Engineering Commons^™

Six Degrees Of Freedom From Six Degrees Of Separation: The History Of Flight Simulators, David Keck, Morgan Lopez

Publications

Some of today's advanced flight simulators have the capacity to provide pilots with experiences of six degrees of freedom: forward/backward, up/down, or left/right (or pitching, rolling, or yawing in either direction). These incredible devices are the product of over 100 years of design developments that come from a series of technological discoveries and historical events.

Vivado Design Interface: Enabling Cad-Tool Design For Next Generation Xilinx Fpga Devices, Thomas James Townsend

Theses and Dissertations

The popularity of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) has grown in recent years due to their potential performance advantages over sequential software, and as a prototyping platform for application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). Vendors such as Xilinx offer automated tool suites that can be used to program FPGAs based on a RTL description. These tool suites are sufficient forgeneral users, but they usually don't provide the opportunity to integrate custom computer-aideddesign (CAD) tools into the regular design flow. Xilinx first offered this capability in their ISE tool suite with the Xilinx Design Language (XDL). Using XDL, a Xilinx design could be extracted …

Determining H2O Vapor Temperature And Concentration In Particle-Free And Particle-Laden Combustion Flows Using Spectral Line Emission Measurements, John Robert Tobiasson

Theses and Dissertations

There is a growing need for the clean generation of electricity in the world, and increased efficiency is one way to achieve cleaner generation. Increased efficiency may be achieved through an improved understanding of the heat flux of participating media in combustion environments. Real-time in-situ optical measurements of gas temperature and concentrations in combustion environments is needed. Optical methods do not disturb the flow characteristics and are not subject to the temperature limitation of current methods. Simpler, less-costly optical measurements than current methods would increase the ability to apply them in more circumstances. This work explores the ability to simultaneously …

Academic Packing For Commercial Fpga Architectures, Travis D. Haroldsen

Theses and Dissertations

With a few exceptions, academic packing algorithms for FPGAs are typically applied solely to theoretical architectures. This has allowed the algorithms to focus on the basic components of packing while abstracting away many of the details dictated by real hardware. As commercially available FPGAs have advanced, however, the academic algorithms and architectures have diverged significantly from their commercial counterparts. In this dissertation, the RapidSmith 2 framework is presented. This framework accurately reflects the architecture of Xilinx FPGAs and provides support for integrating custom tools into the commercial CAD tools. Using this framework, the RSVPack packing algorithm is implemented. The RSVPack …

Development Of A Simplified Performance-Based Procedure For The Assessment Of Liquefaction-Induced Settlements Using Liquefaction Loading Maps, Braden Michael Error

Theses and Dissertations

Liquefaction-induced settlement can cause extensive damage to infrastructure. Quantifying the amount of settlement that may occur after an earthquake is crucial to seismic design. The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center developed performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) as a probabilistic framework to characterize the risks associated with a seismic event. When applied to liquefaction-induced settlement, the PBEE framework provides a more complete and accurate representation of liquefaction hazard than other more conventional evaluation methods. Performance-based engineering is not widely used in practice, however, due to its complexity. In an attempt to make performance-based engineering methods more accessible to engineers for routine …

Microdischarges Utilized In Portable Gas Sensing And Their Atmospheric Contaminants, Colin H. Sillerud

Chemical and Biological Engineering ETDs

Portable applications of microdischarges such as the chemical detection, remediation of gaseous wastes, or the destruction of volatile organic compounds will mandate operation in the presence of contaminant species. This work examines the temporal evolution of microdischarge optical and ultraviolet emissions during pulsed operation by experimental methods. By varying the pulse length of a microdischarge initiated in a 4-hole silicon microcavity array operating in a 655 Torr ambient primarily composed of Ne, we were able to measure the emission growth rates for different contaminant species native to the discharge environment as a function of pulse length. It was found that …

Effect Of Tannic Acid Crosslinking On The Mechanical Properties Of Collagen Scaffolds And Melanoma Cell Proliferation, Christopher J. Bridgeman

