Engineering Commons^™

Addressing Pragmatic Challenges In Utilizing Ai For Security Of Industrial Iot, Maede Zolanvari

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Industrial control systems (ICSs) are an essential part of every nation's critical infrastructure and have been utilized for a long time to supervise industrial machines and processes. Today’s ICSs are substantially different from the information technology (IT) devices a decade ago. The integration of internet of things (IoT) technology has made them more efficient and optimized, improved automation, and increased quality and compliance. Now, they are a sub (and arguably the most critical) part of IoT's domain, called industrial IoT (IIoT).

In the past, to secure ICSs from malicious outside attack, these systems were isolated from the outside world. However, …

Inductor Free Methods For Breaking Dc Currents, Sudipta Sen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The current interruption in dc circuits is more difficult to achieve compared to the ac circuits because, unlike ac systems, dc circuits do not have the natural current zero-crossing. Presently there are three categories of basic dc breaker models namely mechanical, static, and hybrid dc breakers. As current power systems is moving more towards microgrids, DERs, Electric Vehicles (EVs), and with recent advancements in dc circuits, wide verities of dc power sources, and loads, dc breakers are very important in future system protection.

New alternate methods to break dc currents for low-voltage applications are proposed in this work. The proposed …

Ultrafast Spectroscopy Of Air Lasing In Filaments, Brian Robert Kamer

Optical Science and Engineering ETDs

Filamentation in air is a phenomenon that has been extensively investigated for the last two decades. At sufficiently high intensity, even air is a nonlinear medium. These intensities are reached with ultrashort pulses (50 to 100 fs) of more than 1 J energy, which self-focus in air, reach ionizing intensities of oxygen and nitrogen, creating a plasma that defocuses the beam. The air filament is a self-induced waveguide resulting from a balance of focusing and defocusing. In this work new techniques were developed to visualize and analyze this phenomenon through its emission, in particu- lar the UV emission of the …

A Case Study On Hls Portability From Intel To Xilinx Fpgas, Zhili Xiao

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are a hardware accelerator option that is growing in popularity. However, FPGAs are notoriously hard to program. To this end, high-level synthesis (HLS) tools have been developed to allow programmers to design hardware accelerators with FPGAs using familiar software languages. The two largest FPGA vendors, Intel and Xilinx, support both C/C++ and OpenCL C to construct kernels. However, little is known about the portability of designs between these two platforms. In this work, we evaluate the portability and performance of Intel and Xilinx kernels. We conduct a case study, porting the Needleman-Wunsch application from the Rodinia …

Improving Resource Efficiency In Cloud Computing, Jiayi Song

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Customers inside the cloud computing market are heterogeneous in several aspects, e.g., willingness to pay and performance requirement. By taking advantage of trade-offs created by these heterogeneities, the service provider can realize a more efficient system. This thesis is concerned with methods to improve the utilization of cloud infrastructure resources, and with the role of pricing in realizing those improvements and leveraging heterogeneity. Towards improving utilization, we explore methods to optimize network usage through traffic engineering. Particularly, we introduce a novel optimization framework to decrease the bandwidth required by inter-data center networks through traffic scheduling and shaping, and then propose …

Electroshock Treatment Dependent Microstructural Evolution And Mechanical Properties Of Near-Β Titanium Alloy Manufactured By Directed Energy Deposition, Haojie Guo, Pu Liu, Xunpeng Qin, Yanli Song, Dongsheng Qian, Lechun Xie, Liqiang Wang, Lai-Chang Zhang, Lin Hua

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Effects of electroshock treatment (EST) on the microstructural evolution and mechanical properties of near-β titanium alloy (Ti-55531) formed by directed energy deposition (DED) was studied in this work. With the increase in EST time, the average hardness of specimen decreased from 426 HV to 316 HV, and the fracture strain increased significantly, which was attributed to the uniform dispersion of α phase along grain boundaries and inside the β grains. After EST, the texture intensity decreased in terms of the orientation distribution function (ODF), which was ascribed to the redistribution of α phase. Moreover, more atomic vacancies and lattice distortion …

