Engineering Commons^™

Wearable Blood Pressure Device For Detection Of Orthostatic Hypotension, Mariam Hafez

Honors Scholar Theses

Orthostatic hypotension may be described as an inevitable response from the body in the form of a drop in blood pressure after changing positions. This quick drop in blood pressure can cause a syncopal episode, often injuring victims. There are limitations in the currently used cuff-type blood pressure sensor, which is used in healthcare settings, in that it does not continuously measure blood pressure. This research project developed a wearable device that measures heart rate variability (HRV) to detect changes in blood pressure using the correlation between the two measurements. The instrumentation was developed and included a commercially available pulse …

A Real-Time Internet Of Things (Iot) Based Affective Framework For Monitoring Emotions In Infants, Alhagie Sallah

Electrical Engineering Theses

An increase in the number of working parents has led to a higher demand for remotely monitoring activities of babies through baby monitors. The baby monitors vary from simple audio and video monitoring frameworks to advance applications where we can integrate sensors for tracking vital signs such as heart rate, respiratory rate monitoring. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of devices where each device can is recognizable in the network. The IoT node is a sensor or device, which primarily functions as a data acquisition unit. The data acquired through the IoT nodes are wirelessly transmitted to the …

Effects Of Hard-To-Soft Segment Ratios On The Synthesis And Physico-Mechanical Properties Of Polyurethane Films, Aaron C. Wilson

Mechanical Engineering Theses

Blood-contacting cardiovascular stents often induce a secondary clotting event due to unrestricted enzymatic activities. The use of hemocompatible polyurethane coatings on these implantable devices is one of the most promising methods to reduce device rejection. In this study, four commercial polyurethane films of various thicknesses and compositions were evaluated for their anticoagulation properties. Results suggested that these films exhibited excellent thermal and physico-mechanical properties while capable of increasing contact time with blood plasma by over a thousand-fold as compared to a control surface. Due to the unknown structure and composition of these commercial films, polyurethane samples were synthesized from toluene …

Applied-Force Oscillations In Avalanche Dynamics, Louis W. Mcfaul, Gregory Sparks, Jordan Sickle, Jonathan T. Uhl, Wendelin J. Wright, Robert Maass, Karin A. Dahmen

Faculty Journal Articles

Until now most studies of discrete plasticity have focused on systems that are assumed to be driven by a monotonically increasing force; in many real systems, however, the driving force includes damped oscillations or oscillations induced by the propagation of discrete events or “slip avalanches.” In both cases, these oscillations may obscure the true dynamics. Here we effectively consider both cases by investigating the effects of damped oscillations in the external driving force on avalanche dynamics. We compare model simulations of slip avalanches under mean-field dynamics with observations in slip-avalanche experiments on slowly compressed micrometer-sized Au specimens using open-loop force …

Estimation Of Evapotranspiration And Energy Fluxes Using A Deep-Learning-Based High-Resolution Emissivity Model And The Two-Source Energy Balance Model With Suas Information, Alfonso F. Torres-Rua, Andres Ticlavilca, Mahyar Aboutalebi, Héctor Nieto, Maria Mar Alsina, Alex White, John H. Prueger, Joseph Alfieri, Lawrence Hipps, Lynn Mckee, William Kustas, Calvin Coopmans, Nick Dokoozlian

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Surface temperature is necessary for the estimation of energy fluxes and evapotranspiration from satellites and airborne data sources. For example, the Two-Source Energy Balance (TSEB) model uses thermal information to quantify canopy and soil temperatures as well as their respective energy balance components. While surface (also called kinematic) temperature is desirable for energy balance analysis, obtaining this temperature is not straightforward due to a lack of spatially estimated narrowband (sensor-specific) and broadband emissivities of vegetation and soil, further complicated by spectral characteristics of the UAV thermal camera. This study presents an effort to spatially model narrowband and broadband emissivities for …

Fabrication Of Nanoscale Columnar Diodes By Glancing Angle Deposition, Jacob D. Weightman

Macalester Journal of Physics and Astronomy

Glancing angle deposition (GLAD) is a process in which thin films are deposited onto a substrate with obliquely incident vapor together with precisely controlled azimuthal substrate rotation. Ballistic shadowing effects due to the oblique incidence produce nanoscale structures, and a variety of feature shapes, including tilted columns, helices, and vertical columns can be achieved by varying the azimuthal rotation during the deposition process. Due to this control of morphology and the compatibility of the process with a wide variety of materials, GLAD films have found applications in a variety of fields including sensing, photonics, photovoltaics, and catalysis, where they are …

Large Scale Grid Integration Of Wind And Solar Power With Storage, Nicholas Moore