Theses and Dissertations

Metastatic melanoma is responsible for nearly 10,000 deaths in the United States each year. While the prognosis for patients with localized early stage melanoma cancer is good, the chances of survival for patients with late stage metastatic melanoma are only 16%. Matrix stiffness has been shown to have a profound effect on tumor metastasis for breast cancer, but little is known about its role on melanoma metastasis and progression. Similarly, the therapeutic effect of tannic acid (TA) has been extensively characterized for soft breast and leukemia cancers, but not for melanoma. The goal of the current study was to investigate …

Mathematical Model And Experimental Verification Of Spatially Multiplexed System Using Ray Theory And Modified Laguerre Gaussian Beams, Saud Alanzi

Theses and Dissertations

Spatial/Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) is based on a channel spacing technique in optical fibers that has the potential to inspire a revolution in optical communications. This patented technique provides a method to launch, transport, and detect two or more optical channels that operate at exactly the same wavelength inside a single multimode optical fiber. In addition, the patented technique added a new dimension and a new degree of photon freedom to the existing fiber multiplexing techniques and complements Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). As a result, the bandwidth of existing and new optical fiber systems maybe …

Geometry Driven Probabilistic Models For Shape Matching, Classification And Retrieval, Mark Matthew Moyou

Theses and Dissertations

Emulating human vision in a computational framework—known as computer vision—is one of the next major research areas being pursued; this emulation of vision can be viewed from a Systems Engineering perspective. The goal would be to design and develop an Intelligent Vision System built on a framework that could be tailored for specific vision applications. One of the fundamental components of vision is shape, so to design effective vision systems one needs to incorporate shape based algorithms as a core component. This dissertation progresses three facets of shape analysis algorithms: classification, retrieval and registration. Through the use of probabilistic models …

Concept Of Operations And High Level Requirements Framework For The Development Of A Computational Tool For Bridge Deterioration Analysis, Gabrielle Sue Leesman

Theses and Dissertations

In developing the lifecycles of a system, maintenance and support must be considered. Associated with this portion of the life cycle are periods between needs of maintenance and the cost of each type of maintenance. Previously a few state deterioration models have been created separately to better predict these maintenance cycles for varying ages, materials, traffic flow, and environmental conditions in the deck, substructure, and superstructure of bridges. A particular analysis tool from previous studies involves the development of Markov Chain (MC) models. This paper presents a systematic process to develop MC bridge deterioration models for state/federal transportation agencies. A …

Tuning Micro-Electro-Mechanical Resonators For Maximum Dynamic Range, Joseph William Fisher

Theses and Dissertations

This research seeks to improve the linear dynamic range (LDR) of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) resonators, which are commonly used in sensing and timing applications. We address specifically the need for devices whose response is relatively large yet remains single-valued near resonance. We develop and analyze a model for a class of electrostatically actuated micro structures that includes higher order electrostatic effects, thereby allowing one to determine the LDR for devices that are tuned to eliminate cubic order nonlinear effects. The inclusion of the capacitive forces produces a model that is best solved by expanding the force in a Taylor series. …

Improving Crash Safety Of Jet Dragsters Through Modeling And Analysis, Paige Leigh Sanchez

Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this thesis was to analyze how additional foam implementation in a jet dragster driver’s compartment can improve driver safety in the case of an accident. This analysis was divided into two sections: a crash simulation analysis and a base excitation mass-spring-damper model analyzing foam behavior. The jet dragster crash simulation modeled, reflected a Larsen Motorsports jet dragster accident in 2011, where a dragster hit the wall at 270 mph between a 43 to 60 degree angle. A static structural simulation, using the dragster chassis, was modeled in ANSYS and several dynamic simulations at varying impact angles were …

Markerless Kinematics Of Pediatric Manual Wheelchair Mobility, Jacob Robert Rammer

Dissertations (1934 -)

