Engineering Commons^™

Copper Doping Of Zno Crystals By Transmutation Of 64Zn To 65Cu: An Electron Paramagnetic Resonance And Gamma Spectroscopy Study, Matthew C. Recker, John W. Mcclory, Maurio S. Holston, Eric M. Golden, Nancy C. Giles, Larry E. Halliburton

Faculty Publications

Transmutation of ⁶⁴Zn to ⁶⁵Cu has been observed in a ZnO crystal irradiated with neutrons. The crystal was characterized with electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) before and after the irradiation and with gamma spectroscopy after the irradiation. Major features in the gamma spectrum of the neutron-irradiated crystal included the primary 1115.5 keV gamma ray from the ⁶⁵Zn decay and the positron annihilation peak at 511 keV. Their presence confirmed the successful transmutation of ⁶⁴Zn nuclei to ⁶⁵Cu. Additional direct evidence for transmutation was obtained from the EPR of Cu²⁺ ions (where ⁶³Cu and ^{65 …}

Learning Redundant Motor Tasks With And Without Overlapping Dimensions: Facilitation And Interference Effects, Rajiv Ranganathan, Jon A. Wieser, Kristine M. Mosier, Ferdinando A. Mussa-Ivaldi, Robert A. Scheidt

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Prior learning of a motor skill creates motor memories that can facilitate or interfere with learning of new, but related, motor skills. One hypothesis of motor learning posits that for a sensorimotor task with redundant degrees of freedom, the nervous system learns the geometric structure of the task and improves performance by selectively operating within that task space. We tested this hypothesis by examining if transfer of learning between two tasks depends on shared dimensionality between their respective task spaces. Human participants wore a data glove and learned to manipulate a computer cursor by moving their fingers. Separate groups of …

An Enhanced Self-Healing Protection System In Smart Grid: Using Advanced And Intelligent Devices And Applying Hierarchical Routing In Sensor Network Technique, Mohamed Eid Aljahani

Masters Theses

This paper presents a self-healing protection systems were designed using PSCAD software to test and investigate the efficiency of this method. The system was applied on a typical distribution system with loads, buses, and power sources. The availability of advanced and intelligent devices, such as IEDs and PMUs was the trigger to design proficient and accurate self-healing protection systems which are associated with future smart grids. Deploying optimal sensors distributed within the grid could be a suitable method to monitor and control the distribution network. By using a hierarchical clustering communication technique, optimal sensors can work wirelessly and efficiently without …

Improved Accuracy In Real-Time Rfid Localization Systems Using Kalman Filtering, Benjamin J. Sanda

Masters Theses

The use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has become widespread in industry as a means to quickly and wirelessly identify and track packages and equipment. Now there is a commercial interest in using RFID to provide real-time localization. Efforts to use RFID technology for this purpose experience localization errors due to noise and multipath effects inherent to these environments. This paper presents the use of both linear Kalman filters and non-linear Unscented Kalman filters to reduce error effects inherent to real-time RFID localization systems and provide more accurate localization results in indoor environments. A commercial RFID localization system designed for …

Automatic Evaluation Of Multidisciplinary Derivatives Using A Graph-Based Problem Formulation In Openmdao, Justin Gray, Tristan Hearn, Kenneth Moore, John Hwang, Joaquim Martins, Andrew Ning

Faculty Publications

The optimization of multidisciplinary systems with respect to large numbers of design variables is best pursued using a gradient-based optimization together with a method that efficiently evaluates coupled derivatives, such as the coupled adjoint method. However, implementing such a method in a problem with more than a few disciplines is time consuming and error prone. To address this issue, we develop an automated procedure for assembling and solving the coupled derivative equations that takes into account the disciplinary couplings using the interdisciplinary dependency graph of the problem. The coupled derivatives can be computed completely analytically, if analytic derivatives are available …

Analysis Of The Conduction-Radiation Problem In Absorbing, Emitting, Non-Gray Planar Media Using An Exact Method, Travis J. Moore, Matthew R. Jones

Faculty Publications

Systems in which both conduction and radiation are the dominant modes of heat transfer are important in many engineering applications and various numerical methods exist to analyze such systems. An exact solution to the conduction–radiation problem in a one-dimensional, planar, absorbing, emitting, non-gray medium is presented. The method uses an integrating factor to solve the radiative transfer equation and variation of parameters is used to solve the energy equation. The model is verified by comparing the temperature profiles calculated from this work to those found using numerical methods for both gray and non-gray cases.

