Engineering Commons^™

Arsenic Release From Surface Soils Induced By Stormwater Bioretention, Kaisa H. Patterson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Arsenic is a naturally occurring element known for its chronic and acute toxicity. The solubility of arsenic is highly dependent on environmental conditions. The soils of Cache Valley, UT, contain naturally occurring arsenic.

Bioretention systems rely on a combined plant-soil system to remove pollutants carried by stormwater, typically nitrogen, phosphorus, dissolved organic carbon, and select metals. Phosphate from stormwater potentially increases arsenic mobility, which makes stormwater pollutant loading an important factor for evaluating risks associated with stormwater bioretention. Pollutant removal in these systems occurs through sorption of contaminants onto the soils, physical filtration by the soil media, and uptake by …

Spherical Cavity Expansion Approach For The Study Of Rigid-Penetrator’S Impact Problems, Mario Buchely, Alejandro Marañon

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In recent years, Spherical Cavity Expansion (SCE) theory has been extensively utilized to model dynamic deformation processes related to indentation and penetration problems in many fields. In this review, the SCE theory is introduced by explaining the different mathematical features of this theory, its solution, and a potential application to model the penetration of a rigid penetrator into a deformable target. First, a chronologically literature review of the most common models used to study this kind of penetration problems is introduced, focusing on the SCE theory. Then, the engineering model of penetration is presented using the SCE approach. The model …

Predicting Disease Progression Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks And Longitudinal Electronic Health Record Data, Seunghwan Kim

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are widely adopted and used throughout healthcare systems and are able to collect and store longitudinal information data that can be used to describe patient phenotypes. From the underlying data structures used in the EHR, discrete data can be extracted and analyzed to improve patient care and outcomes via tasks such as risk stratification and prospective disease management. Temporality in EHR is innately present given the nature of these data, however, and traditional classification models are limited in this context by the cross-sectional nature of training and prediction processes. Finding temporal patterns in EHR is especially …

Transcriptomic Analysis Of Cytokine-Treated Tissue-Engineered Cartilage As An In Vitro Model Of Osteoarthritis, Jiehan Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Osteoarthritis (OA), as the most common form of arthritis and a leading cause of disability worldwide, currently has no disease-modifying drugs. Inflammation plays an important role in cartilage degeneration in OA, and pro-inflammatory cytokines, IL-1β and TNF-α, have been shown to induce degradative changes along with aberrant gene expression in chondrocytes, the only resident cells in cartilage. The goal of this study was to further understand the transcriptomic regulation of tissue-engineered cartilage in response to inflammatory cytokines using an in vitro miPSC model system. We performed RNA sequencing for the IL-1β or TNF-α treated tissue-engineered cartilage derived from murine iPSCs, …

Embedding Preference Elicitation Within The Search For Dcop Solutions, Yuanming Xiao

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem(DCOP)formulation is a powerful tool to model cooperative multi-agent problems, especially when they are sparsely constrained with one another. A key assumption in this model is that all constraints are fully specified or known a priori, which may not hold in applications where constraints encode preferences of human users. In this thesis, we extend the model to Incomplete DCOPs (I-DCOPs), where some constraints can be partially specified. User preferences for these partially-specified constraints can be elicited during the execution of I-DCOP algorithms, but they incur some elicitation costs. Additionally, we propose two parameterized heuristics that can …

Design And Validation Of A Dynamic Pressure-Based Loading Device And 3d Strain Tracking Protocol For Ventral Hernia Modeling, Griffin Kivitz

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

It is estimated that 350,000-500,000 ventral hernia repair surgeries are performed each year in the United States. While the long-term recurrence rate of ventral hernia repairs is not yet known, when tissues are exposed to the trauma of surgery, there is always the chance of recurrence. Commonly used ex vivo testing methods for determining the mechanical properties of the abdominal wall and biomaterials for hernia repair consist primarily of uniaxial and biaxial testing, which are not physiologically relevant loading environments. The need for a testing device that can exert physiologically relevant loads ex vivo to an abdominal wall is crucial …

A High Frequency Photoacoustic System For Colorectal Cancer Imaging, Kexin Huang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

While colorectal cancer is the second largest cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, early detection is a key factor in its survival rate. Compared to conventional imaging modalities, photoacoustic imaging offers benefits in providing angiographic images which are valuable for early-stage tumor detection. This thesis presents the design of a 32-channel 80 MHz photoacoustic image system, whose relatively high frequency offers particular advantages. The system comprises several modules, including a laser system, ultrasound probe, AD convertor, microcontroller (FPGA), and a computer. The system requires programs for the FPGA and the data receiver on the computer. The data transportation …

