Engineering Commons^™

Click Chemistry Protein Immobilization, James P. Kraley

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The main purpose of the first part in the lab was to try and determine a way to measure the moles of dye per mole of protein in order to detect an azide tag on a recombinantly produced azide-IFN-γ protein. This was done by using click chemistry to bind the azide tagged protein to a dye and then measured the azide tag efficiency. The main purpose of the second part of the project was to make a protein, SDF-1α, and tag it with an azide group. This was completed via processes of expression, isolation, and purification of the protein. From …

Biosurfactants In Electrospinning, Jonathan Russell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Surfactants are useful in electrospinning to help improve the fiber morphology. Crocin is a naturally occurring biosurfactant from saffron that is highly soluble in water. By electrospinning a biocompatible polymer, such as polyethylene oxide (PEO) and Crocin, one can improve the fiber morphology. A systematic study of PEO was conducted by varying the voltage, flow rate, and gap distance. The viscosity of the solution was determined using a viscometer and the surface tension was determined using the pendant drop method. Fiber morphology was examined using SEM and fiber diameters were determined using ImageJ to measure the fibers in the SEM …

Modular Biped Robotic Base, Lawrence T. Chiavaroli, Andrew J. Forchione, Wesley A. Miller, Joseph M. Drockton

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report contains the final developments and research involved with the modular biped robotic base. A need was first identified in 2011 when President Obama announced the National Robotics Initiative, an initiative focused on the funding of robotic development to work alongside or cooperatively with humans. This scope of this project concerns building a robotic base modeled after human legs and hips, capable of interfacing with future modular subsystems depending on what tasks are trying to be accomplished. Firstly, a mathematical torque simulation of the hip, knee, and ankle joints was developed in MATLAB. Using this information, complimentary actuators and …

Electronic Learning Guitar, Justin Fiser

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

No abstract provided.

Engineering Together: Context In Dyadic Talk During An Engineering Task (K-12 Fundamental), Brianna L. Dorie, Monica Cardella, Gina Navoa Svarovsky

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Exploring how children develop early interest and understanding in engineering canprovide useful information for the ongoing efforts to increase the access of women inengineering careers. Drawing on occupational choice theories, girls and women havetended to place a high value on helping others in their work, but do not often realize thatcareers in engineering can lead to these types of endeavors. Adding layers of socialcontext that highlight the connections between engineering endeavors and improving thelives of others may create a more engaging experience for girls and women, andpotentially lead to increased development of girls’ engineering interest and understanding.Additionally, informal learning environments …

Special Session: Building Intentional Community Partnerships, Julia D. Thompson, Juan C. Lucena, Marybeth Lima, Brent Jesiek

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Recent growth in community engagement programs in engineering education clearly reveals the importance of understanding partnerships between the engagement programs and the community they work with. However, there has been minimal research and reflection on engineering education partnerships. In this special session, the participants will learn about theoretical frameworks that categorize different types of interactions within partnerships and practical implications on how to structure programs that make the community an integral part of the community engagement experience. The special session will be highly interactive, and will be grounded in the Transactional, Cooperative, and Communal (TCC) Framework that categorizes interactions within …

Development Of Entrepreneurial Attitudes Assessment Instrument For Freshman Students, Todd M. Fernandez, Genisson Sliva Coutinho, Michael D. Wilson, Stephen R. Hoffmann

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

An increasing population of university programs and quantity of curricular content focused on entrepreneurship poses both enormous opportunities for student growth, and numerous practical challenges. Prior work has largely focused on pre-post assessment of student learning, shifts in‘mindset’, activity effectiveness, mapping of student outcomes, and implications of student learning on career success. A baseline of freshman student attitudes towards entrepreneurship,outside of specifically focused entrepreneurial leaning, has significant potential to identify and inform programming in entrepreneurship, as well as general curriculums and pedagogy. An improved understanding of student’s constructive and cognitive influences in entrepreneurial education will serve to better inform the …

Formation Of Polymer Micro-Tubes, Daniel Peters

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Abstract

Current demand for organs is greater than the supply of donated organs, which means that a new method of obtaining replacement organs needs to be found. The objective of the research is to evaluate the use of thermo-triggered self-rolling polymer tubes that can be used for scaffolds in tissue engineering. Additionally, the research also includes a method for forming polymer tubes through the removal of a sugar fiber, coated with a thin film of polymer, by dissolving it in deionized water. For the first approach, the effect of the aqueous environment and temperature on a polymer bilayer was observed …

