Engineering Commons^™

Design, Construction, And Testing Of An Almond Harvester Pick-Up Belt Tensioning Mechanism, Brandon Eller

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

This senior project presents the design, fabrication, and testing of a tensioning mechanism for an almond harvester pick-up belt system. This tensioner was intended to reduce belt tension spikes when obstructions are encountered in the system, and was tested on a previously fabricated pick-up belt test stand. The result of this project is a prototype tensioner mechanism that was tested with favorable results. Also, the project includes a results and discussion section that presents an improved design based on the testing results.

Human Powered Generation - Seesaw: A Dc House Project, William Varsh, Jeffrey Healy

Electrical Engineering

This project is a proof of concept work, where playground equipment is implemented for power generation. In using a seesaw design, this project was able to show how a simple mechanical motion could be transformed in electrical power. A seesaw power generator was designed and constructed to demonstrate its feasibility. Results show that with some modification and improvement to the current design, the seesaw me indeed provide a viable method to produce electricity.

Cell Phone Charger For The Dc House Project, Andrew Hefner, Antonio Magdaleno

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project is to create a multiple output cell phone charger for the DC House project. The cell phone charger is essentially a DC-DC converter. The converter takes an input of 48 volts from the outlet in the DC House and decreases the voltage level to 5 volts; the input voltage level of all cellular devices. By designing an isolated flyback converter with initial specification in LTSpice simulation software, a converter was created. By monitoring the input and output voltage and current using the multi-meters and electronic load, we determined the charger to be 71% efficient when …

802.15.4 Low Intermediate Frequency Radio Receiver, Sanjay Avasarala

Electrical Engineering

This project involves the design, building, and testing of a low intermediate frequency 802.15.4 receiver that uses an FPGA to perform final demodulation to baseband.

All-In-One Aprs Transmitter, Justin Kenny

Electrical Engineering

The Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) is a digital radio system that allows transmission of data using an analog FM radio link. APRS allows position, brief messages, and other data to be distributed across a network, independent of infrastructure, making it ideal for applications such as search and rescue, asset management, and event tracking, while maintaining low cost and operating even when cellular and internet services are unavailable. This project encompasses the design, build, and test of a compact, low-cost APRS transmitter, which will include a 5W radio, GPS, and LCD-based user interface, to allow full utilization of APRS.

Ignitron Trigger Circuit, John F. O'Hara Iii

Electrical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Ultra-Capacitor Based Electric Bicycle Regenerative Braking System, Alex C. Bronstein

Electrical Engineering

An experimental regenerative braking system was designed and installed on an electric bicycle. The braking system relies on electric double-layer capacitors (EDLC), also known as ultracapacitors, to store the braking energy from the electric bicycle hub motor.

Pulsed Class-G Rf Amplifier System, Kevin Maulhardt, Kevin Haskett

Electrical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Phase Splitter Guitar Effects Pedal, Jerry Gough

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project was to create a unique type of guitar distortion effects pedal. The initial plan was to use a Hilbert Transformer, also called a Phase Splitter, to produce a vibrato type distortion. Later during the circuit design phase, it appeared that a tremolo effect could be easily implemented in addition to the vibrato. Both the tremolo and vibrato effects were implemented in the final design. Although there are many different types of vibrato and tremolo pedals already in existence, it does not appear that any current designs use a Hilbert Transformer or phase splitter. Hopefully, this …

Dc House Model Design And Construction, Mark Cabaj

Electrical Engineering

Approximately 1.6 billion people currently live without electricity. The only sensible solution to their energy problems is the use of renewable energy in an off-grid, autonomous home which is powered directly by direct current, rather than alternating current coming from a power line, which probably cannot be found nearby. The purpose of this project is to construct a prototype of the DC House. More specifically, this project focuses on the development and construction of the power distribution system of the DC House. The system will be put in place starting from the source side model down to the load side …

