Engineering Commons^™

Gradient And Pressure Recovery Of A Self-Expandable Transcatheter Aortic Valve Depends On Ascending Aorta Size: In Vitro Study, Milad Samaee, Hoda Hatoum, Michael Biersmith, Breandan Yeats, Shelley C. Gooden, Vinod H. Thourani, Rebecca T. Hahn, Scott Lilly, Ajit Yoganathan, Lakshmi Prasad Dasi

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Objective: In this study we aimed to understand the role of interaction of the Medtronic Evolut R transcatheter aortic valve with the ascending aorta (AA) by evaluating the performance of the valve and the pressure recovery in different AA diameters with the same aortic annulus size. Methods: A 26-mm Medtronic Evolut R valve was tested using a left heart simulator in aortic root models of different AA diameter (D): small (D = 23 mm), medium (D = 28 mm), and large (D = 34 mm) under physiological conditions. Measurements of pressure from upstream to downstream of the valve were performed …

Modeling Multimodal Access To Primary Care In An Urban Environment, Danielle Eden Del Conte, Amanda Locascio, Joseph Amoruso, Margaret L. Mcnamara

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Access to primary health care facilities is a key component of public health, and measuring that access is vital to understanding how to target interventions. Transportation is one dimension of access and measuring distance via multiple modes allows better understanding of how varied populations access health care, particularly those who do not have access to a personal vehicle. This work builds on the 2-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) method to include travel by car, bus, bicycle, and walking. Travel time data are sourced from OpenStreetMap and transit data incorporates stop and schedule information from the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). …

Mytrials: Clinical Trial Application Concept, Katie Hollister

Graphic Communication

A clinical trial’s success is dependent upon whether a patient attends their highly-structured clinical trial visit schedule, which may include both in-person clinic visits and virtual check-in visits. MyTrials is a clinical trial journey app prototype that enables patients to schedule, reschedule, and attend join their in-person or virtual clinic visits. This product seeks to reduce the burden that scheduling places on the patient, and provides trial-provided resources and a daily and weekly timeline to help patients navigate their clinical trial journey.

Memory Surf: The Surfing App, Lorenzo Quaid Sison

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

Surfing has a very special place in my heart—my dad taught me, my younger brother, and my younger sister at a young age. Since then, the sport has deeply enriched my appreciation for nature and allowed me to better connect with friends.

One late afternoon I was sitting in the water on my board with two of my best friends, watching the rich sunset colors melt into the water; a sea otter was floating on his back next to us, cracking a shell open on his stomach. Then, suddenly, a few feet away, we saw a pod of dolphins leap …

Baja Sae Semi-Active Suspension, Philip Pang, Stassa Cappos, Harrison Hirsch, John Deboer

Mechanical Engineering

This Final Design Review (FDR) Report outlines the senior design project of the Baja SAE Semi-Active Suspension group, which includes mechanical and electrical engineering students at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo. This document compiles the Baja SAE Semi-Active Suspension senior project team’s research and development of a semi-active suspension system for the Cal Poly Racing Baja SAE racecar. The goal is to design a system that adjusts the damping constant of the racecar’s spring-damper suspension while the vehicle is being driven in order to improve vehicle dynamics and driver comfort. None of the semi-active dampers that exist on …

Malware Detection Using Electromagnetic Side-Channel Analysis, Matthew A. Bergstedt

Theses and Dissertations

Many physical systems control or monitor important applications without the capacity to monitor for malware using on-device resources. Thus, it becomes valuable to explore malware detection methods for these systems utilizing external or off-device resources. This research investigates the viability of employing EM SCA to determine whether a performed operation is normal or malicious. A Raspberry Pi 3 was set up as a simulated motor controller with code paths for a normal or malicious operation. While the normal path only calculated the motor speed before updating the motor, the malicious path added a line of code to modify the calculated …

Detection And Identification Of Cellphone Emitted Light Detection And Ranging Light In Security Camera Video Footage, Tristan V. Creek

Theses and Dissertations

The prevalence of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors in consumer cellphones has ushered in an era of access to technologies previously inaccessible to the average person. Although LiDAR sensors emit light in the infrared spectrum invisible to the naked eye, many security cameras possess the ability to capture infrared light reflected off surfaces to detect LiDAR light in an environment. Once detected and recorded to video footage, current classification methods fail to identify the LiDAR light. Therefore, this research develops a methodology to detect LiDAR light in security camera video footage and identify it as cellphone LiDAR. A proposed …

