Engineering Commons^™

Development Of Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulation System For Electric Power Steering Controller Testing, Chuanliangzi Liu

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The Electronic Control Unit (ECU) of an Electric Power Steering (EPS) system is a core device to decide how much assistance an electric motor applies on steering wheel. EPS ECUs play an important role in EPS systems. The effectiveness of EPS ECUs needs to be thoroughly tested before mass production. Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation provides an efficient way for the development and testing of embedded controllers. This report focuses on the development of HIL system for testing EPS controllers. The hardware of the HIL system employs a dSPACE HIL simulator. The EPS plant model is an integrated model consisting of Vehicle …

Beautiful Forms And Compositions Are Not Made By Chance: Exploring The Efficacy Of Portable X-Ray Fluorescence To Sort And Source English Lead Glazed Ceramics, Steven J. Sarich

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Advances in portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) technology have made it a viable option for the non-destructive exploration of the underlying chemical composition of ceramic artifacts for the purposes of classification. However, because the literature regarding the use of this instrument on historic artifacts is limited, it is necessary to begin with a broad scale exploratory assessment that might act as a jumping off point for future studies on this topic. Toward that end, this research uses a collection of British and Continental European ceramics ranging from 1650-1920, owned and curated by the Chipstone Foundation in Fox Point, WI, to explore …

Blood Typing Device Without Reagents: Sensing Electrodes To Replace Optics, Nupur Bihari

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

There is need to develop a fast and efficient procedure for detecting blood type that makes use of an electronic measurement to minimize human error and is portable so that it can be used in triage situations. A process to develop a crossover frequency based blood typing device is described. Alternating field drives red blood cells over the sensing electrodes and depending on the capacitance measured between pairs of sensing electrodes, the position of these RBCs can be determined. The convergence/divergence of these cells at a particular frequency determines blood type, since each type has a characteristic frequency. This project …

Design And Implementation Of Network Transfer Protocol For Big Genomic Data, Mohammed Aledhari, Fahad Saeed

Parallel Computing and Data Science Lab Technical Reports

Genomic data is growing exponentially due to next generation sequencing technologies (NGS) and their ability to produce massive amounts of data in a short time. NGS technologies generate big genomic data that needs to be exchanged between different locations efficiently and reliably. The current network transfer protocols rely on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) protocols, ignoring data size and type. Universal application layer protocols such as HTTP are designed for wide variety of data types and are not particularly efficient for genomic data. Therefore, we present a new data-aware transfer protocol for genomic-data that increases network …

A Transdisciplinary Approach To Determining The Provenience Of A Distorted, Pre-Columbian Skull Recovered In Rural Idaho, Jennifer K. Watkins, Gordon A. Alanko, Samantha H. Blatt, Cynthia A. Bradbury, Matthew J. Kohn, Marion Lytle, Deborah Lacroix, Joanna Taylor, John Dudgeon, Rebecca E. Hazard, Erin O’Leary-Jepsen, Darryl P. Butt

College of Engineering Presentations

Transdisciplinary research involves cooperation, exchange of information, sharing of resources and integration of disciplines to achieve a common scientific goal. In this study, collaborators utilized tools and knowledge of materials science, anthropology, archaeology, geosciences and biology in an attempt to determine the provenience of skeletal remains of unknown origin. The exchange of ideas and skills along with the crossing of disciplines in this study sucessfully allowed the incorporation of expertise from many team members. This transdisciplinary approach to research provided a more comprehensive and detailed analysis than any one field alone could provide. An archaeological assessment of a human skull …

Performance Evaluations Of Pavement Working Platforms Constructed With Large-Sized Unconventional Aggregates, Hasan Kazmee, Erol Tutumluer, Debakanta Mishra

