Engineering Commons^™

A Practical Guide To An Fmri Experiment, Nasser H. Kashou

Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering Faculty Publications

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has been around for two decades and research in this field has been exponentially rising. Much of this research has been dominated by basic science. Recent trends have brought the clinical realm into play in which valuable contributions can still be made. Helping the clinician understand the basic concepts behind an fMRI experiment is crucial to further developing and evaluating functional paradigms and research. Critical to designing an fMRI experiment is understanding the related physics and how fine tuning scanning parameters affects the image quality, which in turn affect the findings of an fMRI study. …

The Mpt Assessment Deployed Via Digital Mobile Application, Niall Duffy

Dissertations

This project will look at the area of the Matching Person and Technology assessment (MPT). This project will be to develop a version of the MPT that can be deployed as a mobile application. The key research being performed in this project will be the analysis of the results given on the mobile application when compared to those given via the traditional paper method. The MPT is a very large assessment; because of this there are a number of different specific assessments like workplace and education assessments (Cook, A.M. and Hussey, S. 2001). Because of the size of the assessment …

Predicting Mortgage Arrears: An Investigation Into The Predictive Capability Of Customer Spending Patterns, Jamie Roche

Dissertations

The management of credit risk and mortgage arrears has become a very important area in financial services and banking. This dissertation set out to build a statistical model, which incorporates customer spending habits and the current equity value of a property, capable of predicting arrears. Current literature identifies many themes such as negative equity and unemployment that are common occurring factors in mortgage arrears but a multi-faceted approach was required to build a model capable of accurately predicting arrears. Property equity values were included in the model by taking the current outstanding value of the loans and using a property …

Material Potential | Recontextualizing Material Libraries, Diana Wagner

Masters Theses

Material libraries are growing resources that offer an opportunity for artists and designers to discover a variety of materials. These collections are composed in a traditional taxonomy, pairing materials based on composition. Samples are typically commercially made and are displayed independent of context, means of production, cultural significance, and application.

Through making we learn a material’s potential: the transformation it can make, the form it can take, and the new composites we can create. This generative experience lives in the studio and workshop. But how can we introduce this language of process, critical thinking, and making to activate and challenge …

Evaluation Of Methods To Account For Release From Nanofiber Scaffolds, Jennifer Moy

Theses

Electrospinning is a common technique utilized to form fibers from the micro- to nanometer range. Nanofibers form through electrospinning can be utilized as scaffolds since the fiber structures are similar to the structures within the extracellular matrix. Researchers use additives, such as growth factors, to help facilitate cell proliferation and function. Also, researchers are attempting to use electrospun fibers for drug delivery and as wound dressings since the electrospun fibers have high surface area to volume ratio. In both situations, the release of either the additive or the drug needs to be controlled so that the fibers would release the …

The Effect Of Vergence Vision Training On Binocularly Normal Subjects, Henry Talasan

Theses

Vergence is the disjunctive (inward or outward) movement of the eyes that is stimulated by retinal disparity (difference of where an image is projected to the retina and the fovea). A recent randomized clinical trial showed the efficacy of vision therapy for children with the binocular dysfunction known as convergence insufficiency is 73%. However, it is unknown whether binocularly normal persons will have any significant change to their vergence ocular motor system if they participate in vision training sessions. A total of ten (n = 10) binocularly normal persons participated in this study (18 to 28 years of age). A …

Experimental Determination Of The Mixing Requirements For Solid Suspension In Pharmaceutical Stirred Tank Reactors, Anqi Zhou

Theses

Glass and glass-lined, stirred-tank reactors are of significant importance in the pharmaceutical and related industries. Because of fabrication issues, a retreat blade impeller (RBI) with a low impeller clearance off the tank bottom is commonly used in glass-lined reactors, typically combined with a single baffle (providing only partial baffling conditions) mounted from the top of the reactor. In addition, these reactors are often provided with a torispherical bottom. Other configurations are also used, including full baffling or no baffles at all, hemispherical bottoms, and different impeller types. Despite their common use, some of the most important mixing characteristics of this …

