Engineering Commons^™

Accurate Hardware Raid Simulator, Darrin Kalung Weng

Master's Theses

Computer data storage is growing at an astonishing rate. With cloud computing and the growth of the Internet enterprise storage has been predicted to grow at rates as high as 300\% per year. To fulfill this need technologies such as Redundant Array of Independent Disks or RAID are being used in industry today. Not only does RAID increase I/O performance but also provides redundancy measures to protect against hardware failure. Even though RAID has existed for some time now and is well understood, proprietary optimizations such as command scheduling and cache strategies that are employed by current RAID controllers are …

Comparing Class A Compressed Air Foam Systems (Cafs) Against Plain Water Suppression In Live Fire Gas Cooling Experiments For Interior Structural Firefighting, Sean Carter Mitchell

Master's Theses

Wildland fire services have successfully integrated compressed air foam systems (CAFS) into their fire suppression arsenal over the last few decades to effectively increase the firefighting ability of water. Many urban fire departments have done the same, but far more still rely on plain water to extinguish Class A fires. Many claims have been made about the advantages and disadvantages of firefighting foams, but only limited research has been conducted on the subject to date. Fire departments need more information, beyond that provided by foam suppliers and CAFS equipment manufacturers, to make an independent decision on whether or not to …

Eye "R" Glasses: Development Of An Infrared Sensor System For Detecting The Human Body, Rick Wong

Master's Theses

Throughout the years, sensors have been an integral part of automation, alert, and medical systems. Many of these systems measure physiological characteristics of the human body to alert themselves of their current conditions. Drowsy driver systems, for instance, measure the eyes and facial movements with a camera to determine if the driver is falling asleep at the wheel. Electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), and electromyography (EMG) employ electrodes on the human body to measure electrical activity of a patient’s REM sleep cycle patterns. Pulse oximeters use optical light through a process called photoplethysmography (PPG) to measure heart rate.

As diverse as …

Tracking Points On A Pacing Lead In A Beating Heart, Avinash Ramesh Varma

Master's Theses

Heart failure is a common condition during which the pumping action of the heart is affected because the heart does not contract or relax properly. Heart failure affects about 5 million Americans, with 550,000 new cases diagnosed each year. Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is used to treat symptoms and other complications associated with a heart failure. While performing CRT, Implantation of a pacing lead in the left ventricle of the heart is a very challenging surgical procedure performed with fluoroscopy. The target location is often difficult to reach through the tortuous coronary venous anatomy, which varies greatly among individuals. Placement …

Design Of Portable Dc Light Bulb For The Dc House Project, Jan Marvin Perez Macairan

Master's Theses

This thesis focuses on the design and implementation of the Portable DC Light Bulb system for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s DC House Project. The DC Portable Light Bulb highlights the NiMH battery charging circuit, buck converter, and boost converter. The system is intended as a flashlight adaptor placed in between the dimmable DC light bulb and its screw base. The adaptor adds a portability feature to the DC light bulb to provide lighting wherever the user pleases. The Portable DC Light Bulb system is designed to operate with an input range of 24V-60V and regulate an output voltage of …

Seismic Design Manual For Interlocking Compressed Earth Blocks, Nicholas Edwards Kennedy

Master's Theses

Seismic Design Manual for Interlocking Compressed Earth Blocks

Nicholas Edwards Kennedy

This thesis presents a comprehensive seismic design manual to be used to design and construct simple Interlocking Compressed Earth Block (ICEB) structures in seismically active regions. ICEBs are earth blocks made primarily of soil and stabilized with cement. They have female and male stud mechanisms designed to interlock when stacked, eliminating the need for mortar. The blocks can accept reinforcement and grout after they are placed. While ICEB construction is similar to conventional masonry construction, current design code standards for masonry only partially capture the actual behavior of ICEB …

Early Wildfire Detection Using Temporal Filtering And Multi-Band Infrared Analysis, Ansel John Boynton

