Engineering Commons^™

Enhanced Covalent Interface, Crosslinked Network And Gas Barrier Property Of Functionalized Graphene Oxide/Styrene-Butadiene Rubber Composites Triggered By Thiol-Ene Click Reaction, Long Zheng, Stephen Jerrams, Tian Su, Zongchao Xu, Liqun Zhang, Li Liu, Shipeng Wen

Articles

The high gas barrier property of a rubber composite is of great significance for reducing the exhaust gas emissions due to tire rolling resistance and hence the contribution this factor makes to environmental protection. Enhanced covalent interfaces and crosslinked networks are crucial to the gas barrier property of rubber composites. In this research, γ-mercaptopropyltriethoxysilane (MPS) modified GO (MGO)/styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) composites were prepared by a synergetic strategy of latex compounding method and thiol-ene click reaction. It was found that the mercapto groups in MGO reacted with the vinyl groups in SBR molecules through thiol-ene click reaction during the crosslinking process …

Strategic Decision-Making In A Turbulent Business Environment: A Dynamic Capabilities Framework For Quantity Surveying Professional Service Firms In Ireland, Michael Adesi

Doctoral

The construction industry contributes significantly to the socio-economic development of nations through infrastructure development, and job creation culminating into the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Quantity Surveying Professional Service Firms (QSPSFs) play a critical role in the construction industry by ensuring that projects are delivered within cost, required quality and duration by providing technical and knowledge-intensive services to clients, contractors and stakeholders. Irish QSPSFs are facing challenges such as tender price inflation, intense competition, a skills shortage and disruptive technology. These challenges coupled with the cyclicality of the sector create a turbulent business environment for Irish QSPSFs, yet there …

Zechipc: Time Series Interpolation Method Based On Lebesgue Sampling, Luis Miralles-Pechuán, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Matthieu Bellucci, Brian Mac Namee

Books/Book Chapters

In this paper, we present an interpolation method based on Lebesgue sampling that could help to develop systems based time series more efficiently. Our methods can transmit times series, frequently used in health monitoring, with the same level of accuracy but using much fewer data. Our method is based in Lebesgue sampling, which collects information depending on the values of the signal (e.g. the signal output is sampled when it crosses specific limits). Lebesgue sampling contains additional information about the shape of the signal in-between two sampled points. Using this information would allow generating an interpolated signal closer to the …

Evaluating Compressive Properties And Morphology Of Expandable Polyurethane Foam For Use In A Synthetic Paediatric Spine, Nor Amalina Muhayudin, Khairul Salleh Basaruddin, Fiona Mcevoy, Anthony Tansey

Articles

An expandable rigid PU foam can turns into complex shapes, with a shell like structure onthe outside and honeycomb structure on the inside, which can be easily shaped to a vertebraform. The present study aims to determine whether expandable rigid polyurethane foamwas an appropriate substitute for rigid block polyurethane foam to model the trabecularbone. Static compression tests were performed to determine compressive moduli and yieldstresses on three polyurethane foam densities namely 0.16 g/cm3, 0.24 g/cm3and 0.42 g/cm3.Morphology of the PU foams for all densities was also observed. The compressive modulusfor 0.16 g/cm3and 0.24 g/cm3were found varied from 40 to 43 …

Low-Pass Filtering Or Gain Tuning Free Simple Dc Offset Rejection Technique For Single And Three-Phase Systems, Samet Biricik, Hafiz Ahmed, Mohamed Benbouzid

Articles

This paper aims to address the DC offset rejection problem in grid synchronization algorithm. A simple approach to estimate the unknown grid frequency in the presence of DC offset is proposed for this purpose. Some of the existing techniques available in the literature use either low-pass filter or an additional integrator to eliminate the DC offset. Both approaches require an additional parameter to tune. However, tuning the additional parameter is not straightforward. Moreover, tuning the overall system can be complicated due to the presence of DC offset rejection part. The proposed approach does not require any additional parameter to tune. …

Brexit Election: Forecasting A Conservative Party Victory Through The Pound Using Arima And Facebook's Prophet, James Usher, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

