Engineering Commons^™

Refining A Post-Stroke Pharmacological And Physical Treatment To Reduce Infarct Volume Or Improve Functional Recovery, Using Gene Expression Changes In The Peri-Infarct Region To Examine Potential Mechanisms In Male And Female Rats, Moner A. Ragas

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Stroke, a life-threatening medical condition, is the fifth-leading cause of death in the United States with an estimated annual cost of treatments above $70 billion. A combination of innovative approaches was used in our lab to optimize the pre-clinical stroke research design by choosing the most appropriate animal model and methodologies to increase the translational capability of the stroke research. The first study, modeled after ongoing clinical trials using fluoxetine, refined the appropriate timing of fluoxetine and ascorbic acid delivery if a rat was on simvastatin for 7 days pre-stroke and throughout the remainder of the study. Administration of fluoxetine …

Co-Transplantation Of Endothelial Progenitor Cells And Neural Progenitor Cells For Treating Ischemic Stroke In A Mouse Model, Jinju Wang

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Ischemic stroke (IS) is a major cause of death and disability with limited and less effective therapeutics. Transplantation of stem cells, such as neuronal progenitor cells (NPCs) and endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), is promising for treating IS. It is well known that neurogenesis and angiogenesis are critical for cerebral repair following ischemic injury. However, whether co-transplantation of EPCs and NPCs has synergistic effects remains unclarified. In addition, the PI3K/Akt pathway participates in modulating a widely range of cellular functions such as anti-apoptotic and anti-oxidant. The signal pathways responsible for the effects of grafted NPCs and EPCs are also waiting for …

Modular Multi-Signal Tracking Pulse Descriptor Word (Pdw) Generator With Field Programmable Gate Array (Fpga) Implementation, Justin Darrell Pelan

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As signal spectra become dense, the task of tracking and identifying radars becomes increasingly cumbersome. The variety of radars in modern theaters of war compound the task due to simultaneous operation. Real-time processing of large data sets prove difficult for sequential systems, and the parallelism of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) becomes an attractive option. To mitigate the increasing complexity of this task, this design proposes an FPGA architecture to produce pulse descriptor words (PDW) for up to eight independent radio frequency signals that can be used in near-real-time processing. Focusing on digital hardware techniques and modular design allow for …

Knowledge-Driven Implicit Information Extraction, Pathirage Dinindu Perera

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Natural language is a powerful tool developed by humans over hundreds of thousands of years. The extensive usage, flexibility of the language, creativity of the human beings, and social, cultural, and economic changes that have taken place in daily life have added new constructs, styles, and features to the language. One such feature of the language is its ability to express ideas, opinions, and facts in an implicit manner. This is a feature that is used extensively in day to day communications in situations such as: 1) expressing sarcasm, 2) when trying to recall forgotten things, 3) when required to …

Probabilistic Svm For Open Set Automatic Target Recognition On High Range Resolution Radar Data, Jason Daniel Roos

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The application of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) on High Range Resolution (HRR) radar data in a scenario that contains unknown targets is of great interest for military and civilian applications. HRR radar data provides greater resolution of a target as well as the ability to perform ATR on a moving target, which gives it an advantage over other imaging systems. With the added resolution of HRR comes the disadvantage that a change in the aspect angle or orientation results in greater changes in the collected data, making classical ATR more difficult. Closed set ATR on HRR radar data is defined …

A Statistical Approach To Broadband Noise Suppression, Walter Eversman

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A method for estimating achievable attenuation for broadband noise in an inlet duct, consistent with Dyer's suggestion that an appropriate model includes all propagating acoustic modes at equal power and random phase, is proposed. Broadband noise is represented in a frequency domain analysis by a statistical distribution of propagating duct modes. The required number of modes is estimated by Rice's approximation method and verified in FEM modeling. For each propagating circumferential mode propagating radial modes have equal acoustic power and random phase. Source acoustic power is distributed among circumferential modes according to the number of propagating radial modes in the …

Decomposition Of A Double Salt Ionic Liquid Monopropellant On Heated Metallic Surfaces, Steven P. Berg, Joshua L. Rovey

