Engineering Commons^™

Jme 4110 Mechanical Engineering Design Project:Stir It Up, Josephn Biermann, Brittany Gray, Nathan Hopper

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

We are designing and building a working prototype that will be able to mix a separated beverage back to a fully integrated state. This will allow for mixing in a beverage that was separated and would possibly just be thrown away because it doesn’t taste right anymore. This will save food waste from separated beverages being thrown away as well as be environmentally friendly since it would reduce the use of single use cups and straws.

The Body Dryer Project, Laura Bailey, Luke Maichel, Nick Zuelke

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

The information contained in this report pertains to the engineering practices to develop a working prototype of a body dryer. A body dryer that is described in the context of this report, is defined as a static structure with two air streams. The main function of the body dryer project is to investigate a replacement for a towel when one is finished showering or after swimming. This report will contain future improvements that were investigated but were not able to implement in the working prototype due to the boundaries of the system. A special shout out to Indoor Comfort Team, …

Automated Single Stream Recycling Sorting Bin (Assrsb), Daniel Pogue, Robert O'Neill, Javi Perez

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

As you probably know, there are many different sorting systems used by various manufacturers. It would be desirable to have a similar sorting system that uses multiple technologies to sort items, but that could easily be interchangeable with various items. Currently, recycling efforts are often costly, as humans need to sort single-stream recycling. It would be beneficial to have a system that sorts various plastic, paper, cardboard, glass, etc.

Portable Car Lift, Ramiz Ahmed, Emel Saeidghafelpoor, Nick Pusateri

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

No abstract provided.

Optimus Pipefitter, Jeffrey Strecker, Vito Fiordimondo, Ben Prinster

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

As climate change becomes a larger threat, the idea of space travel becomes a less abstract idea. If we, as a species, get to a point where settling on a new planet becomes a necessity it would be worthwhile for as much infrastructure to be built before our arrival as possible. The problem this project solves is the ability to autonomously assemble piping for plumbing and drainage. To most people, piping is not what comes to mind when thinking about modern living. Although it is certainly essential.

One Knee Stair Negotiator, Naomi Marciante, Seth Trevino

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

The design-to-prototype process for a One Knee Stair Negotiator, designed to reduce or eliminate the weight on one leg while climbing stairs. The decision-making processes, fabrication plan, engineering analysis, safety concerns, and risk assessments are documented. Pertinent photographs, drawings, and video links are included for clarification.

Evaluation Of Biodegradability Characteristics Of Cellulose-Based Film As Per Is/Iso 14855-1, Narayan C. Saha Dr, Gaurav Madhu Dr, Diksha B. Kadu Ms

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

Biodegradable polymers (especially those derived from plant sources) begin their lifecycle as renewable resources, usually in the form of starch or cellulose. In this paper, the evaluation of biodegradability of cellulose-based polymer film under controlled composting conditions as per the guidelines of IS/ISO 14855 (Part-1) standard has been described. Microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) powder was taken as positive-control polymer. The apparatus used to analyse the degree and rate of biodegradation was developed indigenously. The validation of the biodegradability testing apparatus was also performed as per the prescribed test method given in IS/ISO 14855-1.

Implementing Population-Based Mass Drug Administration For Malaria: Experience From A High Transmission Setting In North Eastern Uganda, Richard Elliott

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Mass drug administration (MDA) is a suggested mean to accelerate efforts towards elimination and attainment of malaria-free status. There is limited evidence of suitable methods of implementing MDA programme to achieve a high coverage and compliance in low-income countries. The objective of this paper is to assess the impact of this MDA delivery strategy while using coverage measured as effective population in the community and population available.

Methods: Population-based MDA was implemented as a part of a larger program in a high transmission setting in Uganda. Four rounds of interventions were implemented over a period of 2 years at …

A Comparison Of Drone Imagery And Ground-Based Methods For Estimating The Extent Of Habitat Destruction By Lesser Snow Geese (Anser Caerulescens Caerulescens) In La Pérouse Bay, Andrew Barnas, Brian J. Darby, Gregory S. Vandeberg, Robert F. Rockwell, Susan N. Ellis-Felege

Biology Faculty Publications

Lesser snow goose (Anser caerulescens caerulescens) populations have dramatically altered vegetation communities through increased foraging pressure. In remote regions, regular habitat assessments are logistically challenging and time consuming. Drones are increasingly being used by ecologists to conduct habitat assessments, but reliance on georeferenced data as ground truth may not always be feasible. We estimated goose habitat degradation using photointerpretation of drone imagery and compared estimates to those made with ground-based linear transects. In July 2016, we surveyed five study plots in La Pérouse Bay, Manitoba, to evaluate the effectiveness of a fixed-wing drone with simple Red Green Blue …

