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Aggies Sweep American Water Works Association Scholarship Challenge | College Of Engineering, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

Four Utah State University engineering students received scholarships from the American Water Works Association Intermountain Section.

Ip Flow Mobility In The Industry: From An Economic Perspective, Jun Huang, Fang Fang, Cong-Cong Xing, Yi Qian

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The popularity of social media together with the advancement of mobile Internet applications enabling the uploading of data plays a dominant role in the entire Internet traffic. IP flow mobility (IFOM) is proposed as an effective means to enhance the system capacity by offloading data from the cellular network to WiFi or Femtocells or other complementary networks. Although IFOM has been extensively investigated during the past few years, most of these studies, however, are concerned with IFOM technical issues only; little work regarding the IFOM application has been done from the service providers’ perspective. Unlike previous research, in this paper, …

Usu Biological Engineer Featured In Chemical & Engineering News | College Of Engineering, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

The ongoing research into alternative bio-based fuels by USU's Dr. Foster Agblevor was featured in a February cover story of Chemical & Engineering News magazine.

Oral History Conversation With Lydell Aaron (Beartha), Alexander Z. Bulkin, Kari Schattinger, Kate L. Gardner, Charbel Mouannes, Danielle Silvaggio

Philosophy: All Student Work

Oral History Interview conducted with Lydell Aaron. He founded Beartha Systems which builds scalable and smart systems that harness energy and resources for small communities.

College Of Engineering News, Georgia Southern University

College of Engineering & Computing: News & Publications (2010-2023)

• IT Faculty and Students Win Best Paper Awards at SAIS
• SGA President Dylan John wins Potts Leadership Award

Information Technology News, Georgia Southern University

Information Technology: News & Publications (2012-2023)

• IT Faculty and Students Win Best Paper Awards at SAIS

Shift-Symmetric Configurations In Two-Dimensional Cellular Automata: Irreversibility, Insolvability, And Enumeration, Peter Banda, John S. Caughman Iv, Martin Cenek, Christof Teuscher

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The search for symmetry as an unusual yet profoundly appealing phenomenon, and the origin of regular, repeating configuration patterns have been for a long time a central focus of complexity science, and physics.

Here, we introduce group-theoretic concepts to identify and enumerate the symmetric inputs, which result in irreversible system behaviors with undesired effects on many computational tasks. The concept of so-called configuration shift-symmetry is applied on two-dimensional cellular automata as an ideal model of computation. The results show the universal insolvability of “non-symmetric” tasks regardless of the transition function. By using a compact enumeration formula and bounding the number …

Reasoning Strategies In The Context Of Engineering Design With Everyday Materials, Marcelo Worsley, Paulo Blikstein

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

‘‘Making’’ represents an increasingly popular label for describing a form of engineering design. While making is growing in popularity, there are still open questions about the strategies that students are using in these activities. Assessing and improving learning in making/ engineering design contexts require that we have a better understanding of where students’ ideas are coming from and a better way to characterize student progress in open-ended learning environments. In this article, we use a qualitative analysis of students’ responses (N = 13) in order to identify the origins of their ideas. Four strategies emerged from this analysis: unexplained …

Headwinds – A Story About Wind Energy, Scott M. Larwood

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

No abstract provided.

Modeling The Movement Of Septic Water Chloride Through A Soil Profile, Shawkat Kochary, Tom Byl, Bahzad Noori

Civil and Architectural Engineering Faculty Research

The purpose of this study was to investigate the movement of chloride through a vadose zone located under failed and non-regulated septic tanks of Duhok city, Kurdistan of Iraq, potentially contaminating its groundwater. A physical vadose model (PVM) of a vertical flow direction was built in the laboratory to represent the city soil profile. The size of the PVM was 210 × 122 × 9.7 cm (height, width, and depth). Preliminary soil tests were conducted to better represent the lithology of study area. The PVM was then packed with regional silt clay soil, after modifying its texture, using an innovative …

Chemically Stable Artificial Sei For Li-Ion Battery Electrodes, Qinglin Zhang, Lei Han, Jie Pan, Zhi Chen, Yang-Tse Cheng

Chemical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications

The importance of coating's chemical stability in lithium-ion batteries has been demonstrated by this study. It is well known that the mechanical properties determine the cycle life, and chemical stability or chemical degradation rate determines the calendar life. In this study, we used HfO₂ coatings prepared by atomic layer deposition as an example to show the chemical stability of the coatings for lithium ion battery electrodes.