Approach To Flood Mitigation - A Post Sandy Study In New Jersey Meadowlands Area, Banshari Datta

Theses

In the last decade the continuous change in the climate has resulted in an increased frequency of natural catastrophic events and the magnitude of their impact. The immense damage caused by such events brought to light the vulnerabilities of the impacted communities. Coastal communities are alarmingly vulnerable due to flood and storm surge impacts such as those caused by super storm Sandy in 2012. In order to mitigate this risk, the communities need to look beyond the short term recovery measures, and build a sustainable community by implementing long term mitigation measures. The objective of this thesis is to investigate …

Optimizing Alginate-Chitosan Microcapsules Using Co-Axial Air Flow Method As 3d Stem Cell Microenvironment, Noel Alfonso

Theses

Microencapsulation of cells is gaining popular interest in the field of biomedical engineering because it provides a more effective 3D scaffold that can mimic the cell microenvironment. The benefits of using microcapsules are biocompatibility, biodegradability, nontoxicity, and formation under mild gelation conditions. In this study, the ability of the alginate microcapsules to control the proliferation and differentiation of mouse OCT4-GFP embryonic stem cells is investigated. Microcapsules are produced by extrusion of alginate into a calcium chloride gelation bath with the aid of a co-axial air flow. It is shown that the size of the spheres is controlled based on needle …

Hydrodynamic Cfd Modeling Of A Pharmaceutical Reactor Vessel Provided With A Retreat-Blade Impeller Under Different Baffling Conditions, Christopher G. Foehner

Theses

In the pharmaceutical industry, glass-lined reactors and vessels are often utilized to carry out a variety of different unit operations. Within these systems, both the vessel and impellers are typically glass-lined in order to provide superior corrosion resistance, prevent product contamination, and enhance cleanability. This approach, in turn, often requires the use of different, and sometimes sub-optimal, baffling conditions, which affect the hydrodynamics of the vessels and the reactor performance.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a computational tool that employs numerical methods and algorithms to discretize and numerically solve partial differential equations (PDEs) representing mass, energy, and momentum conservation equations …

Combustion Of Fine Magnesium Particles, Song Wang

Theses

Recent interest in developing Al-Mg alloys as reactive materials prompted studies of combustion mechanisms for particles of such alloys with different Al/Mg ratios. Reference experiments with pure Al and Mg powders are also desired to better understand and model combustion of the respective alloys. While combustion of pure Al powders has been addressed in many recent studies, combustion of magnesium explored mostly coarse, 50 μm, and larger particles. This effort is focused to characterize and understand combustion dynamics for fine Mg powders. Spherical, micron-sized magnesium particles were introduced in an air-acetylene flame using a custom-made screw feeder. Particles were observed …

Assessment Of A Marine Polysaccharide For Use As Excipient In Pharmaceutical Hot-Melt Extrusion, Qing Ye

Theses

Pharmaceutical Hot Melt Extrusion (HME) is currently investigated by both industry and academia as a method for manufacturing solid oral dosages with improved bioavailability of poorly-water soluble active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and control drug release of water-soluble APIs. Although HME is traditionally utilizing synthetic polymers to produce such dosages, biopolymers constantly gain ground by virtue of renewability, biocompatibility and in some cases biodegradability. In this work, the possibility of using Keltone, a marine polysaccharide derived from brown seaweed, as a polymeric excipient for pharmaceutical HME is explored. Keltone is insoluble in acidic pH and soluble in basic pH, therefore making …

Dispersion And Dissolution Kinetics Of Api Particles In Pharmaceutical Hot Melt Extrusion, Wang Zhan