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

With recent focus on sustainable construction practices and the ever-increasing transportation cost and scarcity of natural resources, use of unconventional aggregate materials, such as primary crusher run and concrete demolition waste, have become viable for the construction of pavement working platforms over very weak and often wet subgrade soils. To this end, a research study was undertaken at the Illinois Center for Transportation to evaluate the adequacy and field performances of such large-sized aggregate materials and validate new material specifications. A state-of-the-art image analysis technique was utilized to characterize the size and morphological properties, e.g. shape, texture and angularity of …

Feature Extraction Using Dimensionality Reduction Techniques: Capturing The Human Perspective, Ashley B. Coleman

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to determine if any of the four commonly used dimensionality reduction techniques are reliable at extracting the same features that humans perceive as distinguishable features. The four dimensionality reduction techniques that were used in this experiment were Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS), Isomap and Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA). These four techniques were applied to a dataset of images that consist of five infrared military vehicles. Out of the four techniques three out of the five resulting dimensions of PCA matched a human feature. One out of five dimensions of MDS matched …

Flexural Behavior Of High-Volume Fly Ash Concrete Beams: Experimental Study, Mahdi Arezoumandi, Carlos A. Ortega, Jeffery S. Volz

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

An experimental investigation was conducted to study both mechanical properties and the flexural strength of full-scale reinforced concrete beams constructed with both high-volume fly ash concrete-concrete with 70% of the cement replaced with fly ash-and conventional concrete (CC). The beams were tested under a simply supported four-point loading condition. The experimental cracking, yielding, and ultimate moments as well as deflection on ultimate load of the beams were compared with both the ACI 318-11 and Eurocode 2-05 provisions. Furthermore, the experimental flexural strengths of the beams were compared with both the modified compression field theory method and a flexural test database …

Frontiers In Operations Research For Overcoming Barriers To Vehicle Electrification, Mahyar Movahed Nejad

Wayne State University Dissertations

Electric vehicles (EVs) hold many promises including diversification of the transportation energy feedstock and reduction of greenhouse gas and other emissions. However, achieving large-scale adoption of EVs presents a number of challenges resulting from a current lack of supporting infrastructure and difficulties in overcoming technological barriers. This dissertation addresses some of these challenges by contributing to the advancement of theories in the areas of network optimization and mechanism design.

To increase the electric driving range of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), we propose a powertrain energy management control system that exploits energy efficiency dif- ferences of the electric machine and …

Ua66 Ogden College Of Science & Engineering Newsletter, Cheryl Stevens, Dean

Ogden College of Science & Engineering Publications

No abstract provided.

Multiferroic Tunnel Junctions And Ferroelectric Control Of Magnetic State At Interface, Y. W. Yin, M. Raju, W. J. Hu, John D. Burton, Y.-M. Kim, A. Y. Borisevich, S. J. Pennycook, S. M. Yang, T. W. Noh, Alexei Gruverman, X. G. Li, Z. D. Zhang, Evgeny Y. Tsymbal, Qi Li

Alexei Gruverman Publications

As semiconductor devices reach ever smaller dimensions, the challenge of power dissipation and quantum effect place a serious limit on the future device scaling. Recently, a multiferroic tunnel junction (MFTJ) with a ferroelectric barrier sandwiched between two ferromagnetic electrodes has drawn enormous interest due to its potential applications not only in multi-level data storage but also in electric field controlled spintronics and nanoferronics. Here, we present our investigations on four-level resistance states, giant tunneling electroresistance (TER) due to interfacial magnetoelectric coupling, and ferroelectric control of spin polarized tunneling in MFTJs. Coexistence of large tunneling magnetoresistance and TER has been observed …

Accelerating Mpi Collective Communications Through Hierarchical Algorithms With Flexible Inter-Node Communication And Imbalance Awareness, Benjamin Scott Parsons

Open Access Dissertations

This work presents and evaluates algorithms for MPI collective communication operations on high performance systems. Collective communication algorithms are extensively investigated, and a universal algorithm to improve the performance of MPI collective operations on hierarchical clusters is introduced. This algorithm exploits shared-memory buffers for efficient intra-node communication while still allowing the use of unmodified, hierarchy-unaware traditional collectives for inter-node communication. The universal algorithm shows impressive performance results with a variety of collectives, improving upon the MPICH algorithms as well as the Cray MPT algorithms. Speedups average 15x - 30x for most collectives with improved scalability up to 65536 cores.^ Further …