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A monopropellant consisting of 59% hydroxylammonium nitrate and 41% 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium ethyl sulfate by mass is tested for decomposition on heated platinum, rhenium, and titanium surfaces. It was found that the propellant decomposes at 165 °C on titanium, which is the decomposition temperature of HAN. The onset temperature for decomposition on platinum was 85 °C and on rhenium it was 125 °C. This suggests that platinum and rhenium act as catalysts for the decomposition of the monopropellant. From the experimental data, Arrhenius-type reaction rate parameters were calculated. The activation energy for platinum was 3 times less than that of titanium suggesting …

Fluorescent Nanocomposite Of Embedded Ceria Nanoparticles In Crosslinked Pva Electrospun Nanofibers, Nader Shehata, Soha Gaballah, Effat Samir, Aya Hamed, Marwa Saad

Biology Faculty Publications

This paper introduces a new fluorescent nanocomposite of electrospun biodegradable nanofibers embedded with optical nanoparticles. In detail, this work introduces the fluorescence properties of PVA nanofibers generated by the electrospinning technique with embedded cerium oxide (ceria) nanoparticles. Under near-ultra violet excitation, the synthesized nanocomposite generates a visible fluorescent emission at 520 nm, varying its intensity peak according to the concentration of in situ embedded ceria nanoparticles. This is due to the fact that the embedded ceria nanoparticles have optical tri-valiant cerium ions, associated with formed oxygen vacancies, with a direct allowed bandgap around 3.5 eV. In addition, the impact of …

Nx 10 For Engineering Design -- Learning Edition, Ming-Chuan Leu, Amir Ghazanfari, Krishna C. R. Kolan

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

NX is one of the world’s most advanced and tightly integrated CAD/CAM/CAE product development solution. Spanning the entire range of product development, NX delivers immense value to enterprises of all sizes. It simplifies complex product designs, thus speeding up the process of introducing products to the market.

The NX software integrates knowledge-based principles, industrial design, geometric modeling, advanced analysis, graphic simulation, and concurrent engineering. The software has powerful hybrid modeling capabilities by integrating constraint-based feature modeling and explicit geometric modeling. In addition to modeling standard geometry parts, it allows the user to design complex free-form shapes such as airfoils and …

An Introduction To The Special Issue On Geoscience Papers Of The Future, Cédric H. David, Yolanda Gil, Christopher J. Duffy, Scott D. Peckham, S. Karan Venayagamoorthy

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Advocates of enhanced quality for published scientific results are increasingly voicing the need for further transparency of data and software for scientific reproducibility. However, such advanced digital scholarship can appear perplexing to geoscientists that are seduced by the concept of open science yet wonder about the exact mechanics and implications of the associated efforts. This special issue of Earth and Space Science entitled "Geoscience Papers of the Future" includes a review of existing best practices for digital scholarship and bundles a set of example articles that share their digital research products and reflect on the process of opening their scientific …

A Biomechanical Comparison Between Expert And Novice Manual Materials Handlers Using A Multi-Joint Emg-Assisted Optimization Musculoskeletal Model Of The Lumbar Spine, Denis Gagnon, André Plamondon, Christian Larivière

Études primaires

Expertise is a key factor modulating the risk of low back disorders (LBD). Through years of practice in the workplace, the typical expert acquires high level specific skills and maintains a clean record of work-related injuries. Ergonomic observations of manual materials handling (MMH) tasks show that expert techniques differ from those of novices, leading to the idea that expert techniques are safer. Biomechanical studies of MMH tasks performed by experts/novices report mixed results for kinematic/kinetic variables, evoking potential internal effect of expertise. In the context of series of box transfers simulated by actual workers, detailed internal loads predicted by a …

Subject-Specific Biomechanics Of Trunk: Musculoskeletal Scaling, Internal Loads And Intradiscal Pressure Estimation, F. Ghezelbash, A. Shirazi-Adl, N. Arjmand, Z. El-Ouaaid, A. Plamondon

