Engineering Commons^™

Development Of Polymer-Based In-Plane Nanopore For Dna Sequencing, Zheng Jia

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mechanically robust solid-state nanopores have the potential to be the next generation DNA sensing platforms. However, mass production and limited base-calling accuracy are the hurdles for solid-state nanopore based DNA sensing. In order to solve these problems, a polymer dual-nanopore device fabricated via high throughput nanoimprint lithography (NIL) was proposed to sequence DNA by time-of-flight (ToF) measurement. As a proof of concept, this study presents mononucleotides discrimination via ToF measurement using polymer in-plane dual-nanopore device.

First, fabrication of polymer in-plane nanopore with controllable dimensions was studied in consideration of experimental conditions and materials selection. Then, surface charge density effect on …

Unpacking The Double Bind: Exploring How The Intersection Of Race And Gender Shape The Undergraduate Experiences Of African American Women In Engineering, Anissa Guerin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This three-part qualitative study explored the factors that contribute to the success of African American female students’ persistence in engineering majors. This study also addressed obstacles African American female students face and overcome to persist in engineering majors. Examining African American women in engineering who persist would be an effective method to provide academic support and increase participation amongst this underrepresented group. In addition to exploring the challenges and barriers faced by African American women, this study also acknowledged the skills, perspectives and resources African American women bring to engineering and engineering education. Highlighting their distinctive contributions and attributes would …

Hyperspectral Imaging For Characterizing Single Plasmonic Nanostructure And Single-Cell Analysis, Nishir Sanatkumar Mehta

LSU Master's Theses

Orientation of plasmonic nanostructures is an important feature in many nanoscale applications such as photovoltaics, catalyst, biosensors DNA interactions, protein detections, hotspot of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), and fluorescence resonant energy transfer (FRET) experiments. Silver nanocubes with significant spectral signatures between 400-700 nm are observed in this experimental research. Whereas study of single cells will enable the analysis of cell-to-cell variations within a heterogeneous population. These variations are important for further analysis and understanding of disease propagation, drug development, stem cell differentiation, embryos development, and how cells respond to each other and their environment. Adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells possess the …

Groundwater Modeling For Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer Of Northeastern Louisiana, Ramazan Karakullukcu

LSU Master's Theses

The Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer (MRAA) locates in northeastern Louisiana, extending from the north border of Louisiana and Arkansas to south central Louisiana and underlies the Mississippi River Valley. The MRAA is the second most used groundwater source with about 390 million gallons per day in 2010, which accounts for 25% of all groundwater withdrawals in Louisiana. The groundwater uses are mainly for irrigation, public supply and industries. The excessive groundwater pumping and the economic importance of the MRAA have drawn attention to build a groundwater model to study future water resources management and sustainability plans. The model is the …

Study Of Rheology And Flow Behavior Of Magneto-Rheological Fluids Under The Influence Of A Magnetic Field And Its Potential Applications For Drilling And Completion Operations, John Edwin Estrada Giraldo

LSU Master's Theses

The use of magnetorheological fluids (MRF) is presented as an alternative to overcome some of the problems encountered in the drilling and completion of a well. The magnetorheological fluids can modify their rheological properties instantaneously under the influence of a magnetic field. In this thesis, MRF consist of a base fluid, magnetizable particles and a polymer that supports the particles. The magnetizable particles align in the direction of the magnetic field, thus modifying the rheology of the mixture. Because of this characteristic, the use of this fluid can have advantages in controlling fluid losses while drilling in narrow operating windows, …

In-Situ Electrochemical Analysis Of Microbial Activity, Ariane L. Martin, Pongsarun Satjaritanun, Sirivatch Shimpalee, Blake A. Devivo, John Weidner, Scott Greenway, J. Michael Henson, Charles E. Turick

Faculty Publications

Microbes have a wide range of metabolic capabilities available that makes them industrially useful organisms. Monitoring these metabolic processes is a crucial component in efcient industrial application. Unfortunately, monitoring these metabolic processes can often be invasive and time consuming and expensive, especially within an anaerobic environment. Electrochemical techniques, such as cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) ofer a non-invasive approach to monitor microbial activity and growth. EIS and CV were used to monitor Clostridium phytofermentans, an anaerobic and endospore-forming bacterium. C. phytofermentans ferments a wide range of sugars into hydrogen, acetate, and ethanol as fermentation by-products. For this …

Identification And Heterologous Reconstitution Of A 5-Alk(En)Ylresorcinol Synthase From Endophytic Fungus Shiraia Sp. Slf14, Huiwen Yan, Lei Sun, Jinge Huang, Yixing Qiu, Fuchao Xu, Riming Yan, Du Zhu, Wei Wang, Jixun Zhan

