Engineering Commons^™

Diffusion Tensor Imaging Of The Central Nervous System Following An Injury To The Spinal Cord And Cell Transplant, Michael Jirjis

Dissertations (1934 -)

The purpose of this dissertation research was to characterize the use of magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) as a diagnostic and prognostic tool in understanding the changes that occur throughout the spinal cord and brain following a spinal cord injury (SCI) and following stem cell transplant. The diffusion of water inside the nervous system is dramatically altered around the lesion site following a traumatic SCI. However, following damage to the spinal cord, little is known about the diffusion characteristics away from an injury and even less is understood about DTI's sensitivity to structural changes that occur following regenerative transplant …

Foot And Ankle Motion Analysis Using Dynamic Radiographic Imaging, Benjamin Donald Mchenry

Dissertations (1934 -)

Lower extremity motion analysis has become a powerful tool used to assess the dynamics of both normal and pathologic gait in a variety of clinical and research settings. Early rigid representations of the foot have recently been replaced with multi-segmental models capable of estimating intra-foot motion. Current models using externally placed markers on the surface of the skin are easily implemented, but suffer from errors associated with soft tissue artifact, marker placement repeatability, and rigid segment assumptions. Models using intra-cortical bone pins circumvent these errors, but their invasive nature has limited their application to research only. Radiographic models reporting gait …

Mechanisms Of Sensorimotor Impairment In Multiple Sclerosis, Matthew Cheeming Chua

Dissertations (1934 -)

Sensorimotor impairments in people with multiple sclerosis (MS) might alter coordination and balance strategy during functional movements. People with MS often have symptoms such as weakness and discoordination in the lower limbs, resulting in poor walking and balance function. This decrease in function can result in falls, decreased community activity, unemployment, and reduced quality of life. As MS is a progressive disease resulting in a range of dysfunction, the amount of lower limb impairment can cause changes to walking and balance strategies to maintain functional performance. The overall objective of this dissertation was to quantify the impairment at the hip …

An Improved Dipole-Moment Model Based On Near-Field Scanning For Characterizing Near-Field Coupling And Far-Field Radiation From An Ic, Zhenwei Yu, Jason A. Mix, Soji Sajuyigbe, Kevin P. Slattery, Jun Fan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, an improved dipole-moment model for characterizing near-field coupling and far-field radiation from an IC based on near-field scanning is proposed. An array of electric and magnetic dipole moments is used to reproduce the field distributions in a scanning plane above an IC. These dipole moments can then be used as noise sources for the IC. In order to ensure the accurate prediction of the near-field coupling from the IC, the regularization technique and the truncated singular-value decomposition method are investigated in this paper, together with the conventional least-squares method, to reconstruct the dipole moments from the near-field …

Adaptive Event-Triggered Control Of A Uncertain Linear Discrete Time System Using Measured Input And Output Data, Avimanyu Sahoo, Hao Xu, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, an adaptive model-based event-triggered control of an uncertain linear discrete time system is developed. Measured input and output vectors and their history are utilized to express the unknown linear discrete-time system as an autoregressive Markov representation (ARMarkov). A novel adaptive model in the form of AR Markov is proposed and an update law is derived in order to estimate parameters of the ARMarkov model at triggered instants unlike periodic updates in standard adaptive control. Lyapunov method is used to derive the event trigger condition, prove boundedness of the parameter vector and asymptotic convergence of the outputs and …

Neural Network-Based Adaptive Event-Triggered Control Of Affine Nonlinear Discrete Time Systems With Unknown Internal Dynamics, Avimanyu Sahoo, Hao Xu, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, the design of a neural network (NN) based adaptive model-based event-triggered control of an uncertain single input single output (SISO) nonlinear discrete time system in affine form is presented. The controller uses an adaptive estimator consisting of a single-layer NN not only to approximate the internal dynamics of an affine nonlinear discrete-time system but also to provide an estimate of the state vector during inter event interval. The NN weights of the adaptive NN estimator are tuned in a aperiodic manner at the event trigger instants unlike periodic updates in standard adaptive neural network (NN) control. A …

Simulation And Validation Of A Low Power Regime Based Attitude Determination And Control System For Cubesats, William D. Mcginnis, David G. Beale, J-M Wersinger

Early Career Technical Journal (ECTJ)

Proceedings of the ASME District F Early Career Technical Conference, November 2-3, 2013. School of Engineering, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama

Section 3: Dynamic Systems & Control; pp. 125-132

Spider Web Topology: Parameterization And Analysis, Pankaj Rajput, Giovanni Di Ilio, Ronald Diaz

Early Career Technical Journal (ECTJ)

Proceedings of the ASME District F Early Career Technical Conference, November 2-3, 2013. School of Engineering, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama

Section 5: Numerical Methods; pp. 172-179

Numerical Characterization Of A Passive Three Dimensional Triangular Micromixer Based On Chaotic Advection And Splitting-Recombination Mixing Mechanism, Lin Li, Qingde Chen, Chi Tay Tsai

Early Career Technical Journal (ECTJ)

Proceedings of the ASME District F Early Career Technical Conference, November 2-3, 2013. School of Engineering, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama

Section 5: Numerical Methods; pp. 180-185

Gas Turbine Exhaust-Heat-Driven Cooling Cycle For Steam Condenser Cooling Air Application, Muhammad M. Mahmood, Drake Viscome, Sheldon M. Jeter

Early Career Technical Journal (ECTJ)

Proceedings of the ASME District F Early Career Technical Conference, November 2-3, 2013. School of Engineering, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama

Section 8: Heat Transfer; pp. 271-277

Experimental Study On Analyzing Human Factor In The Process Of Planning Of Vertical Transportation, Magdalena Krstanoski, Kristina Jakimovska

Early Career Technical Journal (ECTJ)

Proceedings of the ASME District F Early Career Technical Conference, November 2-3, 2013. School of Engineering, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama

Section 9: Miscelleneous; pp. 289-296

Accurate Prediction Of Spectral Phonon Relaxation Time And Thermal Conductivity Of Intrinsic And Perturbed Materials, Tianli Feng

Open Access Theses

The prediction of spectral phonon relaxation time, mean-free-path, and thermal conductivity can provide significant insights into the thermal conductivity of bulk and nanomaterials, which are important for thermal management and thermoelectric applications. We perform frequency-domain normal mode analysis (NMA) on pure bulk argon and pure bulk germanium. Spectral phonon properties, including the phonon dispersion, relaxation time, mean free path, and thermal conductivity of argon and germanium at different temperatures have been calculated. We find the dependence of phonon relaxation time τ on frequency ω and temperature T vary from ~ω^-1.3 to ~ω^-1.8 and ~T^-0.8 to ~T^{-1.8 …}

Design Of A Running Robot And The Effects Of Foot Placement In The Transverse Plane, Timothy James Sullivan

Open Access Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to make advances in the design of humanoid bipedal running robots. We focus on achieving dynamic running locomotion because it is one metric by which we can measure how far robotic technologies have advanced, in relation to existing benchmarks set by humans and other animals. Designing a running human-inspired robot is challenging because human bodies are exceptionally complex mechanisms to mimic. There are only a few humanoid robots designed specifically for running and the existing robots are either constrained to a plane, do not yet exhibit human-like motion, or are unstable.

One aspect of …

Solution Combustion Synthesis Of Cobalt Oxide For Use As A Catalyst Precursor In The Hydrolysis Of Sodium Borohydride, Teandra Leigh Pfeil

Open Access Theses

Solution combustion synthesized (SCS) cobalt oxide (Co₃O₄) powder has been studied as a catalyst precursor for the hydrolysis of sodium borohydride (NaBH₄). Synthesis is completed in less than two minutes and results indicate SCS is capable of reproducibly synthesizing 98.5-99.5% pure Co₃O₄ nano-foam materials. SCS materials demonstrate an as-synthesized specific surface area of 24 m²/g, a crystallite size of 15.5 nm, and fine surface structures on the order of 4 nm. Despite having similar initial surface areas and sample purities, SCS-Co₃O₄ outperforms commercially available Co_{3 …}

Effect Of Exhaust Gas Recirculation And Combustible Oxygen Mass Fraction On Emission Index Of Nox For Counterflow Methane/Air Diffusion Flames, Mugdha S. Sane

Open Access Theses

Exhaust gas recirculation has been proven to be an effective method of reducing emissions of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) from internal combustion engines. The present study validates this effect through flame simulations using detailed chemistry. Counterflow methane/air diffusion flames were simulated in one dimension in physical space using GRI-Mech 3.0 detailed chemistry mechanism, thermal, and transport data. The influence of Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) on the flame structure and NOx emissions was studied by selecting higher than ambient inlet temperature and by varying the composition of the oxidizer stream. The Combustible Oxygen Mass Fraction (COMF), which represents the fraction of …

High Speed Turning Of Compacted Graphite Iron (Cgi) Using Controlled Modulation, Tyler Paul Stalbaum

Open Access Theses

Compacted graphite iron (CGI) is a material which emerged as a candidate material to replace cast iron (CI) in the automotive industry for engine block castings. Its thermal and mechanical properties allow the CGI-based engines to operate at higher cylinder pressures and temperatures than CI-based engines, allowing for lower fuel emissions and increased fuel economy. However, these same properties together with the thermomechanical wear mode in the CGI-CBN system result in poor machinability and inhibit CGI from seeing wide spread use in the automotive industry.

