Engineering Commons^™

Mechanical Study On Edge-Oxidized Graphene Oxide (Eogo) Reinforced Concrete, Mohammad Khawaji

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is known that graphene oxide (GO) has superior mechanical properties and can enhance mechanical properties of cement composites. However, Hummer produced conventional GOs have been limited to small-scale specimens (e.g., cement paste and mortar) and applications to concrete have not been implemented due to their high cost and large volume of concrete. Edge-oxidized graphene oxide (EOGO) is a low-cost, carbon-based nanomaterial produced by a mechanochemical process with ball milling and a non-toxic oxidizing agent. The low cost (less than $50/kg) of EOGO enables its use in bulk-scale concrete materials/structures, which is a prerequisite for the field implementation. In this …

Enhanced Concrete Bridge Assessment Using Artificial Intelligence And Mixed Reality, Enes Karaaslan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Conventional methods for visual assessment of civil infrastructures have certain limitations, such as subjectivity of the collected data, long inspection time, and high cost of labor. Although some new technologies (i.e. robotic techniques) that are currently in practice can collect objective, quantified data, the inspector's own expertise is still critical in many instances since these technologies are not designed to work interactively with human inspector. This study aims to create a smart, human-centered method that offers significant contributions to infrastructure inspection, maintenance, management practice, and safety for the bridge owners. By developing a smart Mixed Reality (MR) framework, which can …

Investigation Of Coastal Vegetation Dynamics And Persistence In Response To Hydrologic And Climatic Events Using Remote Sensing, Subrina Tahsin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Coastal Wetlands (CW) provide numerous imperative functions and provide an economic base for human societies. Therefore, it is imperative to track and quantify both short and long-term changes in these systems. In this dissertation, CW dynamics related to hydro-meteorological signals were investigated using a series of LANDSAT-derived normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data and hydro-meteorological time-series data in Apalachicola Bay, Florida, from 1984 to 2015. NDVI in forested wetlands exhibited more persistence compared to that for scrub and emergent wetlands. NDVI fluctuations generally lagged temperature by approximately three months, and water level by approximately two months. This analysis provided insight …

A Study Of Perceptions On Incident Response Exercises, Information Sharing, Situational Awareness, And Incident Response Planning In Power Grid Utilities, Joseph Garmon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The power grid is facing increasing risks from a cybersecurity attack. Attacks that shut off electricity in Ukraine have already occurred, and successful compromises of the power grid that did not shut off electricity to customers have been privately disclosed in North America. The objective of this study is to identify how perceptions of various factors emphasized in the electric sector affect incident response planning. Methods used include a survey of 229 power grid personnel and the use of partial least squares structural equation modeling to identify causal relationships. This study reveals the relationships between perceptions by personnel responsible for …

Sintering Behavior, Structural, And Catalytic Properties Of Ytterbium Oxide (Yb2o3), Alina Aftab

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Ytterbia (Yb₂O₃) is an oxide ceramic, whose magnetic properties and crystal structure were studied to some extent in the past. However, the information on Yb₂O₃'s catalytic properties is lacking. Therefore, in this work, the sintering behavior and catalytic properties of Yb₂O₃ were examined. Yb₂O₃ ceramic samples were made using pressureless sintering of the commercially available Yb₂O₃ with 99.99% purity powder. The powder was first uniaxially pressed at 20 MPa in a steel die followed by pressureless sintering at different temperatures of 900 ⁰C …

Fabrication And Characterization Of Planar-Structure Perovskite Solar Cells, Guoduan Liu

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Currently organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is one kind of promising photovoltaic technology due to low production cost, easy fabrication method and high power conversion efficiency.

Charge transport layers are found to be critical for device performance and stability. A traditional electron transport layer (ETL), such as TiO₂ (Titanium dioxide), is not very efficient for charge extraction at the interface. Compared with TiO₂, SnO₂ (Tin (IV) Oxide) possesses several advantages such as higher mobility and better energy level alignment. In addition, PSCs with planar structure can be processed at lower temperature compared to PSCs with …

Collagen Based Multicomponent Interpenetrating Networks As Promising Scaffolds For 3d Culture Of Human Neural Stem Cells, Human Astrocytes, And Human Microglia, Rachel Van Drunen, Andrea C. Jimenez-Vergara, Erin H. Tsai, Rachel Tchen, Tyler Cagle, Anne B. Agee, James Roberts, Jennifer M. Steele, Dany J. Munoz Pinto

Engineering Faculty Research

This work describes for the first time the fabrication and characterization of multicomponent interpenetrating networks composed of collagen I, hyaluronic acid, and poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate for the 3D culture of human neural stem cells, astrocytes, and microglia. The chemical composition of the scaffolds can be modulated while maintaining values of complex moduli within the range of the mechanical performance of brain tissue (∼6.9 kPa) and having cell viability exceeding 84%. The developed scaffolds are a promising new family of biomaterials that can potentially serve as 3D in vitro models for studying the physiology and physiopathology of the central nervous system.