Solar Powered Led Lantern For Developing Countries, Lacy Billingsly Iii

Electrical Engineering

In recent years, both LED and solar technology have become the focus of sustainable energy. LED lighting uses significantly less power than its fluorescent competitor. Solar cells enable clean, natural, and portable power. As these two entities become more efficient at exponential rates, the hope for the wide use of off-grid lighting in less developed countries seemingly increases at the same rate. Currently, there has been a development of industry for portable solar powered lighting systems. Before designing a product, a study was conducted of current products on the market that aim to light dark homes. This study and design …

Iphone Breathalyzer: Point Oh Wait!, Gurpal Bhoot

Electrical Engineering

This final year project combines hardware and software components to create an alcohol breathalyzer that is compatible with the iPhone. The final design of the circuit and the iPhone application is original and combines multiple components to create the final product. Most of those components are seen in a simplified version of a breathalyzer, while the added components take care of the interface to the iPhone.

12 Volt Wall Outlet For The Dc House Project, Dylan Van Lant, Chenxi Zhang

Electrical Engineering

The purpose of this project is to build a DC-DC converter for the wall outlet of the DC House. This report focuses on the development of the DC -DC converter, and explains the design process as well as summarize the final results. The proposed system using the Buck or Step Down topology takes input voltage of 48V and output 12V at 100W. Results show the ability of the converter to fulfill such tasks while maintaining efficiency about 90% at all load.

Music Driven Graphical Visualization System, Glenn Bruner

Electrical Engineering

In today’s society, we are able to enjoy listening to music on an assortment of high-tech devices such as home computers, or multimedia players, or personal audio players. A common characteristic of typical audio media players is that they lack the ability to provide visual stimulation in addition to the provided audio stimulus. Large public events, such as concerts, could be enhanced if they included visual effects in addition to audio stimulation. The goal of this project is to provide a graphical visualization that is automatically synchronized to an audio signal with a goal of enhancing the overall musical experience. …

Foce Intermodule Communications System, Roland Quiros

Electrical Engineering

Done in conjunction with Chad Kecy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Reasearch Institute (MBARI), this project is an expansion of the Free Ocean Carbon Emission (FOCE) project. This iteration created a communications protocol between the different modules in an expandable array of PIC24-based boards.

Frg Turbojet, Tyler Vitti

Computer Engineering

Members of the Cal Poly SLO campus club FRG work together with students of several different disciplines to build a functional turbojet engine. Engineering approaches include design, fabrication, testing, and computer sensing, control, and integration. The goal of the project is to produce a running turbojet engine monitored and controlled by embedded hardware and specialized PC software. This project is to be used by later groups for further research and development.

Patterns For Success: Women In Technology: Analyzing Top Technical Women For Repeated Mindsets, Life Experiences, And Career Navigation, Julie L. Gill

Honors College Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss and discover why some women are so successful in the computing fields when public opinion continues to hold that computing is not a women’s field because there are so few women in computing. The roots for this shortage begin in theAmerican educational system, “Nationwide only about 20 percent of the bachelor's degrees incomputer science go to women,” according to a November 11, 2011 NPR story titled “Addressing the Shortage of Women in Silicon Valley”. This shortage is well noted and heavily researched, Plausible solutions have been proposed and it is critically important …

Design, Modeling And Fabrication Of Shear Mode Bulk Acoustic Wave Sensor As A Potential Biosensor, Chi-Jung Cheng

Dissertations

There has been an increasing interest in development of thin film bulk acoustic wave resonator (FBAR) devices for chemical and biological sensing applications in the environmental and biomedical industries. The zinc oxide (ZnO) thin film based FBAR devices provides attractive advantages, such as high resonant frequency, small size, and rapid response. Typically, the ZnO-based FBAR devices are operated in the longitudinal wave mode where the ZnO crystallites are perpendicular to the substrate. In gaseous environments, the longitudinal mode FBAR device provides high sensitivity for mass sensing. However, the longitudinal wave mode is adversely affected when used in liquid environments because …

