Engineering Commons^™

Students’ Perceptions Of And Responses To Teaching Assistant And Peer Feedback, Kelsey J. Rodgers, Aladar K. Horvath, Hyunyi Jung, Amanda S. Fry, Heidi Diefes-Dux, Monica E. Cardella

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

Authentic open-ended problems are increasingly appearing in university classrooms at all levels. Formative feedback that leads to learning and improved student work products is a challenge, particularly in large enrollment courses. This is a case study of one first-year engineering student team’s experience with teaching assistant and peer feedback during a series of open-ended mathematical modeling problems called Model-Eliciting Activities. The goal of this study was to gain deep insight into the interactions between students, feedback providers, and written feedback by examining one team’s perceptions of the feedback they received and the changes they made to their solutions based on …

An Analysis Of Hybrid Energy System: A Case Study, Yading Yang

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the College of Science and Technology Morehead State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science by Yading Yang on November 24, 2014.

Low-Power Analog Processing, Daniel J. White

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation presents the analog harmonic transform (AHT) and a first implementation in an integrated circuit. The transform is designed for a regular and simple hardware structure. It provides coefficients relating to an input signal's spectrum. These coefficients also have a simple relationship to the signal's Fouri\'er series coefficients.

The AHT is defined in its ideal form and evaluated for two example signal classification applications. Both military vehicle and bearing fault classification tasks are presented which validate the ability of a neural network to use the AHT coefficients to correctly classify the input signals. Because any real use of the …

Clustering-Based Methodology For Optimal Residential Time Of Use Design Structure, Maigha, M. L. Crow

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A price responsive demand (PRD) market has been perceived as the future of electricity markets with the capability of achieving economic benefits. It lays the foundation of demand response at the customer level. Time of use structures have been implemented widely to achieve load reshaping. This paper introduces a clustering-based methodology for obtaining optimal time of use structures (optimal number of levels and rate durations) based on historical load profiles and real-time prices. The study takes into account variation in weekday and weekend load profiles and also seasonal variations. A new hybrid policy that bridges the gap between seasonal time-of-use …

Robust Adaptive Channel Estimation In Mimo Underwater Acoustic Communications, Zengli Yang, Yahong Rosa Zheng

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

For underwater acoustic (UWA) communications, a robust iterative channel estimation based minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) adaptive turbo equalizer is proposed and studied for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection. Rather than the classical MMSE or normalized least mean squares (NLMS) estimation algorithms, the improved proportionate NLMS (IPNLMS) is adopted for the iterative MIMO channel estimator. The MIMO channel estimation is performed jointly with the MMSE equalizer and the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) decoder. With inter-block interference removed, the MIMO MMSE equalization is performed with overlapped information subblocks without guard intervals, thus a high transmission efficiency is guaranteed, and performance degradation is prevented. …

Anisotropic Complementary Acoustic Metamaterial For Canceling Out Aberrating Layers, Chen Shen, Jun Xu, Nicholas X. Fang, Yun Jing

Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering Departmental Research

In this paper, we investigate a type of anisotropic, acoustic complementary metamaterial (CMM) and its application in restoring acoustic fields distorted by aberrating layers. The proposed quasi two-dimensional (2D), nonresonant CMM consists of unit cells formed by membranes and side branches with open ends. Simultaneously, anisotropic and negative density is achieved by assigning membranes facing each direction ( x and y directions) different thicknesses, while the compressibility is tuned by the side branches. Numerical examples demonstrate that the CMM, when placed adjacent to a strongly aberrating layer, could acoustically cancel out that aberrating layer. This leads to dramatically reduced acoustic …

Trends In Multimodal Human-Computer Interfaces, Jerry C. Schnepp

Visual Communications and Technology Education Faculty Publications

Touch screens, voice commands and wireless gesture controllers have the potential to provide a more natural human-computer interface than traditional mice and keyboards. While these technologies are still evolving, the usefulness of such interfaces across industries is undeniable. In this presentation, the state of the art of human-computer interfaces will be explored. We will examine the qualifications necessary for these technologies to replace traditional interface hardware and project how far this interface revolution can take us.