Manufacturing And Non-Manufacturing Students' Perceptions On The Applicability Of The Four Pillars, Muhammad Jahan, Mark Doggett

SEAS Faculty Publications

The Four Pillars of Manufacturing Engineering was developed and supported by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), the Association of Technology, Management, and Applied Engineering, (ATMAE), and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). A group of manufacturing educators created it in 2011 as part of a strategic plan to reverse negative trends in manufacturing education and improve manufacturing competitiveness (Mott, Raju, & Stratton). The Four Pillars consist of foundational knowledge areas that represent a typical Manufacturing Engineer’s Body of Knowledge. In addition, it provides the recommended content for academic programs related to manufacturing and articulates the fundamental knowledge …

Finite Element Analysis Of Thermal Buckling In Automotive Clutch And Brake Discs, Huizhou Yang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Thermal buckling behavior of automotive clutch and brake discs is studied by making the use of finite element method. It is found that the temperature distribution along the radius and the thickness affects the critical buckling load considerably. The results indicate that a monotonic temperature profile leads to a coning mode with the highest temperature located at the inner radius. Whereas a temperature profile with the maximum temperature located in the middle leads to a dominant non-axisymmetric buckling mode, which results in a much higher buckling temperature. A periodic variation of temperature cannot lead to buckling. The temperature along the …

Experimental Validation Data For Cfd Of Transient Convection From Forced To Natural With Flow Reversal On A Vertical Flat Plate, Blake W. Lance, Barton L. Smith

Engineering Datasets

Transient convection was investigated experimentally for the purpose of providing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) validation data. A specialized facility for validation experiments called the Rotatable Buoyancy Tunnel was used to acquire thermal and velocity measurements of flow over a smooth, vertical heated plate. The initial condition was forced convection downward with subsequent transition to mixed convection, ending with natural convection upward after a flow reversal. Data acquisition through the transient was repeated for ensemble-averaged results. With simple flow geometry, validation data were acquired at the benchmark level. All boundary conditions (BCs) were measured and their uncertainties quantified. Temperature profiles on …

Optimizing Data Center Operations With Virtualization, Jason Kruse, Osman Sesay, Stephanie Goggin-Burns

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Design a computer network using two or more host servers that supports a virtual hosting environment.

The importance of creating a successful datacenter is to allow a company to maintain data accessibility while keeping the data secure. One way of doing this is to have servers at multiple locations to insure that data isn’t lost in case of a failure at one server location. The impact of a datacenter that supports a virtual hosting environment is to maximize hardware recourses, grants the ability to quickly stand up server services and increases availability during hardware failure due to software like VMotion. …

Text Analytic System: Document Similarity, Ryan Murphy, James Cecil, Joseph Contarino

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Knowledge discovery is a critical function of infrastructure protection in the U.S. By analyzing key text documents, we can gain insight into the interwoven and interdependent infrastructure system of the U.S., and better understand the security aspects of the system as a whole. Massive amounts of relevant data resides in text documents, which must be gathered and parsed to be analyzed on a large scale. Our algorithm collects web-based text embedded in HTML pages and analyzes it in various ways to decipher similarities. It will be a needed component of the larger system being developed by the Idaho National Laboratory, …

Rams Onboard: Improving Employment Process, De-Shunda White, Yamil Boo Irizarry, Samuel Brazil

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In order for the Virginia Commonwealth University Engineering Human Resources department to provide seamless new hire integration, they need to upgrade their current post-hire information gathering techniques. Currently the HR department continues to provide paper forms and packets to new hires to fill out and return for review. This method requires over $30,000 in cost for materials and labor. The main goal of our project is to establish a way for newly hired employees to complete their new hire forms electronically through the VCU server.

