Engineering Commons^™

Design Of A Metadata Framework For The Environmental Models With An Example Hydrologic Application In Hydroshare, Mohamed M. Morsy, Jonathan L. Goodall, Anthony M. Castronova, Pabitra Dash, Venkatesh Merwade, Jeffrey M. Sadler, Mohammad Adnan Rajib, Jeffery S. Horsburgh, David G. Tarboton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Environmental modelers rely on a variety of computational models to make predictions, test hypotheses, and address specific problems related to environmental science and natural resource management. Scientists and engineers must devote significant effort to preparing these computational models. While significant attention has been devoted to sharing and reusing environmental data, less attention has been devoted to sharing and reusing environmental models. A first step toward increasing environmental model sharing and reuse is to define a general metadata framework for models that is flexible and, therefore, applicable across the wide variety of models used by environmental modelers. This paper proposes a …

Opportunities To Mainstream Gender In Water And Wastewater Infrastructure Projects: A Case Study In Barbados, Wainella Isaacs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

According to the World Resources Institute, Barbados is one of seven Caribbean countries ranked as being the most water stressed territories in the world. Prevailing drought conditions for the period 2010-2016 further compromised its water security while confirming predictions of a drier regional Caribbean climate. The simultaneous failing of at least 50-year-old water infrastructure at many points in the distribution network adds to these water stress conditions, and presents a financial burden to the local water utility in the form of lost revenues, and increased energy consumption for pumping.

Climate change and its impacts are not gender-neutral, and water infrastructure …

Ultrasonic Techniques For Air Void Size Distribution And Property Evaluation In Both Early-Age And Hardened Concrete Samples, Shuaicheng Guo, Qingli Dai, Xiao Sun, Ye Sun, Zhen Liu

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering Publications

Entrained air voids can improve the freeze-thaw durability of concrete, and also affect its mechanical and transport properties. Therefore, it is important to measure the air void structure and understand its influence on concrete performance for quality control. This paper aims to measure air void structure evolution at both early-age and hardened stages with the ultrasonic technique, and evaluates its influence on concrete properties. Three samples with different air entrainment agent content were specially prepared. The air void structure was determined with optimized inverse analysis by achieving the minimum error between experimental and theoretical attenuation. The early-age sample measurement showed …

Purdue Ect Report - Fourth Quarter 2016, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Fourth Quarter 2016

This is a quarterly report from the Purdue ECT.

Charge-Steering Cmos Amplifier Design And Testing Final Report, Nathan Whitehead, Shiuhua Wood Chiang

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The goal of this research was to demonstrate that the complementary and 4-stage amplifiers can achieve superior gain or speed over the 2-stage charge-steering amplifier in [1], and the conventional differential amplifier introduced in the ORCA grant proposal. The completion of this project has involved schematic design, layout, test bench setup, amplifier measurements, and characterization.

An Improved Electron Pre-Sheath Model For Tss-1r Current Enhancement Computations, Chunpei Cai

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

This report presents improvements of investigations on the Tethered Satellite System (TSS)-1R electron current enhancement due to magnetic limited collections. New analytical expressions are obtained for the potential and temperature changes across the pre-sheath. The mathematical treatments in this work are more rigorous than one past approach. More experimental measurements collected in the ionosphere during the TSS-1R mission are adopted for validations. The relations developed in this work offer two bounding curves for these data points quite successfully; the average of these two curves is close to the curve-fitting results for the measurements; and an average of 2.95 times larger …

Two-Phase Flow Pressure Drop In Superhydrophobic Channels, Kimberly A. Stevens, Julie Crockett, Daniel R. Maynes, Brian D. Iverson