Development And Application Of A Novel Acoustic Microfluidic Technology For Single Cell Per Well Trapping And High-Resolution Analysis Of Cilia Motion In Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii, Mingyang Cui

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Acoustic manipulation of cells and microorganisms is a label-free and contact-free technique with promise for biological and biomedical applications. When exposed to an ultrasonic standing wave field, particles suspended in microfluidic channels will be moved to pressure minima (nodes) or maxima (antinodes) due to the acoustic impedance mismatch between particles and the suspension medium. Cilia motion is fundamental to understanding biological and biomedical problems related to dysfunctional human cilia, including primary ciliary dyskinesia, blindness, and male infertility. However, in vivo and ex vivo mammalian ciliated cell research is laborious and time-consuming due to difficulty in growing, maintaining, and imaging these …

Photoacoustic Imaging Of Colorectal Cancer And Ovarian Cancer, Xiandong Leng

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is an emerging hybrid imaging technology that uses a short-pulsed laser to excite tissue. The resulting photoacoustic waves are used to image the optical absorption distribution of the tissue, which is directly related to micro-vessel networks and thus to tumor angiogenesis, a key process in tumor growth and metastasis. In this thesis, the acoustic-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (AR-PAM) was first investigated on its role in human colorectal tissue imaging, and the optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) was investigated on its role in human ovarian tissue imaging.Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. …

Deep Learning For Automatic Microscopy Image Analysis, Shenghua He

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Microscopy imaging techniques allow for the creation of detailed images of cells (or nuclei) and have been widely employed for cell studies in biological research and disease diagnosis in clinic practices.Microscopy image analysis (MIA), with tasks of cell detection, cell classification, and cell counting, etc., can assist with the quantitative analysis of cells and provide useful information for a cellular-level understanding of biological activities and pathology. Manual MIA is tedious, time-consuming, prone to subject errors, and are not feasible for the high-throughput cell analysis process. Thus, automatic MIA methods can facilitate all kinds of biological studies and clinical tasks. Conventional …

Acoustic Radiation Force And Its Application For Cell Manipulation And Ion Channels Activation, Xiangjun Peng

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Sound is a stress wave that carries energy and momentum flux. Scattered sound waves can generate acoustic radiation force that can be used to manipulate particles or cells. This dissertation demonstrates the physics behind cell manipulation by ultrasound. The work begins with a detailed analysis of the mechanics of using standing surface acoustic waves to fabricate acoustic tweezers for contactless particle manipulation using acoustic radiation force. Models to design and analyze acoustic radiation force have traditionally relied on plane wave theories that cannot predict how standing surface acoustic waves can levitate cells in the direction perpendicular to the substrate. We …

Anion Exchange Membranes In Electrochemical Energy Systems, Yunzhu Zhang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Non-CO2-emitting sources of renewable energy, such as solar and wind, have become quite popular in recent years, and their electricity generation cost at scale has become comparable with that of gas- and coal-fired power plants. However, their intermittent output makes the resultant electricity hard to dispatch in a reliable manner in the absence of grid-scale electrical energy storage (EES) technologies. Redox-flow batteries (RFBs) are promising devices for medium- to large-scale electric energy storage. They are safe, reliable, and portable, and are designed with decoupled power and energy modules, which makes it easy and cost-effective to scale their output to meet …

Graph Based Management Of Temporal Data, Alex Fotso

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in the use of smart devices and sensors that led to high-volume temporal data generation. Temporal modeling and querying of this huge data have been essential for effective querying and retrieval. However, custom temporal models have the problem of generalizability, whereas the extended temporal models require users to adapt to new querying languages. In this thesis, we propose a method to improve the modeling and retrieval of temporal data using an existing graph database system (i.e., Neo4j) without extending with additional operators. Our work focuses on temporal data represented as intervals …

Low-Level Groundwater Atrazine In High Atrazine Usage Nebraska Counties: Likely Effects Of Excessive Groundwater Abstraction, Moses New-Aaron, Olufemi P. Abimbola, Raheleh Mohammadi, Oluwaseun Famojuro, Zaeema Naveed, Azar M Abadi, Jesse E. Bell, Shannon Bartelt-Hunt, Eleanor G. Rogan