A Performance Analysis Of Hardware-Assisted Security Technologies, Wenjie Qiu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a novel hardware-assisted security technology introduced by Intel Corporation. The ambition of Intel SGX is to provide an isolated and secure execution environment for user-space applications. Even if the BIOS is compromised, the protected applications remains secure. The isolated execution environment is located in a special memory region called the enclave. Promoting and using a novel technology requires a good understanding of it. This thesis first contains a systematization of knowledge of the hardware-assisted security technologies, trusted computing and the Intel SGX. What is more, to have the best practice of using Intel SGX, …

Vehicle Design Study Of A Straight Flying-Wing With Bell-Shaped Spanload, Kevin Hainline

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Straight flying-wing configurations, that is flying wings with zero quarter-chord sweep, are key to understanding bird flight, have potential performance improvements, and are suitable for "survivable" applications. Straight flying-wings are also well suited for morphing geometry, e.g. with variable twist, since changes in lift distribution do not impact longitudinal equilibrium. The straight-flying wing can adjust its lift distribution to optimize aerodynamic efficiency across a wide range of flight conditions. In this thesis, we conduct the design study of a flying-wing with bell-shaped spanload; the study vehicle is called "Biom T1". Biom T1 has a more efficient directional control scheme acheived …

Potential Of Hydrodynamic Metamaterial Cloak For Drag Reduction, Rong Zou

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Metamaterials are rationally designed artificial materials composed of tailored functional building blocks densely packed into an effective material. While metamaterials historically are primarily thought to be associated with negative index of refraction and invisibility cloaking in electromagnetism or optics, it turns out that the simple metamaterial concept also applies to many other areas of physics namely the thermodynamics, classical mechanics including elastostatics, acoustics, fluid dynamics and elastodynamics, and in principle also to the quantum mechanics. The goal of this thesis is to introduce and evaluate the potential of a hydrodynamic metamaterial cloak for drag reduction of objects in viscous flow. …

Computational Imaging Methods For Analysis Of Datscan Spect Images, Hae Sol Moon

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

There is an important need to develop biomarkers to improve the diagnosis and assess the severity of Parkinson’s disease (PD). The potential to derive such biomarkers from quantitative dopamine transporter scan (DaT-Scan) single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging, in particular the uptake of DaT in the caudate, putamen, and globus pallidus regions, is highly appealing as imaging is non-invasive and DaTScan is already used in the management of patients with PD. However, reliable quantification requires reliable segmentation of these regions in these images. Reliable segmentation is challenging due to the limited spatial resolution and high image noise in SPECT images …

A Generalized Gaussian Process Likelihood For Psychometric Function Estimation, Jonathan Wenhan Chen

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Psychometric functions model the relationship between a physical phenomenon, an independent variable, and a subject’s performance on a cognitive task. The estimation of these psychometric functions is critical for the understanding of perception and cognition as well as for the diagnosis and treatment of many sensory conditions. The ability to estimate psychometric functions of any complexity is necessary to this end. In the following thesis, a generalized likelihood function for psychometric function estimation with Gaussian processes is described and validated. Such a likelihood function is necessary to enable the usage of Gaussian processes for the estimation of non-zero guess and …

Predicting Disease Progression Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks And Longitudinal Electronic Health Record Data, Seunghwan Kim

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are widely adopted and used throughout healthcare systems and are able to collect and store longitudinal information data that can be used to describe patient phenotypes. From the underlying data structures used in the EHR, discrete data can be extracted and analyzed to improve patient care and outcomes via tasks such as risk stratification and prospective disease management. Temporality in EHR is innately present given the nature of these data, however, and traditional classification models are limited in this context by the cross- sectional nature of training and prediction processes. Finding temporal patterns in EHR is …

Analog Versus Digital Guitar Pedals, Shaping Guitar Tones And Sparking Debates, Cameron Karren

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper goes into the history of guitar effects, what exactly they are, how they have evolved, and what they are like today. It also presents the results of an experiment that compares perceptions of differences between analog and digital guitar pedals.

Nonpoint Source Pollution Control Using A Multi-Objective Optimization Tool For Best Management Practices Selection And Spatial Placement In The Lower Bear River Watershed, Utah, Ali A. Salha

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation presents a set of approaches to help address water quality problems related to total phosphorus loads in water bodies. Water quality degradation is caused by many nonpoint sources such as agricultural runoff, fertilizers applications, and bank erosion. Three studies present methodologies for water quality protection from degradation in watersheds. The first study demonstrates the application of a watershed simulation tool that can quantify flows in the watershed, the amount of released pollutants and identify the areas contributing to the pollutants’ release in the watershed. The second study presents a simple combination tool that can pair potential management practices …