Faculty Publications

Superhydrophobic surfaces have been shown to reduce drag in single-phase channel flow; however, little work has been done to characterize their drag-reducing ability found in two-phase flows. Adiabatic, airwater mixtures were used to explore the influence of hydrophobicity on two-phase flows and the hydrodynamics which might be present in flow condensation environments. Pressure drop measurements in a rectangular channel with one superhydrophobic wall (cross-section approximately 0.37 x 10 mm) and three transparent hydrophilic walls were obtained. Data for air/water mixtures with superficial Reynolds numbers ranging from 22–215 and 55–220, respectively, were obtained for superhydrophobic surfaces with three different cavity fractions. …

Using Gaussian Mixture Model And Partial Least Squares Regression Classifiers For Robust Speaker Verification With Various Enhancement Methods, Joshua Scott Edwards

Theses and Dissertations

In the presence of environmental noise, speaker verification systems inevitably see a decrease in performance. This thesis proposes the use of two parallel classifiers with several enhancement methods in order to improve the performance of the speaker verification system when noisy speech signals are used for authentication. Both classifiers are shown to receive statistically significant performance gains when signal-to-noise ratio estimation, affine transforms, and score-level fusion of features are all applied. These enhancement methods are validated in a large range of test conditions, from perfectly clean speech all the way down to speech where the noise is equally as loud …

Stress And Thermal Characterization Of 4h-Sic Microelectromechanical Structures, Colton Wells, Jheng Yi Jiang, Ting Fu Chang, Chih Fang Huang, Jiaxin Ke, Weijun Luo, Guangrui Xia, Kuan Yew Cheong, Feng Zhao

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this letter, the potential of single crystalline 4H-polytype silicon carbide (4H-SiC) based microelectromechanical structures as resistance thermometer for high temperature sensing were explored. A dopant-selective photoelectrochemical etching process was applied to release the sensing element – suspended microstructures on 4H-SiC substrate. Residual stress and stress gradient in the microstructure before and after release was examined by micro-Raman spectroscopy. Electrical resistance of the suspended microstructures at different temperatures were characterized and analyzed by a temperature-dependent electron mobility model.

Liquid-Gas Surface Tension Voltage Dependence During Electrowetting On Dielectric Of 5-90 Nm Gold Nanofluids, Saeid Vafaei, Karthik Chinnathambi, Theodorian Borca-Tasciuc

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article investigates the effective liquid-gas surface tension changes of water and 5-90nm gold nanofluids measured during electrowetting on dielectric experiments. The Young-Laplace equation for sessile droplets in air was solved to fit the experimental droplet shape and determine the effective liquid-gas surface tension at each applied voltage. A good agreement between experimental droplet shapes and the predictions was observed for all the liquids investigated in applied range of 0-30V. The measured liquid-gas effective surface tensions of water and gold nanofluid decreased with voltage. At a given voltage, the effective liquid-gas surface tension of gold nanofluids initially decreased as the …

Hyun Kwon, Hyun J. Kwon

Spring 2017

Today I had the wonderful opportunity to discover more of the story of one of our faculty, Hyun Kwon, chair of the Department of Engineering & Computer Science. The conversation left me inspired, reminding me yet again of the amazing faculty who work at Andrews University.

Hyun was born as a second child among three siblings in South Korea. Her father was a police office, her mom a full-time mom. She was a high achiever academically and after attending an elite science track high school, she continued to the prestigious Korean Advanced Institute of Technology (KAIST) with a full governmental …

Supporting Therapy-Centered Game Design For Brain Injury Rehabilitation, Jinghui Cheng

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Brain injuries (BI) are a major public health issue. Many therapists who work with patients who have had a BI include games to ameliorate boredom associated with repetitive rehabilitation. However, designing effective, appropriate, and engaging games for BI therapy is challenging. The challenge is especially manifested when considering how to consolidate the different mindsets and motivations among key stakeholders; i.e., game designers and therapists. In this dissertation, I investigated the ideation, creation, and evaluation of game design patterns and a design tool, GaPBIT (Game Design Patterns for BI Therapy) that leveraged patterns to support ideation of …

A Comparison Of Malfunction-Related Accidents For General Aviation Aircraft Manufactured In 1970–1984 And 2000–2014, Douglas Boyd, Jochen Hinkelbein

Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering

The United States general aviation fleet is aging with aircraft manufactured 35–39 years ago representing the most prevalent group. Since older aircraft are more prone to airframe corrosion, fatigue, and brittle electrical wiring, the present study was undertaken to determine whether malfunction-related accidents for general aviation aircraft manufactured between 1970 and 1984 were elevated relative to airplanes produced more recently (2000–2014).