In industry, machining of CGI is done only at low speeds, less than V = …

Provable Run Time Safety Assurance For A Non-Linear System, Cory Firmin Snyder

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Systems that are modeled by non-linear continuous-time differential equations with uncertain parameters have proven to be exceptionally difficult to formally verify. The past few decades have produced a number of useful verification tools which can be applied to such systems but each is applicable to only a subset of possible verification scenarios. The Level Sets Toolbox (LST) is one such tool which is directly applicable to non-linear systems, however, it is limited to systems of relatively small continuous state space dimension. Other tools such as PHAVer and the SpaceEx invariant of the Le Guernic-Girard (LGG) support function algorithm are specifically …

Computational Modeling Of Graphene Oxide Exfoliation And Lithium Storage Characteristics, Reza Mortezaee

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Graphene oxide is a two dimensional material obtained by adsorption of oxygen or oxygen-containing groups on graphene. Stacked layers of graphene oxide constitute graphite oxide. These materials have various applications such as a source material for graphene production, transport support for electron microscopy, flexible organic photovoltaic cells and use in Li-ion batteries. Generation of exfoliated graphene oxide from a graphite oxide precursor is achieved relatively easily in solution as compared to graphene exfoliation. In this study we investigate the details of the graphene oxide exfoliation procedure in solution by calculating the Gibb's free energies and reaction rates. We consider two …

A Large Scale Distributed Syntactic, Semantic And Lexical Language Model For Machine Translation, Ming Tan

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The n-gram model is the most widely used language model (LM) in statistical machine translation system, due to its simplicity and scalability. However, it only encodes the local lexical relation between adjacent words and clearly ignores the rich syntactic and semantic structures of the natural languages. Attempting to increase the order of an n-gram to describe longer range dependencies in natural language immediately runs into the curse of dimensionality. Although previous researches tried to increase the order of n-gram on a large corpus, they did not see obvious improvement beyond 6-gram. Meanwhile, other LMs, such as syntactic language models and …

Engineering Childhood: Knowledge Transmission Through Parenting, Brianna L. Dorie, Monica Cardella

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Parents are the front line when it comes to the education and development of their children, and are important agents in the educational achievement of their child in a formal setting (Yun et al, 2010; Catsambis, 1995; Fan & Chen, 2001; Seyfried & Chung,2003). Parents purchase toys, read books, take children to museums, and interact with their child on a daily basis. Particular background with a subject, such as science or engineering, can affect the parent’s strategies for educating their children and subsequent understanding of main concepts (Yun et al., 2010). However, many adults and children alike have a minimal …

Reliability Of The Global Real-Time Assessment Tool For Teaching Enhancement (G-Rate), Nikitha Sambamurthy, Jeremi Shavonda London, Jeeyeon Hahn, Jiabin Zhu, Monica F. Cox

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

In response to the need for research-based assessment tools for effective teaching and to provide feedback to graduate teaching assistants about their instructional interactions in a classroom, the Global Real-time Assessment Tool for Teaching Enhancement (G-RATE) has been developed.The G-RATE has a flexible and easy-to-use interface that allows use in lecture and laboratory environments to collect data from a variety of stakeholders, including undergraduate students,instructors, researchers, and administrators.This paper presents a brief overview of the revised version of the Observer function of the G-RATE (Cox, Hahn, McNeill, Cekic, Zhu, & London, 2011) (Figure 1), which collects real-time classroom data framed …

Microcontrollers For Mechanical Engineers: From Assembly Language To Controller Implementation, Noah Salzman, Peter H. Meckl

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

This paper describes the evolution of a graduate and advanced undergraduate mechanical engineering course on microcontrollers and electromechanical control systems. The course begins with developing an understanding of the architecture of the microcontroller, and low-level programming in assembly language. It then proceeds to working with various functions of the microcontroller, including serial communications, interrupts, analog to digital conversion, and digital to analog conversion. Finally, the students learn how to characterize first and second order systems, and develop and implement their own controllers for a variety of electromechanical systems. The course takes the uncommon approach of teaching assembly language programming to …

The Anisotropic Hyperelastic Biomechanical Response Of The Vocal Ligament And Implications For Frequency Regulation: A Case Study, Jordan E. Kelleher, Thomas Siegmund, Mindy Du, Elhum Naseri, Roger W. Chan

School of Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Assessing Student Design Work In Social Entrepreneurship Projects, Lindsey Anne Nelson

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Helping People Living in Poverty? Understanding Factors Motivating Social Entrepreneurship Abstract Increasingly, engineering educators look to increase the social relevance of engineering design activities. The emergence of social businesses has sparked interest in creating programs that teach engineers about social entrepreneurship. Social businesses are viable business ventures where businesses adopt a social mission. Some strategists view social businesses as ways to capture market share in countries that have a large emerging consumer class, such as India and Brazil. These strategists speak of finding “the fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” and target consumers earning less than 4USD/day. Other strategists …