Études primaires

Development of a subject-specific computational musculoskeletal trunk model (accounting for age, sex, body weight and body height), estimation of muscle forces and internal loads as well as subsequent validation by comparison with measured intradiscal pressure in various lifting tasks are novel, important and challenging. The objective of the present study is twofold. First, it aims to update and personalize the passive and active structures in an existing musculoskeletal kinematics-driven finite element model. The scaling scheme used an existing imaging database and biomechanical principles to adjust muscle geometries/cross-sectional-areas and passive joint geometry/properties in accordance with subjects’ sex, age, body weight and …

Review Of Sensing Methodologies For Estimation Of Combustion Metrics, Libin Jia, Jeffrey D. Naber, Jason R. Blough

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

For reduction of engine-out emissions and improvement of fuel economy, closed-loop control of the combustion process has been explored and documented by many researchers. In the closed-loop control, the engine control parameters are optimized according to the estimated instantaneous combustion metrics provided by the combustion sensing process. Combustion sensing process is primarily composed of two aspects: combustion response signal acquisition and response signal processing. As a number of different signals have been employed as the response signal and the signal processing techniques can be different, this paper did a review work concerning the two aspects: combustion response signals and signal …

Direct Position Control Of Dielectric Barrier Discharge Filaments, Matthew C. Paliwoda, Joshua L. Rovey, Mitchell Wainwright

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Controllable patterns of plasma filaments are being explored for reconfigurable metamaterial applications. When operated in a filamentary mode, volume dielectric barrier discharges are known to produce patterns of self-organizing plasma filaments. In this work the presence and intensity of a single filament at a fixed location is controlled by an isolated and independently electrically adjusted needle electrode. Time-averaged normalized light intensity, current, and voltage are measured while varying the voltage of the needle through a self-biasing resistance. For a 7.5 kV, 3.2 kHz DBD, the needle-controlled filament discharges similar to adjacent filaments at low potentials but stops discharging at a …

A Clean Electricity Future: Assessing The Role Of Wide-Area Power System Operations In Supporting Weather-Driven Renewable Energy In The U.S., Paul D. Picciano

Pomona Senior Theses

Over the coming decades, renewable energy sources, namely wind and solar, will need to play a larger role in our nation’s energy mix as we seek to lower greenhouse emissions and respond to renewable energy policies and the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. This thesis assesses the role of wider-area power system operations in the U.S. as a powerful solution in supporting the integration of these weather-driven, variable energy resources that pose substantial challenges to grid reliability. The expansion and integration of organized electricity markets and transmission networks over wider geographic areas can (1) help reduce net-variability in wind and solar …

Analysis Of Pellet Cladding Interaction And Creep Of U3si2 Fuel For Use In Light Water Reactors, Kathryn E. Metzger

Theses and Dissertations

Following the accident at the Fukushima plant, enhancing the accident tolerance of the light water reactor (LWR) fleet became a topic of serious discussion. Under the direction of congress, the DOE office of Nuclear Energy added accident tolerant fuel development as a primary component to the existing Advanced Fuels Program. The DOE defines accident tolerant fuels as fuels that “in comparison with the standard UO2- Zircaloy system currently used by the nuclear industry, can tolerate loss of active cooling in the reactor core for a considerably longer time period (depending on the LWR system and accident scenario) while maintaining or …

A Lithium Battery Current Estimation Technique Using An Unknown Input Observer, Daniel Cambron

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Current consumption measurements are useful in a wide variety of applications, including power monitoring and fault detection within a lithium battery management system (BMS). This measurement is typically taken using either a shunt resistor or a Hall-effect current transducer. Although both methods have achieved accurate current measurements, shunt resistors have inherent power loss and often require isolation circuitry, and Hall-effect sensors are generally expensive. This work explores a novel alternative to sensing battery current by measuring terminal voltages and cell temperatures and using an unknown input observer (UIO) to estimate the battery current. An accurate model of a LiFePO_{4 …}

Modelling Of The Nanowire Cds-Cdte Device Design For Enhanced Quantum Efficiency In Window-Absorber Type Solar Cells, Rasika Ganvir

