Engineering Commons^™

The Role Of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Uas) In Disaster Response And Recovery Efforts: Historical, Current And Future, Dennis Vincenzi, David C. Ison, Brent A. Terwilliger

Publications

A wide range of legislation has been proposed or put into place that restricts the use of unmanned systems. These actions by legislators and regulators will stifle the growth of this technology and the associated surrounding industry. The largest obstacle to the proliferation of UAS in the U.S. is the FAA. The FAA has designated the location of six test sites that are anticipated to allow for less restrictive and formative research to assess the technologies that the FAA has claimed need to exist in order to integrate UAS into the NAS. Further complicating the adoption of UAS for beneficent …

Defect Levels In Cu₂Znsn(Sₓse₁₋ₓ)₄ Solar Cells Probed By Current-Mode Deep Level Transient Spectroscopy, S. Das, S. K. Chaudhuri, R. N. Bhattacharya, K. C. Mandal

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Space Environment, Robert J. Twiggs

Robert "Bob" Twiggs STEM Education Collection

A PowerPoint Presentation created by Professor Bob Twiggs titled "Space Environment" from May 12, 2014.

Context & Overview, Robert J. Twiggs

Robert "Bob" Twiggs STEM Education Collection

A PowerPoint Presentation created by Professor Bob Twiggs titled "Context & Overview" from May 12, 2014.

Earth Orbits, Robert J. Twiggs

Robert "Bob" Twiggs STEM Education Collection

A PowerPoint Presentation created by Professor Bob Twiggs titled "Earth Orbits" from May 12, 2014.

Decaf: A New Event Detection Logic For The Purpose Of Fusing Delineated-Continuous Spatial Information, Kerry Q. Hart

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Geospatial information fusion is the process of synthesizing information from complementary data sources located at different points in space and time. Spatial phenomena are often measured at discrete locations by sensor networks, technicians, and volunteers; yet decisions often require information about locations where direct measurements do not exist. Traditional methods assume the spatial phenomena to be either discrete or continuous, an assumption that underlies and informs all subsequent analysis. Yet certain phenomena defy this dichotomy, alternating as they move across spatial and temporal scales. Precipitation, for example, appears continuous at large scales, but it can be temporally decomposed into discrete …

Evaluation Of Methods For Control Of Vegetation In Utility Corridors, George V. Rancea

Master's Projects and Capstones

Vegetation management programs are now one of the largest budget items for most of the utility companies in the United States. Control methods used in line clearance activities include mechanical trimming, planting management, or use of tree growth regulators (chemicals that suppress the production of gibberellins, the plant hormones that control stem elongation). Choosing the appropriate control method is a decision that vegetation program managers should take based on many factors, like costs, environmental impacts, existing agreements with the landowners, terrain, public perception etc. To find a balance between competing interests – a reliable and economic electric system on one …

Mechanism Of Insulin Aggregation: Applied To Alzheimer's Disease, Milos Atz

Honors Scholar Theses

Alzheimer’s disease, a debilitating neurodegenerative illness, is caused by the irreversible aggregation of beta-amyloid proteins in the brain. In Alzheimer’s brains, the protein can become disfigured, causing it to aggregate into long, insoluble fibers that deposit on brain tissue. Studying the aggregation mechanisms of amyloid proteins can lead to a deeper understanding of the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and possibly point towards a potential cure or treatment for the disease. Heat induced aggregation of insulin provides a model system to study the aggregation of amyloidogenic proteins. This study investigates the early stages of heat induced insulin aggregation using dynamic light …

Handloaded Rifle Ammunition: A Look Into The Assembly Process, Load Development Methods, And Its Comparison To Factory Ammunition, Jeffrey Dalton Snyder

Senior Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to educate the reader on the appeal of assembling firearm ammunition from its individual components, a process known as “handloading,” in comparison to factory assembled ammunition. This is accomplished by providing the reader with the benefits of handloading with an overview of the handloading process. Then, an example of a handload development method (Ladder Test) is discussed and performed. The results from the test are then analyzed and explained. Finally, the handloaded ammunition from the test is compared by function and price to factory ammunition from three different market segments.

