Engineering Commons^™

Means And Methods Of Residential Construction And Design In Remote Areas Of Southeast Alaska, Joseph Anthony Masters

Construction Management

Building in the remote locations of Southeast Alaska is currently an unexplored area of construction that has been avoided due to the complications that accompany such projects. Many property owners in the Southeast Alaska region face challenges due to a lack of common practices that would simplify the construction process, particularly those deprived of road access and utility services. These potential residents must rely on sustainable techniques and alternative modes of material transportation, creating an abundance of planning concerns. Additionally, while code restrictions are limited due to the uniqueness of these properties, certain codes regarding the Alaska Department of Natural …

Cal Poly Construction Management Student’S Main Determinants For Potential Employment Opportunities: A Guide For Employers, David Joseph Van Buskirk Ii

Construction Management

California Polytechnic State University’s Construction Management department has an excellent reputation. This reputation, boosted by a 100% placement rate, attracts an abundant number of recruiters, a number that continues to grow every year. With the large number of recruiters coming to campus, students often find themselves in the fortunate situation of having multiple offers and having the opportunity to select amongst various companies. To be competitive, employers would best serve to cater their recruitment process to suit the needs of the students they are trying to hire. While plenty of research has been conducted to investigate and determine how recruiters …

Interdisciplinary Student Competition For California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo, Forest G. Gobble

Construction Management

Cal Poly has a reputation for producing some of the best qualified graduates in their respective fields of study. While this is very important, curricular activities involving collaboration between students within the same college are limited (excluding same major). Beyond that, collaboration opportunities across colleges are even more rare. When graduates enter the workforce, many are thrust into highly collaborative environments across various disciplines. Industry professionals have shown a strong desire for young people who have had exposure to realistic problems and experience working with other professions outside of their own field of expertise. The question needing answering is, would …

Implementing Weekly Work Plan Lab Into Cm 214 - Residential Construction, David Maslan

Construction Management

A schedule is one of the primary components of any construction project and can determine the success of a job. Schedules most often contain high-level line items and lack the details it takes to actually implement daily work in the field. Subcontractors, as the specialists, understand the myriad of smaller tasks that a master schedule omits. It is the job of a superintendent to extract this information from subcontractors during pull plans, to build precise schedules, called weekly work plans (WWP). At Cal Poly it is expected that students receive a well-rounded curriculum in how to build various types of …

Increasing The Accessibility Of Bim Training Within The Aec Industry, Xavier Caldera

Construction Management

At the turn of the 21^st century, the rise of new technology has helped modernize the AEC industry. Architects, engineers, general contractors, and foremen can build, collaborate, and communicate more efficiently using BIM to help facilitate the building process. The benefits of BIM have been proven through increased coordination, risk mitigation, and cost optimization. However, with the increasing use of BIM, there is a growing education gap between construction workers and BIM technology. Currently, there are three main avenues to learn BIM: in-house company training, attending college, or paying to learn independently online. The foundation for a BIM learning …

Feasibility Of Collaborative Alliance Association For Non-Competitive Small Business Contractors, Brody Allen Gill

Construction Management

Small business construction contracting firms around the country struggle with growing their business successfully. This is a result of unknown results from new business practices and few resources to initiate programs that can improve productivity and efficiency. A simple solution could give small business construction contractors the opportunity to share ideas, compare company analytics and promote professional networking in a non-competitive, collaborative alliance. The goal of this project is to determine if a collaborative alliance association using data benchmarking would be an effective solution for non-competitive small business contractors to grow their businesses. Thereafter being proven effective, is such an …

A Case Study: The First Coastal Nuclear Decommissioning Project In California, Willie Aaron Quiros

Construction Management

San Onofre Nuclear Generating System (SONGS) is one of two nuclear power plants in California. Since the shut down in 2012, there is only one actively remaining, Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which is set to shut down in 2024. This paper will examine the decommissioning of SONGS thus far; the first coastal nuclear decommissioning project in California’s stringent permitting process. This project was awarded as a joint venture to AECOM and Energy Solutions, both having experiencing in the field of nuclear decommissioning. This paper will outline what nuclear decommissioning challenges have been in the past; general steps of decommissioning …

Online Platform For Construction Management Internship Reviews, Erica Zetterquist

Construction Management

This paper discusses the process I went through to develop a website for Construction Management students to review their internships. The scope of the project was to create an online platform similar to “Polyratings” and “Rate My Professors” for Cal Poly Construction Management students to review internships. Reviews from peers would be accessible to students to help them through their job search process. Relative information such as salary, company culture, and other information collected in my survey allows peers better context of the internship experience. Part of the creating process of my website included research into web design sites like …

Comparative Case Study: Understanding Why Clients Hire A 3rd Party Construction Manager, Brandon Ivan Perez

