B. Fowler, Doug F. Hunsaker, W. F. Phillips

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Based on a more direct analogy between turbulent and molecular transport, a foundation was recently presented for an energy-vorticity turbulence model. The new turbulent-energytransport equation contains two closure coefficients; a viscous-dissipation coefficient and a turbulent-transport coefficient. To help evaluate the closure coefficients and provide insight into the energy-vorticity turbulence variables, fully rough pipe flow is considered. For this fully developed flow, excellent agreement with experimental data for velocity profiles and friction factors is attained over a wide range of closure coefficients, provided that a given relation between the coefficients is maintained.

A Modeling Approach To Assessing The Effect Of Multiple Lakes In Sequence On Nutrient Transport, Dave M. Epstein, Bethany T. Neilson, Keli J. Goodman, David King Stevens, Wayne A. Wurtsbaugh

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The effects of a single lake on downstream water chemistry may be compounded by the presence of additional lakes within the watershed, augmenting or negating the effects of the first lake. Multiple, linked lakes are a common feature of many watersheds and these resemble reactors in series often studied in engineering. The effects of multiple lakes in series on nutrient transport are largely unexplored. We populated and calibrated a simple lake model to investigate the role of a sub-alpine lake (Bull Trout Lake (BTL), Rocky Mountains, USA) on the transport of the macronutrients during the summer of 2008. Further, we …

How Rapidly Should Developing Countries Implement Intelligent Transportation Systems (Its) To Solve The Growing Urban Traffic Congestion Problem?, Mandar Khanal

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Many newly developing countries are growing rapidly. One example is India, currently the second most populous country in the world. According to the Indian Ministry of Urban Development, from 1981 to 2001, the population in six major Indian cities increased twofold while motor vehicles increased eightfold. Such rapid growth in vehicles without a comparable growth in transportation infrastructure leads to increasing traffic congestion. Cities in India are already considered congested today, and are going to be even more congested in the coming years since the rate of urbanization in India in 2006 was only 29% and is expected to grow …

Capillarity-Driven Droplet Ejection, Andrew Paul Wollman

Dissertations and Theses

Drop Towers provide brief terrestrial access to microgravity environments. When used for capillary fluidics research, a drop tower allows for unique control over an experiment's initial conditions, which enables, enhances, or otherwise improves the study of capillary phenomena at significantly larger length scales than can normally be achieved on the ground. This thesis provides a historical context for the introduction of a new, highly accessible, 2.1s tower design used for capillary research and presents a variety of demonstrative experimental results for purely capillarity-driven flows leading to bubble ingestion, sinking flows, multiphase flows, and droplet ejections. The focus of this thesis …

Adaptive Energy Management Scheme In Real-Time Energy Harvesting Embedded Systems, Shruti Khare

Master's Theses

The main purpose of this thesis was to develop an online adaptive energy management scheme for energy harvesting embedded systems. Two energy prediction schemes were used, namely Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) and Adaptive Forward Prediction (AFP), to schedule all the tasks with least deadline miss rate. The AFP scheme has a mean relative error of 6-10% which is much lower than exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) algorithm with an error of 30%. The large difference in the error percentage between the two prediction algorithms is due to the adaptive nature of AFP as it tracks small changes in input …

Multiple Molecule Effects On The Cooperativity Of Protein Folding Transitions In Simulations, Jacob I. Lewis, Devin J. Moss, Thomas A. Knotts Iv

Faculty Publications

Though molecular simulation of proteins has made notable contributions to the study of protein folding and kinetics, disagreement between simulation and experiment still exists. One of the criticisms levied against simulation is its failure to reproduce cooperative protein folding transitions. This weakness has been attributed to many factors such as a lack of polarizability and adequate capturing of solvent effects. This work, however, investigates how increasing the number of proteins simulated simultaneously can affect the cooperativity of folding transitions — a topic that has received little attention previously. Two proteins are studied in this work: phage T4 lysozyme (Protein Data …

Estimating Annual Precipitation For The Colorado River Basin Using Oceanic-Atmospheric Oscillations, Ajay Kalra, Sajjad Ahmad

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

Estimating long-lead time precipitation under the stress of increased climatic variability is a challenging task in the field of hydrology. A modified Support Vector Machine (SVM) based framework is proposed to estimate annual precipitation using oceanic-atmospheric oscillations. Oceanic-atmospheric oscillations, consisting of Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) for a period of 1900–2008, are used to generate annual precipitation estimates with a 1 year lead time. The SVM model is applied to 17 climate divisions encompassing the Colorado River Basin in the western United States. The overall results revealed that …

Flexible Urban Drainage Systems In New Land-Use Areas, Jochen Eckart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urban drainage systems are influenced by several future drivers that affect the performance as well as the costs of the systems. The uncertainties associated with future drivers and their impact creates difficulties in designing urban drainage systems sustainably. A review of the different future drivers for urban drainage systems illustrates that no sufficient future predictions for the long operational life spans of the systems are possible. This dissertation contends that to deal with future uncertainties, flexibility in urban drainage systems is necessary.