Theses

Pharmaceutical Hot Melt Extrusion (HME) is essentially a special case of polymer compounding. The elementary steps involved in traditional plastics melt processing are handling of particulates, melting, dispersive and distributive mixing, devolatilization and stripping, and finally pressurization and pumping. However, for pharmaceutical HME, the dissolution of the API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient) is an additional and very important elementary step, along with the melting of the polymeric excipient that precedes it, and mixing which accelerates the dissolution process. A major concern in pharmaceutical HME is the thermal degradation of the API. To avoid overexposure of API to heat while ensuring complete …

Short Term Modification Of Vergence Ramp Eye Movements In The Convergent Direction, Chang Yaramothu

Theses

Prior oculomotor studies have investigated the various effects of short-term modification on vergence, saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movements. Previous vergence studies have concentrated on step modification stimuli. Few have investigated the effects of short-term modification on vergence ramp movements. Thus, this study explores the trends observed within a short-term modification experiment studying smoothly tracking vergence eye movements responses elicited from convergent ramp stimuli. A short-term modification experiment is composed of three phases: baseline, modification and recovery. Baseline and recovery phases contain only test stimuli; whereas, during modification, the subject is presented test and conditioning stimuli in a ratio of …

Soft Shape-Memory Polymers As A Platform For Biomedical Applications, Amir Hossein Torbati

Dissertations - ALL

Soft Shape-Memory Polymers as a Platform for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

by

Amir Hossein Torbati

The overall objective of this work was to expand on the previous efforts carried out by other researchers to develop series of "smart" or stimulus-responsive shape-memory polymers for biomaterials applications. For this purpose, novel shape-memory polymers were fabricated and their macrostructure and microstructure were studied to understand their effects on overall shape-memory characteristics and mechanical properties of these materials. The advent of shape-memory polymers has significantly influenced the development and rapid growth of various functional polymers. Shape-memory polymers are used where the dynamic functions of polymers …

The Effect Of Localized Low Concrete Strength On Flexural Strength Of Rc Beams, Feng Xie

Theses - ALL

In reinforced concrete (RC) beams, localized low concrete strength may occur under certain conditions, e.g., poor construction practice that results in concrete honeycombing. The performance of beams with localized poor zones has received considerable attention in civil engineering research. This report presents the response of beams with various localized poor zones along the length of simply supported flexural members. A finite element model approach is developed and calibrated against two experimental beam test data, conducted by others. Solid 65 elements for modeling the concrete and Link180 elements for modeling the steel reinforcing bars are combined together with spring elements between …

Landscape Factors That Affect Acid-Base Chemistry Of Adirondack Long-Term Monitoring (Altm) Lakes, Zheng Dong

Theses - ALL

The Adirondack region has been affected by acid deposition for multiple decades. Atmospheric deposition of sulfur and nitrogen has decreased since the 1970s because of the 1970 and 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) as well as the NOX Budget Program. Previous studies have related the long-term changes in Adirondack lake water chemistry to decreases in atmospheric deposition and emission controls. However, relatively limited research has been conducted on the spatial patterns and the role of different landscape factors on the recovery of lake water chemistry in the Adirondacks. The objective of this study was to investigate the relations of …

Probing The Roles Of Polymeric Separators In Lithium-Ion Battery Capacity Fade At Elevated Temperatures, Jianchao Chen, Yongda Yan, Tao Sun, Yue Qi, Xiaodong Li

Faculty Publications

The high temperature mechanical property of separators is very important for safety of lithium-ion batteries. However, the mechanical integrity of polymeric separators in lithium-ion batteries at elevated temperatures is still not well characterized. In this paper, the temperature dependent micro-scale morphology change of PP (polypropylene)-PE (polyethylene)-PP sandwiched separators (Celgard 2325) was studied by in-situ high temperature surface imaging using an atomic force microscope (AFM) coupled with power spectral density (PSD) analysis and digital image correlation (DIC) technique. Both PSD and DIC analysis results show that the PP phase significantly closes its pores by means of dilation of the nanofibrils surrounding …

Accelerating Pattern Matching In Neuromorphic Text Recognition System Using Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor, Khadeer Ahmed