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Numerical simulations of current-voltage characteristics of nanowire CdS/CdTe solar cells are performed as a function of temperature using SCAPS-1D. This research compares the experimental current-voltage (I-V) characteristics with the numerical (I-V) simulations obtained from SCAPS-1D at various temperatures. Various device parameters were studied which can affect the efficiency of the nanowire-CdS/CdTe solar cell. It was observed that the present simulated model explains the important effects of these solar cell devices, such as the crossover and the rollover effect. It was shown that the removal of defect in i-SnO2 is responsible for producing the crossover effect. In the past, the rollover …

A Modular Electrical Power System Architecture For Small Spacecraft, Timothy M. Lim

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Small satellites and CubeSats have established themselves within the aerospace community because of their low cost and high return on investment. Many CubeSats are developed in a short time frame and often leverage commercial off the shelf components for quick turnaround missions. With regard to the Electrical Power System, commercially available products typically use a centralized architecture. However, a centralized architecture is not reusable, since missions that require additional solar arrays or batteries would necessitate a redesign of the power system. With the range of CubeSat sizes and mission goals, it is obvious that a one-size-fits-all solution is not appropriate. …

Analysis Of Vocal Fold Kinematics Using High Speed Video, Harikrishnan Unnikrishnan

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Vocal folds are the twin in-folding of the mucous membrane stretched horizontally across the larynx. They vibrate modulating the constant air flow initiated from the lungs. The pulsating pressure wave blowing through the glottis is thus the source for voiced speech production. Study of vocal fold dynamics during voicing are critical for the treatment of voice pathologies. Since the vocal folds move at 100 - 350 cycles per second, their visual inspection is currently done by strobosocopy which merges information from multiple cycles to present an apparent motion. High Speed Digital Laryngeal Imaging(HSDLI) with a temporal resolution of up to …

Robust Background Subtraction For Moving Cameras And Their Applications In Ego-Vision Systems, Hasan Sajid

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Background subtraction is the algorithmic process that segments out the region of interest often known as foreground from the background. Extensive literature and numerous algorithms exist in this domain, but most research have focused on videos captured by static cameras. The proliferation of portable platforms equipped with cameras has resulted in a large amount of video data being generated from moving cameras. This motivates the need for foundational algorithms for foreground/background segmentation in videos from moving cameras. In this dissertation, I propose three new types of background subtraction algorithms for moving cameras based on appearance, motion, and a combination of …

Wearable Privacy Protection With Visual Bubble, Shaoqian Wang

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Wearable cameras are increasingly used in many different applications such as entertainment, security, law enforcement and healthcare. In this thesis, we focus on the application of the police worn body camera and behavioral recording using a wearable camera for one-on-one therapy with a child in a classroom or clinic. To protect the privacy of other individuals in the same environment, we introduce a new visual privacy protection technique called visual bubble. Visual bubble is a virtual zone centered around the camera for observation whereas the rest of the environment and people are obfuscated. In contrast to most existing visual privacy …

Market Based Control Of Pv Inverters In A Distribution System, Kumar Rishikesh

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

A growing energy crisis, a rapid climate change, and a constant depletion of fossil fuel necessitates the role of renewable energy resources like PV (Photovoltaics) and wind energy to form a group of distributed sources of generation. These circumstances promote the use of renewable resources meeting the environmental commitments in terms of checking pollution and toxic footprints. A group of PV and wind energy generation units may work together as micro players to form smart grid systems and participate in an existing distribution system to meet a portion of the daily energy demand. This will help in minimizing the network …

Per-Pixel Calibration For Rgb-Depth Natural 3d Reconstruction On Gpu, Sen Li

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ever since the Kinect brought low-cost depth cameras into consumer market, great interest has been invigorated into Red-Green-Blue-Depth (RGBD) sensors. Without calibration, a RGBD camera’s horizontal and vertical field of view (FoV) could help generate 3D reconstruction in camera space naturally on graphics processing unit (GPU), which however is badly deformed by the lens distortions and imperfect depth resolution (depth distortion). The camera’s calibration based on a pinhole-camera model and a high-order distortion removal model requires a lot of calculations in the fragment shader. In order to get rid of both the lens distortion and the depth distortion …