Macalester Journal of Physics and Astronomy

The current energy grid in the United States is dominated by carbon intense energy generation methods that are based on production when and where it is required. However, solar and wind power have proved themselves as the most promising carbon free energy generation sources. Due to the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of energy production from solar and wind, large scale integration of these resources into the electric grid will require robust storage capacity. In this project, we model the energy grid of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) energy region with high concentrations of solar and wind power to analyze …

Electrical Measurement Of Sram Cell Variation And Sensitivity To Singe-Event Upsets By Low-Energy Protons, James M. Cannon

Macalester Journal of Physics and Astronomy

With the rise of the transistor in the 1970s, electronics shifted from analog circuitry, where values are stored on a continuum, to digital, in which ones and zeros are the law of the land. Transistors, as a class circuit element, can be affected by radiation and cosmic rays which then cause temporary or permanent failures, depending on the specifics of the situation. On Earth, this poses little risk with all electronics shielded by the magnetosphere, however for space bound electronics, the risks from these extraterrestrial particles are not so negligible. The first step in designing a mission to be able …

A Model To Estimate The Lifetime Of Bess For The Prosumer Community Of Manufacturers With Ogs, Md Monirul Islam, Cihan H. Dagli, Zeyi Sun

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Onsite generation system (OGS) with renewable sources for modern manufacturing plant is considered as a critical alternative energy source for the manufacturers. Prosumer community can be formed by aggregating such manufacturers to achieve a mutual goal of sustainable and resilient power system. As the sustainability of the network depends on the reliable operations of each component in the network, it is required to monitor the performance and lifetime of the components existed in the network. One of the critical as well as costly components used to enhance the reliability and performance of the network is the battery energy storage system …

A System-Of-Systems Model To Simulate The Complex Emergent Behavior Of Vehicle Traffic On An Urban Transportation Infrastructure Network, Rayan Assaad, Cihan H. Dagli, Islam H. El-Adaway

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Transportation agencies face escalating challenges in forecasting the traffic demand. Traditional prediction methods focused on individual transportation sectors and failed to study the inter-dependencies between the different transportation systems. Hence, there is a need for more advanced and holistic modeling techniques. To this end, this paper models and analyses an urban transportation system-of-systems incorporating seven various systems: population and GDP, CO₂ emission, gasoline price and total vehicle trips, traffic demand, public and private transportation, transportation investment, and traffic congestion. Accordingly, this research simulates transportation networks as a collection of task-oriented systems that combine their resources to form a complex …

Agent Based Modeling For Flood Inundation Mapping And Rerouting, Vinayaka Gude, Steven Corns, Cihan H. Dagli, Suzanna Long

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Natural disasters like earthquakes and floods can have a serious impact on road networks, which are critical to supply chain infrastructure and to provide connectivity. These extreme events can result in isolating people in the affected area from hospitals and emergency response. This paper presents an agent-based model for understanding flood propagation and developing inundation mapping. The results from the mapping are used to identify the roads prone to floods based on elevation data and flood simulation. A simulation environment was set up in SUMO, and the costs associated with the traffic disruption are evaluated. This paper discusses the integration …

A System Dynamics Approach For Study Of Population Growth And The Residential Housing Market In The Us, Gasser Galal Ali, Islam H. El-Adaway, Cihan H. Dagli

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The US Consensus bureau estimated the total construction spending at 1,320,305 Million Dollars, in February 2020, with an increase of 1.1% since last February. The construction market is large, and risky. Prediction of the market behavior, for several years ahead, is needed in order to take strategic investment decision for long and expensive projects. The goal of this research is to study the relationship between population growth and the housing market. To that end, a system dynamics model is developed. System dynamics is a top-down approach that starts with the high-level behavior of a complex system to simulate the behavior …

A System Dynamics Model For Construction Safety Behavior, Mohamad Abdul Nabi, Islam H. El-Adaway, Cihan H. Dagli

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Construction Industry has always been reputed by its high incident rates and poor safety performance. Construction accidents are, in most cases, resulted from the unsafe behaviors of construction workers on site. The study of workers' behavior is crucial in order to understand the causation of unsafe behaviors. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to simulate construction safety behavior in order to predict the number of safety incidents and better understand their causation factors. The simulation model illustrates how construction system influences construction labors on site in terms of unsafe behavior. The standard leading indicators of safety performance are first …

An Agent-Based Approach To Artificial Stock Market Modeling, Samuel Vanfossan, Cihan H. Dagli, Benjamin J. Kwasa

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Consumer stock markets have long been a target of modeling efforts for the economic gains anticipatorily enabled by well-performing models. Aimed at identifying strategies capable of achieving desired returns, many modeling approaches have attempted to capture the innumerable and intricate complexities present within these adaptive socio-technical systems. Decreasingly constrained by available computation power, contemporary models have grown in sophistication to include several of the features present in de facto market systems. However, these models require extensive effort to dictate the variety of states, behaviors, and adaptations that entities of the system may exhibit. Mandating the development of complex formulas and …