Surface Kinetic Energy Distributions In The Global Oceans From A High-Resolution Numerical Model And Surface Drifter Observations, Xiaolong Yu, Aurelien Ponte, Shane Elipot, Dimitris Menemenlis, Edward Zaron, Ryan Abernathey

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The surface kinetic energy of a 1/48◦ global ocean simulation and its distribution as a function of frequency and location are compared with the one estimated from 15,329 globally distributed surface drifter observations at hourly resolution. These distributions follow similar patterns with a dominant low-frequency component and well-defined tidal and near-inertial peaks globally. Quantitative differences are identified with deficits of low-frequency energy near the equator (factor 2) and at near-inertial frequencies (factor 3) and an excess of energy at semidiurnal frequencies (factor 4) for the model. Owing to its hourly resolution and its near-global spatial coverage, the array of surface …

Analysis Of Individual Molecular Dynamics Snapshots Simulating Wetting Of Surfaces Using Spheroidal Geometric Constructions, Aleksandr Abramov, Stefan Iglauer

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Accurate characterization of wettability of minerals is important for efficient oil recovery and carbon geosequestration. In studies where molecular dynamics simulations are used to compute the contact angle, emphasis is often placed on results or theoretical details of the simulations themselves, overlooking potentially applicable methodologies for determination of the contact angle. In this manuscript, a concept of a method utilizing spheroidal geometric constructions to estimate the contact angle of a water droplet on a silica surface in carbon dioxide atmosphere is outlined and applied to the final snapshots of two molecular dynamics simulation runs. Two carbon dioxide pressures and two …

Post-Treatment Of Nanofiltration Polyamide Membrane Through Alkali-Catalyzed Hydrolysis To Treat Dyes In Model Wastewater, Byung-Moon Jun, Yeomin Yoon, Chang Min Park

Faculty Publications

This research focused on the influence of post-treatment using alkali-catalyzed hydrolysis with a full-aromatic nanofiltration (NF) polyamide membrane and its application to the efficient removal of selected dyes. The post-treated membranes were characterized through Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, goniometry, and zeta-potential analysis to analyze the treatment-induced changes in the intrinsic properties of the membrane. Furthermore, the changes in permeability induced by the post-treatment were evaluated via the measurement of water flux, NaCl rejection, and molecular weight cutoff (MWCO) under different pH conditions and post-treatment times. Major changes induced by the post-treatment in terms of physicochemical properties were the enhancement of …

Knn Optimization For Multi-Dimensional Data, Arialdis Japa

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

The K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm is a simple but powerful technique used in the field of data analytics. It uses a distance metric to identify existing samples in a dataset which are similar to a new sample. The new sample can then be classified via a class majority voting of its most similar samples, i.e. nearest neighbors. The KNN algorithm can be applied in many fields, such as recommender systems where it can be used to group related products or predict user preferences. In most cases, the performance of the KNN algorithm tends to suffer as the size of the …

Teaching Approximations Of Mechanical Engineering Practice Through Designing And Building Robots: An Approach Inspired By Monozukuri, Kevin Delaney, Ger Nagle

Conference Papers

Engineering design is a complex subject and undergraduate students, having learnt to quantify the performance of specific elements of engineering objects, often find it difficult to integrate these elements into quite basic design concepts. Upon entering the workforce engineering graduates must be able to do a great deal more than solve the technical problems taught in engineering school. To help students develop real-world engineering skills as part of their engineering education, the Mechanical Engineering Discipline in Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) introduced Problem Based Learning (PBL) for Third Year Mechanical Engineering students in 2005.