Genetic Algorithms In Stochastic Optimization And Applications In Power Electronics, Mengmei Liu

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are widely used in multiple fields, ranging from mathematics, physics, to engineering fields, computational science, bioinformatics, manufacturing, economics, etc. The stochastic optimization problems are important in power electronics and control systems, and most designs require choosing optimum parameters to ensure maximum control effect or minimum noise impact; however, they are difficult to solve using the exhaustive searching method, especially when the search domain conveys a large area or is infinite. Instead, GAs can be applied to solve those problems. And efficient computing budget allocation technique for allocating the samples in GAs is necessary because the real-life problems …

Mathematical Model For Current Transformer Based On Jiles-Atherton Theory And Saturation Detection Method, Xiang Li

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Current transformer saturation will cause the secondary current distortion. When saturation occurs, the secondary current will not be linearly proportional to the primary current, which may lead to maloperation of protection devices. This thesis researches and tests two detecting methods: Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Wavelet Transform based methods. Comparing these two methods, FFT has a better performance in steady state saturation, and Wavelet Transform can determine singularity to provide the moment of distortion.

The Jiles-Atherton (J-A) theory of ferromagnetic hysteresis is one approach used in electromagnetics transient modeling. With decades of development, the J-A model has evolved into different …

Small Satellite Noncommutative Rotation Sequence Attitude Control Using Piezoelectric Actuators, Joshua L. Evans

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Attitude control remains one of the top engineering challenges faced by small satellite mission planning and design. Conventional methods for attitude control include propulsion, reaction wheels, magnetic torque coils, and passive stabilization mechanisms, such as permanent magnets that align with planetary magnetic fields. Drawbacks of these conventional attitude control methods for small satellites include size, power consumption, dependence on external magnetic fields, and lack of full control authority. This research investigates an alternative, novel approach to attitude-control method for small satellites, utilizing the noncommutative property of rigid body rotation sequences. Piezoelectric bimorph actuators are used to induce sinusoidal small-amplitude satellite …

The Effects Of Micro-Dimple Texture On The Friction And Thermal Behavior Of A Point Contact, Utsav Kamleshbhai Parmar

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This study investigates the effects of the micro-dimple texture on the friction and surface temperature performances of a ball-on-disk contact, operating under the speed and load ranges that cover typical gearing applications. Circular shaped micro-dimple arrays with different dimple center distances and dimple depths are implemented on the ball surface to quantify the impacts of these two parameters on the friction coefficient and the maximum ball surface temperature. In addition, the contacts of three surface texture combinations, namely micro-dimpled and polished ball surface versus polished disk surface, polished ball surface versus polished disk surface and ground ball surface versus ground …

Nonreciprocal Magnetostatic Surface Wave In Thin Ferromagnetic Film, Kumar Vishal

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Interest in the nonreciprocal property of waves inside the magnetic material starts with its current advancement in the field of passive devices. In current technology passive devices without magnetic cores are realized on a silicon chip, usually these devices are lossy and bigger in size. Passive devices constructed with magnetic core material such as isolators, circulators, phase shifters, and gyrators; gives us the chance to minimize such losses. Nonreciprocity in magnetic material is due to the anisotropic property of permeability, it is complex in nature and represent in 3×3 matrix form. We can control the wave flow inside the nonreciprocal …

Retail Facility Design Considering Product Exposure, Corinne H. Mowrey

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Retail store's layout affects a shopper's visual experience and correspondingly the time spent in the store, navigation through the aisles, and allocation of attention and money across departments and categories. We contend that alternate rack layouts allow for more of a rack's facing to appear in the shopper's visual field. In this work we focus on the following two questions: (i) what impact does a given rack layout have on how much of a rack display is exposed to a shopper? (ii) what rack layouts maximize exposure to a shopper? To address the first question, we introduce a set of …