Engineering Commons^™

Behavioral Intention Factors For Prescription Deliveries By Small Unmanned Aircraft In Rural Communities, Sarah M. Talley

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Nearly half of the U.S. population regularly use and depend on prescription medications; however, pharmacy availability and access to pharmacy services are often lacking, particularly in rural communities. In an effort to meet local healthcare needs, delivery by sUAS is proposed to ensure the nearly 60 million rural residents have access to their prescription medications.

As an emerging technology with little research into home delivery applications, the successful implementation of sUAS for prescription medication delivery requires public acceptance and positive behavioral intention toward its use. At the time of the current research, no prior studies have specifically focused on the …

Determining Contributing Factors For Passenger Airline Pilot Perceived Fatigue, Heidi C. Kim

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Fatigue is a recurring concern for pilots and continues to be a common contributing cause of aircraft accidents. The purpose of the dissertation was to determine factors that influence fatigue in commercial airline pilots. The ability to accurately associate fatigue in pilots before a flight begins could have a profound and meaningful impact on aviation safety. Seven factors were identified in the literature review as having possible predictive capabilities of perceived fatigue in pilots working for passenger carriers, including time awake, perceived stress, sleep quality, hours of sleep, age, typically scheduled start time, and hours on duty.

An …

Sequential Electrolysis And Reverse Osmosis To Improve Arsenic Removal From Water, Yizhi Hou, Brooke K. Mayer

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Reverse osmosis (RO) typically removes >98% arsenate (As[V]) but removes arsenite (As[III]) comparatively poorly (approximately 50%–80%). Therefore, oxidizing As(III) to As(V) can improve arsenic removal using RO. In this study, electrolytic oxidation was used to oxidize As(III) in the feed water, and an extreme low-pressure RO membrane was subsequently used to remove the arsenic. Using Ti/IrO2 electrodes under 30 mA DC current in 500 mg/L NaCl solution primarily generated free chlorine, which completely oxidized 300 μg/L As(III) to As(V). Subsequent arsenic removal by RO increased from 54.2% without oxidation to 98.2% with oxidation. Using electrolysis-RO, arsenic removal significantly increased beyond …

The New Normal In The "Worship" Industry: Living The Life Of Victory In The Post-Pandemic World, King Harold A. Recto

Electronics, Computer, and Communications Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Comparison Of Correlation-Agnostic Techniques For Magnetic Navigation, Clark N. Taylor, Josh Hiatt

Faculty Publications

Navigation using a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is common for autonomous vehicles (ground or air). Unfortunately, GNSS-based navigation solutions are often susceptible to jamming, interference, and a limited number of satellites. A proposed technique to aid in navigation when a GNSS-based system fails is magnetic navigation - navigation using the Earth's magnetic anomaly field. This solution comes with its own set of problems including the need for quality magnetic maps in every area in which magnetic navigation will be used. Many of the currently available magnetic maps are generated from a combination of dated magnetic surveys, resulting in maps …

A Concept For Weighting Sentiment Phrase Using Deterministic Solution Of Algebraic Equations, Maryam Jalali, Morteza Zahedi, Abdolali Basiri

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Many text mining methods have used statistical information as text and language-independent procedures that are not deterministic. On the other hand, grammatical structure-based methods are limited to use in a certain language and text. We aim to suggest an algorithmic algebraic equation in a deterministic and nonprobabilistic way while maintaining the advantage of language independence. We propose a mathematical approach that transforms text and labels into a set of dumb equations. By solving the equations, each word is assigned a weight that can reflect the semantic information of that word, then we use the proposed algorithm to build a novel …

Degree-Based Random Walk Approach For Graph Embedding, Sarmad N. Mohammed, Semra Gündüç

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Graph embedding, representing local and global neighbourhood information by numerical vectors, is a crucial part of the mathematical modeling of a wide range of real-world systems. Among the embedding algorithms, random walk-based algorithms have proven to be very successful. These algorithms collect information by creating numerous random walks with a predefined number of steps. Creating random walks is the most demanding part of the embedding process. The computation demand increases with the size of the network. Moreover, for real-world networks, considering all nodes on the same footing, the abundance of low-degree nodes creates an imbalanced data problem. In this work, …