By successfully executing our project we are moving VCU’s onboarding process to a completely paperless …

Automated Disc Kiosks, Kal Stankov, Allen Woods, Yaw Amoatin

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Our improved automated disc kiosks are designed with two purposes in mind: to improve the inventory management and agility of current automated media rental services and to simplify and consolidate the storage and distribution of installation media in an IT environment. The kiosks combine the ability to store and dispense optical discs (CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray Discs, etc.) with the ability to burn newer content pushed out via a network connection from a company’s servers. Designed and built with commonly available components to minimize costs, the prototype consists of a Digilent Zybo FPGA board powered by a Xilinx processor. A tablet …

Molten Metal Loop Driven By Electromagnetic Pump, Dominic Espiritu, Dor Granek, Jerald Moore, Scott Torres

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The first challenge of this proposed study was the gauges for the loop, which were not functioning properly and giving off inaccurate data due to a loop flow issue. Therefore a new loop design, including gauges, was created to gather accurate data for the electromagnetic pump. The electromagnetic pump used in this experiment differs from the standard electromagnetic motors by using rare earth magnets set into opposing steel plates that rotate simultaneously. Accurate data from the velocity and pressure gauges is necessary so the correlation between the EM pump’s speed and the flow velocity could be calculated. This technology could …

Fsae Rear Diffuser Team, Zarwan Waqar, Sohail Hossini, Saman Usodan

Capstone Design Expo Posters

To generate additional force that is applied to the rear of the FSAE race car The importance of the rear diffuser is to add a rear force to the vehicle. The rear force is generated from the airflow coming from underneath the vehicle. The way the airflow creates a force is through generating a pressure differential in which the air exiting the rear of the race car is now causing a downward force from the diffuser. The use of a diffuser is known to be of use at high speeds and if designed correctly creating the aerodynamics needed to keep …

Effluent Treatment And Recovery Of Polyether Using Nanoporous Technology, Suhaib Alramamneh, Zachary Turner, Allison Warth

Capstone Design Expo Posters

This semester Evonik Industries, a specialty chemical producer located in Hopewell, Virginia, approached VCU’s Chemical Engineering department with a project that would reduce their costs and increase process sustainability. The project is to determine a way to separate their liquid organic product from their waste stream in order to recycle the lost product. Liquid-Liquid extraction is a procedure used across most of the chemical industry. Proven separation techniques already exist for the standard liquid-liquid separation; however, when one liquid is miscible in the other the difficulty of separation is greatly increased. In order to do a liquid-liquid separation of an …

A Workload Balanced Mapreduce Framework On Gpu Platforms, Yue Zhang

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The MapReduce framework is a programming model proposed by Google to process large datasets. It is an efficient framework that can be used in many areas, such as social network, scientific research, electronic business, etc. Hence, more and more MapReduce frameworks are implemented on different platforms, including Phoenix (based on multicore CPU), MapCG (based on GPU), and StreamMR (based on GPU). However, these MapReduce frameworks have limitations, and they cannot handle the collision problem in the map phase, and the unbalanced workload problems in the reduce phase. To improve the performance of the MapReduce framework on GPGPUs, in this thesis, …

Synthetic Biology Open Language (Sbol) Version 2.0.0, Bryan Bartley, Jacob Beal, Kevin Clancy, Goksel Misirli, Nicholas Roehner, Ernst Oberortner, Matthew Pocock, Michael Bissell, Curtis Madsen, Tramy Nguyen, Zhen Zhang, John H. Gennari, Chris Myers, Anil Wipat, Herbert Sauro

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Synthetic biology builds upon the techniques and successes of genetics, molecular biology, and metabolic engineering by applying engineering principles to the design of biological systems. The field still faces substantial challenges, including long devel

Improved Spare Part Forecasting For Low Quantity Parts With Low And Increasing Failure Rates, Albert Frank Lowas Iii

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Part demand forecasting methods assume that the demand for a part over time follows a predictable pattern, and that the patterns observed in historical data provide a reliable indication of future demands. Generally, forecasting studies focus on topics such as: the span of time from which to sample the historical data, an assessment of data in order to find weekly or annual patterns, and the assignment of probabilities of different demand quantities in any given time period. Using the demand models derived from these forecasting methods, inventory decisions are made--decisions which directly impact operating cost and equipment availability.