Determining The Critical Micelle Concentration Of Polymer Matrix For Drug Delivery Purposes, Katie Emmert

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Targeted oral release systems have been a large topic within drug delivery systems. There are several benefits to an oral delivery including patient convenience and lower chance of infection. The colon specifically has been researched as the release media. The colon is an ideal location for a release because the pH is stable with high levels of microorganisms. Like any type of drug delivery research, there are several hurdles to overcome. In order for a drug to be released in the colon, the drug must survive the stomach and be biocompatible. This biocompatibility and pH sensitivity was created using a …

2015 Afrl University Design Challenge, Daniel Slattery, Andrew P. Killmeyer, Brandon Null, Brendan Jones, Casey Hale, Jake Stein, Jeff Quartermaine, Kevin Rolik, Nick Tsangeos, Sam Moats, Marisa Seeley

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The University of Akron’s Air Force Research Laboratory’s Design Challenge Team has engineered a Heat Stress Prevention Kit that includes a facial mask in which the soldier will cool down from the inside out by breathing in the cool air circulating throughout the mask. This cool air is produced from a thermoelectric chip, which has a specific temperature difference on either side, one hot and one cold. Each of the sides is isolated from one another and with the combination of heat sinks, fans, and the simple process of breathing, a system is created by inhaling cool air. The entire …

Magnus Effect In Duct Flow, Cameron W. Clarke, Jesse S. Batko, Kenneth W. Smith Jr.

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The following research paper details the preliminary research carried out by this team. The project was originally conceived to determine if Magnus Lift could be utilized in an unconventional way to assist rockets during takeoff. Several conceptual designs were proposed, but the idea was scrapped when it became apparent that the team would not be able to generate the desired lift without inducing significant amounts of drag and additional weight on a rocket. Instead, the team focused on researching an interesting topic that hasn’t been previously explored: Magnus lift on a cylinder within a duct. An experimental procedure that could …

Design Of The University Of Akron's 2015 Fsae Electric Vehicle Braking System, Nicholas D. Galbincea

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The following report encompasses the design of the 2015 University of Akron’s FSAE formula electric braking system. The system is one based on hydraulic braking and designed for a one man performance racing vehicle. The objective of the system is to convert the kinetic energy of the vehicle into thermal energy, allowing the vehicle to decelerate optimally and safely. The design includes three major categories: calculation and evaluation of the hydraulic system in order to select calipers and master cylinders, the design of the pedal box, and the design of the rotors.

The results and findings of the proceeding report …

2015 Zips Sae Baja Brakes And Throttle System, Philip A. Bennett

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The SAE Baja student design team at The University of Akron is one of the longest-standing design teams at the university. The purpose of this team is to design, manufacture, test, and race an off-road vehicle within the guidelines of competition established by the Society of Automotive Engineers. The vehicle is made up of a small number of subsystems including frame, drivetrain, suspension, steering, and braking. The following will discuss all aspects of the design process of the braking and throttle system of the 2015 Zips Baja car. This process includes several steps and considerations such as design goals, system …

Fsae Electric Vehicle Cooling System Design, Jeff Lamarre

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

No abstract provided.

Reusable Adhesive Tapes From Electrospun Polymer Fibers, Vishal K. Chaurasia

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Many emerging applications demand an adhesive that has reusable properties. The adhesive must exhibit high adhesion strength to various surfaces and be able to be removed easily and then reapplied with minimal to no loss in adhesion strength. This work aims to tackle this problem by creating an adhesive tape fabricated by electrospinning polymer solutions onto a substrate. Electrospun adhesive nano/micro fibers have the ability to display the reusable characteristics desired. Several adhesive custom formulations were first developed and optimized for electrospinning. Then these formulations were successfully electrospun on to various substrates after much fine tuning of electrospinning parameters. The …

The Use Of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Aluminum To Stiffen A Portaledge Structure, Jacob Palmer

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Increased stiffness will be achieved through a unidirectional carbon fiber tube that will encase the aluminum tubing. This will give the structure the stiffness it needs to resist bending enabling the elimination of the spreader bar, while still maintaining the ductile material properties of the 6061 T-6 aluminum.