Construction Management

Many construction management students are unfamiliar with the project management for fee industry and the relationship between a construction manager and a project owner. Construction Management programs typically teach their students the variety of project delivery methods available to a client for their project. The Agency-CM project delivery method is not the most common project delivery method, and students have expressed interest in learning more about this side of the construction industry. This senior project will illustrate (3) different real-world projects where former clients chose to hire Cumming Corporation as an 3rd party construction manager and what factors drove them …

Cal Poly Women In Construction Youth Outreach: Girl Scouts In Construction Program, Katherine I. Love

Construction Management

Construction is, historically, a predominately male-dominated major, but today, countless efforts are made to change this. Girl Scouts in Construction was created to help the Cal Poly Women in Construction Club increase their youth outreach. This event was hosted to give a positive-hands on construction experience to increase construction exposure to girls at a young age. Through organizing this event, the connections between the Cal Poly Women in Construction Club and the Girl Scouts of California's Central Coast, National Association of Women in Construction, Cal Poly Construction Management Department, and a few general contracting companies were all strengthened. At this …

Interdisciplinary Studio Pavilion [Isp] 2019, Rhett Turner

Construction Management

The Wine History Project of San Luis Obispo (the “WHP”) has been collecting and presenting viniculture artifacts from the last two centuries. With the need to display and maintain important artifacts comes the need for a structure that can fulfill such criteria. The purpose of this project was to design a pavilion that could entertain individuals while also displaying artifacts for the WHP. Additionally, the project’s design followed the recently trending method of integrated project delivery, which included the Architecture and Architectural Engineering departments. From the beginning, the design was influenced by its value propositions while still working within the …

Interdisciplinary Studio Pavilion 2019, Andrew Jacob Cumpian

Construction Management

The Wine History Project of San Luis Obispo is an organization aimed to preserve the wine making history of the Central Cost of California and share regional viticulture artifacts collected throughout the region. This interdisciplinary pavilion project required design exploration, form development, and constructability review execution to generate a design for a mobile wine-artifact pavilion that will be exhibited throughout the SLO county and beyond. Designing the mobile pavilion required coordination with both architects and architectural engineers to aid in the creation and design a pavilion that was not only visually appealing and functional, but also met the constructability requirements …

Shell House Demo, Cameron Tilmont

Construction Management

The Shell House demo was recommended by the Associate Dean of CAED as a potential senior project for students. Built decades ago it had deteriorated over time. The purpose of this project was to clean up Poly Canyon Architecture Graveyard, making it a nice, safe place to visit. This project interested the author because it was something different and was geared more towards heavy civil.

To get started, a permit had to be submitted to the CAL POLY building department. This process took longer than expected. The permit wasn’t released until an environmental impact test was conducted, resulting in asbestos …

Stem And The Skilled Labor Shortage In The United States, Nicolo Tetsuo Hoshizaki

Construction Management

There is a growing shortage of skilled labor in the United States construction industry. As the baby boomer generation prepares to leave the workforce, this problem is getting exponentially worse. As Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics programs have become the U.S. Department of Education’s top priority, more young adults are pursuing higher education and entering the STEM workforce. Using quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, this paper provides an explanation as to why a logical method to assuage the labor shortage in construction is to employ vocational programs that prepare young adults to enter the industry similar to how STEM programs …

Second-Harmonic Optical Vortex Conversion From Ws₂ Monolayer, Arindam Dasgupta, Jie Gao, Xiaodong Yang

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Wavelength, polarization and orbital angular momentum of light are important degrees of freedom for processing and encoding information in optical communication. Over the years, the generation and conversion of orbital angular momentum in nonlinear optical media has found many novel applications in the context of optical communication and quantum information processing. With that hindsight, here orbital angular momentum conversion of optical vortices through second-harmonic generation from only one atomically thin WS2 monolayer is demonstrated at room temperature. Moreover, it is shown that the valley-contrasting physics associated with the nonlinear optical selection rule in WS2 monolayer precisely determines the output circular …

Detection And Mitigation Of Attacks In Nonlinear Stochastic System Using Modified Detector, Chandreyee Bhowmick, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel attack detection method is presented for a nonlinear system with known dynamics using the measured output in the presence of additive process and measurement noise. False data injection (FDI) and replay attacks are considered using a modified fault detector. The difference between the measured and the estimated output from an adaptive observer, often known as the innovation signal, is generated and shown to have a Gaussian distribution with non-zero mean. This innovation signal in conjunction with the modified detector is utilized to detect attacks under a stable controller using the estimated state vector. Unlike FDI attack, where the …