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Recent studies observed a correlation between estrogen-related cancers and groundwater atrazine in eastern Nebraska counties. However, the mechanisms of human exposure to atrazine are unclear because low groundwater atrazine concentration was observed in counties with high cancer incidence despite having the highest atrazine usage. We studied groundwater atrazine fate in high atrazine usage Nebraska counties. Data were collected from Quality Assessed Agrichemical Contaminant Nebraska Groundwater, Parameter–Elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM), and water use databases. Descriptive statistics and cluster analysis were performed. Domestic wells (59%) were the predominant well type. Groundwater atrazine was affected by well depth. Clusters consisting …

Defining The Role Of Elastic Fibers In Tendon Mechanics, Jeremy D. Eekhoff

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Tendons serve as a linking component of the musculoskeletal system by transferring forces between muscle and bone. As such, the structural proteins of the tendon extracellular matrix are of vital importance for the tissue to function properly and maintain its mechanical integrity. Collagen is the principal constituent of tendon and makes up its aligned hierarchical organization. Other structural proteins, such as elastin, are in comparison understudied and not well understood in relation to tendon function. Elastin, the main component of elastic fibers, has unique mechanical properties including high extensibility, fatigue resistance, and elasticity; these properties are important for elastin-rich tissues …

Predicting Patient Outcomes With Machine Learning For Diverse Health Data, Dingwen Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

As digitized clinical and health data become ubiquitous, machine learning techniques have shown promise in predicting various clinical outcomes. In this thesis research, we exploit three types of data including (1) data collected through wearables outside hospitals, (2) electronic health records (EHR) data of inpatient in general hospital wards, (3) intraoperative data collected during surgery. This thesis work investigates machine learning approaches for the diverse clinical and health data with distinctive characteristics and challenges in the context of real-world clinical applications. Specifically, this thesis makes the following contributions to the state of the art of clinical machine learning.

Extracting informative …

Hyperspectral Imaging And Data Analytics For Civil Infrastructure Inspection, Genda Chen

INSPIRE Archived Webinars

In this 50-minute lecture, the fundamental concept of hyperspectral imaging is reviewed. Each hyperspectral image represents a narrow, contiguous wavelength range of an electromagnetic spectrum, which could be indicative of a chemical substance. All the images in the spectral range of a hyperspectral camera are combined to form a three-dimensional hyperspectral data cube with two spatial dimensions and one spectral dimension. A hyperspectral cube can be sampled in four ways: spatial scanning, spectral scanning, snapshot imaging, and spatio-spectral scanning. This presentation will be focused on spatial scanning from a line-scan camera. The feasibility of horizontal imaging from a synchronized hyperspectral …

Partnerships And Collaboration: Working Together To Build And Achieve Disaster Recovery, Joseph Richmond, Cheryl Knight

Journal of Global Awareness

On May 22, 2011, an EF-5 tornado struck Joplin, Missouri, leaving behind 161 fatalities and $2.8 billion in economic impacts. This case study research design used in-depth semi-structured, one-on-one interviews and a qualitative design and analysis to examine the economic recovery following the disaster. It also formed the foundation for future research on the impact of interdisciplinary teams, specifically disaster emergency management and social work in disaster recovery.

Lessons Learned From Bp: Deepwater Horizon And The Transition To Renewables, Daniel Valle

Journal of Global Awareness

This paper analyzes the gradual transition of British Petroleum (BP), one of the world's largest oil and gas companies, into a renewable energy company focused on sustainability and the reduction of carbon emissions. BP's leadership and ethical practices are compared before and after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The purpose of the comparison and the broader analysis of the transition is to identify how effective leadership can be used to transform a company with a suspect social responsibility record into a leader among its peers. Lessons learned from the disaster, and the subsequent transition conclude the research.