The project portion of …

Preparation And Characterization Of Pc And San Composites And Pc/San Blends With Graphene Nanofiller, Marc Olivier-Blais

Senior Theses

For my thesis defense I plan to focus on both the scientific merit of my research and a reflection of what I personally gained from my experience in Germany. The central goal of this scientific study was to prepare a polymer blend with fine co-continuous blend morphology which contains well dispersed graphene nanofiller. Graphene is currently of great interest as a filler within the polymer nanocomposite community due to its excellent electrical conductivity, favorable mechanical properties, and high surface area. The polycarbonate (PC)/ Poly (styrene acrylonitrile) (SAN) blend system is of interest due to their ubiquitous use in both industrial …

Ceas E-News 05.09.2014, College Of Engineering And Applied Sciences

College of Engineering and Applied Sciences News

• WMU Competes In International Aircraft Design Competition
• Kyle Croes Wins the James W. Barany Award for Student Excellence
• Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) Paper Competition Award
• WMU Students Impress at PaperCon 2014
• WMU Civil and Construction Engineering Department Prepares Career-Ready Graduates
• Summer Camps 2014
• Graduate Poster Competition

Determining Forage Intake Of Nursing Calves Grazing Native Sandhills Rangeland, Jennifer A. Walker

Department of Animal Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Effective management of grazing lands is important for longevity and productivity. Accurate calculations of stocking rates per animal unit will aid in long term sustainability. Calculating stocking rates for cattle can prove challenging for cows and nursing calves. Limited research has been conducted to determine forage intake of the nursing calf pre-weaning. The objective of Trial 1 was to determine nursing calf forage intake over time until weaning. Trial 1 used 8 crossbred cow-calf pairs in experiment 1 and 12 pairs in experiment 2. Pairs were separated into two groups rotating between grazing upland range or housed in individual pens …

Learning Directional Co-Occurrence For Human Action Classification, Hong Liu, Mengyuan Liu, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based methods have shown promising results for human action classification. However, state-of-art works typically utilize bag-of-visual words (BoVW), which focuses on the statistical distribution of features but ignores their inherent structural relationships. To solve this problem, a descriptor, namely directional pair-wise feature (DPF), is proposed to encode the mutual direction information between pairwise words, aiming at adding more spatial discriminant to BoVW. Firstly, STIP features are extracted and classified into a set of labeled words. Then in each frame, the DPF is constructed for every pair of words with different labels, according to their assigned directional …

Predicting Streamflows In Snowmelt-Driven Watersheds Using The Flow Duration Curve Method, Daeha Kim, Jagath J. Kaluarachchi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Predicting streamflows in snow-fed watersheds in the Western United States is important for water allocation. Since many of these watersheds are heavily regulated through canal networks and reservoirs, predicting expected natural flows and therefore water availability under limited data is always a challenge. This study investigates the applicability of the flow duration curve (FDC) method for predicting natural flows in gauged and regulated snow-fed watersheds. Point snow observations, air temperature, precipitation, and snow water equivalent were used to simulate the snowmelt process with the SNOW-17 model, and extended to streamflow simulation using the FDC method with a modified current precipitation …

The Santa Clara, 2014-05-08, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.

The Next Big Thing Is Small, Robert J. Twiggs

Robert "Bob" Twiggs STEM Education Collection

A PowerPoint Presentation created by Professor Bob Twiggs titled "The Next Big Thing is Small" from May 8, 2014.

Leveraging High Resolution Signalized Intersection Data To Characterize Discharge Headway Distributions And Saturation Flow Rate Reliability, Stephen M. Remias, Alexander M. Hainen, Gannon Grimmer, Alexander D. Davis, Christopher M. Day, Thomas M. Brennan Jr, James R. Sturdevant, Darcy M. Bullock

JTRP Other Publications and Reports

As highway systems become more congested, it becomes increasingly important to understand the reliability with which we can estimate important performance measures such as volume to capacity ratios, particularly as we move toward leveraging field infrastructure to obtain real-time performance measures. In 1947, Greenshields wrote a paper that characterized “green time consumed” by “car-in-line-number” that ultimately was called headway. Average headway is one of principles used by the highway capacity manual to estimate saturation flow rate at signalized intersections. However, the current analytical techniques calculate a deterministic value for saturation flow rate that does not consider the stochastic variation of …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2014, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Modeling The Hydrology Of The Great Salt Lake: What Makes The Great Salt Lake Go Up And Down, David G. Tarboton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Evaluation Of The Use Of Composting Latrines And The Perceptions Of Excrement In Ngäbe Communities In Panama, Patricia Anna Marie Wilbur