Neutron Detection Performance Of Gallium Nitride Based Semiconductors, Chuanle Zhou, Andrew G. Melton, Eric Burgett, Nolan Hertel, Ian T. Ferguson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Neutron detection is crucial for particle physics experiments, nuclear power, space and international security. Solid state neutron detectors are of great interest due to their superior mechanical robustness, smaller size and lower voltage operation compared to gas detectors. Gallium nitride (GaN), a mature wide bandgap optoelectronic and electronic semiconductor, is attracting research interest for neutron detection due to its radiation hardness and thermal stability. This work investigated thermal neutron scintillation detectors composed of GaN thin films with and without conversion layers or rare-earth doping. Intrinsic GaN-based neutron scintillators are demonstrated via the intrinsic 14N(n, p) reaction, which has a small …

Strain-Stress Study Of Alxga1−Xn/Ain Heterostructures On C-Plane Sapphire And Related Optical Properties, Yining Feng, Vishal Saravade, Ting Fung Chung, Yongqi Dong, Hua Zhou, Bahadir Kucukgok, Ian T. Ferguson, Na Lu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This work presents a systematic study of stress and strain of AlxGa_1−xN/AlN with composition ranging from GaN to AlN, grown on a c-plane sapphire by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, using synchrotron radiation high-resolution X-ray diffraction and reciprocal space mapping. The c-plane of the AlxGa_1−xN epitaxial layers exhibits compressive strain, while the a-plane exhibits tensile strain. The biaxial stress and strain are found to increase with increasing Al composition, although the lattice mismatch between the AlxGa1−xN and the buffer layer AlN gets smaller. A reduction in the lateral coherence lengths and an increase in the edge and …

Aisle Design For Order Picking Operations With Unit-Load Replenishment., Dominic Ian Sleigh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The warehouse design problem has been addressed in the last decade with fewer constraints than ever before. Between optimization for unit load and order picking warehouses, the former has had extensively more research performed. Unit load optimization efforts have promised labor savings of 20-22%. Of the existing research for order-picking warehouses, only small improvements of less than 4% have been claimed. We propose the design optimization for order-picking warehouses requires consideration for inherently incurred unit load operations from pallet inbound activities, as well as forward-pick area replenishment. We perform experiments comparing optimization of aisle design using order picking data with …

Stabilization Of Bimodal Colloidal Systems Via Nanoparticle Haloing In Microgravity., Luke Hawtrey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Colloidal suspensions typically contain a multi-phase system of solid particles suspended in a liquid medium. Colloids are widely used in industrial applications such as inks, paints, motor oils, foods, cosmetics, and many more. Colloidal systems are typically formed by the interaction of the attractive van der Waals forces and one or more repulsive forces. These repulsive forces include electrostatic repulsion, steric hindrance, and nanoparticle haloing. Nanoparticle Haloing (NPH) is a phenomenon discovered in 2001 as a viable method to stabilize colloidal systems of uncharged silica microparticles using highly charged zirconia nanoparticles. For this thesis the effects of NPH were tested …

Design Of A System For Inexpensive Underwater Fiber Optic In Vivo Imaging And Mass Balance Accounting Of Tissue Engineering Candidates, Nicole Melissa Bueno Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this project is to create a prototype bioreactor that mimics a cell’s microenvironment. The ultimate goal is to set up an array of 36 bioreactors in parallel and monitor them with an array of sensors that will enable full mass and energy balance accounting and in vivo imaging. This thesis will analyze the various options available for cell imaging, as well as describe the construction of a bioreactor design in which cell images can be obtained without removing the cells from the bioreactor. The hypothesis for this project is that imaging of unstained cells in an aquarium …

A Systematic Approach For Automatically Answering General-Purpose Objective And Subjective Questions, Lok Prasad Acharya

Theses and Dissertations

In this era of information explosion, people generally rely on the Internet, and more precisely, the search engines to get answers to their questions. However, what a search engine can do is just retrieve documents. Given some keywords, it only returns the relevant ranked documents that contain the keywords. Although users often want a precise answer to a question, they are left to extract answers from the documents themselves. This is where Automatic Question Answering (AQA) systems come into play. An AQA system takes questions in natural language as input and searches related answers in the set of documents and …

Earth – Mars Cycler Vehicle Conceptual Design, Bhumika Patel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis summarizes a conceptual design for an Earth – Mars Cycler vehicle designed to transfer astronauts between Earth and Mars. The primary objective of the design study is to accommodate the crews’ needs and to estimate the overall mass and power required during Earth – Mars transfer. The study defines a concept of operations and system functional requirements and discusses the systems breakdown and subsystems design analysis. Systems developed for the cycler vehicle is designed primarily for the S1L1 cycler trajectory. The initial sizing of cycler subsystems is based on reference data from historical human spaceflight. The study performed …

Tuning Networks For Prosocial Behavior: From Senseless Swarms To Smart Mobs [Commentary], Sun Sun Lim, Roland Bouffanais

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Social media have been seen to accelerate the spread of negative content such as disinformation and hate speech, often unleashing a reckless herd mentality within networks, further aggravated by malicious entities using bots for amplification. So far, the response to this emerging global crisis has centered around social media platform companies making reactive moves that appear to have greater symbolic value than practical utility. Proposes a solution to favor prosocial behavior via social networks.