Compressible Turbulent Reactions For Hypersonic Propulsion Applications, Jonathan Sosa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work presents the first measurement of turbulent burning velocities of a highly-turbulent compressible standing flame induced by shock-driven turbulence in a Turbulent Shock Tube. High-speed schlieren, chemiluminescence, PIV, and dynamic pressure measurements are made to quantify flame-turbulence interaction for high levels of turbulence at elevated temperatures and pressure. Distributions of turbulent velocities, vorticity and turbulent strain are provided for regions ahead and behind the standing flame. The turbulent flame speed is directly measured for the high-Mach standing turbulent flame. From measurements of the flame turbulent speed and turbulent Mach number, transition into a non-linear compressibility regime at turbulent Mach …

Shock Tube Investigations Of Novel Combustion Environments Towards A Carbon-Neutral Future, Samuel Barak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) cycles are being investigated for the future of power generation. These cycles will contribute to a carbon-neutral future to combat the effects of climate change. These direct-fired closed cycles will produce power without adding significant pollutants to the atmosphere. For these cycles to be efficient, they will need to operate at significantly higher pressures (e.g., 300 atm for Allam Cycle) than existing systems (typically less than 40 atm). There is limited knowledge on combustion at these pressures or at the high dilution of carbon dioxide. Nominal fuel choices for gas turbines include natural gas and syngas …

Probing The Influence Of Cx43 And Glucose On Endothelial Biomechanics, Md Mydul Islam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Endothelial cells (ECs) form the innermost layer of all vasculature and constantly receive both biochemical and biomechanical signals, yielding a plethora of biomechanical responses. In response to various biochemical or biomechanical cues, ECs have been documented to generate biomechanical responses such as tractions and intercellular stresses between the cell and substrate and between adjacent cells in a confluent monolayer, respectively. Thus far, the ability of endothelial tight junctions and adherens junctions to transmit intercellular stresses has been actively investigated, but the role of gap junctions is currently unknown. In addition, there is no report of the independent influence of hyperglycemia …

Linear Systems With Integral Constraints On Transient Step-Response, Bilal Salih

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The topic of shaping and controlling transient responses of dynamic systems has important applications. Achieving a desired transient response is an essential design requirement for many control system. In this research, we discuss the impact on the transient response of linear systems when it is subjected to a set of integral constraints. The investigation is generalized in a theoretical framework. Formulation of three types of integral constraints is first discussed. The underlying goal of the problem is to shape the step response to generate a specific type of transient response which in turn satisfies the desired integral constraints. The problem …

Integration Of Computational Fluid Dynamics And Machine Learning For Modeling Scaffold Pore Structure For Tissue Engineering, Amir Rouhollahi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Freeze-casting is a popular method to produce biomaterial scaffolds with highly porous structures. Three approaches are developed to predict the scaffold pore structure as function of experimental conditions including mold geometry, material and thermal boundary conditions. First, a mathematical model integrating Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with Population Balance Model is developed to predict average pore size (APS) of 3D porous chitosan alginate scaffolds and to assess the influence of the geometrical parameters of mold on scaffold pore structure. The model predicted the crystallization pattern and APS for scaffolds cast in different diameter molds and filled to different heights. The predicted …

Development Of Poly-Vinyl Alcohol Stabilized Silver Nanofluids For Solar Thermal Applications, James Walshe, George Amarandei, Hind Ahmed, Sarah Mccormack, John Doran

Articles

Nanofluids offer the potential to address the low thermal conductivities found in conventional heat transfer fluids, through their unique electrical, optical and thermal properties, but their implementation remains restricted due to absorption and stability limitations. Here, we characterize and exploit the distinctive plasmonic properties exhibited by polyvinyl-alcohol stabilized silver nanostructures by tuning their absorption and thermal properties through controlling the nanoparticle size, morphology and particle-size distribution configuration at the synthesis stage. The photo-thermal efficiency of different water-based silver nanofluids under a standard AM1.5G weighted solar spectrum were explored, the influence of each of these components on the resulting fluids performance …

A New Era For Reuse Social Enterprises In Ireland? The Capacities Required For Achieving Sustainability, Gerard Doyle

Articles

The conventional linear relationship between production and consumption is no longer sustainable. A key component of the transition towards a more sustainable society is the continuation in use of products for longer and the development of a repair and reuse culture. Reuse social enterprises contribute to addressing a range of environmental, economic and social issues facing urban areas. This paper is concerned with, firstly, the motivations for citizens to establish reuse social enterprises in Ireland. Secondly, the paper examines the factors that contribute to reuse social enterprises in Ireland becoming sustainable.