Catalytic Gasification Of A Powder River Basin Coal With Co2 And H2o Mixtures, Zhang Fan, Fan Maohong, Huang Xin, Morris D. Argyle, Zhang Bo, Brian Towler, Zhang Yulong

Faculty Publications

CO₂ capture and utilization caused more and more public attention because of its environmental impact. The objective of this work was to study the catalytic gasification of a sub-bituminous coal from the Powder River Basin (PRB) using a CO₂ and H₂ O mixture as the gasifying agent. Sodium and iron, in the form of inexpensive compounds, were chosen to catalyze the coal gasification. The experiments were conducted between 700 and 900 °C in a fixed-bed laboratory gasifier under the atmospheric pressure. Results show that the added catalysts had an effect on the composition of gas …

Focused Electron Beam Induced Deposition Of Copper With High Resolution And Purity From Aqueous Solutions, Samaneh Esfandiarpour, Lindsay Boehme, J. Todd Hastings

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Electron-beam induced deposition of high-purity copper nanostructures is desirable for nanoscale rapid prototyping, interconnection of chemically synthesized structures, and integrated circuit editing. However, metalorganic, gas-phase precursors for copper introduce high levels of carbon contamination. Here we demonstrate electron beam induced deposition of high-purity copper nanostructures from aqueous solutions of copper sulfate. The addition of sulfuric acid eliminates oxygen contamination from the deposit and produces a deposit with ~95 at% copper. The addition of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), Triton X-100, or polyethylene glycole (PEG) improves pattern resolution and controls deposit morphology but leads to slightly reduced purity. High resolution nested lines …

Sorption Of Benzene, Dichloroethane, Chloroform And Dichloromethane By Polyethylene Glycol, Polycaprolactone And Their Copolymers At 298.15 K Using A Quartz Crystal Microbalance, Abhijeet Radhakrishna Iyer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Quartz crystal microbalances (QCM) are acoustic wave sensor systems which are used majorly for vapor and liquid sensing. QCM come under the category of thickness shear mode (TSM) sensors. There are several methods to study organic vapor sensing; the QCM method is the one that offers the highest sensitivity and generates the most data. Solubilities of benzene, dichloroethane, chloroform and dichloromethane in polyethylene glycol (PEG), polycaprolactone (PCL), and several di-block PEG/PCL copolymers at 298.15 K are reported. There are literature data available for most of the solvents in the homopolymers PEG and PCL but no literature data is available for …

Mechanism Of Cathodic Prevention Of Carbon Steel In Concrete, Krittin Rattakham

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this work, I aim to clarify the mechanism that allows steel to attain higher chloride threshold as it is cathodically polarized. Specifically, I seek to provide empirical information on whether an intrinsic (predominantly interfacial effects of polarization) or an extrinsic (predominantly concentration changes due to polarization) mechanism may be dominant in the beneficial effect of polarization. I carried out this experiment with 12 identical concrete specimens, each with a cast-in steel plate, constantly exposed them to high-chloride environment. The specimens were divided into 4 triplicates and polarized at 4 different level from OCP, -200, -300 to -400 mV_{SCE …}

Transient Nonlinear Optical Properties Of Thin Film Titanium Nitride, Sarahkatie Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

nitride (TiN) and scandium nitride (ScN), using the beam deflection characterization technique. The thin films were made at the Air Force Research Lab by controllably unbalanced magnetron sputtering. Transition metal nitrides, specifically TiN, are used widely in industry because of their unique properties, including extreme hardness and high damage threshold. The properties of thin film transition metal nitrites are dependent on the chemical structure of the thin film, which can be heavily influenced by substrate and deposition method. This durability and tunability is an asset in applications such as sensor protection and all optical computing. Two substrates, sapphire (Al_{2 …}

A Portfolio Decision Analysis Study For Improving Consequence Of Facility Failure Indices, Michael J. Blaess

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Air Force partially integrated the Mission Dependency Index (MDI) into its portfolio project selection model by assigning an MDI value to a facility type or real property category code (CATCODE) in lieu of assigning a unique MDI value to each facility through a structured interview process. This took an initial step to improve the Air Forces asset management practices; however, it failed to accurately capture the consequence of facility failure in some cases. Although a process to adjudicate the MDI value of individual facilities was created, it is still unknown how much the surveyed MDI value deviates …

Tunable Combline Filter And Balun: Design, Simulation, And Test, Daniel Alex Ramirez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Reconfigurable filters are an attractive solution for many military and commercial applications due to their ability to alter the partitioned frequency band in an RF system without requiring a bank of fixed filters. The onset of this technology has the potential to revolutionize the RF industry by allowing for agile devices which consume less size, weight, and power while providing greater performance. However, at the present state, reconfigurable filters present a reduction in performance when compared to filter banks. This has led to exciting research in the field of RF tunable filters.