Pediatric manual wheelchair users face substantial risk of orthopaedic injury to the upper extremities, particularly the shoulders, during transition to wheelchair use and during growth and development. Propulsion strategy can influence mobility efficiency, activity participation, and quality of life. The current forefront of wheelchair biomechanics research includes translating findings from adult to pediatric populations, improving the quality and efficiency of care under constrained clinical funding, and understanding injury mechanisms and risk factors. Typically, clinicians evaluate wheelchair mobility using marker-based motion capture and instrumentation systems that are precise and accurate but also time-consuming, inconvenient, and expensive for repeated assessments. There is …

Improving Resource Management In The Afghan Air Force, Jonathan D. Ritschel, Tamiko L. Ritschel

Faculty Publications

The nascent Afghan Air Force (AAF) is rapidly changing with new platforms programmed and existing platforms expanding. As US and coalition forces draw down, the transition of financial responsibility from American to Afghan processes is on the horizon.

Perspective: The Physics, Diagnostics, And Applications Of Atmospheric Pressure Low Temperature Plasma Sources Used In Plasma Medicine, M. Laroussi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Low temperature plasmas have been used in various plasma processing applications for several decades. But it is only in the last thirty years or so that sources generating such plasmas at atmospheric pressure in reliable and stable ways have become more prevalent. First, in the late 1980s, the dielectric barrier discharge was used to generate relatively large volume diffuse plasmas at atmospheric pressure. Then, in the early 2000s, plasma jets that can launch cold plasma plumes in ambient air were developed. Extensive experimental and modeling work was carried out on both methods and much of the physics governing such sources …

Road Accidents Bigdata Mining And Visualization Using Support Vector Machines, Usha Lokala, Srinivas Nowduri, Prabhakar K Sharma

Publications

Useful information has been extracted from the road accident data in United Kingdom (UK), using data analytics method, for avoiding possible accidents in rural and urban areas. This analysis make use of several methodologies such as data integration, support vector machines (SVM), correlation machines and multinomial goodness. The entire datasets have been imported from the traffic department of UK with due permission. The information extracted from these huge datasets forms a basis for several predictions, which in turn avoid unnecessary memory lapses. Since data is expected to grow continuously over a period of time, this work primarily proposes a new …

Consumers’ Willingness To Fly In Augmented Cognition Equipped Aircraft, Eric Schanafelt

Theses and Dissertations

Current advancements in the field of Augmented Cognition have garnered attention from the aviation industry. Equipping flight management systems with Augmented Cognition is a possibility in the near future as the result of recent computing breakthroughs. The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent gender, country of origin and condition of Augmented Cognition affect consumers willingness to fly. To further understand the consumer's decision-making process the participant’s willingness to fly measured through affect (emotion), represented through the six universal facial expressions, (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sad, and surprise) (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). This study surveyed participants from …

Mining Capstone Project Wikis For Knowledge Discovery, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Melvrivk Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wikis are widely used collaborative environments as sources of information and knowledge. The facilitate students to engage in collaboration and share information among members and enable collaborative learning. In particular, Wikis play an important role in capstone projects. Wikis aid in various project related tasks and aid to organize information and share. Mining project Wikis is critical to understand the students learning and latest trends in industry. Mining Wikis is useful to educationists and academicians for decision-making about how to modify the educational environment to improve student's learning. The main challenge is that the content or data in project Wikis …

A Unified Framework For Vehicle Rerouting And Traffic Light Control To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Zhiguang Cao, Siwei Jiang, Jie Zhang, Hongliang Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the number of vehicles grows rapidly each year, more and more traffic congestion occurs, becoming a big issue for civil engineers in almost all metropolitan cities. In this paper, we propose a novel pheromone-based traffic management framework for reducing traffic congestion, which unifies the strategies of both dynamic vehicle rerouting and traffic light control. Specifically, each vehicle, represented as an agent, deposits digital pheromones over its route, while roadside infrastructure agents collect the pheromones and fuse them to evaluate real-time traffic conditions as well as to predict expected road congestion levels in near future. Once road congestion is predicted, …