The research points to the necessity of reuse social …

The Expanding Business Of The Entrepreneurial University: Job Creation, Mike Murphy, Michael Dyrenfurth

Books/Book chapters

This chapter explores the role of universities in job creation. It does this by taking two approaches. The first is to look at how the university sees its role as expanding from traditional first and second mission activities to encompass third mission activities including industry engagement and how this supports job creation and economic development. The second approach is to examine how new jobs are created in a geographic region or country, and the role that the university can play in support of this. Typical third mission activities such as incubators, technology transfer, and science parks are also examined; including …

Business In Engineering Education: Issues, Identities, Hybrids, And Limits, Mike Murphy, Pat O'Donnell, John Jameson

Books/Book chapters

This chapter explores how engineering students are broadened in their education through the teaching of non-engineering subjects, such as business subjects, in order to develop critical thinking skills and self-knowledge of what it means to be an engineer. The goal of the chapter is to provide a commentary on the level of interaction, from design of courses to design of curricula, between business faculty and engineering faculty, and the results of that interaction. This chapter sets out to (i) explore whether there appears to be a place in engineering education curricula for reflective critique of assumptions related to business thinking, …

International Observations: United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Sdgs) And Digitalisation, Mike Murphy

Presentations

•Superficial thoughts on SDGs and Digitalisation •International Observations: –Skills and competences –Networking •Including a word about the EU –Broadening the Curriculum

Spatial Coherency In Colourisation, Sean Mullery, Paul F. Whelan

Session 6: Applications, Architecture and Systems Integration

Automatic colourisation is the function of inferring colour information from a grey-scale prior and then combining the colour with the grey-scale to form a colourised version of the image. We identify Spatial Coherence as a particular weakness in methods that use Convolutional Neural Networks for colourisation. Generated colours do not adhere to semantic edges and are not consistent within boundaries where we would expect uniform colour. Spatial Coherence, while often evident to the human eye, does not yet have an objective metric. We show, by segmentation of the combined ab channels of the CIEL*a*b* colour space, that a segmentation based …

Neuromorphic Event-Based Action Recognition, S. Harrigan, S. Colman, D. Kerr, P. Yogarajah, Z. Fang, C. Wu

Session 6: Applications, Architecture and Systems Integration

An action can be viewed as spike trains or streams of events when observed and captured by neuromorphic imaging hardware such as the iniLabs DVS128. These streams are unique to each action enabling them to be used to form descriptors. This paper describes an approach for detecting specific actions based on space-time template matching by forming such descriptors and using them as comparative tools. The developed approach is used to detect symbols from the popular RoShambo (rock, paper and scissors) game. The results demonstrate that the developed approach can be used to correctly detect the motions involved in producing RoShambo …

Synthetic Positron Emission Tomography Using Conditional-Generative Adversarial Networks For Healthy Bone Marrow Baseline Image Generation, Patrick Leydon, Martin O'Connell, Derek Greene, Kathleen Curran

Session 6: Applications, Architecture and Systems Integration

A Conditional-Generative Adversarial Network has been used for a supervised image-to-image transla- tion task which outputs a synthetic PET scan based on real patient CT data. The network is trained using only data of patients with healthy bone marrow metabolism. This allows for a patient specific synthetic healthy baseline scan to be produced. This can be used by a clinician for comparison to real PET data in the absence of a baseline scan or to aid in the diagnosis of conditions such as Multiple Myeloma which manifest as changes in bone marrow metabolism.

Development Of A Nanodrop Shape Analysis Tool For Installation In A Novel Nanodrop Spectrophotometer, Colin Monaghan, Jane Courtney

Session 6: Applications, Architecture and Systems Integration

The rapid identification of liquid composition is an important task integral to a wide range of industries including medical, pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, and vinification. To aid in this identification spectroscopy can be utilised, however specialised instrumentation must be developed to deliver quantitative information. A spectrophotometer uses spectral data to identify chemical composition of droplets. However, to accurately perform this function, prior knowledge of the size and shape of the droplet is essential to understand chemical quantity. Whilst image data can be easily captured with a high definition camera, the image analysis to translate images into a relevant region of interest (ROI) …

Place Recognition In Challenging Conditions, Saravanabalagi Ramachandran, John Mcdonald

Session 2: Deep Learning for Computer Vision

Place recognition in a visual SLAM system helps build and maintain a map from multiple traversals of the same environment while closing loops to correct drift accumulated over time. Despite the marked success in visual place recognition research over the past decade, it remains a challenging problem in the context of variations caused due to different times of the day, weather, lighting and seasons. In this paper, we address this problem by progressively training convolutional neural networks in a siamese fashion to generate embeddings that encode semantic and visual features for sequence-aligned image pairs taken at different timescales and viewpoints. …