Biological Engineering Faculty Publications

A new type III polyketide synthase gene (Ssars) was discovered from the genome of Shiraia sp. Slf14, an endophytic fungal strain from Huperzia serrata. The intron-free gene was cloned from the cDNA and ligated to two expression vectors pET28a and YEpADH2p-URA3 for expression in Escherichia coli BL21(DE3) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae BJ5464, respectively. SsARS was efficiently expressed in E. coli BL21(DE3), leading to the synthesis of a series of polyketide products. Six major products were isolated from the engineered E. coli and characterized as 1,3-dihydroxyphenyl-5-undecane, 1,3-dihydroxyphenyl-5-cis-6'-tridecene,1,3-dihydroxyphenyl-5-tridecane, 1,3-dihydroxyphenyl-5-cis-8'-pentadecene, 1,3-dihydroxyphenyl-5-pentadecane and 1,3-dihydroxyphenyl-5-cis-10'-heptadecene, respectively, …

Effect Of Heating On Heat Capacity Of Vegetable Oils Used For Biofuel Production, Sailee Nitin Nagpurkar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Biodiesel has become a major renewable fuel for diesel engines particularly from various waste sources. New biodiesel production technologies are emerging with data demands for efficient process design. This project highlights the data requirements, gaps in the thermo-physical property data, and consolidation of experimental and estimation methods for effective process development. Knowing the thermodynamic properties of a substance is important in order to know what process or procedures it has to go under. The aim of this project is to assess the potential of vegetable oils to serve as feedstock for biofuel production by determining their heat capacity (Cp). Such …

Usu Researchers Find Significant Groundwater Exchanges Along The Logan River | College Of Engineering, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

Researchers in Northern Utah have demonstrated that the Logan River is highly dependent on karst aquifer discharge to maintain summer low flow when water demands are the highest.

Award-Winning Student Design Could Generate Alternative Energy Using Food Waste | College Of Engineering, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

Utah State University students created an award-winning design that helps one of Utah’s wastewater treatment facilities increase the use of renewable energy using food waste as a biofuel feedstock.

Fast Uncertainty Propagation Of Ultrasonic Testing Simulations For Mapod And Sensitivity Analysis, Xiaosong Du, Leifur Leifsson, Praveen Gurrala, Jiming Song, Slawomir Koziel

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Model-assisted probability of detection (MAPOD) and sensitivity analysis (SA) are widelyused for measuring the reliability of nondestructive testing (NDT) systems., such as ultrasonictesting (UT), and understanding the effects of uncertainty parameters. In this work, a stochastic expansion-based metamodel is used in lieu of the physics-based NDT simulation model for efficient uncertainty propagation while keeping satisfactory accuracy. The proposed stochasticmetamodeling approach is demonstrated for MAPOD and SA on a benchmark case for UT simulations on a fused quartz block with a spherically-void defect. The proposed approach is compared with direct Monte Carlo sampling (MCS), and MCS with Kriging metamodels. The results …

Multifidelity Modeling Of Ultrasonic Testing Simulations With Cokriging, Leifur Leifsson, Xiaosong Du, Slawomir Koziel

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Multifidelity methods are introduced to the nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of measurement systems. In particular, Cokriging interpolation metamodels of physics-based ultrasonic testing (UT) simulation responses are utilized to accelerate the uncertainty propagation in model-assisted NDE. The proposed approach is applied to a benchmark test case of UT simulations and compared with the current state-of-the-art techniques. The results show that Cokriging captures the physics of the problem well and is able to reduce the computational burden by over one order of magnitude compared to the state of the art. To the best of the author's knowledge, this the first time multifidelity methods …

Dispersing And Depositing Mose2 Onto Metal, Insulating, And Semiconducting Substrates Via Voltage-Controlled Deposition Technique, Kalyan Chakravarthy Byrisetty

LSU Master's Theses

In today’s world, consumer electronics are getting smaller than ever. These reductions in size are preceded by advancements in electronic materials engineering and related fields. The need for materials that have various properties and are suitable for applications also necessitated research on different materials. Growing research in the applications of graphene led the way to the discovery of materials that have similar properties to graphene. In this way, the transition metal di-chalcogenides (TMDCs) came into use for electrical engineering. Techniques are required to put TMDCs into application, however here we are going to explain the vital focus of our research …

Large Eddy Simulations Of Vertical Jets In Crossflow, Pranaya Pokharel

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Jets in crossflow (JICF) have applications ranging from oil spill to film cooling of turbine blades. Hence, an understanding of the flow physics is important. The majority of the research has been conducted for low velocity ratios between jet and crossflow with round jets. JICF is demonstrated to behave differently for high velocity ratios and different jet shapes. Circular and rectangular jets are commonly used in aircraft applications. Current study focuses on high velocity ratio JICF issuing from both circular and rectangular exit.