Generating Ad Creatives Using Deep Learning For Search Advertising, Kevser Nur Çoğalmiş, Ahmet Bulut

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

We generated advertisement creatives programmatically using deep neural networks. A landing page contains relevant text data, which can be used for generating advertisement creatives, i.e. ads. We treated the ad generation task as a text summarization problem and built a sequence to sequence model. In order to assess the validity of our approach, we conducted experiments on four datasets. Our empirical results showed that our model generated relevant ads on a template-based dataset with moderate hyperparameters. Training the model with more content increased the performance of the model, which we attributed to rigorous hyperparameter tune-up. The choice of word embedding …

Prediction Of Broken Rotor Bar In Induction Motor Using Spectral Entropy Features And Tlbo Optimized Svm, Sudip Halder, Sunil Bhat, Bimal Dora

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The information of the fault frequency characteristics is of great importance for all associated fault diag nostics. This requires a high-resolution spectrum analysis to achieve efficient monitoring of machinery faults, especially while diagnosing rotor bar breakage under light load conditions, because the fault frequencies almost overlap with the fundamental. In this context, rather than looking for frequencies associated with rotor faults, several frequency bands are observed separately in terms of the entropy contained within these bands. First, the motor current signal has been divided into several frequency bands using the continuous wavelet transform (CWT), and the spectral entropy is calculated …

Predicting The Remaining Service Life Of Railroad Bearings: Leveraging Machine Learning And Onboard Sensor Data, Leonel Villafranca

Theses and Dissertations

By continuously monitoring train bearing health in terms of temperature and vibration levels of bearings tested in a laboratory setting, statistical regression models have been developed to establish relationships between the sensor-acquired bearing health data with several explanatory factors that potentially influence the bearing deterioration. Despite their merits, statistical models fall short of reliable prediction accuracy levels since they entail restrictive assumptions, such as a priori known functional relationship between the response and input variables. A data-driven machine learning algorithm is presented, which can unravel the nonlinear deterioration model purely based on the bearing health data, even when the structure …

Supermodal Decomposition Of The Linear Swing Equation For Multilayer Networks, Kshitij Bhatta, Amirhossein Nazerian, Francesco Sorrentino, Majeed M. Hayat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

We study the swing equation in the case of a multilayer network in which generators and motors are modeled differently; namely, the model for each generator is given by second order dynamics and the model for each motor is given by first order dynamics. We also remove the commonly used assumption of equal damping coefficients in the second order dynamics. Under these general conditions, we are able to obtain a decomposition of the linear swing equation into independent modes describing the propagation of small perturbations. In the process, we identify symmetries affecting the structure and dynamics of the multilayer network …

Identification And Quantitation Of Aqueous Single- And Multianalyte Solutions Of The Isomers Ethylbenzene, M-, P-, And O-Xylene Using A Single Specifically Tailored Sensor Coating And Estimation Theory-Based Signal Processing, Nicholas Post, Florian Bender, Fabien Josse, Edwin E. Yaz, Antonio J. Ricco

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The isomer-specific detection and quantitation of m-, p-, and o-xylene and ethylbenzene, dissolved singly and as mixtures in aqueous solutions at concentrations from 100 to 1200 ppb by volume, is reported for a specifically designed polymer-plasticizer coating on a shear-horizontal surface acoustic wave (SH-SAW) device. The polystyrene-ditridecyl phthalate-blend coating was designed utilizing Hansen solubility parameters and considering the dipole moment and polarizability of the analytical targets and coating components to optimize the affinity of the sensor coating for the four chemical isomers. The two key coating sorption properties, sensitivity and response time constant, are determined by the …

Aqueous Humor Dynamics And Compound Action Potentials In The Anesthetized And Conscious Freely Moving Rat, Youssef Mohamed