Mouldingnet: Deep-Learning For 3d Object Reconstruction, Tobias Burns, Barak Pearlmutter, John B. Mcdonald

Session 2: Deep Learning for Computer Vision

th the rise of deep neural networks a number of approaches for learning over 3D data have gained popularity. In this paper, we take advantage of one of these approaches, bilateral convolutional layers to propose a novel end-to-end deep auto-encoder architecture to efficiently encode and reconstruct 3D point clouds. Bilateral convolutional layers project the input point cloud onto an even tessellation of a hyperplane in the (d Å1)-dimensional space known as the permutohedral lattice and perform convolutions over this representation. In contrast to existing point cloud based learning approaches, this allows us to learn over the underlying geometry of the …

Comparing Data Augmentation Strategies For Deep Image Classification, Sarah O'Gara, Kevin Mcguinness

Session 2: Deep Learning for Computer Vision

Currently deep learning requires large volumes of training data to fit accurate models. In practice, however, there is often insufficient training data available and augmentation is used to expand the dataset. Historically, only simple forms of augmentation, such as cropping and horizontal flips, were used. More complex augmentation methods have recently been developed, but it is still unclear which techniques are most effective, and at what stage of the learning process they should be introduced. This paper investigates data augmentation strategies for image classification, including the effectiveness of different forms of augmentation, dependency on the number of training examples, and …

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks For Estimating Lens Distortion Parameters, Sebastian Lutz, Mark Davey, Aljosa Smolic

Session 2: Deep Learning for Computer Vision

In this paper we present a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict multiple lens distortion parameters from a single input image. Unlike other methods, our network is suitable to create high resolution output as it directly estimates the parameters from the image which then can be used to rectify even very high resolution input images. As our method it is fully automatic, it is suitable for both casual creatives and professional artists. Our results show that our network accurately predicts the lens distortion parameters of high resolution images and corrects the distortions satisfactory.

Bioelectrical Circuits: Lecture 5, Jacek P. Dmochowski, Luis Cardoso

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Developing A Real-World Vehicle Trip Dataset Through Public Travel Surveys And Applying It To Battery Electric Vehicle Performance Study, Nizar Ali Khemri

Wayne State University Dissertations

Real-world second-by-second vehicle driving cycle data is very important for research and development of the traditional fuel-powered vehicles, the emerging electric vehicles, and the hybrid vehicles. A project solely dedicated to generating such information would be extremely costly and time-consuming. Alternatively, we introduce a method to develop such a database by utilizing two publicly available passenger vehicle travel surveys; the 2004-2006 Puget Sound Regional Commission (PSRC) Travel Survey and the 2011 Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) Travel Survey. The two surveys complement each other – the former is in low time resolution but covers vehicle driving and non-driving operation for over …

Data-Driven Intelligent Scheduling For Long Running Workloads In Large-Scale Datacenters, Guoyao Xu

Wayne State University Dissertations

Cloud computing is becoming a fundamental facility of society today. Large-scale public or private cloud datacenters spreading millions of servers, as a warehouse-scale computer, are supporting most business of Fortune-500 companies and serving billions of users around the world. Unfortunately, modern industry-wide average datacenter utilization is as low as 6% to 12%. Low utilization not only negatively impacts operational and capital components of cost efficiency, but also becomes the scaling bottleneck due to the limits of electricity delivered by nearby utility. It is critical and challenge to improve multi-resource efficiency for global datacenters.

Additionally, with the great commercial success of …

Performance Of Detection Algorithms For Massive Mimo Systems, Mohammad Abdellatif, Ayatalla Abdelrahman

Electrical Engineering

MIMO or Multiple- input- Multiple- output is one of the latest technologies, which has been developed to combat the major problems encountering wireless communications. MIMO was developed to improve communication's capacity, range, reliability, throughput, to overcome bandwidth limitations, and to combat fading. This paper investigates the performance of massive MIMO which is the core of the fifth generation that is expected to be released by 2020. Massive MIMO is a promising technology that allows the use of hundreds of antennas at the base station to achieve optimal reliability, capacity, and throughput. However, it suffers from multiple limitations in the detection …

Telemedicine: An Iot Application For Healthcare Systems, Mohammad Abdellatif, Walaa Mohamed

Electrical Engineering

Telemedicine is the abstract term used to define medical services delivered through Information Technology and Telecommunications. With the growing advancements in the field of data mining, pattern recognition, expert systems, and image processing, the motivation of such a technology has increased. This allowed Telemedicine to be a stable solution especially because people are starting to trust the system more for its higher accuracy. This paper proposes a Telemedicine platform between the patient and the doctor. This platform belongs to the internet of medical things (IoMT) by enabling multiple medical sensors to connect to a server either using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or …