A Combined Method For Segmentation And Registration For An Advanced And Progressive Evaluation Of Thermal Images, Emilio Z. Barcelos, Walmir Matos Caminhas, Eraldo Ribeiro, Eduardo Mendonça Pimenta, Reinaldo Martinez Palhares

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, a method that combines image analysis techniques, such as segmentation and registration, is proposed for an advanced and progressive evaluation of thermograms. The method is applied for the prevention of muscle injury in high-performance athletes, in collaboration with a Brazilian professional soccer club. The goal is to produce information on spatio-temporal variations of thermograms favoring the investigation of the athletes’ conditions along the competition. The proposed method improves on current practice by providing a means for automatically detecting adaptive body-shaped regions of interest, instead of the manual selection of simple shapes. Specifically, our approach combines the optimization …

Detection Of Variable Retention Time In Dram, Neraj Kumar

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis investigates a test method to detect the presence of Variable Retention Time (VRT) bits in manufactured DRAM. The VRT bits retention time is modeled as a 2-state random telegraph process that includes miscorrelation between test and use. The VRT defect is particularly sensitive to test and use conditions. A new test method is proposed to screen the VRT bits by simulating the use conditions during manufacturing test. Evaluation of the proposed test method required a bit-level VRT model to be parameterized as a function of temperature and voltage conditions. The complete 2-state VRT bit model combines models for …

Global Leader In Water Treatment Industry Opens Cache Valley Office And New Partnership With College Of Engineering, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

An international leader in the water and wastewater industry is opening a new office in Cache Valley to take advantage of what the company calls an ideal location and a talented workforce of new engineering graduates.

Stable And Metastable Nanowires Displaying Locally Controllable Properties, Eli A. Sutter, Peter Werner Sutter

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

(57) ABSTRACT Vapor-liquid-solid growth of nanowires is tailored to achieve complex one-dimensional material geometries using phase diagrams determined for nanoscale materials. Segmented one-dimensional nanowires having constant composition dis play locally variable electronic band structures that are deter mined by the diameter of the nanowires. The unique electrical and optical properties of the segmented nanowires are exploited to form electronic and optoelectronic devices. Using gold-germanium as a model system, in situ transmis sion electron microscopy establishes, for nanometer-sized Au Ge alloy drops at the tips of Ge nanowires (NWs), the parts of the phase diagram that determine their temperature dependent equilibrium …

Analysing The Impact Of Digital Photography Projects On Student Engagement And Performance In A Higher Education Engineering Discipline, Michael Gleeson

Conference papers

Developing and implementing engaging activities aligned with the learning outcomes of a module within a higher education programme is essential to successful teaching practice in the 21^st century. Substantial research evidence indicates that student engagement plays a pivotal role in the academic performance and success of the student. The aim of this research is to compare student performance after adopting an alternative pedagogic approach utilising digital photography as a tool to engage the student in an engineering discipline. The activity was designed to promote student engagement by integrating digital photography, replicating authentic construction professional practice and focusing on images …

University Professors’ Perceptions About The Impact Of Integrating Google Applications On Students’ Communication And Collaboration Skills, Jacqueline L. Cahill

Journal of Research Initiatives

A qualitative research study was conducted and data were collected by interviewing university professors on their perceptions about the impact of integrating Google Apps, as a means of classroom instructional delivery, on students’ communication and collaboration skills. The participants consisted of eight university professors from a major university, who integrate, or had previously integrated at least two Google Apps Education Edition collaborative tools into their instructional strategies. The result of this study has the potential to benefit universities that are debating on whether utilizing teaching collaborative technology skills, as an instruction tool, would engage students and enhance their communication skills. …

Achieving Global Range In Future Subsonic And Supersonic Airplanes, Nihad E. Daidzic Ph.D., Sc.D.

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

No commercial airplane in service today is able to fly half great-circle distances over the globe and achieve the non-stop or the global range to any antipodal location on Earth. A subsonic jetliner has the optimum cruising speed at Mach numbers approaching the drag divergence Mach number while still preserving relatively high aerodynamic efficiency. Various fuel-flow laws were used to investigate the cruise performance of subsonic and supersonic aircraft. The effect of wind and aircraft weight and how it affects the optimal cruising airspeed was investigated. Of all different operational cruising techniques, the cruise-climb at high Mach numbers is the …

Performance Evaluation And Integrated Management Of Airport Surface Operations, Qing Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The demand for aviation has been steadily growing over the past few decades and will keep increasing in the future. The anticipated growth of traffic demand will cause the current airspace system, one that is already burdened by heavy operations and inefficient usage, to become even more congested than its current state. Because busy airports in the United States (U.S.) are becoming "bottlenecks" of the National Airspace System (NAS), it is of great importance to discover the most efficient means of using existing facilities to improve airport operations.