A recent review of this teaching …

Optimizing Impression Counts For Outdoor Advertising, Yipeng Zhang, Yuchen Li, Zhifeng Bao, Songsong Mo, Ping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we propose and study the problem of optimizing theinfluence of outdoor advertising (ad) when impression counts aretaken into consideration. Given a database U of billboards, each ofwhich has a location and a non-uniform cost, a trajectory databaseT and a budget B, it aims to find a set of billboards that has themaximum influence under the budget. In line with the advertisingconsumer behavior studies, we adopt the logistic function to takeinto account the impression counts of an ad (placed at differentbillboards) to a user trajectory when defining the influence measurement. However, this poses two challenges: (1) our problemis …

Coresets For Minimum Enclosing Balls Over Sliding Windows, Yanhao Wang, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Coresets are important tools to generate concise summaries of massive datasets for approximate analysis. A coreset is a small subset of points extracted from the original point set such that certain geometric properties are preserved with provable guarantees. This paper investigates the problem of maintaining a coreset to preserve the minimum enclosing ball (MEB) for a sliding window of points that are continuously updated in a data stream. Although the problem has been extensively studied in batch and append-only streaming settings, no efficient sliding-window solution is available yet. In this work, we first introduce an algorithm, called AOMEB, to build …

Synthesis, Characterization And Selected Application Of Chitosan-Coated Magnetic Iron Oxide Nanoparticles, Hany A. Elazab Dr

Chemical Engineering

In this research, we report an efficient method to prepare highly active chitosan-coated magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles by implementing co-precipitation technique which is used for waste water treatment applications. Chitosan-coated magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles were synthesized and characterized using TEM, XRD, and XPS. A comparative study has been made between chitosan powder and chitosan coated with magnetic nanoparticles with respect to the rate of adsorption of copper from aqueous solution. It was also experimentally verified that chitosancoated magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles are much more effective in adsorption of heavy metals than chitosan powder and it takes just few minutes instead …

Workshop On Convergence In Biological Engineering, Keith Roper

Funded Research Records

No abstract provided.

Defect Detection Of Concrete Structures Through Sounding Data Analytics, Ran Cao, Anil K. Agrawal

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Impact sounding has been recognized as an effective technique to detect delamination in concrete structures, such as concrete decks. An enormous amount of sounding data can be generated/collected by the autonomous inspection systems equipped with impactors and microphones. However, the main challenge in the practical application of this technology is the development of advanced data analysis approaches for identifying defects from impact sounding data. In this study, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) analysis and power-spectral density (PSD) analysis are combined to extract useful features of sounding data generated by the impact hammer. It has been found that the EMD method …

Image Data Analytics To Support Engineers’ Decision-Making, Tianyi Zhao, Zhaozheng Yin, Ruwen Qin, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Robots such as drones have been leveraged to perform structure health inspection such as bridge inspection. Big data of inspection videos can be collected by cameras mounted on drones. In this project, we develop image analysis algorithms to support bridge engineers to analyze the big video data. Bridge engineers define the region of interest initially, then the algorithm retrieves all related regions in the video, which facilitates the engineers to inspect the bridge rather than exhaustively check every frame of the video. To perform this task, we propose a Multi-scale Siamese Neural Network. The network is initially trained by one-shot …

Updating Bridge Resilience Assessment Based On Corrosion And Foundation Scour Inspection Data, Yijian Zhang, Reginald Desroches, Iris Tien

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Aging and degradation of bridge structural components due to corrosion and scour create severe safety issues in the structural system and can lead to possible bridge failures. Collecting and analyzing inspection data provide a way to monitor and assess the safety condition of bridges. This paper proposes a framework to utilize collected inspection data to assess the condition of a bridge through updating both component- and system-level fragility curves of the bridge. Particularly, collected data such as mass loss of reinforcement and depth of scour hole are utilized to update the mechanical properties of structural members in the finite element …

Distributed Strain Measurements In A Steel-Concrete Composite Floor Beam Under Multi-Point Loading At Ambient Temperature, Matthew A. Klegseth, Yi Bao, Liang Fan, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

A 12.8 m-long composite floor beam consisting of a steel reinforced concrete slab with profiled metal decking supported by a W18×35 steel beam was tested under multi-point bending load at ambient temperature. Material strain and temperature were measured using fiber optic sensors. Measurements were taken along more than 150 m of fiber optic cables using Pre-Pump Pulse Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (PPP-BOTDA) and Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR). Along the beam centerline, three strain and two temperature fiber loops were placed to characterize the strain and temperature distribution along and through the depth of the concrete slab. The neutral …

Synchro-Squeezed Adaptive Wavelet Transform And Its Application To Impact Echo Signals For Pavement Defect Detection, Hongya Qu, Titantian Li, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

In this study, the recently-proposed adaptive wavelet transform (AWT) and synchro-squeezed adaptive wavelet transform (SSAWT) are introduced with their optimum transformation parameters automatically searched to derive at a desirable time-frequency representation of any dynamic response. The AWT enables the selectivity of time and frequency resolution in a domain of interest and the synchro-squeezing algorithm reduces the dispersion of a scalogram of the AWT, facilitating an accurate extraction of frequency features over time. The effectiveness of AWT is first demonstrated with an illustrative signal of four time segments covering various frequency distribution cases. In comparison with conventional wavelet transform, the AWT …

Proceedings Of The 9th International Conference On Structural Health, Monitoring Of Intelligent Infrastructure: Transferring Research Into Practice, International Society For Structural Health Monitoring Of Intelligent Infrastructure (Ishmii), Genda Chen, Sreenivas Alampalli

INSPIRE Conference Contributions

No abstract provided.