An Agent-Based Model To Study Competitive Construction Bidding And The Winner's Curse, Amr Elsayegh, Cihan H. Dagli, Islam H. El-Adaway

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Reverse auction theory is the basis for competitive construction bidding process. The lowest bid method is utilized for selecting contractors in public projects. The winning contractor having the lowest bid value could be cursed when the submitted bid value results in negative profits. This is caused by many factors such as the contractor's estimation accuracy and markup. This is addressed in this paper by providing a model simulating the construction competitive bidding and the occurrence of the winner's curse. To this end, the authors show the extent to which the winner's curse affects the status of contracting companies. The objectives …

Efficient Architecture Search For Deep Neural Networks, Ram Deepak Gottapu, Cihan H. Dagli

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper addresses the scalability challenge of automatic deep neural architecture search by implementing a parameter sharing approach with regularized genetic algorithm (RGE). The key idea is to use a regularized genetic algorithm (RGE) on a pre-determined template and discover a high-performance architecture by searching for the optimal chromosome. During evolution, each model corresponding to a discovered chromosome is trained for a fixed number of epochs to minimize a canonical cross-entropy loss on a given training dataset. Meanwhile, the performance of the trained model on validation dataset is used as a fitness value to perform the evolutions. Because of parameter …

Modeling And Simulation Of A Robotic Bridge Inspection System, Md Monirul Karim, Cihan H. Dagli, Ruwen Qin

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Inspection and preservation of the aging bridges to extend their service life has been recognized as one of the important tasks of the State Departments of Transportation. Yet manual inspection procedure is not efficient to determine the safety status of the bridges in order to facilitate the implementation of appropriate maintenance. In this paper, a complex model involving a remotely controlled robotic platform is proposed to inspect the safety status of the bridges which will eliminate labor-intensive inspection. Mobile cameras from unmanned airborne vehicles (UAV) are used to collect bridge inspection data in order to record the periodic changes of …

Preface To The Special Issue: "Complex Adaptive Systems," Malvern, Pennsylvania, November 13-15, 2019, Nil Kilicay-Ergin, Cihan H. Dagli

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Congressional Committee Resources On Space Policy During The 115th Congress (2017-2018): Providing Context And Insight Into Us Government Space Policy, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Article 1 of the US Constitution assigns the US Congress numerous responsibilities. These include creating new laws, revising existing laws, funding government programs, and conducting oversight of these programs' performance. Oversight of US Government agency space policy programs is executed by various congressional space policy committees including the House and Senate Science Committees, Armed Services, and Appropriations Committees. These committees conduct many public hearings on space policy, which invite expert witnesses to testify on US space policy programs and feature debate on the strengths and weaknesses of these programs. Documentation produced by these committees is widely available to the public, …

Investigation Of Particle Interference In Induced Electromagnetic Coil, Elizabeth Soha

Honors Scholar Theses

The purpose of this thesis work is to study the effect of a ferromagnetic particle on an induced solenoid’s magnetic field. Solenoids are wound coils that are charged with current to induce a magnetic field. The placement of a particle inside a solenoid interacts with the coil’s magnetic field and therefore changes the coil’s field behavior. This work comprises a parametric study of how particle size and placement within a solenoid affect the solenoid’s magnetic field. A model of the coil and particle is created and parametrically studied using the computational software ANSYS. The results from this simulation help to …

Assessing The Potential For Greater Solar Development In West Texas, Usa, Dale D. Devitt, M. H. Young, J. P. Pierre

Life Sciences Faculty Research

As population and economies continue to grow on a global scale, so too does the demand for energy. To improve reliability and independence of energy supplies, the U.S. and many other countries are seeking internally-sourced renewable energy; solar is one such renewable-energy source that meets these criteria. However, all energy sources exert some environmental impacts. In the case of solar, direct impacts stem mostly from alteration of land needed to host infrastructure. Understanding the environmental upside and downside potential of solar energy systems allows a more comprehensive, side-by-side comparison with different energy sources. In this article, we focus on the …

Trading Up: Exchanging Our Data For A Better Life, Nathan Turner

Marriott Student Review

We live in a data-driven economy. Many people feel like consumers are on the losing end of an economic data-battle with tech giants, but this is simply not true; our data can drive innovation. That’s right—personal data collected from you and me can influence new technologies that will improve our lives. This should excite us, but our fear of losing data privacy can quell our excitement for progress and even restrict innovation. Our quality of life has already begun to improve through data driven innovation, and technological progress is not slowing down. If we let our fear of losing data …

New Policies Give Solar Users An Economic Boost, Olivia Fowler

Marriott Student Review

The future looks bright for Solar Energy, as more States and Territories in the United States commit to moving to 100% renewable energy. What are the different states and territories committing to exactly, and what economic incentives are they bringing? Find out in this article by author Olivia Fowley.