Exploiting The Iot Through Network-Based Covert Channels, Kyle S. Harris

Theses and Dissertations

Information leaks are a top concern to industry and government leaders. The IoT is a technology capable of sensing real-world events. A method for exfiltrating data from these devices is by covert channel. This research designs a novel IoT CTC without the need for inter-packet delays to encode data. Instead, it encodes data within preexisting network information, namely ports or addresses. Additionally, the CTC can be implemented in two different modes: Stealth and Bandwidth. Performance is measured using throughput and detectability. The Stealth methods mimic legitimate traffic captures while the Bandwidth methods forgo this approach for maximum throughput. Detection results …

Testbed Creation To Study Noise Radar Network Weighting Models And Data Fusion With Radio Tomographic Imaging, Ryan M. Jans

Theses and Dissertations

Significant research has been conducted on RTI weighting models; however, very little comparative research has been conducted for NRN weighting methods. In order to create comparative weighting methods for NRN, it is necessary to create a testbed which allows for RTI and NRN research to be conducted simultaneously and allow for data fusion methods to also be researched. After creating the testbed and analyzing results, the newly proposed weighting method provides an up to 33% performance increase in target localization accuracy when compared to the previous weighting model used for NRN. The attenuation image resolution improvements resulted in a 79% …

Monocular Camera Localization Using A Bag Of Visual Words From Virtual World Data, Joshua A. Rinaldi

Theses and Dissertations

The Visual Localization problem is the question of how to use visual information to determine the location of the camera that captured that data. The wide availability and low price of RGB cameras has made this useful in many fields such as SLAM, SAM and AR. This research seeks to determine if a BOVW can adequately overcome repetitious features in indoor environments and be effectively incorporated into a VL pipeline.

Military Personnel Flight Customer Wait Time Reduction Model Using Simulation, Nicholas C. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

Customers at Military Personnel Flights (MPFs) have been experiencing long wait times. These customers are typically employees of the United States Air Force and every moment spent waiting for service is a moment they are away from their actual jobs. By reducing the mean wait time of MPF customers, manhours can be saved and customer complaints may be alleviated. This research uses data collected from an MPF to build a discrete-event simulation model of an MPF. A full factorial experimental design was conducted in the model using five factors. The factors included the total number of employees, the total number …

Narrative Analysis Of Open-Source Social Media Activity In The Indopacom Aor, Aaron K. Glenn

Theses and Dissertations

Emotion classification can be a powerful tool to derive narratives from social media data. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) can meet or exceed the performance of state-of-the-art traditional machine learning techniques using exclusively open-source data and models. Specifically, these results show that RNN variants can produce more than an 8% gain in accuracy in comparison to Logistic Regression and SVM techniques and a 15% gain over Random Forest when using FastText embeddings. This research found a statistical significance in the performance of a single layer Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) model over a 2-layer stacked Bi-LSTM model. This research also found …

Approximate Dynamic Programming For An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Routing Problem With Obstacles And Stochastic Target Arrivals, Kassie M. Gurnell

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Air Force is investing in artificial intelligence (AI) to speed analysis in efforts to modernize the use of autonomous unmanned combat aerial vehicles (AUCAVs) in strike coordination and reconnaissance (SCAR) missions. This research examines an AUCAVs ability to execute target strikes and provide reconnaissance in a SCAR mission. An orienteering problem is formulated as anMarkov decision process (MDP) model wherein a single AUCAV must optimize its target route to aid in eliminating time-sensitive targets and collect imagery of requested named areas of interest while evading surface-to-air missile (SAM) battery threats imposed as obstacles. The AUCAV adjusts its …

A New Approach To Career Field Matching For Commissioning Air Force Cadets, Daniel Griffen Laird

Theses and Dissertations

The current method of assigning graduating cadets from the United States Air Force Academy and Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) detachments to their career fields uses an integer programming model to maximize \global" Air Force utility, subject to several Air Force-defined constraints. This utility evaluates the positive benefit of assigning a certain cadet to a certain career field. This paper discusses the issues with such a model, as well as presents a new, more refined approach to the problem. Rather than provide a one-size-fits-all formulation of this particular assignment problem, a Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) framework is applied, in conjunction with …

Analysis Of Twitter Networks To Aid Open Source Intelligence Capabilities: A Multilayer Network Approach, Austin P. Logan

Theses and Dissertations

Open Source Intelligence using social media is a practice which gives military intelligence analysts a window into the thoughts and minds of an online population. Using Social Network Analysis, user interactions on Twitter will be modeled as a weighted and directed network. Topic modeling through Latent Dirichlet Allocation uncovers the topics of discussion in Tweets and is then integrated into a multi-layer network which allows users to be connected to the conversations with which they have participated. Influential users in this network as well as highly connected groups of individuals are then discovered to paint a picture for intelligence analysts …