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Engineers are exploring a new paradigm in wastewater treatment; focus is shifting to the recovery and reuse of energy, water, and nutrients. Ecological sanitation (EcoSan) technologies, which allow for this recovery and reuse, are an environmentally sound option for the future of sanitation. While the technology to achieve this goal of recovery and reuse exists, a limiting factor is user attitudes and perceptions. Social sciences, especially anthropology, can and should inform engineering projects to ensure socio-cultural sustainability.

Since 2003, rural indigenous Ngäbe communities in Panama have been implementing ecological sanitation projects, mainly double vault urine diverting (DVUD) latrines known as …

Agent-Based Control Of A Flapping Wing Micro Aerial Vehicle, Michal Podhradský

Student Research Symposium

Flapping wing micro aerial vehicles (FWMAVs) are biomimetic vehicles, because they imitate insects in the way they fly. FWMAVs are very small and highly manoeuvrable and can be used in reconnaissance, environmental monitoring, search & rescue, and other applications. The goal of the project is to develop & verify an agent based flight controller for FWMAV that can adapt to different flight conditions, actuator failures, and different vehicles while delivering constant performance. Agent based control was successfully applied in industry and distributed applications, but to our best knowledge never in an actual flying vehicle. Agent based control utilizes machine learning, …

Detecting Rule Of Balance In Photography, Uyen T. Mai, Feng Liu

Student Research Symposium

Rule of Balance is one of the most important composition rules in photography, which can be used as a standard for photo quality assessment. The rule of balance states that images with evenly distributed visual elements are visually pleasing and thus are highly aesthetic. This work presents a method to automatically classify balanced and unbalanced images. Detecting the rule of balance requires a robust technique to locate and analyze important objects and visual elements, which involves understanding of the image content. Since semantic understanding is currently beyond the state of the art in computer vision, we employ the saliency maps …

Quantum And Classical Magnetoresistance In Ambipolar Topological Insulator Transistors With Gate-Tunable Bulk And Surface Conduction, Jifa Tian, Cuizu Chang, Helin Cao, Ke He, Xucun Ma, Qikun Xue, Yong P. Chen

Birck and NCN Publications

Weak antilocalization (WAL) and linear magnetoresistance (LMR) are two most commonly observed magnetoresistance (MR) phenomena in topological insulators (TIs) and often attributed to the Dirac topological surface states (TSS). However, ambiguities exist because these phenomena could also come from bulk states (often carrying significant conduction in many TIs) and are observable even in non-TI materials. Here, we demonstrate back-gated ambipolar TI field-effect transistors in (Bi0.04Sb0.96)(2)Te-3 thin films grown by molecular beam epitaxy on SrTiO3(111), exhibiting a large carrier density tunability (by nearly 2 orders of magnitude) and a metal-insulator transition in the bulk (allowing switching off the bulk conduction). Tuning …

Characterization Of 3d Interconnected Microstructural Network In Mixed Ionic And Electronic Conducting Ceramic Composites, William M. Harris, Kyle S. Brinkman, Ye Lin, Dong Su, Alex P. Cocco, Arata Nakajo, Matthew B. Degostin, Yu-Chen Karen Chen-Wiegart, Jun Wang, Fanglin Chen, Yong S. Chu, Wilson K. S. Chiu

Faculty Publications

The microstructure and connectivity of the ionic and electronic conductive phases in composite ceramic membranes are directly related to device performance. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) including chemical mapping combined with X-ray nanotomography (XNT) have been used to characterize the composition and 3-D microstructure of a MIEC composite model system consisting of a Ce_0.8Gd_0.2O₂ (GDC) oxygen ion conductive phase and a CoFe₂O₄ (CFO) electronic conductive phase. The microstructural data is discussed, including the composition and distribution of an emergent phase which takes the form of isolated and distinct regions. Performance implications are considered …

Ferromagnetic Resonance Study Of Eightfold Artificial Ferromagnetic Quasicrystals, Vinayak Shantaram Bhat, J. Sklenar, J. Woods, B. Farmer, J. B. Ketterson, Jeffrey Todd Hastings, Lance E. De Long