Practical Optical Survey Strategies For Near Geostationary Orbital Debris, Akhter Mahmud Nafi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Uncontrolled space objects, more commonly known as space debris, consist of dead satellites, satellite deployment packages, and lost elements of these systems such as insulation blankets. These uncontrolled objects represent hazards to our nation’s most valuable space assets which include communication satellites, weather satellites, Earth monitoring systems, and military assets. To help mitigate this problem, this research proposes using the known astrodynamics of the near geosynchronous orbit (GEO) along with the known concentration of the uncontrolled GEO objects and observation constraints to design ground-based optical surveys that will detect uncatalogued debris. Furthermore, a scoring metric is developed to evaluate the …

Observation Of Struvite In The Mixed Microalgae Biofilm Matrix Of A Rotating Algal Biofilm Reactor During Nutrient Removal From Municipal Anaerobic Digester Filtrate, Kyle M. Hillman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Central Valley Water Reclamation Facility (CVWRF) in Salt Lake City is the largest municipal wastewater treatment plant in Utah and must meet new and rigorous nutrient effluent standards–over 95% reduction in phosphorus output by 2025. Filtrate from CVWRF anaerobic digesters contains high levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium. Supersaturation of these constituents leads to nuisance struvite precipitation that clogs belts, pumps, and pipes downstream of anaerobic digesters. Struvite is a mineral precipitate composed of equimolar magnesium, ammonium, and phosphate. Controlled precipitation of struvite helps prevent clogging and scaling, removes phosphate from wastewater, and generates a marketable fertilizer product.

Struvite was …

Ranchers Adapting To Climate Variability In The Upper Colorado River Basin, Utah, Hadia Akbar

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Changes in climate influence agricultural production. This study looks at the impacts of climate variability in the Utah regions of the Upper Colorado River Basin by combining regression techniques with interview data to explore how climate variability affects agricultural production and how the farmers are adapting their practices to these changes. The results show that climate does not have any significant impact on cattle and hay production in the study area on a decadal scale. However, on an annual basis temperature seems to have more impact than precipitation. Among non-climatic variables, commodity prices and their regulations by the government are …

Decoding Ldpc Codes With Probabilistic Local Maximum Likelihood Bit Flipping, Rejoy Roy Mathews

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Communication channels are inherently noisy making error correction coding a major topic of research for modern communication systems. Error correction coding is the addition of redundancy to information transmitted over communication channels to enable detection and recovery of erroneous information. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are a class of error correcting codes that have been effective in maintaining reliability of information transmitted over communication channels. Multiple algorithms have been developed to benefit from the LDPC coding scheme to improve recovery of erroneous information. This work develops a matrix construction that stores the information error probability statistics for a communication channel. This …

Development And Validation Of A Synchronous Model To Simulate Skeletal Muscle Damage Due To Spaceflight Ionizing Radiation And Microgravity, Lori M. Caldwell

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Astronauts traveling or researching in space are subject to a harsh environment that includes high levels of ionizing radiation and microgravity. Ionizing radiation is dangerous to overall health because it causes double-stranded DNA breaks, increases the production of free radicals or reactive oxygen species, and leads to an enhanced risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer over a person’s lifetime. Similarly, microgravity is hazardous to astronaut health because humans require gravity to maintain a healthy heart and muscular and vascular systems.

Both ionizing radiation and microgravity have been studied individually in previous research, but there is a lack of information on …

Size-Dependent Inhibitory Effects Of Antibiotic Nanocarriers On Filamentation Of E. Coli, Preeyaporn Songkiatisak, Feng Ding, Pavan Kumar Cherukuri, Xiao-Hong Nancy Xu

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications

Multidrug membrane transporters exist in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and cause multidrug resistance (MDR), which results in an urgent need for new and more effective therapeutic agents. In this study, we used three different sized antibiotic nanocarriers to study their mode of action and their size-dependent inhibitory effects against Escherichia coli (E. coli). Antibiotic nanocarriers (AgMUNH–Oflx NPs) with 8.6 × 10², 9.4 × 10³ and 6.5 × 10⁵ Oflx molecules per nanoparticle (NP) were prepared by functionalizing Ag NPs (2.4 ± 0.7, 13.0 ± 3.1 and 92.6 ± 4.4 nm) with a monolayer …

Service Dog Ramp, Matthew Lundgren, Ariel Tolentino, Dallas Rocha, Adam Mayeda

Mechanical Engineering

This project involves designing a device to help a service dog easily get into and out of a truck. It details the design and manufacturing process. The project was interrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so detailed instructions are provided for whoever takes on the project in the future.