A Study In The Use Of Elastic Materials In Expandable Containment Units, Andrew J. Eisenman, Joby Anthony Iii, David Satagaj

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

The rigidity of materials in conjunction with the aspect of elasticity has been a concern of modern technologies and construction in recent centuries because of the advantages that expandable storage would bring to the fields of containment units with respect to population growth and space exploration. The world population is currently growing at an exponential rate, and as our population grows, the more important it will become to have containment units that can both contain large volumes of material as well as minuscule amounts of material without wasting space. In order accomplish this, we will need a new type of …

15-03 Real Time Bicycle Simulation Study Of Bicyclists' Behaviors And Their Implication On Safety, Valerian Kwigizile, Jun-Seok Oh, Raed Hasan, Cole G. Villalobos, Aous Hammad Kurdi, Anil Shaw

Transportation Research Center Reports

The main goal of this study was to build a bicycle simulator and study the interaction between cyclists and other roadway users. The simulator developed was used in conjunction with Oculus Rift googles to create a virtual cycling environment. The virtual riding environment contained roadway infrastructures and features such as intersections, crosswalks, bicycle lanes, shared-lanes, etc. It also contained both motor vehicles and pedestrians that interacted with cyclists. The rider’s perception and reactions to different situations were investigated based on their performance during four virtual simulation scenarios with an electroencephalogram (EEG) readings. In addition to the results on interactions of …

Simulation Of The Scattered Em Field Of A Rotating Conducting Cylinder Using Static Data, Esmail M. M. Abuhdima, Robert Penno

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The effect of the rotation of a very good conducting cylinder on the backscattered field will be investigated where the incident wave is considered as a plane wave in both polarizations (E-wave and H-wave). Previous work has explained that rotation or vibration of the object may induce phase changes of the scattered signal. Modulation during rotation or vibration is referred to as micro-Doppler effect. Also, the effect of the rotation of a conducting cylinder was investigated by many researchers in the past using the Galilean transformation. These analyses conclude that the effect of rotation does not exist in the case …

The Specific Vulnerabilities Of Cancer Cells To The Cold Atmospheric Plasma-Stimulated Solutions., Dayun Yan, Haitao Cui, Wei Zhu, Niki Nourmohammadi, Julian Milberg, Lijie G Zhang, Jonathan H Sherman, Michael Keidar

Neurological Surgery Faculty Publications

Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP), a novel promising anti-cancer modality, has shown its selective anti-cancer capacity on dozens of cancer cell lines in vitro and on subcutaneous xenograft tumors in mice. Over the past five years, the CAP-stimulated solutions (PSS) have also shown their selective anti-cancer effect over different cancers in vitro and in vivo. The solutions used to make PSS include several bio-adaptable solutions, mainly cell culture medium and simple buffered solutions. Both the CAP-stimulated medium (PSM) and the CAP-stimulated buffered solution (PSB) are able to significantly kill cancer cells in vitro. In this study, we systematically compared the anti-cancer …

15-02 Estimating And Enhancing Public Transit Accessibility For People With Mobility Limitations, Jun-Seok Oh, C. Scott Smith, Rostam Qatra, Mohammad Al-Akash

Transportation Research Center Reports

This two-part study employs fine-scale performance measures and analytical techniques designed to evaluate and improve transit services for people experiencing disability. Part one puts forth a series of time-sensitive, general transit feed system (GTFS)-enhanced employment accessibility models that account for multiple transportation modes, categories of functional limitation and design characteristics of existing public transit infrastructure. Model results shed light on the degree to which a medium-size city’s public transit system addresses the gap between a theoretical continuum of rider capacities and the physical demands required to achieve mobility and access to employment. Our research finds that an individual’s combined physical …

Program Progress Performance Report #1, Missouri University Of Science And Technology. Inspire - University Transportation Center

Semi-Annual Progress Reports

No abstract provided.