For many applications, planar reconfigurable filters have been …

Failure Analysis Of High Nickel Alloy Steel Seal Ring Used In Turbomachinery, Wenbo Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The system of upper high nickel alloying steel seal ring and lower high nickel alloying steel seal ring, installed in the grooves of turbine, can extend out and fit with the wall of valve cage, resulting in forming a good seal under the pressure. In the project, the failure steel seal ring is considered. This situation had threatened the safety of the whole steam turbine system. The purpose of this study is to identify the failure cause of the steel seal ring used in nuclear steam turbines. New high nickel steel alloy seal ring was compared with the failed seal …

A Study Of Corrosion Monitoring Techniques Used In Urls For Metals, Sirui Li

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing use of fission-type nuclear power generation, particularly high-levels radioactive nuclear waste are generated, so the safe use of nuclear energy requires proper disposal of high-level radioactive nuclear waste. The selected treatment method is deep geological disposal. Therefore, underground research laboratory (URL) to prepare for deep geological disposal will also be carried out. Corrosion of metallic materials, which are closely related to the safety of URL, is the focus of this research project. This study selected monitoring techniques for URL and developed a rough monitoring scheme for temperature and resistivity in URL. In this study, corrosion-temperature and corrosion-resistivity …

Microwave Instrumentation And Sensing Techniques For Quantum Efficiency And Minority-Carrier Lifetime Measurements, Kyle Benjamin Lu

Dissertations and Theses

A non-contact method characterizing the quantum efficiency of a solar cell using the microwave reflectance signature is presented in this thesis. Traditional solar cell quantum efficiency (QE) measurements are only possible near the completion of the fabrication process using contacts in direct physical connection with the metalized surface tabs to probe and extract charge carriers from the device. However, pressure within the solar metrology industry to report the spectral performance of the device earlier in the manufacturing process as part of the process control loop requires that a new non-contact method be developed. This thesis work contributes the development of …

Building Energy Model Calibration For Retrofit Decision Making, Nicolas R. Johnson

Dissertations and Theses

Accommodating the continued increase in energy demand in the face of global climate change has been a worldwide concern. With buildings in the US consuming nearly 40% of national energy, a concerted effort must be given to reduce building energy consumption. As new buildings continue to improve their efficiency through more restrictive energy codes, the other 76.9 billion square feet of current building stock falls further behind. The rate at which current buildings are being retrofit is not enough and better tools are needed to access the benefits of retrofits and the uncertainties associated with them. This study proposes a …

Evaluating The Autonomous Flying Qualities Of A Simulated Variable Stability Aircraft, Ali M. Hamidani

Theses and Dissertations

Delivering communications from high altitudes, at airspeeds of just 30 knots, gathering data from active volcanoes and forming hurricanes, and collecting ISR over hostile territories, UAVs are at the ready to perform those missions that are too dull, dirty, or dangerous for manned aircraft. However, the proliferation of this new technology has its fair share of challenges. Over 460 DoD UAV mishaps have occurred since 2001, with almost half resulting in damages of $2M or more. One incident almost ended in fatalities, when a UAV, suffering from loss of control, collided with a C-130. That loss of control is what …

Military Space Mission Design And Analysis In A Multi-Body Environment: An Investigation Of High-Altitude Orbits As Alternative Transfer Paths, Parking Orbits For Reconstitution, And Unconventional Mission Orbits, John N. Brick

Theses and Dissertations

High-altitude satellite trajectories are analyzed in the Earth-Moon circular restricted three-body problem. The equations of motion for this dynamical model possess no known closed-form analytical solution; therefore, numerical methods are employed. To gain insight into the dynamics of high-altitude trajectories in this multi-body dynamical environment, periapsis Poincare' maps are generated at particular values of the Jacobi Constant. These maps are employed as visual aids to generate initial guesses for orbital transfers and to determine the predictability of the long term behavior of a spacecraft's trajectory. Results of the current investigation demonstrate that high-altitude transfers may be performed for comparable, and …