At present, profound insights about defining, measuring, and generating flexible urban drainage systems do not exist. This research …

Human Motion Tracking For Assisting Balance Training And Control Of A Humanoid Robot, Ahmad Adli Manasrah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

This project illustrates the use of the human's ability to balance according to his center of gravity as demonstrated in two applications. The center of gravity of a human is explained in detail in order to use it in controlling the Aldebaran NAO robot and in the robot-assisted balance training.

The first application explains how a humanoid robot can mimic a human's movements via a three dimensional depth sensor where the sensor analyzes the position of a user's limbs and how the robot can lift one foot and balance on the other by redistributing the its body mass when …

Laboratory-Based Microgrid Setup For Validating Frequency And Voltage Control In Islanded And Grid-Connected Modes, Shyam N. Bhaskara, Md Rasheduzzaman, Badrul H. Chowdhury

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Small sized synchronous generator based distributed generators (DG) often have low start-up times, and therefore serve as valuable dispatchable generators in a microgrid environment. the advantage is that it allows the power network to operate in a true smart grid environment. the disadvantage is that such DGs typically tend to have low inertia and the prime movers driving these resources need to be controlled in real time for them to operate effectively in islanded, grid-connected modes and during transition. When multiple DGs are present in the microgrid, the overall control can become complicated because of the need for sharing the …

Investigation Of Trends And Predictive Effectiveness Of Crash Severity Models, James E. Mooradian

Master's Theses

This thesis describes analysis using ordinal logistic regression to uncover temporal patterns in the severity level (fatal, serious injury, minor injury, slight injury or no injury) for persons involved in highway crashes in Connecticut, focusing on the demographic split between senior travelers (65 years and over) and non-senior travelers. Existing state sources provide data describing the time and weather conditions for each crash and the vehicles and persons involved over the time period from 1995 to 2009 as well as the traffic volumes and the characteristics of the roads on which these crashes occurred. Findings indicate an overall increase in …

Comprehensive Solution To Scattering By Bianisotropic Objects Of Arbitrary Shape, Chong Mei, Moamer Hasanovic, Jay K. Lee, Ercument Arvas

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

This paper presents a method of moments (MoM) solution for the problems of electromagnetic scattering by inhomogeneous three- dimensional bianisotropic scatterers of any shape. The electromagnetic response of bianisotropy has been described by the constitutive relations of the most general form composed of four 3 X 3 matrices or tensors. The volume equivalence principle is used to obtain a set of mixed potential formulations for a proper description of the original scattering problem. Here, the total fields are separated into the incident fields and the scattered fields. The scattered fields are related to the electric and magnetic potentials which are …

Automated Tongue Feature Extraction For Zheng Classification In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ratchadaporn Kanawong, Tayo Obafemi-Ajayi, Tao Ma, Dong Xu, Shao Li, Ye Duan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

ZHENG, Traditional Chinese Medicine syndrome, is an integral and essential part of Traditional Chinese Medicine theory. It defines the theoretical abstraction of the symptom profiles of individual patients and thus, used as a guideline in disease classification in Chinese medicine. For example, patients suffering from gastritis may be classified as Cold or Hot ZHENG, whereas patients with different diseases may be classified under the same ZHENG. Tongue appearance is a valuable diagnostic tool for determining ZHENG in patients. In this paper, we explore new modalities for the clinical characterization of ZHENG using various supervised machine learning algorithms. We propose a …

Scalability Study Of Explicit Finite Element Method On Shared And Distributed Memory Architectures, Leonardo Orea-Amador, Jack F. Chessa Ph.D.

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Parallel architectures in computer systems are powerful tools for processing enormous amounts of information. The results of this research will illustrate their optimal usage by evaluating the scalability of the code Abaqus in the cases of domain decomposition and loop parallelization architectures. The scalability was analyzed using concomitant variation having the DoF (Degrees of Freedom) and CPU (Central Processing Unit) numbers as the variables. Abaqus jobs with less than 100,000 DoF showed similar scalability than that of jobs with more than 500,000. These results contradict the original hypothesis which proposed that small jobs would show poor scalability and vice versa. …

Systems And Methods For Detecting Defects In Coatings Utilizing Color-Based Thermal Mismatch, Richard Alloo, Kozo Saito, Belal Gharaibeh, Keng Hoo Chuah, Nelson Kudzo Akafuah, Ahmad Salaimeh

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Patents

A method of analyzing a thermal image of a coated substrate to determine the presence of defects includes determining a defect temperature range based on a color of the coated substrate and the maximum temperature of the coated substrate in the thermal image. Thereafter, the thermal image is processed by determining a signal value of a pixel of interest based on a temperature of the pixel of interest, temperatures of pixels in a kernel of pixels surrounding the pixel of interest, and the color of the coated substrate. The signal value of the pixel of interest is then compared to …