Engineering Commons^™

Sweet Spot Demonstration, Andrew Amend, Mitchell Smith, Ian Fish, Curtis Hoffman

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Our goal was to design and build an exhibit for the St. Louis Science Center to serve as a teaching tool to help explain the unintuitive concept of a baseball bat’s sweet spot to a typical children museum’s visitor, a 5th grade student, in an interesting and visually pleasing way. The sweet spot of the bat is colloquially known as the place that makes the best contact with the ball, and it is determined by a combination of the center of percussion and location of vibrational nodes. We focused on showing how the location of bat-ball impact affects the vibration …

Sweet Spot Demonstration, Keval Amin, Beau Allen, Kieran Lenssen, Ricardo Del Olmo Parrado

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The purpose of this project was to create a sweet spot exhibit for the St. Louis Science Center to demonstrate the basic dynamic and vibrational theory behind the game of baseball. This demonstration focuses on the dynamics of batting and the effects that induced bat vibrations have on the energy transfer from the bat to the ball. Through this demonstration, the vibrational nodes within a baseball bat can be measured based on the ball’s contact with the ”sweet spot,” or the area on the barrel of the bat that induces the least amount of bat vibration. The project went through …

Jet Beluga: Diver Propulsion Wearable, Jacob Graham, Bernardo Amaral Neves, Ethan Genter

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Scuba diving is a physically and mentally challenging task performed in both recreational and professional settings. Recreational divers seek to experience the marine world for extended periods of time without buoyant resistance. Rescue divers, military personnel, and underwater construction workers train to execute complicated tasks in a limited time period. Diver propulsion vehicles can improve the quality of recreational diving as well as the effectiveness of diving as performed in professional settings. The following report describes the design and motivations for a wearable diver propulsion device that provides the benefits of increased speed and mobility while limiting the amount of …

Polyvinylpyrrolidone - Reduced Graphene Oxide - Pd Nanoparticles As An Efficient Nanocomposite For Catalysis Applications In Cross-Coupling Reactions, Hany A. Elazab, Tamer T. El-Idreesy

Chemical Engineering

This paper reported a scientific approach adopting microwave-assisted synthesis as a synthetic route for preparing highly active palladium nanoparticles stabilized by polyvinylpyrrolidone (Pd/PVP) and supported on reduced Gra-phene oxide (rGO) as a highly active catalyst used for Suzuki, Heck, and Sonogashira cross coupling reactions with remarkable turnover number (6500) and turnover frequency of 78000 h-1. Pd/PVP nanoparticles supported on re-duced Graphene oxide nanosheets (Pd-PVP/rGO) showed an outstanding performance through high catalytic activ-ity towards cross coupling reactions. A simple, reproducible, and reliable method was used to prepare this efficient catalyst using microwave irradiation synthetic conditions. The synthesis approach requires simultaneous reduc-tion …

Lidar Assessment To Monitor Bridge Response Under Live And Dead Loads, Daniel Watson

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

Understanding how a bridge structure responds to various loads in a time and resource-efficient approach is vital in characterizing bridge health. Bridge health monitoring is an evaluation of the structural condition and performance, which optimizes limited transportation budgets by prioritizing the bridges that are in the most need for retrofit or replacement. Identifying and remedying issues will mitigate long-term problems and ensure that the bridge remains open to service for all legal loads. In contrast, health monitoring and load rating will determine if a bridge can only carry traffic up to a certain weight or speed, requiring a bridge load …

3d Chocolate Printer Dropper, Jessica Jimenez, Jacqueline Pielli, Shuhan Zhang

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Mechanical Engineering Department at Washington University in St. Louis is working to stimulate interest in the fields of fluid dynamics and thermal sciences, as students are not typically exposed to these topics within the first two years of school. Dr. Okamoto, Jeff Krampf, and Dr. Weisensee of the Mechanical Engineering Department would like to remedy this situation by developing a laboratory experiment for first year students that utilizes a 3D chocolate printer to teach thermal-fluid concepts in a fun and engaging manner. The goal of this project is to build a chocolate droplet dispensing system, which is a part …

Asme 2020 Design Challenge, Anthony Acosta, Justine Alandy-Dy, Michael Lorberg, Nathan Vaska

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Our project was to build a machine that would fulfill the requirements for the ASME 2020 design challenge, which was called, ”Building to the Sky.” The rules of the challenge were to build a machine that would take ordinary 8.5” x 11” sheets of paper and stack them into a tower. To accomplish this task, we decided to make our paper tower out of accordion-shaped folds that would be placed on top of each other, alternating in 90 degree orientations. Our device is divided into various sub-components, each which manipulate the paper in various ways. We first have a mechanism …