Master's Theses

Every year wildfires threaten or destroy ecological habitats, man-made infrastructure and people’s lives. Additionally millions of dollars are spent each year trying to prevent and control these fires. Ideally if a wildfire can be detected before it rages out of control it can be extinguished and avoid large scale devastation. Traditional manned fire lookout towers are neither cost effective nor particularly efficient at detecting wildfire. It is proposed that temporal filtering can be used to isolate the signals created at the beginnings of potential wildfires. Temporal filtering can remove any background image and any periodic signals created by the camera …

A Novel Unit Cell Antenna For Highly Integrated Phased Arrays In The Shf Band, Timothy Bryan Ogilvie

Master's Theses

Phased arrays are electromagnetic antenna systems comprised of many radiating elements and processing electronics. Radiating elements are typically positioned in an orderly grid within the antenna aperture. In the receive mode of operation, radiating elements capture some of the signal energy from incoming radiation and guide these signals to processing electronics. Signals are filtered and amplified to maintain the desired sensitivity and complexly weighted using circuits with reconfigurable amplification gain and phase delay. Finally, all signals are combined. The summation of these complexly weighted spatial samples forms a spatial filter in the same way complexly weighted temporal samples establish a …

Comparison Of Biofilm Media In Reciprocating Biofilters Treating Dairy Flushwater, Kyle Keoki Tatsuo Fooks

Master's Theses

Reciprocating biofilters known as ReCip is a viable technology to manage nutrients, mainly nitrogen, problems at livestock operations such as swine farms and dairies. Past studies have demonstrated that ReCip is more adept at total nitrogen (TN) removal than traditional subsurface flow wetland systems. The traditional substrate used to attach biomass was rock aggregate; this media may be hard to obtain for some agricultural projects, so alternate substrates are tested and compared with the rock aggregate. The purpose of the study was twofold: first, different biofilm media were tested and compared in terms of treatment performance and, second, the long-term …

Settling Performance In Wastewater Fed High Rate Algae Ponds, Elliott Blake Ripley

Master's Theses

Although high rate algae ponds (HRAPs) are a proven wastewater treatment technology with numerous environmental, social, and economic benefits, their widespread use has been hindered by inconsistent and unreliable settling performance. Hence, the goal of this thesis is to investigate how specific operational parameters affect the settling performance of HRAPs. Nine HRAPs (30 m² surface area, 0.3 m depth) were operated as three triplicate sets, with each set run on either a 2, 3, or 4 day HRT continuously from January 25, 2012 through April 11, 2013. Settling performance was determined (i) by measuring the TSS of Imhoff cone …

Cuda Enhanced Filtering In A Pipelined Video Processing Framework, Austin Aaron Dworaczyk Wiltshire

Master's Theses

The processing of digital video has long been a significant computational task for modern x86 processors. With every video frame composed of one to three planes, each consisting of a two-dimensional array of pixel data, and a video clip comprising of thousands of such frames, the sheer volume of data is significant. With the introduction of new high definition video formats such as 4K or stereoscopic 3D, the volume of uncompressed frame data is growing ever larger.

Modern CPUs offer performance enhancements for processing digital video through SIMD instructions such as SSE2 or AVX. However, even with these instruction sets, …

Characterization Of The Effects Of A Sun-Synchronous Orbit Slot Architecture On The Earth's Orbital Debris Environment, Connor David Noyes

Master's Theses

Low Earth orbit represents a valuable limited natural resource. Of particular interest are sun-synchronous orbits; it is estimated that approximately 44% of low Earth satellites are sun-synchronous. A previously developed sun-synchronous orbit slot architecture is considered. An in-depth analysis of the relative motion between satellites and their corresponding slots is performed. The long-term evolution of Earth's orbital environment is modeled by a set of coupled ordinary differential equations. A metric for quantifying the benefit, if any, of implementing a sun-synchronous architecture is developed. The results indicate that the proposed slot architecture would reduce the frequency of collisions between satellites in …