Like most …

Electron-Beam Patterning Of Teflon Af For Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensing, Mansoor A. Sultan

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Variable pressure electron beam etching and lithography for Teflon AF has been demonstrated. The relation between dose and etching depth is tested under high vacuum and water vapor. High resolution structures as small as 75 nm half-pitch have been resolved. Several simulation tools were tested for surface plasmon excitation. Grating based dual mode surface plasmon excitation has been shown numerically and experimentally.

Textured Digital Elevation Model Formation From Low-Cost Uav Ladar/Digital Image Data, Taylor C. Bybee, Scott Budge

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Textured digital elevation models (TDEMs) have valuable use in precision agriculture, situational awareness, and disaster response. However, scientific-quality models are expensive to obtain using conventional aircraft-based methods. The cost of creating an accurate textured terrain model can be reduced by using a low-cost (<$20k) UAV system fitted with ladar and electro-optical (EO) sensors. A texel camera fuses calibrated ladar and EO data upon simultaneous capture, creating a texel image. This eliminates the problem of fusing the data in a post-processing step and enables both 2D- and 3D-image registration techniques to be used. This paper describes formation of TDEMs using simulated data from a small UAV gathering swaths of texel images of the terrain below. Being a low-cost UAV, only a coarse knowledge of position and attitude is known, and thus both 2D- and 3D-image registration techniques must be used to register adjacent swaths of texel imagery to create a TDEM. The process of creating an aggregate texel image (a TDEM) from many smaller texel image swaths is de- scribed. The algorithm is seeded with the rough estimate of position and attitude of each capture. Details such as the required amount of texel image overlap, registration models, simulated flight patterns (level and turbulent), and texture image formation are presented. In addition, examples of such TDEMs are shown and analyzed for accuracy.

The Evolution Of A New Technological University In Terms Of Policy Definition And Control Of Implementation, Kevin Kelly, Deborah Brennan

Conference papers

This paper derives from a Doctoral case study completed in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) in 2008. The main issues of the case study are still being addressed today as DIT prepares to amalgamate with the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown (ITB) and Institute of Technology Tallaght (ITT) in 2015. The combined new institute will become a university in 2016 and is in the process of a move to a green field site. The rate and scope of these changes are challenging for all concerned. Through a series of interviews and focus groups in 2008, a story of DIT emerged. …

Engineering Ethics: Ontology And Politics, Eddie Conlon

Conference papers

“Ontology...acts as both gatekeeper and bouncer for methodology” (Archer 1995: 22). This exploratory paper, through a focus on the relationship between structure and agency, examines the underlying social ontologies informing the teaching, and researching of the teaching, of engineering ethics. It argues that current approaches are deficient and that Critical Realism can provide the basis for a more robust and inclusive research agenda for understanding engineering practice and the teaching of engineering ethics.

Exploring Programme Chairs' Understanding Of The Integration Of Sustainable Development: An Issue Of Professional Identity, Iacovos Nicolaou, Eddie Conlon, Brian Bowe

Conference papers

This paper is part of a wider study addressing the level of provision of sustainable development (SD) competencies in seven engineering programmes in three Irish Higher Education Institutions. The paper explores the influence that programme chairs’ professional identity has on their views of SD and their assessment of the extent to which SD is integrated in their programmes. The data for exploring this is taken from a thematic analysis of six interviews with programme chairs which shows that their assessments of the extent to which SD is integrated in their programmes are at odds with previous findings that highlight deficiencies …