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Vision is dependent on the proper functioning of many intricate components of the eye. Aqueous humor dynamics function to keep the eye inflated at the right pressures and nourish avascular tissue in the eye while properties of the corneoscleral shell dictate how dynamic changes in volume and pressure affect tissue at the optic nerve head. Retinal ganglion cells exit the globe at the optic nerve head and carry all of the visual information to the brain for perception of visual stimulus. In this dissertation, we aim to present a lumped parameter model of the eye that can accurately describe the …

A Protein-Based Therapeutic Combination For The Treatment Of Hard-To-Heal Wounds, Graham L. Strauss

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chronic wounds present many clinical challenges in relation to the successful treatment and closure of the damaged tissue. Most current treatment methods focused on one or two aspects to drive wound closure, while most chronic wounds are multifactorial environments with many of those dependencies relying on the termination of one another to effectively gain tissue construction, closure, and full skin thickness and composition. Natural wound healing processes allude to potential biologics that can impede the chronic breakdown of tissue, while restoring deposition of new tissue, and effectively leading to a healed wound. Proteases secreted by the body’s immune system lay …

Large Area Projection Sintering Of Semicrystalline Polymers And Part Analysis Of The Printed Specimens, Taranjot Kaur

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the requirements posed to products have increased in recent years. The trend towards individualized serial products steps up the need for respective manufacturing techniques to be more and more flexible. Conventional techniques of serial production, such as injection molding, are unable to fully meet the requirements of this trend. Additive manufacturing techniques generate components directly from a CAD data set while requiring no specific mold, producing minimal waste, and reaching satisfactory geometric accuracy. This is how, as opposed to conventional techniques, they comply with these increased demands to processing technology. Over the last two decades, the research community has …

Ti–6al–4v Alloy Deposition Characteristics At Electrode-Negative Polarity In The Cold Metal Transfer–Gas Metal Arc Process, Tae Hyun Lee, Dong Hyuck Kam, Je Hoon Oh, Cheolhee Kim

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) of Ti alloys using gas metal arc yields a high deposition rate, cathode spots exhibit unstable behavior. In this study, the cold-metal-transfer process and an electrode-negative (EN) polarity were used in the WAAM process of the Ti–6Al–4V alloy. High-speed imaging was performed to investigate the mechanisms to stabilize cathode plasma jets, arc plasma, and molten metal transfer in the EN polarity. Arc plasma and cathode jets had the same direction, and sound cathode jets were shrouded by arc plasma in the EN mode. The metal transfer was also stabilized by balanced plasma formation under …

Sex Differences And Potential Non-Invasive Treatments For Calcific Aortic Valve Disease, Henry Pascal Helms

Theses and Dissertations

Calcific Aortic Valve Disease (CAVD) is a progressive heart disease that ranges from aortic valve sclerosis to aortic valve stenosis. It is characterized by intense calcification and compromised valve function. CAVD affects 25% of people older than 65 and 50% of people older than 85. These rates are expected to increase in the United States due to higher levels of obesity and diabetes, as well as an aging population. CAVD is the leading cause of valve replacement surgery. Annual healthcare costs for these valve replacements are currently estimated to be approximately 2 billion dollars. There are currently no medications approved …

Evaluation Of The Energetic Factors In Crystalline Pharmaceuticals Using Solid-State Density Functional Theory And Low-Frequency Vibrational Spectroscopy, Margaret P. Davis

Dissertations - ALL

Due to the importance of maintaining stable and effective pharmaceutical solid doses, it is critical to study the variety of solid forms that active pharmaceutical ingredients can adopt including polymorphs, hydrates, and cocrystals. In this work, low-frequency vibrational spectroscopies and rigorous quantum mechanical simulations are combined to provide a new technique for characterizing and investigating pharmaceutically relevant polymorphs, hydrates, and cocrystals as well as a series of model cocrystals. Low-frequency spectra in the sub-200 cm-1 range provide not only unique and characteristic spectra for all of the systems explored here but, along with X-ray structural parameters, they offer a way …

Analysis Of Wireless Networks With Massive Connectivity, Mangqing Guo

Dissertations - ALL

Recent years have witnessed unprecedented growth in wireless networks in terms of both data traffic and number of connected devices. How to support this fast increasing demand for high data traffic and connectivity is a key consideration in the design of future wireless communication systems. With this motivation, in this thesis, we focus on the analysis of wireless networks with massive connectivity.