Communication: First-Principles Evaluation Of Alkali Ion Adsorption And Ion Exchange In Pure Silica Lta Zeolite (Vol 149, 131102, 2018), Vancho Kocevski, Benjamin D. Zeidman, Charles H. Henager Jr., Theodore M. Besmann

Faculty Publications

Using first-principles calculations, we studied the adsorption of alkali ions in pure silica Linde Type A (LTA) zeolite. The probability of adsorbing alkali ions from solution and the driving force for ion exchange between Na+ and other alkali ions at the different adsorption sites were analyzed. From the calculated ion exchange isotherms, we show that it is possible to exchange Na+ with K+ and Rb+ in water, but that is not the case for systems in a vacuum. We also demonstrate that a solvation model should be used for the accurate representation of ion exchange in an LTA and that …

Relative Navigation Of Fixed-Wing Aircraft In Gps-Denied Environments, Gary J. Ellingson, Kevin M. Brink, Timothy Mclain

Faculty Publications

The future impact of small unmanned aircraft will depend in part on how well they can navigate in GPS-denied and GPS-degraded environments. While several GPS-denied navigation methods have been introduced, small fixed-wing aircraft have, for the most part, been neglected. This paper introduces a method to enable GPS-denied fixed-wing flight while accounting for fixed-wing-specific sensing requirements. This work uses a methodology called relative navigation as an overarching framework. The development of an odometry-like, front-end, EKF-based estimator that utilizes only a monocular camera and an inertial measurement unit is presented. The filter uses the measurement model of the multi-state-constraint Kalman filter. …

Subsurface Mimo: A Beamforming Design In Internet Of Underground Things For Digital Agriculture Applications, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

In underground (UG) multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO), the transmit beamforming is used to focus energy in the desired direction. There are three different paths in the underground soil medium through which the waves propagates to reach at the receiver. When the UG receiver receives a desired data stream only from the desired path, then the UG MIMO channel becomes three path (lateral, direct, and reflected) interference channel. Accordingly, the capacity region of the UG MIMO three path interference channel and degrees of freedom (multiplexing gain of this MIMO channel requires careful modeling). Therefore, expressions are required for the degree of …

The Linc Complex, Mechanotransduction, And Mesenchymal Stem Cell Function And Fate, Tasneem Bouzid, Eunju Kim, Brandon D. Riehl, Amir Monemian Esfahani, Jordan Rosebohm, Ruiguo Yang, Bin Duan, Jung Yul Lim

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Faculty Publications

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) show tremendous promise as a cell source for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, and are understood to be mechanosensitive to external mechanical environments. In recent years, increasing evidence points to nuclear envelope proteins as a key player in sensing and relaying mechanical signals in MSCs to modulate cellular form, function, and differentiation. Of particular interest is the Linker of Nucleoskeleton and Cytoskeleton (LINC) complex that includes nesprin and SUN. In this review, the way in which cells can sense external mechanical environments through an intact nuclear envelope and LINC complex proteins will be briefly described. Then, …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Dinitro Pentamethylene Tetramine (Dpt), M. M. Seleet, S. A. Hassanien, M. A. Radwan, M. A. Sadek

Chemical Engineering

Preparation of dinitro pentamethylene tetramine (DPT) through the action of nitrating mixture formed of ammonium nitrate and fuming nitric acid on hexamine in presence of acetic acid, acetic anhydride and p-formaldehyde has been carried out. DPT was also prepared from hexamine dinitrate which is an important intermediate appears through preparation of DPT from hexamine directly. Prepared DPT was purified and then characterized through the determination of melting point, element test, FTIR spectrometry, UV spectrometry, and high performance liquid chromatography "HPLC". The obtained results were reliable and consistent with the literature.

License To Launch: The Regulatory Future Of Commercial Ballistic Travel, Jacob Weindling

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.