Stakeholder Involvement In Upscaling Of Soil Fertility Research Output In Tharaka-Nithi County, Kenya, Serah W. Kimaru-Muchai

Journal of Global Awareness

Food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa has prompted a lot of research in the development of soil fertility technologies; however, few of the recommendations from soil fertility management research have been put into use by the target end-users. The objective of the study was to investigate information exchange pathways used by researchers in upscaling of soil fertility in Maara and Mbeere South Sub-counties in Kenya. Structured questionnaires were used to collect information from 22 researchers and 240 farmers. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics like frequency, mean, and percentages, while Chi-square, Kendal's correlation coefficient was used to test the magnitude of …

Letter From The Editor, Jay Nathan

Journal of Global Awareness

No abstract provided.

Indicator Of Accident And Analysis Of Existing Problems Of Ensuring Traffic Safety In Major Cities Of Uzbekistan, Jamshid Abdunazarov

Scientific-technical journal

This article is devoted to the analysis of accidents and road safety in large cities of the Republic of Uzbekistan such as Bukhara, Fergana and Samarkand. And also, statistical data of road traffic accidents are processed throughout the republic. Such factors as transport risk, social risk and severity of the consequences of a road traffic accident have been identified. In conclusion, the author's opinion on the factors affecting road safety in the republic is presented.

Development Of A Model For Control Of A Flexible Production Sewage System, Shalala Jafarova

Scientific-technical journal

This article discusses the development of a production module management model for one area of the technological process. New modeling methods are used for this purpose. Mathematical modeling and research is one of the key issues in the early stages of designing automated and automated systems operating in uncertain or fuzzy environments. Efficient modeling devices are used to solve these problems, taking into account the specific features of the process. The article builds the management model of the production module and obtains the results.

Replication Data For: Experimental And Numerical Study Of Evaporation From Wavy Surfaces By Coupling Free Flow And Porous Media Flow, Bo Gao, Kathleen Smits

Earth & Environmental Sciences Datasets - Archive

The macroscale roughness of the soil surface has significant influences on the mass/energy interactions between the subsurface and the atmosphere during evaporation. However, most previous works only consider evaporation behavior from flat surfaces. Based on experimental and numerical approaches, the goal of this work is to provide a framework for the understanding of the mechanisms of evaporation from irregular soil surfaces at representative elementary volume scale. A coupling free flow-porous media flow model was developed to describe evaporation under nonisothermal conditions. For simplicity, sinusoidal-type wavy surfaces were considered. To validate this modeling approach, an experiment using an open-ended wind tunnel …

Replication Data For: Evaporation From Undulating Soil Surfaces Under Turbulent Airflow Through Numerical And Experimental Approaches, Bo Gao, Kathleen Smits, John Farnsworth

Earth & Environmental Sciences Datasets - Archive

Evaporation from undulating soil surfaces is rarely studied due to limited modeling theory and inadequate experimental data linking dynamic soil and atmospheric interactions. The goal of this paper is to provide exploratory insights into evaporation behavior from undulating soil surfaces under turbulent conditions through numerical and experimental approaches. A previously developed and verified coupled free flow and porous media flow model was extended by incorporating turbulent airflow through Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations. The model explicitly describes the relevant physical processes and the key properties in the free flow, porous media, and at the interface, allowing for the analysis of coupled exchange …

Replication Data For: Effect Of Varying Atmospheric Conditions On Methane Boundary-Layer Development In A Free Flow Domain Interfaced With A Porous Media Domain, C. T.K.K. Deepagoda, Kathleen Smits

Earth & Environmental Sciences Datasets - Archive

Mitigation of atmospheric emission of methane from leaky underground infrastructure is important for controlling the global anthropogenic greenhouse gas burden. Overexposure to methane may also cause occupational health problems in indoor/outdoor environments at the local scale. Subsurface soil conditions (e.g. soil heterogeneity) affect methane migration in soils while near-surface atmospheric boundary conditions (e.g. wind and temperature) affect off-site emissions across the soil-atmosphere interface. This study investigated the above-surface methane concentration boundary-layer development under different soil conditions (homogenous and layered) and atmospheric boundary controls (wind and temperature). A series of controlled bench-scale experiments was conducted using an open-loop boundary-layer wind tunnel …