In the first part of the thesis, we seek to improve the energy efficiency (EE) of single-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks with joint antenna selection and user scheduling. We propose a two-step iterative procedure to maximize the …

Circular Reinforced Concrete Columns Damaged By Fire And Retrofitted With Cfrp And Steel Jacketing, Jia Xu

Dissertations - ALL

In recent decades, the post-fire behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) columns with normal and high-strength concrete has become an important research topic. Numerous studies have demonstrated that RC columns exhibit good fire resistance owing to the thermal properties of concrete. Therefore, reinforced concrete structures rarely collapse within a finite fire duration and can be successfully repaired. Along with the increasing number of skyscrapers, high-strength concrete (HSC) has played an equally important role as normal-strength concrete (NSC) in the industry. In this study, the thermal behavior of RC columns with NSC and HSC exposed to ISO 834 standard fire for various …

Data-Driven Prioritization And Empirical Predictions For Bridge Scour In Nebraska, Awgku Ahmad Hashim Awg Bolhasan

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The effect of scour at the bridge substructure results in an increase in the vulnerability of the overall bridge stability. Previous studies have found that current guidelines are often overly-conservative with respect to scour. This project aims to provide guidance on hydraulic modeling parameters and reasonable scour estimates specific to Nebraska conditions. This will enable engineers to assess bridge sites for scour more precisely for efficient and effective design and countermeasures.

Four sites were surveyed for scour changes between the period of December 9, 2020, to April 20, 2021. At these four sites, overland and bathymetry survey data were collected. …

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning For Traffic Signal Control Through Universal Communication Method, Qize Jiang, Minhao Qin, Shengmin Shi, Weiwei Sun Sun, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

How to coordinate the communication among intersections effectively in real complex traffic scenarios with multi-intersection is challenging. Existing approaches only enable the communication in a heuristic manner without considering the content/importance of information to be shared. In this paper, we propose a universal communication form UniComm between intersections. UniComm embeds massive observations collected at one agent into crucial predictions of their impact on its neighbors, which improves the communication efficiency and is universal across existing methods. We also propose a concise network UniLight to make full use of communications enabled by UniComm. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate that UniComm …

Electrothermal Design Of A Gan-Based Axially Stator Iron-Mounted Fully Integrated Modular Motor Drive, Armin Ebrahimian, Waqar A. Khan, S. Iman Hosseini, Nathan Weise

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The concept of More Electric Aircraft (MEA) has gained a lot of attention from researchers recently. For such an application, two of the pivotal requirements are having a power dense and energy efficient propulsion system. To that end, in the design procedure of the electric motor and its drive system, high power density and efficiency over the entire operating range is the ultimate goal. Thus, the integration of the electric motor and drive system into a single unit has been introduced as an effective method to meet the design objectives. Therefore, this paper presents the design procedure of a module …

Cross Domain Semantic Segmentation, Xinyi Wu

Theses and Dissertations

As a long-standing computer vision task, semantic segmentation is still extensively researched till now because of its importance to visual understanding and analysis. The goal of semantic segmentation is to classify each pixel of images based on the pre-defined classes. In the era of deep learning, convolutional neural networks largely improve the accuracy and efficiency of semantic segmentation. However, this success is achieved with two limitations: 1) a large-scale labeled dataset is required for training while the labeling process for this task is quite labor-intensive and tedious; 2) the trained deep networks can get promising results when testing on the …

Development Of Micro-Sized Algan Deep Ultraviolet Light Emitting Diodes And Monolithic Photonic Integrated Circuits, Richard Speight Floyd Iii