The NTSB aviation accident database was used to identify piston-powered airplane accidents occurring over the 2005–2014 period. Aircraft manufacture year and fleet activity data were from the FAA. Statistical analyses employed contingency tables and Poisson distributions.

The proportion of …

Modeling And Computation Of The Maximum Braking Energy Speed For Transport Category Airplanes, Nihad E. Daidzic

Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering

Transport-category or FAR/CS 25 certified airplanes may occasionally become braking energy capacity limited. Such limitation may exist when heavy airplanes are departing airports at high-density altitudes, on relatively long runways, and/or possibly with some tailwind component. A maximum braking energy VMBE speed exists which may limit the maximum allowable takeoff decision/action speed V1. The ever-existing possibility of high-speed rejected takeoff in such conditions may also limit the airplane gross weight for declared available distances. To gain deeper insights and acquire better understanding of the topic, a theoretical model of the maximum braking energy and the related VMBE speed for T-category …

Optimal Bidding Strategy For A Strategic Power Producer Using Mixed Integer Programming, Sayed Abdullah Sadat

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The thesis focuses on a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for a bi-level mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC) considering chance constraints. The particular MPEC problem relates to a power producer’s bidding strategy: maximize its total benefit through determining bidding price and bidding power output while considering an electricity pool’s operation and guessing the rival producer’s bidding price. The entire decision-making process can be described by a bi-level optimization problem. The contribution of our thesis is the MILP formulation of this problem considering the use of chance constrained mathematical program for handling the uncertainties.

First, the lower-level poor operation …

A Comparison Of Malfunction-Related Accidents For General Aviation Aircraft Manufactured In 1970–1984 And 2000–2014, Douglas Boyd, Jochen Hinkelbein

Publications

The United States general aviation fleet is aging with aircraft manufactured 35–39 years ago representing the most prevalent group. Since older aircraft are more prone to airframe corrosion, fatigue, and brittle electrical wiring, the present study was undertaken to determine whether malfunction-related accidents for general aviation aircraft manufactured between 1970 and 1984 were elevated relative to airplanes produced more recently (2000–2014).

The NTSB aviation accident database was used to identify piston-powered airplane accidents occurring over the 2005–2014 period. Aircraft manufacture year and fleet activity data were from the FAA. Statistical analyses employed contingency tables and Poisson distributions.

The proportion of …

Measurement And Analysis Of Transport Vibration For Ltl Freight Utilizing Stowage Optimization Equipment, Jay Singh, Koushik Saha, David Leinberger, John Antle

Industrial Technology and Packaging

The random vibration spectra typically used in lab based simulations towards developing and validating optimized packages for distribution have been developed through past research that have studied global transport vibration environments. Approximately 67% of all the freight tonnage moved in the U.S. utilizes heavy duty Class 8 trucks. While the floor (suspension) based vibration simulation profiles for these types of trucks are available towards lab based simulation, there have been no studies investigating the impact of shelving and stacking systems typically used for optimization of freight stowage in truck trailers by many freight companies. It is important to quantify how …