Application Of Solar Water Heaters For Industrial Use, Lucas T. Atkins

Theses and Dissertations

Solar water heating is a technology that is mainly used for domestic water heating in residential homes. In most applications, the idea is to make a home “off the grid” in that there is no requirement for outside infrastructure or need for energy utility to provide power to this home. This falls in line with the trend of “going green” in an effort to reduce energy use, increase efficiency, or reduce emissions and other harmful byproducts.

This technology can be adapted to reduce the energy costs of industrial manufacturing plants. By eliminating the need for certain sections of a process …

Graphene-Fibers Hybrid Structures As Adsorbents For Heavy Metal Ions In Aqueous Solutions, Dulce C. Capitanachi

Theses and Dissertations

The project focuses on the study of graphene-fiber hybrid structures for adsorption of heavy metal ions in aqueous solutions. Polyvinyl alcohol-based graphene–fiber structures were created using centrifugal spinning and a carbonization process.

Characterization methods of the graphene–fiber hybrid structures (GFHS) include SEM, FTIR, TGA, and EDX. Single-step batch-type adsorption studies were performed to analyze the interaction of Cu (II) and Pb (II) ions onto GFHS surface. Different heavy metal ion concentrations were used, as well as a variation of pH values. Elemental analysis of the adsorbent’s surface after filtration experiments was studied by EDX and spectroscopy to verify the presence …

Design And Testing Of A Modular Laser System With Laser Machining And Bioprinting Capabilities, Jesus Gonzalez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis introduces the applications of ultrafast lasers while focusing on their bioprinting capabilities. A custom system was designed to utilize a femtosecond laser for 2D and 3D applications. The characteristics of lasers allow them to be efficiently used in machining, 3D printing, research, and more. Their power and precision allow them to be used for delicate work such as bioprinting. Bioprinting is a field holding great potential to benefit society. Studies conducted over the years prove its usefulness in printing cells and biomaterials, while showing there is still much to improve upon before being able to print fully functioning …

Investigating The Effects Of Altitude And Flap Setting On The Specific Excess Power Of A Pa-28-161 Piper Warrior, Tjimon Meric Louisy

Theses and Dissertations

The high number of General Aviation (GA) accidents attributed to Loss of Control suggests that GA pilots are lacking low speed awareness and are unable to appropriately recognize when the aircraft is in a low energy state. There is, therefore, an urgent need for the development of an energy management system which is applicable to GA aircraft that can alert the pilot in situations of low energy conditions and recommends to the pilot the appropriate corrective action to restore conditions to a safe energy state. This will require the development of an algorithm that governs this energy management system that …

Comparison Of Naïve Bayes Algorithm And Decision Tree C4.5for Hospital Readmission Diabetes Patientsusing Hba1c Measurement, Utomo Pujianto, Asa Luki Setiawan, Harits Ar Rosyid, Ali M. Mohammad Salah

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Diabetes is a metabolic disorder disease in which the pancreas does not produce enough insulin or the body cannot use insulin produced effectively. The HbA1c examination, which measures the average glucose level of patients during the last 2-3 months, has become an important step to determine the condition of diabetic patients. Knowledge of the patient's condition can help medical staff to predict the possibility of patient readmissions, namely the occurrence of a patient requiring hospitalization services back at the hospital. The ability to predict patient readmissions will ultimately help the hospital to calculate and manage the quality of patient care. …

Impact Of Metazooplankton Filter Feeding On Escherichia Coli Under Variable Environmental Conditions, Niveen S. Ismail, Brittney M. Blokker, Tyler R. Feeney, Ruby H. Kohn, Jingyi Liu, Vivian E. Nelson, Mariah C. Ollive, Sarah B. L. Price, Emma J. Underdaha

Engineering: Faculty Publications

The fecal indicator bacterial species Escherichia coli is an important measure of water quality and a leading cause of impaired surface waters. We investigated the impact of the filter-feeding metazooplankton Daphnia magna on the inactivation of E. coli. The E. coli clearance rates of these daphnids were calculated from a series of batch experiments conducted under variable environmental conditions. Batch system experiments of 24 to 48 h in duration were completed to test the impacts of bacterial concentration, organism density, temperature, and water type. The maximum clearance rate for adult D. magna organisms was 2 ml h1 organism1. Less than …