The Inaugural Readership And Authorship Report Of The Journal Of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-Peer), Senay Purzer, Emily Jones

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

The Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER) approaches a decade of publications since its launch in 2011. This inaugural report presents metrics and statistics on J-PEER's readership and authorship, looking specifically at data from 2019, along with reflections from the founding and immediate-past editors.

A Perceptual Evaluation Of Short-Time Fourier Transform Window Duration And Divergence Cost Function On Audio Source Separation Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Ryan J. Miller

Student Theses

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is an established method of performing audio source separation. Previous studies used NMF with supplementary systems to improve performance, but little has been done to investigate perceptual effects of NMF parameters. The present study aimed to evaluate two NMF parameters for speech enhancement: the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) window duration and divergence cost function. Two experiments were conducted: the first investigated the effect of STFT window duration on target speech intelligibility in a sentence keyword identification task. The second experiment had participants rate residual noise levels present in target speech using three different cost functions: the …

Using Case-Level Context To Classify Cancer Pathology Reports, Shang Gao, Mohammed Alawad, Noah Schaefferkoetter, Lynne Penberthy, Xiao-Cheng Wu, Eric B. Durbin, Linda Coyle, Arvind Ramanathan, Georgia Tourassi

Kentucky Cancer Registry Faculty Publications

Individual electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical reports are often part of a larger sequence-for example, a single patient may generate multiple reports over the trajectory of a disease. In applications such as cancer pathology reports, it is necessary not only to extract information from individual reports, but also to capture aggregate information regarding the entire cancer case based off case-level context from all reports in the sequence. In this paper, we introduce a simple modular add-on for capturing case-level context that is designed to be compatible with most existing deep learning architectures for text classification on individual reports. We …

Wind Tunnel Wake Generator, Carl Pickl, James L. Rutledge, Marc D. Polanka, Brian Crabtree, Christopher Harkless

AFIT Patents

A wake generator for placement in a wind tunnel between a wind source and a test object includes a first frame member having a first track formed thereon, where the first track has a shape including a first side that is substantially rounded and a second side that is substantially flat. The wake generator may include a mounting plate disposed within a perimeter of the first track, where the mounting plate is rotatable relative to the first frame member about a first axis. The wake generator may also include a plurality of bars slidably engaged to the mounting plate and …

Optimized Xanthene-Based Probes For Pancreatic Cancer Imaging, Ian Ruramai Munhenzva

Dissertations and Theses

Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the deadliest human malignancies with an extremely poor 5-year survival rate of below 5%. Surgical resection is the most effective treatment of choice because chemotherapy and radiation therapy do not improve life expectancy. Residual tumor after PDAC surgery is common due to a lack of PDAC targeted intraoperative contrast agents to confirm clear margins.

Fluorescence imaging has the potential to improve surgery outcome and PDAC patients' survival rate via the use of highly PDAC-specific molecular probes to facilitate tumor identification. This thesis describes the application of a focused library of benzoxanthene fluorophores for …

Evaluation Of Undrained Shear Strength Of Soil, Ultimate Pile Capacity And Pile Set-Up Parameter From Cone Penetration Test (Cpt) Using Artificial Neural Network (Ann), Md Ariful Hassan Mojumder

LSU Master's Theses

Over the years, numerous design methods were developed to evaluate the undrained shear strength, S_u, ultimate pile capacity and pile set-up parameter, A. In recent decades, the emphasis was given to the in-situ cone and piezocone penetration tests (CPT, PCPT) to estimate these parameters since CPT/PCPT has been proven to be fast, reliable and cost-effective soil investigation method. However, because of the paucity of a vivid comprehension of the physical problem, some of the developed methods incorporate correlation assumptions which might compromise the consistent accuracy. In this study, the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was exerted using CPT data …

Stochastic Simulation Of Cellular Metabolism, Emalie J. Clement, Thomas T. Schulze, Ghada A. Soliman, Beata Joanna Wysocki, Paul H. Davis, Tadeusz A. Wysocki

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Increased technological methods have enabled the investigation of biology at nanoscale levels. Such systems require the use of computational methods to comprehend the complex interactions that occur. The dynamics of metabolic systems have been traditionally described utilizing differential equations without fully capturing the heterogeneity of biological systems. Stochastic modeling approaches have recently emerged with the capacity to incorporate the statistical properties of such systems. However, the processing of stochastic algorithms is a computationally intensive task with intrinsic limitations. Alternatively, the queueing theory approach, historically used in the evaluation of telecommunication networks, can significantly reduce the computational power required to generate …