Replication Data For: Thermal Conductivity Of Binary Sand Mixtures Evaluated Through Full Water Content Range, Benjamin Wallen, Kathleen Smits

Earth & Environmental Sciences Datasets - Archive

A soil's grain-size distribution affects its physical and hydraulic properties; however, little is known about its effect on soil thermal properties. To better understand how grain-size distribution affects soil thermal properties, specifically the effective thermal conductivity, a set of laboratory experiments was performed using binary mixtures of two uniform sands tightly packed with seven different mixing fractions over the full range of saturation. For each binary mixture, the effective thermal conductivity, λ, capillary pressure, hc, and volumetric water content, θ, were measured. Results demonstrated that the λ–θ relationship exhibited distinct characteristics based on the percentage of fine- and coarse-grained sands. …

Effects Of Tendon Viscoelasticity On The Distribution Of Forces Across Sutures In A Model Tendon-To-Bone Repair, Yuxuan Huang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Tears to the rotator cuff often require surgical repair. These repairs often culminate in re-tearing when sutures break through the tendon in the weeks following repair. Numerous studies have been performed to identify suturing strategies that reduce this risk by balancing forces across sutures. However, the structural engineering basis for these approaches is still emerging, and the effects of tendon mechanics on load balancing is still unclear. Specifically, the effects of the viscoelastic nature of tendon on load sharing have not been established. With the aim of providing insight into this problem, this thesis studies how tendon viscoelasticity, tendon stiffness, …

Replication Data For: Characterization Of Grain-Size Distribution, Thermal Conductivity, And Gas Diffusivity In Variably Saturated Binary Sand Mixtures, C. T.K.K. Deepagoda, Kathleen Smits

Earth & Environmental Sciences Datasets - Archive

Characterization of differently textured porous materials, as well as different volumetric porous media mixtures, in relation to mass and heat transport is vital for many engineering and research applications. Functional relations describing physical (e.g., grain-size distribution, total porosity), thermal, and gas diffusion properties of porous media and mixtures are necessary to optimize the design of porous systems that involve heat and gas transport processes. However, only a limited number of studies provide characterization of soil physical, thermal, and gas diffusion properties and the functional relationships of these properties under varying soil water contents, especially for soil mixtures, complicating optimization efforts. …

Single-Rail Adiabatic Logic For Energy-Efficient And Cpa-Resistant Cryptographic Circuit In Low-Frequency Medical Devices, Amit Degada, Himanshu Thapliyal

Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Research

Designing energy-efficient and secure cryptographic circuits in low-frequency medical devices are challenging due to low-energy requirements. Also, the conventional CMOS logic-based cryptographic circuits solutions in medical devices can be vulnerable to side-channel attacks (e.g. correlation power analysis (CPA)). In this article, we explored single-rail Clocked CMOS Adiabatic Logic (CCAL) to design an energy-efficient and secure cryptographic circuit for low-frequency medical devices. The performance of the CCAL logic-based circuits was checked with a power clock generator (2N2P-PCG) integrated into the design for the frequency range of 50 kHz to 250 kHz. The CCAL logic gates show an average of approximately 48% …

Sortie-Based Aircraft Component Demand Rate To Predict Requirements, Thomas R. O'Neal, John M. Dickens, Lance Champaign, Aaron V. Glassburner, Jason R. Anderson, Timothy W. Breitbach

Faculty Publications

Purpose — Forecasting techniques improve supply chain resilience by ensuring that the correct parts are available when required. In addition, accurate forecasts conserve precious resources and money by avoiding new start contracts to produce unforeseen part requests, reducing labor intensive cannibalization actions and ensuring consistent transportation modality streams where changes incur cost. This study explores the effectiveness of the United States Air Force’s current flying hour-based demand forecast by comparing it with a sortie-based demand forecast to predict future spare part needs. Design/methodology/approach — This study employs a correlation analysis to show that demand for reparable parts on certain aircraft …