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

We have performed broadband (10 MHz–18 GHz) and narrowband (9.7 GHz) ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) measurements on permalloy thin films patterned with quasiperiodic Ammann tilings having eightfold rotational symmetry. We observed highly reproducible mode structures in the low-frequency, hysteretic regime in which domain walls and unsaturated magnetization textures exist. A minimum of 10 robust modes were observed in patterned samples, compared to the single uniform mode observed in unpatterned permalloy films. The field dependence and approximate eightfold rotational symmetry of the FMR spectra are in good agreement with micromagnetic simulations that confirm the importance of patterning for controlling static and dynamic …

Improved Registration For 3d Image Creation Using Multiple Texel Images And Incorporating Low-Cost Gps/Ins Measurements, Scott E. Budge, Xuan Xie

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The creation of 3D imagery is an important topic in remote sensing. Several methods have been developed to create 3D images from fused ladar and digital images, known as texel images. These methods have the advantage of using both the 3D ladar information and the 2D digital imagery directly, since texel images are fused during data acquisition. A weakness of these methods is that they are dependent on correlating feature points in the digital images. This can be dicult when image perspectives are signicantly dierent, leading to low correlation values between matching feature points. This paper presents a method to …

Range Resolution Improvement Of Eyesafe Ladar Testbed (Elt) Measurements Using Sparse Signal Deconvolution, Scott E. Budge, Jacob H. Gunther

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The Eyesafe Ladar Test-bed (ELT) is a experimental ladar system with the capability of digitizing return laser pulse waveforms at 2 GHz. These waveforms can then be exploited o-line in the laboratory to develop signal processing techniques for noise reduction, range resolution improvement, and range discrimination between two surfaces of similar range interrogated by a single laser pulse. This paper presents the results of experiments with new deconvolution algorithms with the hoped for gains of improving the range discrimination of the ladar system. The sparsity of ladar returns is exploited to solve the deconvolution problem in two steps. The rst …

Surface Reconstruction Using Differential Invariant Signatures, Sophors Khut

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

This thesis addresses the problem of reassembling a broken surface. Three di- mensional curve matching is used to determine shared edges of broken pieces. In practice, these pieces may have different orientation and position in space, so edges cannot be directly compared. Instead, a differential invariant signature is used to make the comparison. A similarity score between edge signatures determines if two pieces share an edge. The Procrustes algorithm is applied to find the translations and rotations that best fit shared edges. The method is implemented in Matlab, and tested on a broken spherical surface.

In-Situ Tem Observation Of The Response Of Ultrafine- And Nanocrystalline-Grained Tungsten To Extreme Irradiation Environments, Osman El-Atwani, J. A. Hinks, G. Greaves, Sean Gonderman, T. Qiu, M. Efe, Jean P. Allain

Birck and NCN Publications

The accumulation of defects, and in particular He bubbles, can have significant implications for the performance of materials exposed to the plasma in magnetic-confinement nuclear fusion reactors. Some of the most promising candidates for deployment into such environments are nanocrystalline materials as the engineering of grain boundary density offers the possibility of tailoring their radiation resistance properties. In order to investigate the microstructural evolution of ultrafine- and nanocrystalline-grained tungsten under conditions similar to those in a reactor, a transmission electron microscopy study with in situ 2 keV He+ ion irradiation at 950 degrees C has been completed. A dynamic and …

Piezoresistive Sensing Of Bistable Micro Mechanism State, Jeffrey K. Anderson, Larry L. Howell, Jonathan W. Wittwer, Timothy W. Mclain

Faculty Publications

The objective of this work is to demonstrate the feasibility of on-chip sensing of bistable mechanism state using the piezoresistive properties of polysilicon, thus eliminating the need for electrical contacts. Changes in position are detected by observing changes in resistance across the mechanism. Sensing the state of bistable mechanisms is critical for various applications, including high-acceleration sensing arrays and alternative forms of nonvolatile memory. A fully compliant bistable micro mechanism was designed, fabricated, and tested to demonstrate the feasibility of this sensing technique. Testing results from two fabrication processes, SUMMiT IV and MUMPs, are presented. The SUMMiT mechanism was then …