Special Section On Electrical Contacts, Ronald A. Coutu Jr., Ravi Mahajan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Welcome to the Special Topics Section dedicated to the 2015 Holm Conference on Electrical Contacts. This Special Section contains six high-quality papers that comprehensively describe the state of the art and potential future directions for topics of great interest to our readers. The Editor-in-Chief (EIC), in consultation with the other EICs, Associate Editors (AEs), and domain experts, selects the topics for the Special Sections, and a Guest Editor or AE (GE/AE) who is a leading expert in the technical area then directs the solicitation and peer review of the papers. In cases where the GE/AE is also an author, the …

Engineered Nanocomposite Materials For Microwave/Millimeter-Wave Applications Of Fused Deposition Modeling, Juan De Dios Castro

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A variety of high-permittivity (high-k) and low-loss ceramic-thermoplastic composite materials as fused deposition modeling (FDM) feedstock, based on cyclo-olefin polymer (COP) embedded with sintered ceramic fillers, have been developed and investigated for direct digital manufacturing (DDM) of microwave components. The composites presented in this dissertation use a high-temperature sintering process up to 1500°C to further enhance the dielectric properties of the ceramic fillers. The electromagnetic (EM) properties of these newly developed FDM composites were characterized up to the Ku-band by using the cavity perturbation technique. Several models for prediction of the effective relative dielectric permittivity of composites based …

Thz Metamaterial Characterization Using Thz-Tds, Christopher H. Kodama, Ronald A. Coutu Jr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The purpose of this chapter is to familiarize the reader with metamaterials and describe terahertz (THz) spectroscopy within metamaterials research. The introduction provides key background information on metamaterials, describes their history and their unique properties. These properties include negative refraction, backwards phase propagation, and the reversed Doppler Effect. The history and theory of metamaterials are discussed, starting with Veselago’s negative index materials work and Pendry’s publications on physical realization of metamaterials. The next sections cover measurement and analyses of THz metamaterials. THz Time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) will be the key measurement tool used to describe the THz metamaterial measurement process. Sample …

Temperature Effects On The Swelling And Bentonite Extrusion Characteristics Of Gcls, James L. Hanson, Nazli Yesiller, Everett P. Allen

Civil and Environmental Engineering

This investigation was conducted to evaluate effects of temperature on swelling and bentonite extrusion properties of GCLs. The swelling characteristics were determined using standardized test procedures and extrusion characteristics were determined using a new test method developed by the authors. Tests were conducted on a conventional medium-weight woven/nonwoven GCL. The range of test temperatures was 2 to 98°C (swelling tests) and -5 to 100°C (extrusion tests). The extrusion tests were conducted under stresses between 100 and 400 kPa and moisture contents between 50 and 150%. Temperature had significant effects on both swell and extrusion. The swell index ranged from 21 …

Synthesis And Catalytic Applications Of Non-Metal Doped Mesoporous Titania, Syed Z. Islam, Suraj R. Nagpure, Doo Young Kim, Stephen E. Rankin

Chemical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications

Mesoporous titania (mp-TiO₂) has drawn tremendous attention for a diverse set of applications due to its high surface area, interfacial structure, and tunable combination of pore size, pore orientation, wall thickness, and pore connectivity. Its pore structure facilitates rapid diffusion of reactants and charge carriers to the photocatalytically active interface of TiO₂. However, because the large band gap of TiO₂ limits its ability to utilize visible light, non-metal doping has been extensively studied to tune the energy levels of TiO₂. While first-principles calculations support the efficacy of this approach, it is challenging to …

P26. Global Exponential Stabilization On So(3), Soulaimane Berkane

Western Research Forum

Global Exponential Stabilization on SO(3)

A Novel Hybrid Imaging System To Aid In Surgical Decision Making, Lawrence Yip, Madeleine Van De Kleut, Ivan Kosik, Astrid Chamson-Reig, Jeffrey Jl Carson

Western Research Forum

Background:

Breast cancer accounts for 25% of all cancer cases among women. In breast-conserving surgery, a common treatment, the tumour is excised with a healthy tissue margin. However, detection of the margin can be difficult. Current techniques to guide excision are often insufficient, and re-excision can occur up to 25% of the time.