Theses and Dissertations

III-Nitride materials-based visible emission LEDs have emerged as a disruptive technology in the fields of lighting,ⁱ) communications,^ii,iii,iv) and displays.^v,vi) Shorter wavelength LEDs in the DUV spectral region (210nm – 360nm) with ultra-wide bandgap (UWBG) Al_xGa_1-xN active layers are now poised to displace toxic Mercury-based light sources.^vii) Over the past decade AlGaN LEDs operating in the deep ultra-violet (DUV) spectral region (200 nm < λ_emission < 300 nm) have been deployed in novel applications including autonomous drone-based sterilization and sanitization systems, ^viii) point-of-use water purification systems, ^ix) photo-therapeutics,x) gas sensors,xi) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) communications.^xii) Similarly, DUV light detectors using ultra-wide bandgap (UWBG) Al …

Long Non-Coding Rna Pvt1 – An Exploratory Study In Ovarian And Endometrial Cancer, Kevin Tabury

Theses and Dissertations

Gynecological cancers, ovarian and endometrial cancer, are still leading causes of cancer-related death in women worldwide. Early detection methods as well as treatment resistance remain a challenge. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are emerging as therapeutic targets with diagnostic and prognostic potential with lncRNA PVT1 being one of them.

Here I test and demonstrate the role of PVT1 in ovarian cancer growth and metastasis. PVT1 is amplified and overexpressed in ovarian cancer and has predictive value for survival and response to targeted therapeutics. We find that expression of PVT1 is regulated by tumor cells in response to cellular stress, particularly loss …

Learning Depth From Images, Zhenyao Wu

Theses and Dissertations

Estimating depth from images has become a very popular task in computer vision which aims to restore the 3D scene from 2D images and identify important geometric knowledge of the scene. Its performance has been significantly improved by convolutional neural networks in recent years, which surpass the traditional methods by a large margin. However, the natural scenes are usually complicated, and hard to build the correspondence between pixels across frames, such as the region containing moving objects, illumination changes, occlusions, and reflections. This research explores rich and comprehensive spatial correspondence across images and designs three new network architectures for depth …

Oxidized Graphitic Nano-Amendment Of Cement Composites: Exploring Truly Low Concentrations And Novel Particle Morphologies, Shohana Iffat

Theses and Dissertations

Oxidized graphitic nanoparticles such as multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs), can produce enhancements in physicomechanical properties of cement composites that are relevant to structural and durability performance, provided that said nanoparticles are well dispersed in the composite. Lower-bound MWCNT concentrations are reported in the literature in the range 0.01-0.05% in weight of cement (wt%). Such concentrations may not be costeffective for practical applications and may also be excessive since they would result in a nanoparticle surface area at or above 105 m2 for 1 m3 of cement paste, or 104.5 m2 for 1 m 3 of concrete, …

Nondestructive Material Characterization Using A Fully Noncontact Ultrasonic Lamb Wave System For Thin Metals, Nuclear Cladding, And Composite Materials, Elsa Z. Compton

Theses and Dissertations

Effective non-destructive evaluation (NDE) inspection system and methods are highly desired in a broad range of engineering applications including thin metal structure thickness evaluation. Ultrasonic guided waves in thin-walled structures, namely Lamb waves, have gained popularity as a NDE method. By using the ultrasonic waves in conjunction with high spatial resolution multidimensional wavefield measurements, thickness evaluations for thin metals can be achieved. This thesis explores the configuration and application of a fully noncontact ultrasonic Lamb wave NDE system for thickness characterization and evaluation of very thin metal plates. We have tested the actuation and sensing of Lamb waves for thickness …

Identifying And Discovering Curve Pattern Designs From Fragments Of Pottery, Jun Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

The surface of many cultural heritage objects, such as pottery sherds found in the Southeastern Woodlands, were embellished with curve patterns. The original full designs of these patterns reflect rich historical and cultural information. However, in practice, most objects are fragmentary, making the complete underlying designs unknowable at the scale of the sherd fragment. The challenge to reconstruct and study complete designs is stymied because 1) most pottery sherds contain only a small portion of the underlying full design, 2) curve patterns detected on a sherd are usually incomplete and noisy, and 3) in the case of a stamping application, …