Synthetic Aperture Radar Rapid Detection Of Range And Azimuth Velocities Implemented In Matlab, Cheuk Yu David So

Master's Theses

The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) algorithm processes multiple radar returns from the target space to generate a single high-resolution image. Targets moving through the target space during the capture sequence will appear distorted on the final image. In addition, there is no velocity information that is calculated as part of the processing. The objective of this thesis is to develop techniques to determine the azimuth and range velocities of moving objects in the target space in the early stages of SAR processing. The typical SAR processing steps are Range Compressed, Range Doppler, and final image generation. The range velocity of …

Uav Formation Flight Utilizing A Low Cost, Open Source Configuration, Christian W. Lopez

Master's Theses

The control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a swarm or cooperative team scenario has been a topic of great interest for well over a decade, growing steadily with the advancements in UAV technologies. In the academic community, a majority of the studies conducted rely on simulation to test developed control strategies, with only a few institutions known to have nurtured the infrastructure required to propel multiple UAV control studies beyond simulation and into experimental testing. With the Cal Poly UAV FLOC Project, such an infrastructure was created, paving the way for future experimentation with multiple UAV control systems. …

Early Forest Fire Heat Plume Detection Using Neural Network Classification Of Spectral Differences Between Long-Wave And Mid-Wave Infrared Regions, Raul-Alexander Aldama

Master's Theses

It is difficult to capture the early signs of a forest fire at night using current visible-spectrum sensor technology. Infrared (IR) light sensors, on the other hand, can detect heat plumes expelled at the initial stages of a forest fire around the clock. Long-wave IR (LWIR) is commonly referred to as the “thermal infrared” region where thermal emissions are captured without the need of, or reflections from, external radiation sources. Mid‑wave IR (MWIR) bands lie between the “thermal infrared” and “reflected infrared” (i.e. short-wave IR) regions. Both LWIR and MWIR spectral regions are able to detect thermal radiation; however, they …

Dispersive Waves In Microstructured Solids, A. Berezovski, J. Engelbrecht, A. Salupere, K. Tamm, T. Peets, Mihhail Berezovski

Publications

The wave motion in micromorphic microstructured solids is studied. The mathematical model is based on ideas of Mindlin and governing equations are derived by making use of the Euler–Lagrange formalism. The same result is obtained by means of the internal variables approach. Actually such a model describes internal fields in microstructured solids under external loading and the interaction of these fields results in various physical effects. The emphasis of the paper is on dispersion analysis and wave profiles generated by initial or boundary conditions in a one-dimensional case.

Application Of Active Learning In Microwave Circuit Design Courses, Branimir Pejcinovic

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Application of active learning in microwave circuit design courses. We have recently expanded our undergraduate labs to include four 20 GHz VNA-s and four high-speed TDR oscilloscopes. They were obtained initially for junior electromagnetics labs but this opens up obvious opportunities for more hands-on approaches to teaching and learning microwave circuit design. We have redesigned our two quarter, senior-level sequence with these goals in mind: a) Emphasize complete design cycle, from "paper" development, to simulation, to prototype development and testing, followed by more advanced prototyping, testing and redesign. b) De-emphasize face-to-face lecture and emphasize in-class activities and peer interaction c) …

Designing Anti-Islanding Detection Using The Synchrophasor Vector Processor, Ruth Christiana Huang

Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

Designing Anti-Islanding Detection Using the Synchrophasor Vector Processor

Ruth Huang

The need for distributed generation (DG) has become more and more popular because of the adverse effects of fossil fuels and the fear of running out of fossil fuels. By having DG, there are less transmission losses, voltage support, controllability of the system, decreased costs in transmission and distribution, power quality improvement, energy efficiency, and reduced reserve margin. The adverse effects of DG are voltage flicker, harmonics, and islanding. Islanding occurs when the DG continues to energize the power system when the main utility is disconnected. Detecting islanding is …

Exceed: Excellence In Your Engineering Education Summer Transition Program, Stacy Gleixner, Katherine Casey, Jared Tuberty, S. Latic, Patricia Backer, Emily Allen