Using Puppets To Elicit Talk During Interviews On Engineering With Young Children, Brianna L. Dorie, Zdanna Tranby, Scott K. Van Cleave, Monica Cardella, Gina Navoa Svarovsky

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Interviewing can be tricky at best, but with a younger audience (< 5 years) there are some additional barriers that inhibit the interview process such as shyness, short attention span,lack of vocabulary, and level of parental guidance (Clark, 1999). When in an interview, a child may try to ‘second guess’ what the researcher wants them to say, especially if they believe that the interviewer may already know the answer (Gallop, 2000). Additionally young children tend to give monosyllabic answers to open ended questions (Tizard &Hughes, 1984), and might require more prompting than adults.One aide that has been recently investigated is the use of puppets to elicit children’s talk for research (Epstein et al., 2008). Puppets have been shown to: • Decrease children’s fears of the interview process • Lower anxiety levels • Help assess children’s knowledge • Help children to adjust to environment • Provide effective communication and teaching tools. Most research focuses on puppets within clinical contexts, but recently the use has been extended towards other applications such as qualitative interviews (Epstein et al., 2008),mathematical lessons (Cauley, 1988), promoting science engagement (Naylor et al,2007), and teaching phonics (Johnston & Watson, ???). However, there has not been any documented use of this research approach within engineering education.There are three common interview techniques involving puppets in practice: the Alien Puppet Interview (API) (Krott and Nicoladis, 2005), the Puppet Interview (PI) (Cassidy,1988; Verschueren, Buyuk and Marcoen, 2001) and the Berkeley Puppet Interview (BPI) (Measelle et al., 1998; Ablow et al., 1999). Each technique has a different strategy depending on how the child interacts with the puppet.As part of a larger project, children ages 3-5 were interviewed about an engineering task that they had just completed with their parents during a museum event. The interview was a hybrid mix of the Alien Puppet Interview and the Puppet Interview, depending on the way in which the child interviewee chose to interact with the puppet. Thirty interviews were analyzed for children’s interaction, quality of answers, and behavior toward the puppet.In the paper, we will provide more details about the specific interview approach used for our study (as well as insights into how children responded to this interview approach) in addition to a larger discussion of the three interview techniques in order to provide a research methodology resource for other pre-college engineering education researchers to use.

Making The Most Of Site Visits, Lindsey Anne Nelson

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

In order to engage communities, engineering educators must build networks with diverse community organizations. These community organizations primarily act as clients for student design teams. Engineering students are expected to treat clients with respect while developing solutions that solve a real problem found in the community organization. However, engineering students might not view people within the community organization as crucial stakeholders who have valuable information. The purpose of this paper is to explore how engineering students seek information during site visits to community partners.This paper analyzes students in a simulation activity to observe how students interact with different kinds of …

The Dynamics Of Attracting Switchers: A Cross-Disciplinary Comparison, Corey T. Schimpf, George Dante Ricco, Matthew Ohland

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

A Hazards Model Study of Pathway Analysis in Engineering Factors that indicate, explain, or predict if a student will persist or exit an engineering degree have been a subject of a lot of research in engineering education. Findings from these studies identify factors that lead to success or barriers that lead premature exit from an engineering degree; however, they often focus on students who matriculate into engineering or analyze students once they have matriculated into engineering. We propose studying an alternate pathway, students who switch into engineering from other majors. Examining alternate pathways may yield a fuller picture of the …

General Transformations For Gpu Execution Of Tree Traversals, Michael Goldfarb, Youngjoon Jo, Milind Kulkarni

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Technical Reports

With the advent of programmer-friendly GPU computing environments, there has been much interest in offloading workloads that can exploit the high degree of parallelism available on modern GPUs. Exploiting this parallelism and optimizing for the GPU memory hierarchy is well-understood for regular applications that operate on dense data structures such as arrays and matrices. However, there has been significantly less work in the area of irregular algorithms and even less so when pointer-based dynamic data structures are involved. Recently, irregular algorithms such as Barnes-Hut and kd-tree traversals have been implemented on GPUs, yielding significant performance gains over CPU implementations. However, …

Mechanical Concrete, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Mechanical Concrete® is a way of binding crushed stone aggregates together into a load bearing cellular building unit. The Mechanical Concrete® unit can support compressive loads and resist lateral soil pressure.

Greenpatch® - Cold Mix Asphalt, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

GreenPatch® is environmentally friendly cold asphalt that is a direct replacement for traditional cold patch in repairing asphalt pavements. This revolutionary breakthrough in the cold asphalt industry contains no petroleum based softeners such as diesel, toluene, kerosene, and naphthalene found in conventional cold asphalt that pose serious threats to human health and the environment.