Optimized Monopole And Dipole Antennas For Uwb Asset Tag Location Systems, Antoine Dumoulin, Matthias John, Max Ammann, Patrick Mcevoy

Articles

Miniaturized monopole and dipole antenna designs are reported with performances optimized for ultrawideband pulsed radio applications. The geometries are created using Bézier spline shapes, which have been refined with a genetic algorithm to simultaneously take account of both frequency- and time-domain criteria. Time-domain measurements of ultra wideband antennas with uniformly distributed energy across the full 3.1-10.6 GHz mask are reported for the first time and validate a new approach to minimization of pulse dispersion effects in the antenna designs.

Two-Semester Agile Systems Engineering Design Course: Investigation And Exploration Of "Immersive" Training Technologies, Andrew S. Bodenhamer, Ivan G. Guardiola, Steven Corns, Cihan H. Dagli

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The teaching of systems engineering is a daunting task that involves the development of curriculum capable of teaching students the systems engineering process, the design aspects of engineering, and the interdisciplinary knowledge of a variety of fields. Design is widely considered to be the central or the major distinguishing activity of engineering1. Design can be considered as the center of system engineering, in which engineers employ an interdisciplinary approach to design effective solutions to meet social needs. However, systems engineering requires that traditional academic boundaries be crossed and intertwined with other fields of engineering as well as business, socio-political, and …

Research On Roadway Performance And Distress At Low Temperature, Yong-Rak Kim, Soohyok Im, Hoki Ban

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

This research project investigated the performance and damage characteristics of Nebraska roadways at low-temperature conditions. To meet the research objective, laboratory tests were incorporated with mechanistic numerical modeling. The three most common pavement structures in Nebraska were selected and modeled considering local environmental conditions and pavement materials with and without truck loading. Cracking of asphalt overlay was predicted and analyzed by conducting finite element simulations incorporated with cohesive zone fracture. Parametric analyses were also conducted by varying pavement geometries and material properties, which could lead to helping pavement designers understand the mechanical sensitivity of design variables on the overall responses …

Safety Improvements At Highway-Railroad Crossing For Pedestrians And Bicyclists And The Assessment Of Long-Term Effects Of Centerline Curbing, Aemal Khattak, Zheng Luo

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

No abstract provided.

Development Of A Ground Based Atomic Oxygen And Vacuum Ultraviolet Radiation Simulation Apparatus, Max Jay Glicklin

Master's Theses

The space environment possesses numerous unique and unusual attributes, creating challenges that must be considered in order to accomplish a successful space mission. Two of the detrimental aspects of the space environment include Atomic Oxygen, AO, and Ultraviolet, UV, radiation. UV radiation becomes more severe in space as there is no atmosphere to attenuate incoming photons, thereby exposing spacecraft to radiation that never reaches the surface of the Earth. Overall, space vehicles are exposed to a total of 107.4 Watts/m² of light shorter than 400 nm. AO is created by the photo disassociation of molecular oxygen by UV radiation …

A Kinetic Study Of Anti-Vegf-A Polyclonal Antibodies And Anti-Vegf-A Ssdna Aptamers, Heather A. Hedeen

Master's Theses

A new detection reagent that could possibly augment or replace antibodies research and diagnosis methods are aptamers. Aptamers are ssDNA, RNA or polypeptide constructs that function like active antibodies. Antibodies and aptamers both specifically bind to selected target molecules, and as such they enable the detection or targeting of the presence or absence of a specific antigen.