Multiplex Memory Network For Collaborative Filtering, Xunqiang Jiang, Binbin Hu, Yuan Fang, Chuan Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recommender systems play an important role in helping users discover items of interest from a large resource collection in various online services. Although current deep neural network-based collaborative filtering methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in recommender systems, they still face a few major weaknesses. Most importantly, such deep methods usually focus on the direct interaction between users and items only, without explicitly modeling high-order co-occurrence contexts. Furthermore, they treat the observed data uniformly, without fine-grained differentiation of importance or relevance in the user-item interactions and high-order co-occurrence contexts. Inspired by recent progress in memory networks, we propose a novel multiplex …

Route Choice Behaviour And Travel Information In A Congested Network: Static And Dynamic Recursive Models, Giselle De Moraes Ramos, Tien Mai, Winnie Daamen, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Travel information has the potential to influence travellers choices, in order to steer travellers to less congested routes and alleviate congestion. This paper investigates, on the one hand, how travel information affects route choice behaviour, and on the other hand, the impact of the travel time representation on the interpretation of parameter estimates and prediction accuracy. To this end, we estimate recursive models using data from an innovative data collection effort consisting of route choice observation data from GPS trackers, travel diaries and link travel times on the overall network. Though such combined data sets exist, these have not yet …

Development Of Plane Rotating Traction System: Based On The High-Speed Rail (72+128+72) M Continuous Prestressed Concrete Beam Bridge, Weinan Wang

Theses and Dissertations

With the advent of rotate construction techniques, it is easy to build a new bridge crossing over existing structures, rivers and valleys quickly, easily and safely. Although the general concept of the rotating method is similar for different engineering characteristics, it is necessary to make some changes, which are more in line with the requirements of the particular project. Based on a 3-spans (72+128+72)m continuous concrete bridge, this paper presents a new rotation method, the down-slide-way unbalanced rotation system, which can save time and reduce cost compared to the up-slide-way rotation method. Through the improvements of the traction system and …

Flash Lab: A High-Speed Imaging Laboratory, Cody D. Hatch

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

To help students become better acquainted with high-speed instrumentation and measurement techniques, a high-speed imaging laboratory for the College of Engineering is equipped with a high-speed camera and schlieren imaging device. The laboratory will be used for labs in classes, such as Instrumentation, Thermal/Fluids Lab, Experimental Solids, and Mechanical Experiments. In addition, graduate students will use it for research purposes. The laboratory also has the potential to have a course associated with it that would include the image processing techniques for a variety of applications (e.g., a course on high-speed imaging). The scope of this project will be to create …

Geolocation Based On Signal Level Measurement And Time Advance Inside The Network, Zaenab Shakir

Theses and Dissertations

The increasing demands for location-based services in recent years led to provide accurate location information inside the network. The applications for location-based service are assisting emergency request, fraud defense, social media, and marketing. All these demands make the position accuracy highly required. Various techniques and methods have been developed to estimate the position of mobile device inside the network such as RSS, TOA, AOA, and TDOA. In this work, a new method to estimate the accuracy of locating active LTE cellular subscribers. The proposed method is a network-based technique and relies on the Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) measurements and …

Optical Nanoantenna Coupled Detector And Hybrid Surface Waveguide, Shenjie Miao

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, plasmonic resonant antennas have seen widespread consideration in many detection and chemistry applications due to their potential for enhancing and confining the emission and polarization of electromagnetic fields. Examples include optical couplers to ultra-compact photodetectors, high-resolution optical microscopy, enablers of single molecule Raman signal detection and heating elements that facilitate nanostructure growth. A wideband teardrop shape antenna coupled detector will illustrate in this dissertation. An asymmetric cross-bowtie antenna is investigated for providing a broad circular polarized frequency response in the long wave infrared (LWIR). The asymmetric cross-bowtie antenna is constructed with two perpendicular bowtie antennas with differing …

On The Characterization Of Natural Language Structure And Literary Stylometry - A Network Science Approach, Younis Anas Younis Al Rozz

Theses and Dissertations

Natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been through many advancements in recent years, linguistics and scientist utilized these techniques to solve many challenges related to written language and literary. Problems such as finding the genetic relationships among languages, attributing author of a text and categorizing text by genre have been treated throughout the years using conventional statistical methods, for instance, bag of words (BoW), N-gram, the frequency of words and the lexical distance between words. By considering written language as a complex system, network science tools and techniques can be used to address those problems. A unified methodology is proposed …

Infrared Detection And Waveguiding Using Metasurfaces, Navaneeth Premkumar

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this work is to be able to detect thermal radiation in the long-wave and mid-infrared spectrum to a reasonable efficiency. In order to aid this effort, antenna arrays with large collection apertures are coupled with infrared bolometers. This dissertation shows the performance of a series-fed patch type of leaky-wave antenna array coupled to a Nickel bolometer in terms of the angular-frequency scanning abilities of the antenna. The antenna is then made out of electrooptic Graphene in order to be able to dynamically tune the radiation properties of the antenna. A two-dimensional leaky-wave antenna array made from Gold …