This dissertation aims at designing an efficient airport surface operations management system …

Microwave-Assisted Synthesis Of Pd Nanoparticles Supported On Fe3o4, Co3o4, And Ni(Oh)2 Nanoplates And Catalysis Application For Co Oxidation, Hany A. Elazab

Chemical Engineering

In this paper, we report a simple, versatile, and rapid method for the synthesis of Pd nanoparticle catalysts supported on Fe3O4, Co3 O4, and Ni(OH)2 nanoplates via microwave irradiation. The important advantage of microwave dielectric heating over convective heating is that the reactants can be added at room temperature (or slightly higher temperatures) without the need for high-temperature injection. Furthermore, the method can be used to synthesize metal nanoparticle catalysts supported on metal oxide nanoparticles in one step. We also demonstrate that the catalyst-support interaction plays an important role in the low temperature oxidation of CO. The current results reveal …

Finite Element Modelling And Dilation Of Frp-Confined Concrete Columns, Osama Youssf, Mohamed Elgawady, Julie E. Mills, Xing Ma

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Concrete dilation is one of the main parameters that controls the stress-strain behavior of confined concrete. Several analytical studies have been carried out to predict the stress-strain behavior of concrete encased in fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP), which is crucial for structural design. However, none of these studies have provided a simple formula to determine the dilation parameter that is always required in the finite element (FE) material modelling of concrete. This paper presents a simple empirical model predicting the confined concrete dilation parameter within the theoretical framework of a Karagozian and Case type concrete plasticity model. A set of 105 FRP-confined …

Modification Of A Single-Molecule Afm Probe With Highly Defined Surface Functionality, Fei Long, Bin Cao, Ashok Khanal, Shiyue Fang, Reza Shahbazian-Yassar

Michigan Tech Publications

Single-molecule force spectroscopy with an atomic force microscope has been widely used to study inter- and intramolecular interactions. To obtain data consistent with single molecular events, a well-defined method is critical to limit the number of molecules at the apex of an AFM probe to one or to a few. In this paper, we demonstrate an easy method for single-molecule probe modification by using the Cu-catalyzed alkyne–azide cycloaddition reaction. Excess terminal alkynes were covalently attached to the probe, and a bi-functional molecule containing an azide at one end and a carboxylic acid at the other was dissolved in the reaction …

Hydroshare: Advancing Collaboration Through Hydrologic Data And Model Sharing, David G. Tarboton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

HydroShare is an online, collaborative system being developed for open sharing of hydrologic data and models. The goal of HydroShare is to enable hydrology researchers to easily discover and access hydrologic data and models, retrieve them to their desktop for local analysis and perform analyses in a distributed computing environment that may include grid, cloud or high performance computing. Users may also share and publish outcomes (data, results or models) into HydroShare, using the system as a collaboration platform. HydroShare is expanding the data sharing capability of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System by broadening the classes of data accommodated. HydroShare …

Reliability Of Eyewitness Reports To A Major Aviation Accident, Dave English, Michael Kuzel

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

There is a paucity of studies on the reliability of eyewitness reports to aviation crashes. We examine witness statements to a widely observed major airline accident to determine if reported accident investigator distrust of details in eyewitness reports is supported by empirical evidence. The extensive archival witness record (N > 300) of a wide-body airliner crash in clear daylight conditions is subjected to statistical analysis to test eyewitness reliability. Even with over 200 witnesses within a three square kilometre (1.6 square mile) area answering a binary observation question, the variance is sometimes high enough to preclude forming statistically significant conclusions …

The Santa Clara, 2014-11-13, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.

United States Patent Application Publication, John H. Posselius, Christopher A. Foster, Santosh Pitla, Scott A. Shearer, Joe D. Luck, Michael P. Sama, Rodrigo S. Zandonadi

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

A multiple robot control architecture including a plurality of robotic agricultural machines including a first and second robotic agricultural machine. Each robotic agricultural machine including at least one controller configured to implement a plurality of finite state machines Within an individual robot control architecture (IRCA) and a global information module (GIM) communicatively coupled to the IRCA. The GIMs of the first and second robotic agricultural machines being configured to cooperate to cause said first robotic agricultural machine and said second agricultural machine to perform at least one agricultural task.