Optimal Configurations For Aerosol Monitoring With Multi-Rotor Small Unmanned Aerial Systems, Inna D. Chavez

Theses and Dissertations

Applicability of aerosol sampling on multi-rotor unmanned aerial systems (UAS) platform was investigated. Multi-rotor UAS have impacts of wind speed, turbulence, and orientation possibly contributing to sampling bias. The SKC IMPACT sampler, Tecora C.A.Th.I.A., and modified three-dimensionally printed Universal Inlet for Airborne-Particle Size-Selective Sampling were selected based on particle size-selectivity and operational independence to wind. Airflow visualizations concluded that below UAS fuselage was optimal sampler placement. Tests were conducted with Arizona Road Dust in a still-air chamber, and aerosolized sugar in a wind tunnel. Inlet mounting was evaluated in, upright, upside-down, and horizontal orientations. Horizontal orientations of all inlets resulted …

Optimal Design Of A Hexakis Icosahedron Vacuum Based Lighter Than Air Vehicle, Joseph R. Schwemmer

Theses and Dissertations

Due to the rising cost and scarcity of helium, new methods to ensure buoyancy for lighter-than-air vehicles (LTAVs) are being sought. One alternative under study uses an internal vacuum to reduce the weight to buoyancy ratio. It's a novel approach; however, the vacuum presents challenges for the vehicle's structure. The structure must have minimum mass while preventing buckling and excess stress throughout the frame and membrane. The structure under analysis is a hexakis icosahedron with a membrane covering. Achieving minimum mass involves optimizing the structure under the loading conditions. Finite-element analysis (FEA) and direct-search methods are employed, providing an optimal …

Application Of Enlisted Force Retention Levels And Career Field Stability, Jamie T. Zimmermann

Theses and Dissertations

The Air Force’s success is influenced by the manpower it has. The end-strength is Congressionally mandated. Predicting personnel retention is critical to the operations of the military. Over 10 years ago, the Air Force produced enlisted career field sustainment lines based on manning. If a career field was over manned the authorizations were decreased, likewise if a career field was under manned the authorizations were increased. The constant fluctuation of manning caused bathtubs to be created and requirements to go unfilled. Currently, the Air Force produces enlisted career field sustainment lines based on the 5-year historical retention rates. This method …

Analyzing The Critical Supply Chain For Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Megan L. Muniz

Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) play a vital role in present day operations due their asset capability and ability to reduce risk to pilots’ lives. A complex supply chain network capable of producing and integrating all raw materials, components, sub- systems, and systems supports the successful acquisition of a UAS. Such a complex network is supported by vital supply chain decisions. Two important decisions regarding supply chain design include supplier selection and optimal flow of material and product Whether a decision maker wishes to design or interdict a supply chain, the methodology developed in this thesis provides a suite of tailorable …

Reliability And Cost Impacts For Attritable Systems, Bryan R. Bentz

Theses and Dissertations

Attritable systems trade system attributes like reliability and reparability to achieve lower acquisition cost and decrease cost risk. Ultimately, it is hoped that by trading these attributes the amount of systems able to be acquired will be increased. However, the effect of trading these attributes on system-level reliability and cost risk is difficult to express complicated reparable systems like an air vehicle. Failure-time and cost data from a baseline limited-life air vehicle is analyzed for this reliability and reparability trade study. The appropriateness of various reliability and cost estimation techniques are examined for these data. This research employs the cumulative …

2018 Military Retirement Options: An Expected Net Present Value Decision Analysis Model, Bret N. Witham

Theses and Dissertations

The 2016 NDAA authorized changes to the military retirement system transitioning from the legacy High-3 defined benefit annuity to the new Blended Retirement System (BRS). In exchange for a reduced defined benefit annuity, the BRS incorporates automatic and matching contributions to the member’s Thrift Savings Plan and a continuation payment offered at 12 years of service. In 2018,service members with less than 12 years of service will make an irrevocable decision between the two retirement systems. This research effort addresses the problem by developing a decision analysis model incorporating up to 27 different input variables. Service members can use the …