A Low-Dimensional Vector Representation For Words Using An Extreme Learning Machine, Paula Lauren, Guangzhi Qu, Guang Bin Huang, Paul Watta, Amaury Lendasse

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Word Embeddings Are a Low-Dimensional Vector Representation of Words that Incorporates Context. Two Popular Methods Are Word2vec and Global Vectors (Glove). Word2vec is a Single-Hidden Layer Feedforward Neural Network (Slfn) that Has an Auto-Encoder Influence for Computing a Word Context Matrix using Backpropagation for Training. Glove Computes the Word Context Matrix First Then Performs Matrix Factorization on the Matrix to Arrive at Word Embeddings. Backpropagation is a Typical Training Method for SLFN's, which is Time Consuming and Requires Iterative Tuning. Extreme Learning Machines (Elm) Have the Universal Approximation Capability of SLFN's, based on a Randomly Generated Hidden Layer Weight Matrix …

The Interacting Hydrologic Responses To Changing Climate, Watershed Physical Characteristics, River Regulation, And Land Development In The Northeastern United States, Rouzbeh Berton

Dissertations - ALL

In this dissertation, the scale-dependency of hydrologic responses due to changing climate and regime shifts of large-scale circulation patterns and their teleconnection patterns were evaluated using long-term precipitation and discharge records in sub-basins with no development, and extensive development and riverine impoundments of the Merrimack River watershed. The Merrimack (New Hampshire-Massachusetts) is a 13,000 km2 forested (67%) watershed located in the northeastern United States. The overarching goal of this dissertation was to assess hydrologic responses to the potential effects of changing climate in sub-basins experiencing a range of development in order to help guide sustainable water management in the Merrimack …

Transitioning To Sustainable Civil Infrastructure Systems: Green Stormwater Management And Engineering Design Thinking, Carli Denyse Flynn

Dissertations - ALL

Green infrastructure has been endorsed by many practitioners and organizations as a more sustainable approach to stormwater management. Decisions on how to best design municipal green infrastructure systems can be complicated by factors such as uncertainties about the performance and public acceptance of particular technologies. Thus, deciding how to design sustainable stormwater management systems requires engineers not only to reflect upon the fundamental principles used to conceptualize their designs, but also to consider how a broad array of social, economic, and environmental factors both influence and are influenced by their work.

This thesis examines factors that influence the design and …

Ionic Thermoelectric Paper, Fei Jiao, Ali Naderi, Dan Zhao, Joshua Schlueter, Maryam Shahi, Jonas Sundström, Hjalmar Granberg, Jesper Edberg, Ujwala Ail, Joseph W. Brill, Tom Lindström, Magnus Berggren, Xavier Crispin

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

Ionic thermoelectric materials, for example, polyelectrolytes such as polystyrene sulfonate sodium (PSSNa), constitute a new class of materials which are attracting interest because of their large Seebeck coefficient and the possibility that they could be used in ionic thermoelectric SCs (ITESCs) and field effect transistors. However, pure polyelectrolyte membranes are not robust or flexible. In this paper, the preparation of ionic thermoelectric paper using a simple, scalable and cost-effective method is described. After a composite was fabricated with nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC), the resulting NFC–PSSNa paper is flexible and mechanically robust, which is desirable if it is to be used in …

Fitting A Parametric Model To A Cloud Of Points Via Optimization Methods, Pengcheng Jia

Dissertations - ALL

Computer Aided Design (CAD) is a powerful tool for designing

parametric geometry. However, many CAD models of current

configurations are constructed in previous generations of CAD

systems, which represent the configuration simply as a collection of

surfaces instead of as a parametrized solid model. But since many

modern analysis techniques take advantage of a parametrization, one

often has to re-engineer the configuration into a parametric

model. The objective here is to generate an efficient, robust, and

accurate method for fitting parametric models to a cloud of

points. The process uses a gradient-based optimization technique,

which is applied to the whole …