Theses - ALL

Neuromorphic computing systems refer to the computing architecture inspired by the working mechanism of human brains. The rapidly reducing cost and increasing performance of state-of-the-art computing hardware allows large-scale implementation of machine intelligence models with neuromorphic architectures and opens the opportunity for new applications. One such computing hardware is Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, which delivers over a TeraFLOP of computing power with 61 integrated processing cores. How to efficiently harness such computing power to achieve real time decision and cognition is one of the key design considerations. This work presents an optimized implementation of Brain-State-in-a-Box (BSB) neural network model on …

Electrochemical Control Of Bacterial Persister Cells, Tagbo Herman Roland Niepa

Dissertations - ALL

The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has presented an increasing challenge to infection control. Conventional methods of antibacterial treatment involving high dose of antibiotics or surgical intervention have proven insufficient for eradicating persistent infections, such as those associated with medical implants. It is well recognized that bacterial populations commonly contain a small percentage of phenotypic variants, known as persister cells, which are metabolically inactive and extremely tolerant to antibiotics. When the antibiotic treatment is stopped, surviving persister cells can regenerate the bacterial population with a similar percentage of persister cells. Thus, persistence presents a great challenge to curing chronic infections.

In …

Attacks And Countermeasures For Webview On Mobile Systems, Tongbo Luo

Dissertations - ALL

ABSTRACT

All the mainstream mobile operating systems provide a web container, called ``WebView''. This Web-based interface can be included as part of the mobile application to retrieve and display web contents from remote servers. WebView not only provides the same functionalities as web browser, more importantly, it enables rich interactions between mobile apps and webpages loaded inside WebView. Through its APIs, WebView enables the two-way interaction. However, the design of WebView changes the landscape of the Web, especially from the security perspective.

This dissertation conducts a comprehensive and systematic study of WebView's impact on web security, with a particular focus …

Energy-Efficient Lightweight Algorithms For Embedded Smart Cameras: Design, Implementation And Performance Analysis, Mauricio Casares

Dissertations - ALL

An embedded smart camera is a stand-alone unit that not only captures images, but also includes a processor, memory and communication interface. Battery-powered, embedded smart cameras introduce many additional challenges since they have very limited resources, such as energy, processing power and memory. When camera sensors are added to an embedded system, the problem of limited resources becomes even more pronounced. Hence, computer vision algorithms running on these camera boards should be light-weight and efficient. This thesis is about designing and developing computer vision algorithms, which are aware and successfully overcome the limitations of embedded platforms (in terms of power …

Dyadic Green's Functions For Layered General Anisotropic Media And Their Application To Radiation Of Dipole Antennas, Ying Huang

Dissertations - ALL

In this dissertation, the dyadic Green‟s functions (DGFs) for unbounded and layered anisotropic media, with no restriction imposed on the medium property, are derived. Utilizing the obtained DGFs, the radiation problems of a Hertzian dipole and a microstrip antenna in the presence of an anisotropic substrate are solved.

After a brief introduction, the eigenvector dyadic Green‟s functions (E-DGFs) for an unbounded general anisotropic medium through the eigen-decomposition method are derived. The E-DGFs of a layered anisotropic geometry are then constructed based on the derivation of the unbounded E-DGFs using two different approaches. One is through the symmetrical property of the …

Solving Time Domain Scattering And Radiation Problems In A Marching-On-In-Degree Technique For Method Of Moment, Zicong Mei

Dissertations - ALL

The time domain method of moment has been proposed for a long time. The marching-on-in-time solver suffers from late time instability, while the marching-on-in-degree technique can avoid this problem.

This thesis introduces a new temporal basis function and a new Green's function form that improves the computation speed of the marching-on-in-degree technique. This method can be used for the perfect conductor and can also be applied to conductors with loss or dielectric.