Evaluation Of The Signature Molecular Descriptor With Blosum62 And An All-Atom Description For Use In Sequence Alignment Of Proteins, Lindsay M. Aichinger

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This Honors Project focused on a few aspects of this topic. The second is comparing the molecular signature kernels to three of the BLOSUM matrices (30, 62, and 90) to test the accuracy of the mathematical model. The kernel matrix was manipulated in order to improve the relationship by focusing on side groups and also by changing how the structure was represented in the matrix by increasing the initial height distance from the central atom (Height 1 and Height 2 included).

There were multiple design constraints for this project. The first was the comparison with the BLOSUM matrices (30, 62, …

Senior Design: Kong Toy Instruction-Manual Insertion, Rachael L. Innocenzi, Ashley N. Cuthbert, Marianna R. Smith

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The team’s goal is to design and test a prototype and procedure that will automate the insertion of the Kong toy instructions into the cardboard packaging. This automation will increase the speed at which the product is packaged and will serve as an aid to workers with limited dexterity who find the task cumbersome.

Senior Design:Kong Toy Instruction-Manual Insertion, Ashley N. Cuthbert, Rachael L. Innocenzi, Marianna R. Smith

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The team’s goal is to design and test a prototype and procedure that will automate the insertion of the Kong toy instructions into the cardboard packaging. This automation will increase the speed at which the product is packaged and will serve as an aid to workers with limited dexterity who find the task cumbersome.

Designing A Heat Sink For Lithium-Ion Battery Packs In Electric Vehicles, Dylan Irvine, Evan Foreman, Christopher B. Remington, Aaron Jackson, Sam Endrizzi

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report addresses the concepts and implementation of fluid cooled heat sink designs for an electric or hybrid vehicle battery. To determine the battery’s temperature and heat flux profile, testing was performed by measuring these values at multiple locations on a lithium-ion pouch battery using heat flux sensors and thermocouples during the charge and discharge cycles of the battery. Once the data was collected and analyzed, trendlines were fit to the heat flux data then used to create equations for the heat flux profile during the discharging stage. Each equation represented a specific region on the battery geometry. Four heat …

Developing A Colorimetric Membrane Sensor To Detect Trihalomethanes In Water Samples Utilizing The Fujiwara Reaction, Max D. Duckworth

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This work focused on creating a colorimetric sensor to detect trihalomethanes (THMs) at concentrations near the level of environmental regulations from the environmental protection agency (EPA). This work utlized the fujiwara reaction as well as a hydrophobic electrospun polyprolylene membrane to produce a sensitive colorimetric reaction. A calibration curve was produced which was able to predict the concentration of a bromoroform solution in the range of 8-250 ppb with a confidence of 97.7 % using the intensity of the color change as a quantitative measure.

Characterizing Signalized Intersection Performance Using Maximum Vehicle Delay, Steven M. Lavrenz, Christopher M. Day, Alexander M. Hainen, W Benjamin Smith, Amanda L. Stevens, Howell Li, Darcy M. Bullock

Lyles School of Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Optimizing Strategies For Population-Based Chlamydia Infection Screening Among Young Women: An Age-Structured System Dynamics Approach Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Yu Teng, Nan Kong, Wanzhu Tu

Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

Background

Chlamydia infection (CT) is one of the most commonly reported sexually transmitted diseases. It is often referred to as a “silent” disease with the majority of infected people having no symptoms. Without early detection, it can progress to serious reproductive and other health problems. Economical identification of asymptomatically infected is a key public health challenge. Increasing evidence suggests that CT infection risk varies over the range of adolescence. Hence, age-dependent screening strategies with more frequent testing for certain age groups of higher risk may be cost-saving in controlling the disease.

Methods

We study the optimization of age-dependent screening strategies …

Bifacial Si Heterojunction-Perovskite Organic-Inorganic Tandem To Produce Highly Efficient (Η T * ~ 33%) Solar Cell, Reza Asadpour, Raghu Vamsi Krishna Chavali, Mohammad Ryyan Khan, Muhammad Ashraful Alam

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

As single junction photovoltaic (PV) technologies both Si heterojunction (HIT) and perovskite based solar cells promise high efficiencies at low cost. Intuitively a traditional tandem cell design with these cells connected in series is expected to improve the efficiency further. Using a self-consistent numerical modeling of optical and transport characteristics however we find that a traditional series connected tandem design suffers from low JSC due to band-gap mismatch and current matching constraints. Specifically a traditional tandem cell with state-of-the-art HIT ( η=24% ) and perovskite ( η=20% ) sub-cells provides only a modest tandem efficiency of η_T~ 25%. …