Semi-Automated Method Of Assembly For Physio Ii Ring, Cameron Anderson Deines, Kelsey Jean Engel, Christopher Kiuyen Wong

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Installation Plan For An Automatic Fresh Water Ball Valve For The Dairy Unit Flush Tank At California Polytechnic State University, Garret James Rowley

Agricultural Education and Communication

The purpose of this senior project was to plan for the installation of an automatic fresh water valve at the Dairy Unit at California Polytechnic State University. This new valve will replace the existing manual gate valve that repeatedly overfills the tank. The data and research was completed in order to assess the projects feasibility and installation needs. This project outlines the steps needed to be taken in order to install the valve, as well provides a detailed explanation on why this installation is pertinent.

Project Proposal And Development Plan For A New Security Gate At Swanton Pacific Ranch, K. Morgan Perry

Agricultural Education and Communication

The purpose of this project was to develop a prototype gate for Cal Poly’s Swanton Pacific Ranch in Santa Cruz, CA. Swanton Pacific Ranch requested that the author design and build a 21’x5’ single-retractable gate for Swanton Pacific Ranch to help decrease the security issues that have recently arisen at the facility. The design and format of this project are focused towards the desires and goals set forth by Swanton Pacific Ranch and the Operations Manager, Steve Auten in order to obtain a certain outcome. This project provides an outline of what needs to be done in order to produce …

Development And Implementation Of Assessment Methods For Tissue-Engineered Blood Vessel Mimics, Tanner Stevenson

Biomedical Engineering

Coronary Artery Disease (CAD), the most prevalent form of heart disease, is the result of clogged or damaged coronary arteries and claims around 380,000 Americans annually. A common treatment for CAD involves placing a stent into the artery in order to open the lumen and support the native tissue—a procedure that drastically reduces patient recovery times in comparison to heart bypass surgery. However, stents do not always interact well with the body and require additions such as surface coatings or drug elution in order for additional biocompatibility. These additions necessitate extensive in vitro and in vivo testing which are expensive …

Functional Vasodilation Is Impaired In Arterialized Capillaries In The Spinotrapezius, Joshua P. Cutts

Biomedical Engineering

Ischemic diseases are the result of atherosclerotic plaques, which occlude conduit arteries. Ischemic disease in different tissues leads to different conditions, such as coronary artery disease (CHD), cerebrovascular disease (CVD), and peripheral arterial occlusive disease (PAOD). Patient vasculature architecture is variable; some patients having many collateral vessels, which are connect one arterial branch to another, and readily serve as natural bypass routes to atherosclerotic occlusions, to enlarge and provide blood flow to tissue distal to the occlusion. Patients with many natural collateral vessels are ischemia protected. Unfortunately, not all patients have collateral arterioles to remodel into conduit vessels and provide …

Sonar For The Visually Impaired, Anastasia Newark, Edwin Ng, Scott Terhorst

Biomedical Engineering

There are currently no inexpensive assistive devices that allow the visually impaired detect low hanging objects that are above waist height and may cause injury, such as a rope or tree branch. The challenge presented to the team by the Quality of Life Plus Lab (QL+) was to develop a Sonar Cane device that attaches to a traditional white cane to address this problem. This device must be lightweight, inexpensive to manufacture, have a long battery life, and accurately detect obstacles to prevent user injury.