Introducing Phonetic Information To Speaker Embedding For Speaker Verification, Yi Liu, Liang He, Michael T. Johnson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Phonetic information is one of the most essential components of a speech signal, playing an important role for many speech processing tasks. However, it is difficult to integrate phonetic information into speaker verification systems since it occurs primarily at the frame level while speaker characteristics typically reside at the segment level. In deep neural network-based speaker verification, existing methods only apply phonetic information to the frame-wise trained speaker embeddings. To improve this weakness, this paper proposes phonetic adaptation and hybrid multi-task learning and further combines these into c-vector and simplified c-vector architectures. Experiments on National Institute of Standards and Technology …

Variable Camber Wings Using Compliant Mechanisms, Benjamin Moulton

Fall Student Research Symposium 2019

Wing morphing is the manipulation of a wing shape to influence aerodynamics. Wing morphing has significant aerodynamic advantages over traditional flaps, including increased efficiency and control. The USU Aerolab specializes in morphing aircraft and is currently working with the Air Force Research Lab on morphing straight wings [1-4].

The purpose of this project is to identify methods for applying morphing technologies to swept-wing aircraft. These methods are then used to create a morphing wing aircraft to demonstrate the efficiency and control of morphing flight with a swept wing.

2019 Fall Engr333 Poster, Megan Black, Evan Block, Jacob Deysher, Zach Erickson, Peter Atma, John Macy, Paul Steenwyk, Justin Skaggs, Justin Eekhoff, Adam Marquardt, Alan Samdel, Nathan Van Wyhe, Zach Ashenfelter, Brett Ermer, Clayton Lockwood, Ryan Schierbeek, Andrew Zerull, Matthew Buist, Hannah Chilkiewicz, Nathan Hall, Holly Straup, Ivy Chipinda, Andrew Huston, Peter Oh, Tony Vander Ploeg, Josh Hallenbeck, Cameron Ilbrink, Bridget Pertzsch, Lillie Spackman, Zuber Abdella, Michael Merz, Nathan Schuten, Abigail Willson, William Benneh, Marcus Gelder, Steven Vanast, Tyler Johnson, Christopher Pappageorge, Trevor Sando

ENGR 333

Energy efficiency can be a worthy goal for institutions and individuals; reducing energy consumption decreases demand for fossil fuels and consumes energy more sustainably. However, more cost-effective devices can lead to behavioral changes that ultimately increase energy consumption, even though the devices themselves are more energy efficient: This called the rebound effect. Rebound occurs when less energy is saved than expected. This can be a result of several factors: increased use of the device drawing more energy, manufacturers using more energy to create the new device, or money saved by the users being re-spent in the economy. The combination of …

Mazak Laser Optimization, Maylon Ellington, Terrilian E. Agbor Oji, William N. Palm

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Starflex Fabrication is a manufacturing company that thrives to provide custom, precision fabricated parts, and assemblies to their customers.The Mazak laser is Starflex Fabrication’s primary cutting machine and is critical to the overall process for each order. Team Flex will look to optimize the laser’s process and improve overall shop throughput.

Investigation Of Retrieved Cardiac Devices, Anmar Salih, Iosif Papadakis Ktistakis, Spyridon Manganas, Abdul Wase, Tarun Goswami

Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering Faculty Publications

Damage assessment of lead and pulse generator with various exposure times is important in the development of cardiac devices. Approximately, 92.1 million patients in the US suffer from cardiovascular diseases with an estimated healthcare cost of over $300 billion and at least one million with implantable cardiac devices. These devices are complex and composed on multiple levels and present challenges while assessing the damage. However, the study on the analysis of cardiac devices may lend insight into common damage patterns and improve future cardiac devices design. The objective of this work is to perform a thorough in vivo damage assessment …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2019, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Amodal Instance Segmentation And Multi-Object Tracking With Deep Pixel Embedding, Yanfeng Liu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis extends upon the representational output of semantic instance segmentation by explicitly including both visible and occluded parts. A fully convolutional network is trained to produce consistent pixel-level embedding across two layers such that, when clustered, the results convey the full spatial extent and depth ordering of each instance. Results demonstrate that the network can accurately estimate complete masks in the presence of occlusion and outperform leading top-down bounding-box approaches.

The model is further extended to produce consistent pixel-level embeddings across two consecutive image frames from a video to simultaneously perform amodal instance segmentation and multi-object tracking. No post-processing …

Space Optimization And Process Improvement, Harith Alshareef

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Siemens Energy warehouse located in Suwanee, GA runs out of space in the Precision Lab due to rapid growth, seasonal peaks, and poor space utilization. The objective of the project is to redesign the Precision Lab layout and improve the tool assessment process to increase efficiency, productivity, and profitability.