Methods:

Photoacoustic imaging is a hybrid imaging modality that combines the advantages of optical imaging and ultrasound while using safe non-ionizing light. This project involves the development of a novel imaging system with a new scanner design to overcome common limitations and provide images to aid in …

Civil Engineering Professor Named Educator Of The Year | College Of Engineering, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

Utah State University professor of civil engineering Dr. Paul J. Barr has been named the 2017 Educator of the Year by the Utah Engineers Council.

Recombinant Elastin Based Nanoparticles For Targeted Gene Therapy, Dagmara Anne Monfort

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Gene therapy is a technique used to inactivate, replace or insert a corrective copy of a defective gene in order to help diseased tissues to function properly. Gene therapy is a promising treatment for many diseases cancer, cystic fibrosis, and Parkinson’s. There are different methods to introduce a gene to the cell; one of them is the use of viruses. Among viruses, lentiviruses have been popular vectors for gene delivery due to their efficient mode of gene delivery. However, the non-specific delivery of genes associated with viruses may result in undesirable side effects. Here, we propose a heterogeneous nanoparticle delivery …

Analysis Of Aggregate Mineralogy Using Libs, Bless Ann Varghese

Theses and Dissertations

The New Jersey Department of Transport (NJDOT) has a vested interest in the determination of the chemical composition and thereby the mineralogy of aggregates. Depending on the mineralogy of an aggregate sample, it may be inappropriate to use for construction and roadwork purposes. Current methods of determining the mineralogy of aggregates are costly in terms of time, money and convenience. As such, there is a desire for the development of an alternative and efficient method for aggregate mineralogical determination in the field.

The focus of this study is to develop a portable system for aggregate analysis in the field and …

Addressing Data Challenges For Bicycle Crash Analysis, Eleni Christofa

PSU Transportation Seminars

Although an increasing number of separated bicycle facilities have been appearing across the US over the last few years, the majority of bicyclists are still traveling on roadways shared with motorized vehicles.

As a result, bicycles are essentially double exposed to safety risk, due to their interactions with both motorized vehicles and other bicycles. In addition to this double exposure, data challenges–such as a lack of continuous counts and bicycle crash data—complicate the assessment of bicycle safety further.

This research presents a bicycle crash analysis framework for estimating bicycle crash rates accounting for both bicycle and motorized vehicle exposure as …

An Analytical System For Determining Disciplinary Vocabulary For Data-Driven Learning: An Example From Civil Engineering, Philippa Jean Otto

Dissertations and Theses

Data-driven learning (DDL), an inductive teaching approach in which students learn through corpus interaction, has gained recent traction as way to teach specialized vocabulary in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes. There is little research, however, that addresses how to choose specialized vocabulary for teaching with DDL.

This study addressed this gap in research by exploring the potential of a three-part analytical, corpus-based system for determining vocabulary to teach with DDL for a specific context of language use. This system included (1) identifying words that were significantly more frequent in a specialized expert corpus than in a corpus of general …

Effect Of Dual Ion Beam Irradiation (Helium And Deuterium) On Tungsten–Tantalum Alloys Under Fusion Relevant Conditions, Sean Gonderman, J K. Tripathi, T J. Novakowski, T Sizyuk, A Hassanein

School of Nuclear Engineering Faculty Publications

The selection of tungsten (W) as a divertor material in ITER is based on its high melting point, low erosion, and strong mechanical properties. However, continued investigation has shown W to undergo severe morphology changes in fusion-like conditions. Recent literature suggests alloying W with other ductile refractory metals, viz. tantalum (Ta) may resolve some of these issues. These results provide further motivation for investigating W–Ta alloys as a plasma-facing component (PFC) for ITER and future DEMO reactors. Specifically, how these alloy materials respond to simultaneous He+ and D+ ion irradiation, and what is the effect on the surface morphology when …