Design Of Cpu Simulation Software For Armv7 Instruction Set Architecture, Dillon Tellier

Computer Engineering

Simulations have long been a part of the engineering process in both the professional and academic domain. From a pedagogic standpoint, simulations allow students to explore the dynamics of engineering scenarios by controlling variables, taking measurements, and observing behavior which would be difficult or impossible without simulation. One such tool is a CPU simulator used in Cal Poly’s Computer Architecture classes; this software simulates an instruction accurate operation of a computer processor and reports statistics regarding the execution of the supplied compiled machine code. For the last several years Cal Poly’s computer architecture classes have used a previous version of …

The Effects Of Austempering And Cryogenic Processing On The Mechanical Properties Of Forged E4340 Steel For Automotive Engine Connecting Rods, Aaron Taylor Ludlow

Materials Engineering

The components in top-fuel dragster and stock car engines undergo significantly more force than their production passenger vehicle counterparts do. Therefore, they must be manufactured and processed to withstand those forces so that they do not catastrophically fail while in service. In this project, the effects of austempering and adding a cryogenic processing step to the control quench and double temper heat treatment on the tensile and hardness properties of E4340 high-strength steel were examined. Tensile test samples were machined from raw connecting rod forgings and underwent either a quench-double temper heat treatment, an austempering heat treatment, or the quench-double …

Designing A Modular Dsp Core For Real-Time Audio Performance, Kevin Richard Brewer

Computer Engineering

This project provides an overview for building a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) core on a Digilent Nexys2 FPGA board. The DSP core is designed to give Cal Poly students interested in DSP and its applications to audio engineering a usable platform to perform signal processing and analytics. The processes of the DSP core are modular, allowing students to design their own implementations of various adder and multiplier functions. Infinite impulse response (IIR) filters and finite impulse response (FIR) filters using both cascade and parallel implementations are the primary processing tools in the core, and all output can be visually and …

Autonomous Competitor, Josh B. Porter

Computer Engineering

A description of a fully autonomous, golf ball rolling, RoboRodentia 2014 competitor made with stepper motors, photodiodes, a servo and an Ardunio Uno.

Design, Testing, And Evaluation Of Stands To Facilitate Tractor Clutch Repairs, Nathan Sperling

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

No abstract provided.

Design, Construction And Analysis Of A Conveyor System For Drying Seasoned Snack Almonds, Nick Civetz

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

No abstract provided.

Design, Construction, And Evaluation Of A Cotton Module Tarp Roller, Bradon Spain

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

No abstract provided.

Feasibility Of Water Reuse In Solano County, Dakari Barksdale

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

No abstract provided.

Design, Fabrication And Analysis Of A Utility Strip For Light Utility Trucks, Ian D. Hare

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

This senior project discusses the design and fabrication of a utility strip for a light utility truck. The utility strip is desirable for off road enthusiasts with its double use as a dirt bike ramp as well as a traction strip. This report will show the cost of materials as well as labor, and if it is feasible for mass production.

Tests were conducted which indicated that the Utility Strip was able to support the weight of a dirt bike as a ramp, as well as regain traction to a two-wheel drive truck stuck in the sand. This product can …

Design And Construction Of A Feeding System For A Pellet Mill, Jeremy Mahrt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

No abstract provided.

Adaptive Basketball Shooter - Final Project Report, Jenna N. Becker, Richard A. Galanti, Justin D. Haley, Brett Y. Nayudu

Mechanical Engineering

The Friday Club is a joint venture between the Cal Poly Kinesiology Department and the San Luis Obispo Special Olympics that offers people with varying degrees of disability the opportunity to meet weekly and learn various sports and games. At Friday Club, athletes in wheelchairs with limited arm strength use devices built by Cal Poly mechanical engineering students in order to participate in various sports. Many devices are designed to attach to the Universal Play Frame (UPF), a wheel-chair attachment. The purpose of this project was to design and build a UPF device that will launch a basketball, so that …

Textual Appropriation And Attribution In Engineering Theses And Dissertations: An Exploratory Study, Edward J. Eckel

University Libraries Faculty & Staff Publications

This exploratory study seeks to build a clearer picture of the extent to which engineering graduate students use and attribute unquoted verbatim source text in the literature review sections of their theses and dissertations. In addition, it explores whether or not there are differences between master’s and doctoral engineering students in these patterns of copying and attribution and what this might indicate about their potential skill levels in source use.