Faculty Publications

EXCEED: Excellence in Your Engineering Education is a ten day, residential summer transition program that was designed to improve retention and graduation rates at San José State University (SJSU). SJSU is a large, public institution in the West with a very diverse student population. However, the university has lower graduation and retention rates for certain student populations in engineering including underrepresented groups and first generation college students. This transition program was designed to meet five outcomes: acculturate the students to the College of Engineering and the university, enhance math and writing preparation, build community amongst the cohort of students, enhance …

How Important Is The Wow Factor In First Year Engineering Courses?, Thalia Anagnos, Burford Furman, Ping Hsu, Patricia Backer

Faculty Publications

This paper discusses the effectiveness of using projects with a “wow factor,” that is, engaging and challenging hands-on projects, in a freshman engineering course to motivate studentretention and persistence in engineering. Our course enrolls approximately 700 students per year in a lecture/laboratory format. Our university, a large comprehensive public university in thewest, has offered a freshman introduction to engineering course since 1992. In its original form, the course was part of a lower division engineering core, required of all engineering majors, and focused on computational skills (spreadsheets and MATLAB).In 1997, based on faculty and student feedback, a task force was …

Training Future Designers: A Study On The Role Of Physical Models, Vimal Viswanathan, Julie Linsey

Faculty Publications, Mechanical Engineering

Physical Models in Engineering Education: Making Tomorrow’s Designers Creative Innovation and creativity are two essential qualities for tomorrow’s designers. In order to nurture these skills in designers, our engineering curricula need to include more hands-on training. In recent times, many engineering educators have recognized the importance of hands-on training in engineering curriculum. Allowing students to build and test their own physical models and learn from their mistakes can be a very effective way of teaching. Recent studies have shown that physical models play a very important role in design innovation and creativity. Building and testing such models can lead designers …

Evaluation Of The Anterior Talofibular And Calcaneofibular Ligament In Relation To Supination Ankle Sprains, Peter Tran

Biomedical Engineering

Ankle injuries have always posed an issue to a number of athletes. Sports that involve running and jumping accumulate about 25% of injuries correlating to ankle sprains. In most ankle sprains the inversion (supination) of the ankle cause damage to lateral ligaments. The two most common lateral ligaments to experience damage are the anterior talofibular (ATFL) and calcaneofibular (CFL) ligaments. The methods of taping and ankle braces have allowed athletes to prevent recurring sprains from occurring. However, sprains can still occur even when one or both methods are applied. The purpose of each method is to restrict the range of …

Shelf Life Study Of Electrospun Plga Copolymers, Sean Youra, Nick Hudson

Biomedical Engineering

Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) is one of the most commonly used copolymers for electrospinning in tissue engineering applications. However, most research has not focused on the copolymer itself in regards to how long it can be used effectively and if varying the concentrations of polylactic acid (PLA) and polyglycolic acid (PGA) affect the resulting properties. Electrospinning is the method we use to create the three-dimensional constructs, or “scaffolds”, for the blood vessel mimic (BVM) in the tissue engineering lab. The aim of our project was to investigate if the morphology and mechanical properties of the scaffolds changed over time when they …

Analysis Of Acetabular Cup Orientation Effects On Stress Shielding In Total Hip Replacements Using Finite Element Methods, Brogan Mcguire, Jennifer Gemkow, Brad Gausewitz, Alex Georges

Biomedical Engineering

Improper positioning of the acetabular cup has been shown to contribute to issues such as high wear rates and dislocations in total hip replacements. The differences in contact mechanics due to varying orientation of the acetabular cup may also significantly affect strain distribution in the femur. This study examined these effects of acetabular orientation changes and their contribution to stress shielding using finite element analysis. A solid model of a cementless total hip implant was obtained using 3D point scanning and implanted virtually into a femur solid model. The implanted femur model was imported into ABAQUS and loaded with a …