On the 30th October, 2019, the markets watched as British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, took a massive political gamble to call a general election to break the Withdrawal Agreement stalemate in the House of Commons to “Get BREXIT Done”. The pound had been politically sensitive owing to BREXIT uncertainty. With the polls indicating a Conservative win on 4thDecember, 2019, the margin of victory could be observed through increases in the pound. The outcome of a Conservative party victory would benefit the pound by removing the current market turbulence. We look to provide a short-term forecast of the pound. Our approach …

Brain Disease Detection From Eegs: Comparing Spiking And Recurrent Neural Networks For Non-Stationary Time Series Classification, Hristo Stoev

Dissertations

Modeling non-stationary time series data is a difficult problem area in AI, due to the fact that the statistical properties of the data change as the time series progresses. This complicates the classification of non-stationary time series, which is a method used in the detection of brain diseases from EEGs. Various techniques have been developed in the field of deep learning for tackling this problem, with recurrent neural networks (RNN) approaches utilising Long short-term memory (LSTM) architectures achieving a high degree of success. This study implements a new, spiking neural network-based approach to time series classification for the purpose of …

Content-Based Filtering Recommendation Approach To Label Irish Legal Judgements, Sandesh Gangadhar

Dissertations

Machine learning approaches are applied across several domains to either simplify or automate tasks which directly result in saved time or cost. Text document labelling is one such task that requires immense human knowledge about the domain and efforts to review, understand and label the documents. The company Stare Decisis summarises legal judgements and labels them as they are made available on Irish public legal source www.courts.ie. This research presents a recommendation-based approach to reduce the time for solicitors at Stare Decisis by reducing many numbers of available labels to pick from to a concentrated few that potentially contains the …

A Discrimination Aware Model To Predict Childhood Literacy Levels, Kate Byrne

Dissertations

It is illegal in Ireland to discriminate in the provision of education on the basis of multiple characteristics including gender, race and religion. While the increased use of machine learning models can open multiple avenues to identify early intervention strategies in education, caution must be exercised to ensure that any intervention does not discriminate with respect to a protected class. Poor literacy in childhood can have long term effects as the child ages, including on employment and mental health outcomes. Early intervention is key in mitigating this. In this dissertation, a model was created that predicted the outcome of a …

Optimization Of Home Mortgage Mover Predictive Model Applying Geo-Spatial Analysis And Machine Learning Techniques, Natalia Riscovaia

Dissertations

In the last decade digital innovations and online banking services have significantly changed customers banking preferences and behaviour. Banking industry is going through the changes and developments in the provision of banking services that are affecting the structure and the organization of the bank network. However, private home loan, referred as Home Mortgage hereinafter, continue to remain among the products, that customers prefer to have personal interaction about with professional advisors prior making the decision to apply for the loan with financial institution.

Synthetic Data Generation Using Wasserstein Conditional Gans With Gradient Penalty (Wcgans-Gp), Manhar Singh Walia

Dissertations

With data protection requirements becoming stricter, the data privacy has become increasingly important and more crucial than ever. This has led to restrictions on the availability and dissemination of real-world datasets. Synthetic data offers a viable solution to overcome barriers of data access and sharing. Existing data generation methods require a great deal of user-defined rules, manual interactions and domainspecific knowledge. Moreover, they are not able to balance the trade-off between datausability and privacy. Deep learning based methods like GANs have seen remarkable success in synthesizing images by automatically learning the complicated distributions and patterns of real data. But they …

Improving Transfer Learning For Use In Multi-Spectral Data, Yuvraj Sharma

Dissertations

Recently Nasa as well as the European Space Agency have made observational satellites images public. The main reason behind opening it to public is to foster research among university students and corporations alike. Sentinel is a program by the European Space Agency which has plans to release a series of seven satellites in lower earth orbit for observing land and sea patterns. Recently huge datasets have been made public by the Sentinel program. Many advancements have been made in the field of computer vision in the last decade. Krizhevsky, Sutskever & Hinton, 2012, revolutionized the field of image analysis by …