Task-Based Robotic Grasp Planning, Yun Lin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Grasp should be selected intelligently to fulfill different stability properties and manipulative requirements. Currently, most grasping approaches consider only pick-and-place tasks without any physical interaction with other objects or the environment, which are common in an industry setting with limited uncertainty. When robots move to our daily-living environment and perform a broad range of tasks in an unstructured environment, all sorts of physical interactions will occur, which will result in random physical interactive wrenches: forces and torques on the tool.

In addition, for a tool to perform a required task, certain motions need to occur. We call it "functional tool …

Generalized Conditional Matching Algorithm For Ordered And Unordered Sets, Ravikiran Krishnan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Designing generalized data-driven distance measures for both ordered and unordered set data is the core focus of the proposed work. An ordered set is a set where time-linear property is maintained when distance between pair of temporal segments. One application in the ordered set is the human gesture analysis from RGBD data. Human gestures are fast becoming the natural form of human computer interaction. This serves as a motivation to modeling, analyzing, and recognition of gestures. The large number of gesture categories such as sign language, traffic signals, everyday actions and also subtle cultural variations in gesture classes makes gesture …

Fabrication Of 3d Ultrafine Fibrous Protein Structures Via Freeze-Drying, Yiling Huang

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, ultrafine fibrous 3D matrices were fabricated using three different proteins (soy protein, wool keratin, and chicken feather keratin) via freeze-drying. Protein matrices are preferable for tissue engineering compared to matrices made from synthetic material because of their similarity to native extracellular matrices. Due to their cell-binding motifs, natural proteins are also recognized as more biocompatible compared. Freeze-drying, which is a simple method used to produce 3D sponge matrices, was employed in this study to fabricate 3D fibrous matrices in a controlled manner. The inner structures of the 3D matrices fabricated ranged from film to fibers, and the …

Improved Bayesian Multi-Modeling: Integration Of Copulas And Bayesian Model Averaging, Shahrbanou Madadgar, Hamid Moradkhani

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) is a popular approach to combine hydrologic forecasts from individual models, and characterize the uncertainty induced by model structure. In the original form of BMA, the conditional probability density function (PDF) of each model is assumed to be a particular probability distribution (e.g. Gaussian, gamma, etc.). If the predictions of any hydrologic model do not follow certain distribution, a data transformation procedure is required prior to model averaging. Moreover, it is strongly recommended to apply BMA on unbiased forecasts, whereas it is sometimes difficult to effectively remove bias from the predictions of complex hydrologic models. To …

Potential Airborne Optical Contributions To The European Phased Adaptive Approach (Epaa) For Missile Defense, Garry Schnelzer, Sean Collins, Scott Hansen, Joe Kristl

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

Outline

• European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA)
• Airborne Optical Sensor’s Contribution and Coverage
• Notional Airborne Optical Sensor and Performance
• Recommendations

A Low-Power Compact Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance (Nqr) Based Explosive Detection System, Xinwang Zhang

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Abandoned landmines and terrorist bomb attacks are severe issues threatening our society. These issues necessitate the development of prompt and accurate explosive detection systems. The detection mechanisms commonly-used nowadays usually search for explosive containers, which suffer numerous false alarms caused by external detection circumstance changes. Alternatively, explosive substances inside the bombs and landmines can be detected by means of biology, chemistry and physics techniques. Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance (NQR) detection technology has proven to be a highly effective solution for detecting explosives unambiguously.

In this work, a portable NQR-based explosive detection system that employs state-of-the-art semiconductor technologies is presented. This system …

Pseudo-Rigid-Body Models For Approximating Spatial Compliant Mechanisms Of Rectangular Cross Section, Issa Ailenid Ramirez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The objective of the dissertation is to develop and describe kinematic models (Pseudo-Rigid-Body Models) for approximating large-deflection of spatial (3D) cantilever beams that undergo multiple bending motions thru end-moment loading. Those models enable efficient design of compliant mechanisms, because they simply and accurately represent the bending and stiffness of compliant beams.

To accomplish this goal, the approach can be divided into three stages: development of the governing equations of a flexible cantilever beam, development of a PRBM for axisymmetric cantilever beams and the development of spatial PRBMs for rectangular cross-section beam with multiple end moments.

The governing equations of a …

Usu College Of Engineering Student Honored By Aviation Week, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

The aerospace industry has its eyes on a group of young engineering professionals, including Utah State University’s Ryan Martineau, who will lead tomorrow’s innovations in space, aviation and defense.