As a method of moment solver, this marching-on-in-degree technique must solve a dense matrix equation and it may be time consuming if the objects are very large. Therefore, …

The Effects Of Active Flow Control On High-Speed Jet Flow Physics And Noise, Zachary P. Berger

Dissertations - ALL

The work to be presented focuses on the noise generation of a fully turbulent, compressible jet flow within a large scale anechoic chamber. The investigations are aimed at understanding the complex nature of the jet flow field in an effort to reduce the far-field noise through active flow control and novel reduced-order modeling. The flow field of a highly subsonic, axisymmetric jet with a nozzle diameter of two inches (50.8 mm), is probed through the implementation of two-component particle image velocimetry (PIV) in the streamwise plane, along the jet's centerline. These measurements are coupled with simultaneously sampled near and far-field …

Application Of Data Fusion To Fluid Dynamic Data, Christopher John Ruscher

Dissertations - ALL

In recent years, there have been improvements in the methods of obtaining fluid dynamic data, which has led to the generation of vast amounts of data. Extracting the useful information from large data sets can be a challenging task when investigating data from a single source. However, most experiments use data from multiple sources, such as particle image velocimetry (PIV), pressure sensors, acoustic measurements, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), to name a few. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each measurement technique, one can fuse the data together to improve the understanding of the problem being studied. Concepts from the …

Effect Of Confinement And Temperature On The Behavior Of Eps Geofoam, Amsalu Birhan

Dissertations - ALL

EPS geofoam blocks underlying compacted soil and structural loads become subjected to multi-axial loading. Effects of confining pressure on the stress-strain behavior of EPS geofoam have been investigated in previous studies. Some studies found increases in confining stress lead to corresponding decreases in both modulus and compressive strength. Increasing confining stress has also been reported to result in higher compressive strength. Regardless of the sense and attributed significance of the effects of confinement on EPS geofoam behavior, the implied effects on performance are generally not considered in practice. A series of triaxial compression tests were conducted on EPS geofoams of …

Fabrication And Characterization Of Carbon Nanofiber Reinforced Shape Memory Epoxy (Cnfr-Sme) Composites, Derek Weed

Theses - ALL

Shape memory polymers have a wide range of applications due to their ability to mechanically change shapes upon external stimulus, while their achievable composite counterparts prove even more versatile. An overview of literature on shape memory materials, fillers and composites was provided to pave a foundation for the materials used in the current study and their inherent benefits. This study details carbon nanofiber and composite fabrication and contrasts their material properties. In the first section, the morphology and surface chemistry of electrospun-poly(acrylonitrile)-based carbon nanofiber webs were tailored through various fabrication methods and impregnated with a shape memory epoxy. The morphologies, …

Mercury Transport And Fluxes In The Lake Ontario Basin, Joseph Steven Denkenberger

Dissertations - ALL

In this dissertation I assess mercury dynamics in the Lake Ontario Basin. In four interrelated phases, ecosystem mercury concentrations and fluxes were analyzed at increasing scales. Each phase is presented in order of increasing scale, starting with a reach-by-reach analysis in the Seneca River in New York, then moving up to an analysis of the Lake Ontario watershed, followed by an assessment of Lake Ontario, and culminating with an estimate of atmospheric mercury exchange for the entire Great Lakes Basin.

Phase 1 of my research is a multi-year study exploring mercury (Hg) dynamics in the Three Rivers system, with particular …

Hydrochemical Dynamics Under Differing Winter Climate Regimes At The Hubbard Brook Experiment Forest, Colin Fuss

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation is a two-phase study of the hydrochemical dynamics of drainage waters at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF) in New Hampshire, USA, that aims to improve understanding of changes in water quality associated with winter climate variation. The first phase was an analysis of the long-term stream and soil water chemistry dataset from Watershed 6, the biogeochemical reference watershed of the HBEF. The second phase was a series of field measurements designed to evaluate variation in the chemistry and hydrology of stream and soil water across a natural gradient of winter climate at the HBEF.

Thirty years (1982-2011) …