An Experimental Research On Cationic Reverse Flotation Of Anshan-Type Iron Ores, Zhonghang Chen, Dianbing Zhu, Shujuan Dai, Ahmed Sobhy

Mining Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The mineral processing technology of Anshan-type iron ores has been developed in a rapid speed in recent years, and the combined flowsheet at the core of anionic reverse flotation has become a mainstream in the beneficiation of Anshan-type iron ores in China. With the successful application of this combined flowsheet, some obvious problems are also emerging. Such as high requirement of pulp temperature, complex reagent system, high cost of reagent consumption and so on. In view of this, we have carried out an experimental study on the separation of Anshan type iron ore by cationic reverse flotation. A new collector …

Robustness Metric For Robust Design Optimization Under Time-And Space-Dependent Uncertainty Through Metamodeling, Xinpeng Wei, Xiaoping Du

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Product performance varies with respect to time and space in many engineering applications. This paper discusses how to measure and evaluate the robustness of a product or component when its quality characteristics (QCs) are functions of random variables, random fields, temporal variables, and spatial variables. At first, the existing time-dependent robustness metric is extended to the present time-and space-dependent problem. The robustness metric is derived using the extreme value of the quality characteristics with respect to temporal and spatial variables for the nominal-the-better type quality characteristics. Then, a metamodel-based numerical procedure is developed to evaluate the new robustness metric. The …

Direct Numerical Simulation Of Turbulent Pressure Fluctuations Over A Cone At Mach 8, Junji Huang, Lian Duan, Katya M. Casper, Ross M. Wagnild, Neal P. Bitter

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) were conducted to characterize the pressure fluctuations under the turbulent portion of the boundary layer over a sharp 7◦ half-angle cone at a nominal freestream Mach number of 8 and a unit Reynolds number of Reunit = 13.4 x 106/m. The axisymmetric cone geometry and the flow conditions of the DNS matched those measured in the Sandia Hypersonic Wind Tunnel at Mach 8 (Sandia HWT-8). The DNS-predicted wall pressure statistics, including the root-mean-square (r.m.s.) fluctuations and the power spectral density (PSD), were compared with those measured in the Sandia HWT-8. A good comparison between the DNS …

Real-Time Assembly Operation Recognition With Fog Computing And Transfer Learning For Human-Centered Intelligent Manufacturing, Wenjin Tao, Md Al-Amin, Haodong Chen, Ming-Chuan Leu, Zhaozheng Yin, Ruwen Qin

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In a human-centered intelligent manufacturing system, every element is to assist the operator in achieving the optimal operational performance. The primary task of developing such a human-centered system is to accurately understand human behavior. In this paper, we propose a fog computing framework for assembly operation recognition, which brings computing power close to the data source in order to achieve real-time recognition. For data collection, the operator's activity is captured using visual cameras from different perspectives. For operation recognition, instead of directly building and training a deep learning model from scratch, which needs a huge amount of data, transfer learning …

A Brief Review On 3d Bioprinted Skin Substitutes, Fateme Fayyazbakhsh, Ming-Chuan Leu

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The Global Escalating Cases of Skin Donor Shortage for Patients with Severe Wounds Warn the Vital Need for Alternatives to Skin Allografts. over the Last Three Decades, Research in the Skin Regeneration Area Has Addressed the Unmet Need for Artificial Skin Substitutes. 3D Bioprinting is a Promising Innovative Technology to Accurately Fabricate Skin Constructs based on Natural or Synthetic Bioinks, Whether Loaded or Not Loaded with Native Skin Cells (I.e., Keratinocytes and Fibroblasts) or Stem Cells in the Prescribed 3D Hierarchal Structure to Create Artificial Multilayer and Single Cell-Laden Construct. in This Paper, the Recent Developments in 3D Bioprinting for …

From Open Access To Open Science: The Path From Scientific Reality To Open Scientific Communication, Christian Heise, Joshua M. Pearce