The first solution is to add shelves in the Precision lab as well as the Torque lab and reduce the honeycombing effect on the shelves, which results in a 120%-150% increase in the storage space. We propose adding Tablets that include barcode scanner features to reduce the time spent on the …

Design Of The Skybus Sb-400 High Capcity Short Range Transport Aircraft, Alexander Barroso, Austin Klee, Chandler Palmer

Senior Design Project For Engineers

As air travel becomes more and more affordable and the world economy expands, so does the demand for flights. Major commercial airports and their infrastructure are struggling to keep up with this increased demand. The AIAA has identified this problem and has put out a Request for Proposal for a High Density Short Range Transport Aircraft which can carry 400 people in a two class configuration up to 3,500 nautical miles. The Skybus SB-400 is our clean slate design response to the AIAA’s RFP for a High DensityShort Range Transport Aircraft. an increasing part of everyday life. Our focus for …

Forensic Investigation Of Building Failure – The Harbour Cay Condominium Disaster, John Airis

Publications and Research

When a building suffers collapse, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is tasked with conducting an investigation into the cause. Often OSHA will request technical assistance from the National Institute for Standards and Technology to assist in the forensic technical aspects determining a most probable cause. This forensic effort entails many actions. The Harbour Cay Condominium disaster occurred on March 28, 1981 in Cocoa Beach, Florida. It was a total collapse of a five story reinforced concrete structure during the last stage of roof construction, resulting in 11 deaths and 24 injuries. The investigation report revealed structural design …

Metal-Free Deep Eutectic Solvents: Preparation, Physical Properties, And Significance, Burcu E. Gurkan, Henry Squire

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, reports detailing the preparation, characterization, and application of deep eutectic solvents (DESs) have grown in number significantly, showing signs of increased interest and attention. Indeed, these systems provide tunable polar environments attractive for their ease of synthesis and lack of need for purification. DESs are homogeneous systems composed of two or more components having a significantly depressed melting point compared to either constituent material. As interest and application of DESs grow, the need for a common understanding of their preparation and characterization is required. In this Perspective, we discuss metal-free DESs, focusing on their preparation, characterization …

Optimal Allocation Of Energy Storage And Wind Generation In Power Distribution Systems, Carlos Mendoza

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The advent of energy storage technologies applications for the electric power system gives new tools for planners to cope with the operation challenges that come from the integration of renewable generation in medium voltage networks. This work proposes and implements an optimization model for Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) and distributed generation allocation in radial distribution networks. The formulation aims to assist distribution system operators in the task of making decisions on energy storage investment, BESSs' operation, and distributed generation penetration's level to minimize electricity costs. The BESSs are required to participate in energy arbitrage and voltage control. In addition, …

Diver Propulsion Wearable, Joseph Lucca Paletta, Andrew Kessler, Andrew Beukelman, Nico Topulos

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This project was proposed by Jin Hwan (Josh) An, a current undergraduate student in the Olin Business School at Washington University in St Louis. Given his interest in diving and his experience with current diver propulsion vehicles, Josh has challenged us to design a hands-free diver propulsion wearable (DPW). While Josh has left the project rather open-ended for the engineers, the main challenge is to create a design that can propel the diver using a hands-free control system. Having a hands-free controller will allow the user to engage in other tasks while gliding underwater. Ideally, this design would be useful …

An Exploration Of Neural Networks In Enhanced Resolution Remote Sensing Products, Jordan Paul Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Scatterometry and radiometry are used to obtain measurements of Earth properties with extensive spatial coverage at daily or near-daily temporal resolution. Their measurements are used in many climate studies and weather applications, such as iceberg tracking, ocean wind estimation, and volumetric soil moisture measurements. The spatial resolution of these data products ranges from a few kilometers to tens of kilometers. Techniques to enhance the spatial resolution of these products help reveal finer scale features, but come at the cost of increased noise. This thesis explores the application of neural networks as a possible method to handle the noise and uncertainty …

Proactive Energy Optimization In Residential Buildings With Weather And Market Forecasts, Cody Simmons, Joshua Arment, Kody M. Powell, John Hedengren

Faculty Publications

This work explores the development of a home energy management system (HEMS) that uses weather and market forecasts to optimize the usage of home appliances and to manage battery usage and solar power production. A Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) application is used to find the unknown home model parameters. These parameters are then updated in a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) which optimizes and balances competing comfort and economic objectives. Combining MHE and MPC applications alleviates model complexity commonly seen in HEMS by using a lumped parameter model that is adapted to fit a high-fidelity model. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning …

Near-Coastal Ultrahigh Resolution Scatterometer Winds, Nolan Lawrence Hutchings

Theses and Dissertations

RapidScat 2.5 km ultrahigh resolution (UHR) wind estimation is introduced and validated it in near-coastal regions. In addition, this thesis applies direction interval retrieval techniques and develops a new wind processing method to enhance the performance of RapidScat UHR wind estimation in the nadir region. The new algorithm is validated with L2B wind estimates, Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) wind products, and buoy measurements. The wind processing improvements produce more spatially consistent UHR winds that compare well with the wind products mentioned above. Hawaii regional climate model (HRCM), QuikSCAT, and ASCAT wind estimates are compared in the lee of the Big …

Numerical Simulations Of The Hall–Petch Relationship In Aluminium Using Gradient-Enhanced Plasticity Model, Yooseob Song, Jaeheum Yeon, Byoungjoon Na

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

+e Hall-Petch relation in aluminium is discussed based on the strain gradient plasticity framework. +e thermodynamically consistent gradient-enhanced flow rules for bulk and grain boundaries are developed using the concepts of thermal activation energy and dislocation interaction mechanisms. It is assumed that the thermodynamic microstresses for bulk and grain boundaries have dissipative and energetic contributions, and in turn, both dissipative and energetic material length scale parameters are existent. Accordingly, two-dimensional finite element simulations are performed to analyse characteristics of the Hall–Petch strengthening and the Hall–Petch constants. +e proposed flow rules for the grain boundary are validated using the existing experimental …

Hardware Implementation Of Assistive Technology Robot, Joycephine Li

Publications and Research

SuperHERO is an on-going research project in Computer Engineering Technology department which involves upgrading Heathkit Education Robot (HERO) hardware circuits and features by using modern hardware devices and sensors. The current phase of the project will focus on upgrading the motor drive system hardware as well as implementation and testing of features such as mobile robot obstacle detection and other assistive technologies to help people with disabilities. This involves the reattachment of the robot arm after repairing and updating with 3D printing and using modern hardware and software technology. We observed that the robotic arm has rotary and translation movements …

Hardware-Entangled Software Execution Using Dynamic Pufs, Wenjie Xiong

Yale Day of Data

Low-end computing devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, especially due to the widespread deployment of Internet-of-Things products. There is, however, much concern about sensitive data being processed on these low-end devices which have limited protection mechanisms in place. This paper proposes a Hardware-Entangled Software Protection (HESP) scheme that leverages hardware features to protect software code from malicious modification before or during run-time. It also enables implicit hardware authentication. Thus, the software will execute correctly only on an authorized device and if the timing of the software, e.g., control flow, was not changed through malicious modifications. The proposed ideas are based on …

Saving Software And Using Emulation To Reproduce Computationally Dependent Research Results, Euan Cochrane, Limor Peer, Ethan Gates, Seth Anderson

Yale Day of Data

Using digital data necessarily involves software. How do institutions think about software in the context of the long-term usability of their data assets? How do they address usability challenges uniquely posed by software such as, license restrictions, legacy software, code rot, and dependencies? These questions are germane to the agenda set forth by the FAIR principles. At Yale University, a team in the Library is looking into the application of a novel approach to emulation as a potential solution. In this presentation, we will outline the work of the Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) program, discuss our plans for …

Diffusion And Uniformity Of Recycled Asphalt In Pavements, Baoshan Huang

Abbett Distinguished Seminar Series

Asphalt pavements covers over 93 percent of the paved roads in the United States. The use of recycled asphalt into pavement maintenance and construction has been a common practice. However the lack of understanding of the interaction between recycled and virgin asphalt poses a change on the efficient use of recycled asphalt, and often causes pavement premature failures. The present study addressed some fundamental aspects associated with the beneficial use of recycled asphalt into asphalt paving mixtures: 1) how much recycled asphalt can be mobilized into a uniform asphalt coating in the mixture? and 2) will the mobilized old asphalt …

Simulation Training And Route Optimization For Bridge Inspection, Sushil Louis

INSPIRE Archived Webinars

Since the 1970s, simulation training has developed opera­tional trainers for a variety of complex systems from pilot flight simulations to cultural awareness training simulations. When connected to the real world, such simulation training interfaces can drive real vehicles and systems. We have been building a Simulation Training And Control System (STACS) for autonomous bridge inspection that uses a simulated world to train inspectors to control a heterogeneous group of robots. The objective is that, once trained, inspectors can use the same STACS interface used in training to control multiple real robots simultaneously during a bridge inspection task. We first built …

2019 Fall Engr333 Seminar Presentation, Ivy Chipinda, Andrew Huston, Adam Marquardt, Lillie Spackman

ENGR 333

File for student presentation, given by students in the Fall 2019 class of ENGR333.