Assessing The United States Foreign Assistance Activities Impact On Violent Conflicts, Daniel F. Feze

Theses and Dissertations

The Global Fragility Act, H.R.2116 116th Cong. (2019), “directs the Department of State to establish the interagency Global Fragility Initiative to stabilize conflict-affected areas and prevent violence globally, and establishes funds to support such efforts”. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has identified deteriorating economies, weak or illegitimate political institutions, and competition over natural resources as causes of violence, extremism and instability (USAID, 2021). The agency gives priority to mitigating the causes and consequences of violent conflicts, instability and extremism and funds programs and activities to accomplish that (USAID, 2021). With this study, we aim to quantitatively assess …

Coupled Orbit-Attitude Dynamics And Control Of A Cubesat Equipped With A Robotic Manipulator, Charles M. Carr

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the utility and expected performance of a robotic servicing CubeSat. The coupled orbit-attitude dynamics of a 6U CubeSat equipped with a four-link serial manipulator are derived. A proportional-integral-derivative controller is implemented to guide the robot through a series of orbital scenarios, including rendezvous and docking following ejection from a chief spacecraft, repositioning the end effector to a desired location, and tracing a desired path with the end effector. Various techniques involving path planning and inverse differential kinematics are leveraged. Simulation results are presented and performance metrics such as settling time, state errors, control use, and system robustness …

Covariance Analysis For Multi-Source Navigation Architecture, Tristan T. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Currently, analysis on navigation systems can be slow and computationally expensive using Monte Carlo approaches. Covariance analysis is a tool that can return trade space analysis results promptly and can be computationally reasonable. This research aims to create a covariance analysis tool in a new navigation framework architecture, PntOS. The creation of this covariance tool is explained in coordination with the tool being used in a few different navigation scenarios with the results. These scenarios include a Doppler LiDAR velocity sensor and magnetic anomaly navigation.

Predicting Tf33-Pw-100a Engine Failures Due To Oil Issues Using Survival Analyses, Anna M. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

In 2007, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment pushed for the need to transition to a Condition Based Maintenance Plus (CBM ) initiative for weapon systems in the U.S. Department of Defense. The CBM initiative can help increase aircraft availability (AA) for the United States Air Force. There are many reasons where AA can be affected but one such issue is engine availability primarily due to oil issues. Within the CBM perspective, this study examines the risk of a jet engine failure due to an oil issue and attempts to predict an engines time until next …

Critical Evaluation Of Construction Industry-Related Additive Manufacturing Research: A Scientometric Analysis, Tyler J. Brunjes

Theses and Dissertations

Review of construction-related AM literature is used to identify the advantages, challenges, and current trends of the research. Using a scientometric analysis of 522 bibliographic records, this research systematically analyzed construction related AM research to determine the key research areas and trends. Results showed that starting in 2015, the field has been growing at an exponential rate. Recent AM research focused on materials and reinforcement topics, which matched the most notable challenges of AM, which are material rheology, reinforcement, and lacking construction standards. This study provides an insight into AM research and identifies areas requiring more innovation before its commercial …

The Cyber Wargame Commodity Course Of Action Automated Analysis Method, Alex Hoffendahl

Theses and Dissertations

In the modern operational landscape, strategic decisions are made and executed, under uncertain conditions, with many potential constraints and limited information. The end goal of these decisions is to minimize and mitigate the effect of adversarial threats, which may or may not act in line with previous assumptions. Wargaming is a powerful tool that allows for the practical implementation of theoretical knowledge into real-world scenarios, enhancing decision-makers critical thinking and problem solving skills. Furthermore, including cyber-effects in a wargame leads to a broader decision scope for an entire operation. This research aims to enhance the analytical capabilities and overall usability …

Understanding Logistics Airmen’S Risk Information Seeking And Processing During The Covid-19 Pandemic: The Role Of Organizational Meetings In An Extended Prism Framework, Christopher T. Price

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this survey-based research was to understand how organizational workplace meetings surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic impacted logistics Airmen across the United States Air Force and subsequently played a role into their risk seeking behavior on social media. Specifically, this research tested an expanded Planned Information Risk Seeking Model with organizational meetings as an antecedent to determine if current meetings influenced an Airman's perceived behavioral control, attitude toward seeking, subjective norms, knowledge sufficiency an intentions to seek information regarding COVID-19.