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Although opening up of research is considered an appropriate and trend-setting model for future scientific communication, it can still be difficult to put open science into practice. How open and transparent can a scientific work be? This article investigates the potential to make all information and the whole work process of a qualification project such as a doctoral thesis comprehensively and freely accessible on the internet with an open free license both in the final form and completely traceable in development. The answer to the initial question, the self-experiment and the associated demand for openness, posed several challenges for a …

Exploration Of Approaches To Arabic Named Entity Recognition, Husamelddin Balla, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Abstract. The Named Entity Recognition (NER) task has attracted significant attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP) as it can enhance the performance of many NLP applications. In this paper, we compare English NER with Arabic NER in an experimental way to investigate the impact of using different classifiers and sets of features including language-independent and language-specific features. We explore the features and classifiers on five different datasets. We compare deep neural network architectures for NER with more traditional machine learning approaches to NER. We discover that most of the techniques and features used for English NER perform well on Arabic …

Sustainable And Resilient Construction: Current Status And Future Challenges, Niamh Murtagh, Lloyd Scott, Jingli Fan

Articles

The construction industry globally is one of the most environmentally damaging of sectors. Additionally, the resources consumed and the operational energy requirements of buildings are ‘locked-in’, potentially for decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recognised construction as a sector in which significant improvements can, and indeed must, be made. But the industry is often argued to be unique, in its multiplicity of stakeholders, transient organisational structures, avoidance of risk and impact on society. The current Virtual Special Issue (VSI) sought to bring together a collection of papers on progress and potential for improvement in the construction sector, in …

A Review Of Carbon Dioxide Adsorption To Unconventional Shale Rocks Methodology, Measurement, And Calculation, Sherif Fakher, Abdulmohsin Imqam

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) injection has been applied extensively in hydrocarbon reservoirs for both increasing oil recovery and CO₂ storage purposes. Recently, CO₂ injection has been proposed to increase oil recovery and for CO₂ storage in shale reservoirs. During CO₂ injection in shale reservoirs, adsorption will take place on the surface of the rock, which will impact both the oil recovery and the storage capacity. This research provides a roadmap to the different types of adsorption and the adsorption measurements and calculations with emphasis on the ones most applicable during CO₂ injection in shale …

Coordinated Container Migration And Base Station Handover In Mobile Edge Computing, Mao V. Ngo, Tie Luo, Hieu T. Hoang, Q. S. Tony Quek

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Offloading computationally intensive tasks from mobile users (MUs) to a virtualized environment such as containers on a nearby edge server, can significantly reduce processing time and hence end-to-end (E2E) delay. However, when users are mobile, such containers need to be migrated to other edge servers located closer to the MUs to keep the E2E delay low. Meanwhile, the mobility of MUs necessitates handover among base stations in order to keep the wireless connections between MUs and base stations uninterrupted. In this paper, we address the joint problem of container migration and base-station handover by proposing a coordinated migration-handover mechanism, with …

The Effect Of Cutting Condition Selection On Tool Life In Sand Milling, Craig Ertl

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This study was completed to address the problem of determining what effect selected cutting conditions have on tool wear and tool life in robotic sand milling (RSM) operations. The purpose of this study was to analyze the tool wear mechanisms and characteristics that govern the RSM process. The purpose was also to establish an experimental methodology that may be used in future studies to assess tool life when examining various tooling materials and designs, as well as additional sand workpiece materials. Completing this research allowed the machining process to be optimized by analyzing differences in tooling cost with variable values …

Cone Identification In Choroideremia: Repeatability, Reliability, And Automation Through Use Of A Convolutional Neural Network, Jessica I.W. Morgan, Min Chen, Andrew M. Huang, Yu You Jiang, Robert F. Cooper

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose: Adaptive optics imaging has enabled the visualization of photoreceptors both in health and disease. However, there remains a need for automated accurate cone photoreceptor identification in images of disease. Here, we apply an open-source convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically identify cones in images of choroideremia (CHM). We further compare the results to the repeatability and reliability of manual cone identifications in CHM.