In order to ensure that ssDNA aptamers perform similarly to antibodies, anti-VEGF-A polyclonal antibody and anti-VEGF-A ssDNA aptamer were evaluated against vascular endothelial growth factor A (VEGF-A) using Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR). It was hypothesized that the anti-VEGF-A aptamer had the same, if …

Uniting The Nation's Power Grids: Opening Markets To Integrate Large Scale Renewable Power, Jeffrey Kenneth Wilkinson

Master's Theses

As renewable energy becomes increasingly cost competitive and Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) push states to produce more and more of their steadily growing power demands from renewable sources, the need to solve the problems associated with renewable penetration becomes a priority. The intermittent nature of solar and wind power generation require additional cost that inhibit their implementation as penetration levels grow. Reliability remains power utilities' top priority while they struggle to upgrade their systems. Old generation facilities will be decommissioned, renewable energy projects will come on line and transmission upgrades become inevitable. Variability on the grid is currently mitigated through …

Adaptive Security-Aware Scheduling For Packet Switched Networks Using Real-Time Multi-Agent Systems, Ma'en Saleh Saleh

Dissertations

Conventional real-time scheduling algorithms are in care of timing constraints; they don’t pay any attention to enhance or optimize the real-time packet’s security performance. In this work, we propose an adaptive security-aware scheduling with congestion control mechanism for packet switching networks using real-time agentbased systems. The proposed system combines the functionality of real-time scheduling with the security service enhancement, where the real-time scheduling unit uses the differentiated-earliest-deadline-first (Diff-EDF) scheduler, while the security service enhancement scheme adopts a congestion control mechanism based on a resource estimation methodology.

The security service enhancement unit was designed based on two models: singlelayer and weighted …

A Discriminative Imaging-Based Framework For Road Sign Condition Assessment Using Local Features And Svm Classifiers, Jafar Jameel Abukhait

Dissertations

Transportation departments are required to monitor the condition of road signs through appropriate condition assessment mechanisms to improve road safety and keep drivers properly informed. Typically, these mechanisms include visual inspection or specialized equipment such as retroreflectometers. These methods are costly, tedious, and risky since they need direct contact with road signs. Efforts to use emerging computer vision techniques for the assessment of road signs condition combined with the availability of road data inventories are allowing the automation of these processes, thus easing the inspection process, reducing costs of equipment, and decreasing the risks associated with the need for maintenance …

A Study Of Integrated Uwb Antennas Optimised For Time Domain Performance, Antoine Dumoulin

Doctoral

Antennas for impulse radio ultra-wideband based portable devices are required to be compact and able to transmit or receive waveforms with minimal distortion in order to support proximity ranging with a centimetre-scale precision. The first part of thesis characterises several pulse types for use in the generation of picosecond-scale signals in respect to the regulatory power and frequency standards while the principles of antenna transient transmission and reception are stated. The proximity effect of planar conductors on the performance of an ultra-wideband antenna is investigated in both spectral and temporal domain demonstrating the relationship between the antenna-reflector separation and the …

Benchmarking Of A Single-Cylinder Engine Toward The Development Of A Direct Fuel-Injection System, Michael J. Nienhuis

Masters Theses

In this study, the performance and efficiency of a single-cylinder gasoline, fourstroke cycle engine was benchmarked in support of the Formula SAE student project. The development of an engine test stand, instrumentation, data acquisition, and test plan is described in detail. Experimental results in the areas of engine performance and efficiency are discussed. Physical test data were used to refine a previous model of a single-cylinder, gasoline, direct-injection engine. Results from this effort are discussed and compared to those obtained in a preliminary study. The current work advances the development of more efficient power-train technologies for application in small displacement …

Structural Health Monitoring Of A Bridge Structure Using Wireless Sensor Network, Cheekian Teng

Masters Theses

Bridge Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has rapidly become one of the main interests in civil engineering field. Inexpensive and efficient SHM method utilizing Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is helping to facilitate the selection of the bridges that require maintenance. The changes to structural properties (i.e. stiffness) caused by damage (i.e. corrosion) will change the structural responses (i.e. acceleration responses) to ambient motions. Modal analysis algorithms applied to the vibration responses acquired through WSN provide the modal properties (i.e. natural frequency, modal shape and damping ratio) that will change with the changes in stiffness indicating possible existence of damage. Three output-only …