For simulating JICF, an in house code “Chem3D” is used with Large Eddy Simulation (LES) to model …

First-Principles Study On The Catalytic Role Of Cerium Dioxide In The Conversion Of Organic Compounds, Chuanlin Zhao

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Ceria is an earth-abundant material that has been widely used in heterogeneous catalysis, environmental catalysis, and energy applications thanks for its ability to readily convert between different oxidation states. The objective of this study is to theoretically elucidate the reaction mechanisms for the conversion of model organic compounds on ceria, in order to gain insights for the design of cost-effective and selective ceria-based catalysts. Acetaldehyde, acetic acid, and para-nitrophenyl phosphate monoester were selected as the model compounds to probe ceria surfaces. Density functional theory calculations can provide accurate predictions of adsorption and reaction energetics, which can be used to …

Image Zooming Using Corner Matching, Ronald Marsh, Md Nurul Amin, Charles Crandall, Raymond Davis

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This work was intended to direct the choice of an image interpolation/zoom algorithm for use in UND’s Open Prototype for Educational Nanosats (OPEN) satellite program. Whether intended for a space-borne platform or a balloon-borne platform, we expect to use a low cost camera (Raspberry Pi) and expect to have very limited bandwidth for image transmission. However, the technique developed could be used for any imaging application. The approach developed analyzes overlapping 3x3 blocks of pixels looking for “L” patterns that suggest the center pixel should be changed such that a triangle pattern results. We compare this approach against different types …

Containers And Reproducibility In Scientific Research, Sara Faraji Jalal Apostal, David Apostal, Ronald Marsh

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Numerical reproducibility has received increased emphasis in the scientific community. One reason that makes scientific research difficult to repeat is that different computing platforms calculate mathematical operations differently. Software containers have been shown to improve reproducibility in some instances and provide a convenient way to deploy applications in a variety of computing environments. However, there are software patterns or idioms that produce inconsistent results because mathematical operations are performed in different orders in different environments resulting in reproducibility errors. The performance of software in containers and the performance of software that improves numeric reproducibility may be of concern for some …

17-01 An Intersection Database Enhances Blind Pedestrians' Access To Complex Signalized Intersections: Stage 2 Analysis & Database Development, Dave Guth, Janet Barlow, Paul Ponchillia, Lee Rodegerdts, Dae Shik Kim, Kevin Lee

Transportation Research Center Reports

This project investigated the effects of providing verbal descriptions of intersections and crosswalks on the performance of street-crossing subtasks by individuals who are totally blind. The intersections included crosswalks that varied widely in geometric and operational characteristics, including the presence or absence of accessibility features. In the no-database condition, participants used their typical street-crossing procedures. In the database-condition, participants additionally listened to database-generated descriptions of the intersections and crosswalks before crossing. The database descriptions had significant positive effects on some subtasks (primarily “crossing” subtasks such as deciding when to cross) and not others (primarily “wayfinding” subtasks such as remaining in …

Design Of An Automatic Defect Identification Method Based Ecpt For Pneumatic Pressure Equipment, Bo Zhang, Yuhua Cheng, Chun Yin, Xuegang Huang, Sara Dadras, Hadi Malek

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, in order to achieve automatic defect identification for pneumatic pressure equipment, an improved feature extraction algorithm eddy current pulsed thermography (ECPT) is presented. The presented feature extraction algorithm contains four elements: data block selection; variable step search; relation value classification; and between-class distance decision function. The data block selection and variable step search are integrated to decrease the redundant computations in the automatic defect identification. The goal of the classification and between-class distance calculation is to select the typical features of thermographic sequence. The main image information can be extracted by the method precisely and efficiently. Experimental …

Usu Researchers Develop New Devices To Test Retinal Cells | College Of Engineering, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

Researchers at Utah State University have developed new devices to mechanically stress human cells in the lab.

New Findings Of Controls On Carbon Export In Permafrost Terrain | College Of Engineering, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

After two decades of collecting data, a team of researchers discovered new ways in which groundwater moves and controls the export of carbon from land to streams in the permafrost terrain of the Alaskan North Slope.