Methods: We used split-detection adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy to image the inner segment cone mosaic of 17 patients with CHM. Cones were manually identified twice by one experienced grader and once by two …

Rapid Assessment Of Breast Tumor Margins Using Deep Ultraviolet Fluorescence Scanning Microscopy, Tongtong Lu, Julie M. Jorns, Mollie Patton, Renee Fisher, Amanda Emmerich, Todd Doehring, Taly Gilat-Schmidt, Dong Hye Ye, Tina Yen, Bing Yu

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Significance: Re-excision rates for women with invasive breast cancer undergoing breast conserving surgery (or lumpectomy) have decreased in the past decade but remain substantial. This is mainly due to the inability to assess the entire surface of an excised lumpectomy specimen efficiently and accurately during surgery.

Aim: The goal of this study was to develop a deep-ultraviolet scanning fluorescence microscope (DUV-FSM) that can be used to accurately and rapidly detect cancer cells on the surface of excised breast tissue.

Approach: A DUV-FSM was used to image the surfaces of 47 (31 malignant and 16 normal/benign) fresh breast tissue samples stained …

Erratum: Minimization Of The Kullback-Leibler Divergence For Nonlinear Estimation (Journal Of Guidance, Control, And Dynamics, (2017), 10.2514/1.G002282), Jacob E. Darling, Kyle J. Demars

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Erratum Notice In the original article [https://doi.org/10.2514/1.G002282], Eqs. (16b) and (18b) were typeset as (Formula Presented) which incorrectly show that the posterior covariance at time tk, denoted by Pk, is calculated about the prior mean, m−k. The correct forms of these equations are given by (Formula Presented) which show that Pk is calculated about the posterior mean, mk. All resulting analyses and simulations reported in the article were performed using the correct forms of the equations.

Information-Based Particle Flow For High Uncertainty Estimation, Kari C. Ward, Kyle J. Demars

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This work presents a new formulation of the Gaussian particle flow filter derived using an information theoretic approach. The developed information flow addresses two problems with Gaussian particle flow: the lack of inherent meaning in the flow parameters and the inability to easily include modifications for a non-Bayesian update. Equivalency between Gaussian particle flow and information flow is established using a linear, Gaussian example. An orbit determination simulation with high initial uncertainty is used to demonstrate the consistent, robust performance of the information flow filter in situations where the extended Kalman filter fails.

Soil Fatigue From Induced Seismicity, Merissa L. Zuzulock, Oliver Denzil S. Taylor, Norbert H. Maerz

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Induced seismicity and the effects on civil engineering systems are not completely understood and infrequently studied. One specific area that is not well known is soil fatigue which includes factors such as understanding the natural conditions of the subsurface as well as operational parameters under short duration impulse loads. With the increase of Geo induced seismic activity, soil fatigue becomes of greater concern to structures in the vicinity of this seismic load. The foundations of these structures can be affected by impulse loads which can ultimately cause failure. The lack of quantitative data puts the reliability of these civil engineering …

Dynamic Loading Experimentation And Surface Imaging Of Pressure Vessel Loadcell Fractures, Austin T. Sumner

Honors College Theses

Pressure vessels are very common pieces of equipment in industry and they are used for a variety of applications. It is standard in industry to rest pressure vessels on load cells. For some special cases, the pressure vessels are rested on load cells instead of solid foundation. Pressure vessels and their loadcells are generally designed for static environmental conditions and loading and tend to experience adverse effects when exposed to dynamic environments, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. These adverse-loading conditions cause vibrations and asymmetrical loading on the load cells, which can concurrently cause unexpected failure. This research investigates the effects …

Public Perception Of Different Planting Techniques Using Augmented Reality, Sultana Quader Tania

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this study was to measure public perception of the different planting techniques (block and matrix), which are used at visitor information centers (VICs) and other rights of way (ROW) areas. The main factors that affect public perception of planting techniques were identified through an extensive literature review and qualitative survey from four welcome centers in the state of Georgia. The ranking of those indicators, based on public preferences, was discovered through a quantitative survey. During the first phase of the quantitative survey, images of block and matrix were used. An iOS-based user-friendly and cost-effective augmented reality (AR) …