A Simple Boltzmann Transport Equation For Ballistic To Diffusive Transient Heat Transport, Mark S. Lundstrom, Jesse Maassen

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Developing simplified, but accurate, theoretical approaches to treat heat transport on all length and time scales is needed to further enable scientific insight and technology innovation. Using a simplified form of the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE), originally developed for electron transport, we demonstrate how ballistic phonon effects and finite-velocity propagation are easily and naturally captured. We show how this approach compares well to the phonon BTE, and readily handles a full phonon dispersion and energy-dependent mean-free-path. This study of transient heat transport shows (i) how fundamental temperature jumps at the contacts depend simply on the ballistic thermal resistance, (ii) that …

Steady-State Heat Transport: Ballistic-To-Diffusive With Fourier's Law, Jesse Maassen, Mark S. Lundstrom

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

It is generally understood that Fourier's law does not describe ballistic phonon transport, which is important when the length of a material is similar to the phonon mean-free-path. Using an approach adapted from electron transport, we demonstrate that Fourier's law and the heat equation do capture ballistic effects, including temperature jumps at ideal contacts, and are thus applicable on all length scales. Local thermal equilibrium is not assumed, because allowing the phonon distribution to be out-of-equilibrium is important for ballistic and quasi-ballistic transport. The key to including the non-equilibrium nature of the phonon population is to apply the proper boundary …

Computational Electronics For The 21st Century: Reflections On The Past, Present, And Future, Mark S. Lundstrom

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The author’s career has coincided with the development of numerical simulation into an essential component of semiconductor device technology research and development. We now have a sophisticated suite of simulation capabilities along with new challenges for 21st Century electronics. This talk presents a short history of the field and a description of the current state of the art, but it concentrates on lessons learned and thoughts about how computational electronics can continue to contribute effectively to the development of new electronic device technologies. The author will argue that electronics is changing, and that computational electronics can play a key role …

Photovoltaic Material Characterization With Steady-State And Transient Photoluminescence, Xufeng Wang, Jayprakash Bhosale, James Moore, Rehan Kapadia, Peter Bermel, Ali Javey, Mark S. Lundstrom

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this study, we develop an approach to characterize the surface and bulk properties for thin films of photovoltaic materials by combining two experimental photoluminescence (PL) techniques with one multiphysics simulation. This contactless, in-line characterization technique allows reliable extraction of key lifetime parameters. In this study, we first discuss the strengths and weaknesses of both steady-state and transient PL techniques (specifically, steady-state PL excitation spectroscopy and time-resolved PL) and show that combining them with numerical simulation can be used to extract surface and bulk lifetimes self consistently. The method is applied to InP thin films grown with a novel vapor-liquid-solid …

Emission-Diffusion Theory Of The Mosfet, Mark S. Lundstrom, Supriyo Datta, Xingshu Sun

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

An emission-diffusion theory that describes MOSFETS from the ballistic to diffusive limits is developed. The approach extends the Crowell-Sze treatment of metalsemiconductor junctions to MOSFETs and is equivalent to the scattering/transmission model of the MOSFET. The paper demonstrates that the results of the transmission model can be obtained from a traditional, drift-diffusion analysis when the boundary conditions are properly specified, which suggests that traditional drift-diffusion MOSFET models can also be extended to comprehend ballistic limits.

Mass Media And The Contagion Of Fear: The Case Of Ebola In America, Sherry M J Towers, Shehzad Afzal, Gilbert Bernal, Nadya T. Bliss, Baltazar Espinoza, Jasmine Jackson, Julia Judson-Garcia, Maryam Khan, Michael Lin, Robert Mamada, Victor M. Moreno, Fereshteh Nazari, Kamaldeen Okumeye, Mary L. Ross, Claudia Rodriguez, Jan Medlock, David S. Ebert, Carlos Castillo-Chavez,

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Background: In the weeks following the first imported case of Ebola in the U. S. on September 29, 2014, coverage of the very limited outbreak dominated the news media, in a manner quite disproportionate to the actual threat to national public health; by the end of October, 2014, there were only four laboratory confirmed cases of Ebola in the entire nation. Public interest in these events was high, as reflected in the millions of Ebola-related Internet searches and tweets performed in the month following the first confirmed case. Use of trending Internet searches and tweets has been proposed in the …