Accelerating Transition To Production By Manufacturing Readiness Focus During Development, William K. Duncan

Theses and Dissertations

The Department of Defense has adopted management tools, such as Manufacturing Readiness Levels (MRLs), which seek to address issues that have delayed the transition to production and delivery of deployment-ready systems. The MRL scale and assessment process institutes periodic reviews of products during the acquisition process. Specifically, MRLs provide a scale to measure, and importantly communicate, progress by evaluating and summarizing multiple aspects of product maturity. Unfortunately, issues are often identified during the periodic assessments which, if addressed earlier, would have further streamlined product delivery. The current research applies Model Based System Engineering tools to analyze and refine organizational structures …

Airworthiness Decision Factors In The Us Air Force, Derek N. Dennis

Theses and Dissertations

There are multiple airworthiness (AW) certification paths for aircraft platforms and their modifications. Specifically, military commercial derivative aircraft (MCDA) have a unique opportunity to pursue either FAA certification, military certification or a combination of both. Policy tells MCDA programs to pursue FAA certification to the maximum extent possible, however, the policy lacks clarity regarding where that extent ends. This concept of extent encompasses multiple factors and the choice of an AW basis is a complex decision. Under ideal conditions the decision maker, the program manager, has the experience and insight to support their decision, however, this is not always the …

Investigating The Relationship Of Preventive And Corrective Maintenance In Chiller Assets Using Linear Regression Analysis, Jacob A. Franke

Theses and Dissertations

Asset managers must balance maintenance plans between preventive (PM) and corrective maintenance (CM). While PM plans have been a staple for decades, the benefits achieved have not been thoroughly examined at the asset specific level. This study focuses on the U.S. Air Force chiller portfolio to better understand the relationship between PM and CM, utilizing multiple stages of linear regression modeling and data from 14 US Air Force installations. PM and CM were found to be positively correlated, with PM accounting for relatively small portions of the variance experienced in CM. This study reveals the value of standardized data collection …

A Critical Review Of Climate Change On Coastal Infrastructure Systems, Gregory J. Howland Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a response to climate threats identified by DoD report on Climate Change in 2019. A critical review of climate change literature related to coastal infrastructure was conducted to synthesize past research and to inform future research. This review intends to inform how climate change may impact infrastructure systems, how those impacts are evaluated, can the investigation be improved, and what can stakeholders learn from the outcomes. The end goal is to find climate change mitigation strategies and adaptation measures, or identify the easiest path to get to that end. The compiled information will inform civilian and military …

A Framework For Assessing Facility-Level Vulnerability And Risk To Extreme Weather Events, Blake A. Gawlik

Theses and Dissertations

Intensifying extreme weather events, tied to the rise in the global average temperature, put global built infrastructure at risk. This presents a daunting challenge for organizational leaders who are tasked to determine how best to adapt current infrastructure to uncertain future events. To develop adaptation plans and policies, vulnerability and risk must be downscaled to an actionable scale, such that planners, designers, and engineers can make adaptation recommendations. However, previous research has largely assessed risk at coarser scales, e.g., regional, national, or global. These assessments are informative, but do not help those tasked to lead adaptation to make detailed, actionable …

Magnetic Navigation Using Online Calibration Filter Analysis, Jonnathan D. Bonifaz

Theses and Dissertations

Magnetic navigation using the Earth’s magnetic anomaly field has proven to be a promising alternative that can provide coverage for a navigation system. This research demonstrates a magnetic navigation system using an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to aid an aircraft’s inertial navigation system (INS). Traditional magnetic anomaly navigation uses a “static calibration method,” which takes post-processed data to calibrate, obtaining the Tolles-Lawson coefficients needed for magnetic anomaly navigation filter compensation. These coefficients are constant and may cause drifts in the navigation filter if not re-calibrated. The online calibration method continuously updates the Tolles-Lawson coefficients as a filter state, reducing the …

Improving Task-Operator Analysis For Training Through The Integration Of Human Learning Taxonomies And Systems Engineering Models, James M. Earley

Theses and Dissertations

Training is a critical part of force sustainment, but the life-cycle cost of recurring training can be quite high. Further, the promotion of the Multi-Capable Airman (MCA) concept leads to questions on how best to train airmen on tasks outside of their core career field. The MCA concept, coupled with continued increase of technology effectiveness, incentivize the replacement of formerly in-residence-only training with distance training that enables Just-in-Time (JIT) learning. However, effective implementation of the MCA concept may also require adaptive training which considers the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) developed by a trainee within their core career field when …

Quantifying Project Complexity To Resource Project Managers, Jereme R. Henrard

Theses and Dissertations

This research develops a multi-criteria decision analysis model to quantify project complexity and inform decision-makers in resource-constrained organizations with the Tyndall Program Management Office (PMO) as a case study. The complexity score is used as a risk metric to determine the appropriate number of skilled or novice project managers to effectively manage the PMO portfolio to mitigate cost and schedule overruns. The research provides an innovative approach to consider manning levels at the PMO and other project management-focused organizations/sections.