The study asks the following research questions: (1) Do the literature review sections of engineering master's theses contain longer average verbatim text matches than the corresponding sections of engineering doctoral …

Analysis Of Long-Term Utah Temperature Trends Using Hilbert-Haung Transforms, Brent H. Hargis

Theses and Dissertations

We analyzed long-term temperature trends in Utah using a relatively new signal processing method called Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). We evaluated the available weather records in Utah and selected 52 stations, which had records longer than 60 years, for analysis. We analyzed daily temperature data, both minimum and maximums, using the EMD method that decomposes non-stationary data (data with a trend) into periodic components and the underlying trend. Most decomposition algorithms require stationary data (no trend) with constant periods and temperature data do not meet these constraints. In addition to identifying the long-term trend, we also identified other periodic processes …

Cooperative Construction In Schools In California, John Mauck Donley

Master's Theses

Cooperative Construction in Schools in California

John M. Donley

The construction industry has lost efficiency since 1964, while becoming increasingly more litigious. Schools in California can ill afford the time to allow the construction industry time to fully evolve. It may take years or decades to fully improve the efficiency of, and reduce the conflict within the construction industry.

At the same time, the construction industry has developed new processes to improve efficiency and reduce conflict. These processes are beginning to be broadly embraced by the industry. They all contain cooperative elements. Taken together they represent a new organizing principle …

The Impacts Of Triclosan On Anaerobic Community Structures, Function, And Antimicrobial Resistance, Patrick J. Mcnamara, Timothy M. Lapara, Paige J. Novak

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Triclosan is a widespread antimicrobial agent that accumulates in anaerobic digesters used to treat the residual solids generated at municipal wastewater treatment plants; there is very little information, however, about how triclosan impacts microbial communities in anaerobic digesters. We investigated how triclosan impacts the community structure, function and antimicrobial resistance genes in lab-scale anaerobic digesters. Previously exposed (to triclosan) communities were amended with 5, 50, and 500 mg/kg of triclosan, corresponding to the median, 95th percentile, and 4-fold higher than maximum triclosan concentration that has been detected in U.S. biosolids. Triclosan amendment caused all of the Bacteria and Archaea communities …

The I: A Client-Based Point-And-Click Puzzle Game, Aldo Lewis

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Given mobile devices’ weak computational power, game programmers must learn to create games with simple graphics that are engaging and easy to play. Though seldom created for phones and tablets, puzzle games are a perfect fit. In recent years, the genre has gained a following and even won some acclaim. Games like Myst, The Seventh Guest and Portal all engage gamers with challenging puzzles and then reward them with story components upon task fulfillment. Few such games have been created for mobile devices, in part due to the difficulty of developing for devices with different operating systems. Android, WebIOS and …

Developing Defined And Scalable 3d Culture Systems For Culturing Human Pluripotent Stem Cells At High Densities, Yuguo Lei, Daeun Jeong, Jifang Xiao, David V. Schaffer

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering: Faculty Publications

Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs)—including embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs)—are very promising candidates for cell therapies, tissue engineering, high throughput pharmacology screens, and toxicity testing. These applications require large numbers of high quality cells; however, scalable production of human pluripotent stem cells and their derivatives at a high density and under well-defined conditions has been a challenge. We recently reported a simple, efficient, fully defined, scalable, and good manufacturing practice (GMP) compatible 3D culture system based on a thermoreversible hydrogel for hPSC expansion and differentiation. Here, we describe additional design rationale and characterization of this …

3-Input Pre-Amp, Daniel Pico, Carla Salome Ramirez

Electrical Engineering

There is no commercial available pre-amplifier that takes 3 individual input signals and synthesizes them for an acoustic guitar. The acoustic pre-amplifier takes three separate small signal inputs and combines or isolates to endure amplification depending with user setting. The user deciphers which signal or signal combination is desired. The device features coil pick-up, microphone pick-up, and piezo disc pick-up for variety of tone quality and control.