Reinforcement Learning In Robotic Task Domains With Deictic Descriptor Representation, Harry Paul Moore

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the field of reinforcement learning, robot task learning in a specific environment with a Markov decision process backdrop has seen much success. But, extending these results to learning a task for an environment domain has not been as fruitful, even for advanced methodologies such as relational reinforcement learning. In our research into robot learning in environment domains, we utilize a form of deictic representation for the robot’s description of the task environment. However, the non-Markovian nature of the deictic representation leads to perceptual aliasing and conflicting actions, invalidating standard reinforcement learning algorithms. To circumvent this difficulty, several past research …

Optical And X-Ray Technology Synergies Enabling Diagnostic And Therapeutic Applications In Medicine, Brian W. Pogue, Brian C. Wilson

Dartmouth Scholarship

X-ray and optical technologies are the two central pillars for human imaging and therapy. The strengths of x-rays are deep tissue penetration, effective cytotoxicity, and the ability to image with robust projection and computed-tomography methods. The major limitations of x-ray use are the lack of molecular specificity and the carcinogenic risk. In comparison, optical interactions with tissue are strongly scatter dominated, leading to limited tissue penetration, making imaging and therapy largely restricted to superficial or endoscopically directed tissues. However, optical photon energies are comparable with molecular energy levels, thereby providing the strength of intrinsic molecular specificity. Additionally, optical technologies are …

Non-Parametric Classification Of Time Series Using Permutation Ordinal Statistics, Aldo Duarte Vera Tudela

LSU Master's Theses

The present thesis explores some approaches to classify time series without prior statistical information using the concept of permutation entropy. Motivated by the results from a previous published and relevant work that set similarity relationships between EEG time series, a reproduction of the proposed approach was performed giving negative results. The failure to reproduce those results led to the conclusion that the approach of building statistics from permutation patterns have to be complemented with another metric in order to be used for classification purposes. The concept of Total Variation Distance (TVD) was then used to develop three algorithms to classify …

Hydrologic Observation, Model, And Theory Congruence On Evapotranspiration Variance: Diagnosis Of Multiple Observations And Land Surface Models, Ruijie Zeng, Ximing Cai

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper reconciles the state-of-the-art observations and simulations of evapotranspiration (ET) temporal variability through a diagnostic framework composed of an observation-model-theory triplet. Specifically, a confirmed theoretical tool, Evapotranspiration Temporal VARiance Decomposition (EVARD), is used as a benchmark to estimate ET monthly variance (σ²_ET) across the contiguous United States (CONUS) with inputs including hydroclimatic observations, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment-based terrestrial water storage, four observation-based products (ET_RSUW by the University of Washington, ET_RSMOD16 from MOD16 Global Terrestrial ET Data Set, ET_FLUXNET upscaled from of fluxtower observations, and ET_GLEAM from Global Land Evaporation Amsterdam Model), …

Keyword-Based Patent Citation Prediction Via Information Theory, Farshad Madani, Martin Zwick, Tugrul U. Daim

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Patent citation shows how a technology impacts other inventions, so the number of patent citations (backward citations) is used in many technology prediction studies. Current prediction methods use patent citations, but since it may take a long time till a patent is cited by other inventors, identifying impactful patents based on their citations is not an effective way. The prediction method offered in this article predicts patent citations based on the content of patents. In this research, Reconstructability Analysis (RA), which is based on information theory and graph theory, is applied to predict patent citations based on keywords extracted from …

Development Of Concrete And Reinforced Concrete In Near Future, V. Usmanov, B. Kurbanov

Problems of Architecture and Construction

The article depicts the main directions and tasks of the development of scientific technology in the field of concrete and reinforced in the future. The main direction of scientific and technical development on the sphere of c in the field of concrete and reinforced concrete is systematically to improve the features of materials.

Transverse Vibrations Of The Building On The Basis Of A Continuum Plate Model, D. Rumi, G. Ayubov

Problems of Architecture and Construction

In this article was considered the question of the oscillation of the buildings with a continuum plate model based on the finite difference method. The results of the amplitude-frequency characteristics of the building are compared by the finite element method with finite differences and the correctness of the solution of the obtained calculation model is justified.

Calculations Of The Viscous Plastic Displacement Of The Pulsed-Loaded Flat Frames, M. Aslanov

Problems of Architecture and Construction

The article is offering two methods of the determination of the final offsets and time of deformation of flat square-wave paradise, subject to pulsed load, attached to transverse element. The Offsets, achieving approximately one third of a part of the stairwell are determined by method modal approximation and method of the estimation of the borders for offsets; the dependency from plastic velocities of deformation is considered with uniform-viscous defining equations.

Determination Of The Longitudinal Reactions Of The Complex Node Under The Underground Structure Earthquakes, N. Egamov, N. Kholbutayev, G. Karimova

Problems of Architecture and Construction

In paper the longitudinal is investigated seismic oscillations of difficult knot of underground structures at earthquakes. The gained results shows, that nosing motions of difficult knot on lateral a pipe the considerable. It confirms results of observation of an aftereffect destructive earthquakes.