Effect Of Oral Lipids On Blood Glucose, Tyler R. Knisley

Biomedical Engineering

Diabetes mellitus is a disease in which insulin hormone is ineffective or no longer produced. Multiple pathophysiologies can cause either insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) or insulin independent diabetes mellitus (IIDM), which can lead to chronic hyperglycemia and an array of short and long term health risks. Prior research has shown that IDDM patients have dyslipidemia, and experiments infusing lipids directly into the blood result in heightened insulin resistance. The hypothesis that dyslipidemia increases insulin resistance was tested by performing oral glucose tolerance tests across three treatment conditions. Participants were nondiabetic college-aged students. Data from a control group was gathered …

A Mouse Model Of Aortic Endothelial Denudation And Neointimal Formation, Ashkon C. Nehzati

Biomedical Engineering

More than 385,000 people die from coronary heart disease (CHD) annually and treatment costs $108.9 billion each year including the cost of health care services, medications, and lost productivity. CHD decreases heart function by limiting oxygen and nutrient transport carried through the coronary arteries. A complete block to the coronary arteries causes a myocardial infarction in response to an elimination of blood supply to cardiomyocytes. Partial occlusion results in insufficient blood supply to cardiomyocytes, producing myocardial ischemia and angina, which are usually treated with intravascular stents deployed percutaneously, before myocardial infarction occurs. Stents are the most common ways to expand …

Zone Of Intrusion For Permanent 9.1-Degree Single Slope Concrete Barriers, Cale J. Stolle

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Three WDOT 9.1-degree single-slope concrete barriers, with top heights of 36 in. (914 mm), 42 in. (1,067 mm), and 56 in. (1,422 mm) (Standard 14B32), were analyzed for Zone of Intrusion (ZOI)’ and working width using nonlinear finite element analysis (FEA). Tire-barrier friction, vehicle-barrier friction, barrier stiffness, mesh size, tire deflation, and suspension component failures were all found to have effects on simulation results. The zone of intrusion and working width were evaluated for each barrier under varying tire deflation and suspension failure conditions and determined to have a maximum value of 12.2 in. (310 mm) for the front fender …

Caltrain Bridging Structure And Commercial Buildings, Anthony Navarrete, Guadalupe Gonzalez

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The proposed project involves the design of three tower structures connecting a pedestrian bridge to help provide commuters, bicyclists, and pedestrians access to the east and west sides of the Santa Clara Caltrain rail system. Since the new San Jose Earthquakes stadium is currently being constructed on the east side of the tracks adjacent to Coleman Avenue, high business potential for a possible multi-use retail development exists. In addition to the three towers, three commercial structures will be designed in order to satisfy the need for a retail development. This project will serve as an attraction that will help attract …

Conductive Polymer Blends And Their Use In Memory Devices, Mohammad Yousef Al-Haik

Theses

The aim of this project is to synthesize and characterize conductive polymers made out of blending nonconductive polymers with ionic liquids. An application to demonstrate the use of these novel conductive polymers is to create an organic memory device.

Attempts to synthesize conductive polymers have been reported in the literature; several of these approaches include doping a polymer with arsenic or iodine based dopant. In this work, ionic liquids, known as plasticizer, are sued as the dopant for non-conductive polymers. There are several advantages of employing the ionic liquids over other dopants, including the maintenance of organic based blends (both …

Enzymatic Production Of Biodiesel From Fats Extracted From Lamb Meat Using Supercritical Co2, Hanifa Easa Taher

Theses

Due to the reduction in fossil fuel reserves and associated environmental impacts from using petroleum fuels, biodiesel has been presented as a feasible alternative because it is sustainable and environmentally friendly. In this study, it is proposed to investigate the feasibility of enzymatic production of biodiesel from waste animal fats using supercritical fluid technology for the extraction and reaction. The operating conditions that resulted in the optimum extraction and biodiesel production yield were identified. To the best of my knowledge of the investigators, the waste animal fat extracted by supercritical CO₂ (SC-CO₂) for the production of biodiesel …