Engineering Commons^™

Feature-Based And String-Based Models For Predicting Rna-Protein Interaction, Donald Adjeroh, Maen Allaga, Jun Tan, Jie Lin, Yue Jiang, Ahmed Abbasi, Xiaobo Zhou

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In this work, we study two approaches for the problem of RNA-Protein Interaction (RPI). In the first approach, we use a feature-based technique by combining extracted features from both sequences and secondary structures. The feature-based approach enhanced the prediction accuracy as it included much more available information about the RNA-protein pairs. In the second approach, we apply search algorithms and data structures to extract effective string patterns for prediction of RPI, using both sequence information (protein and RNA sequences), and structure information (protein and RNA secondary structures). This led to different string-based models for predicting interacting RNA-protein pairs. We show …

Study Of Material Compatibility For A Thermal Energy Storage System With Phase Change Material, Songgang Qiu, Laura Solomon, Ming Fang

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The suitability of stainless steel 316L and Inconel 625 for use in a latent heat thermal energy storage (TES) system was investigated. A NaCl–NaF eutectic mixture with a melting temperature of 680 ◦C was used as the phase change material (PCM). Containers were filled with the PCM prior to heating to 750 ◦C, then examined after 100 and 2500 h of high-temperature exposure by analyzing the material surface and cross-section areas. A small amount of corrosion was present in both samples after 100 h. Neither sample suffered significant damage after 2500 h. The undesirable inter-granular grain boundary attack found in …

Sulfur Resistance Of Ce-Mn/Tio2 Catalysts For Low-Temperature Nh3–Scr, Quan Xu, Wenjing Yang, Jason Street, Yan Lou

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Ce-Mn/TiO2 catalyst prepared using a simple impregnation method demonstrated a better low-temperature selective catalytic reduction of NO with NH3 (NH3–SCR) activity in comparison with the sol-gel method. The Ce-Mn/TiO2 catalyst loading with 20% Ce had the best low-temperature activity and achieved a NO conversion rate higher than 90% at 140–260°C with a 99.7% NO conversion rate at 180°C. The Ce-Mn/TiO2 catalyst only had a 6% NO conversion rate decrease after 100ppm of SO2 was added to the stream. When SO2 was removed from the stream, the catalyst was able to recover completely. The crystal structure, morphology, textural properties and valence …

Hyperspectral Imaging And K-Means Classification For Histologic Evaluation Of Ductal Carcinoma In Situ, Yasser Khouj, Jeremy Dawson, James Coad, Linda Vona-Davis

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is a non-invasive optical imaging modality that shows the potential to aid pathologists in breast cancer diagnoses cases. In this study, breast cancer tissues from different patients were imaged by a hyperspectral system to detect spectral differences between normal and breast cancer tissues. Tissue samples mounted on slides were identified from 10 different patients. Samples from each patient included both normal and ductal carcinoma tissue, both stained with hematoxylin and eosin stain and unstained. Slides were imaged using a snapshot HSI system, and the spec- tral reflectance differences were evaluated. Analysis of the spectral reflectance values indicated …

Catalytic Fast Pyrolysis Of Kraft Lignin Over Hierarchical Hzsm-5 And Hβ Zeolites, Yadong Bi, Xiaojuan Lei, Guihua Xu, Hui Chen, Jianli Hu

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The hierarchical HZSM-5 and Hβ zeolites were prepared by alkaline post-treatment methods adopting Na2CO3, TMAOH/NaOH mixture, and NaOH as desilication sources, respectively. More mesopores are produced over two kinds of zeolites, while the micropores portion is well preserved. The mesopores formed in hierarchical Hβ zeolites were directly related to the basicity of the alkaline solution, indicating that Hβ zeolite is more sensitive to the alkaline post-treatment. The hierarchical HZSM-5 and Hβ zeolites are more active than the parent one for catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP) of Kraft lignin. Hierarchical zeolites retained the function of acid catalysis, while additionally creating larger mesopores …

Air Data Sensor Fault Detection With An Augmented Floating Limiter, Fabio Balzano, Mario Luca Fravolini, Marcello R. Napolitano, Stephane D'Urso, Michele Crispoltoni, Giuseppe Del Core

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Although very uncommon, the sequential failures of all aircraft Pitot tubes, with the consequent loss of signals for all the dynamic parameters from the Air Data System, have been found to be the cause of a number of catastrophic accidents in aviation history. This paper proposes a robust data-driven method to detect faulty measurements of aircraft airspeed, angle of attack, and angle of sideslip. This approach first consists in the appropriate selection of suitable sets of model regressors to be used as inputs of neural network-based estimators to be used online for failure detection. The setup of the proposed fault …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Blue Light Poly(Β-Amino Ester)S, Nicholas John Kohrs

Theses and Dissertations--Biomedical Engineering

Volumetric muscle loss (VML) is a debilitating injury which results in full or partial loss of function. Current clinical options utilize tissue grafts and bracing to restore function. Tissue graft implantation oftentimes leads to serious complications, some of which end in graft rejection and thereby necessitate further surgeries and procedures. Polymeric scaffolds show promise as scaffolding systems due to their mechanical properties and overall degradation profiles. Scaffolds need appropriate mechanical properties, 10-60 kPa modulus, and overall degradation times, five days to two weeks, to initiate tissue regeneration. Poly(β-amino ester)s (PBAE), a class of synthetic polymers, act as a safe biocompatible …

Design Of A Novel Tissue Culture System To Subject Aortic Tissue To Multidirectional Bicuspid Aortic Valve Wall Shear Stress, Janet Liu

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Blood vessels experience complex hemodynamics marked by three-dimensionality and pulsatility. Arterial endothelial cells interact with the characteristics of the fluid wall shear stress (WSS) to maintain homeostasis or promote disease states. In particular, the bicuspid aortic valve (BAV), a congenital heart valve anatomy consisting of two leaflets instead of three, is associated with aortic complications presumably promoted by hemodynamic abnormalities. While devices have been used to test this hypothesis, their capabilities are limited to the generation of time-varying WSS magnitude in one direction. However, the increased flow helicity generated by BAVs in the aorta is expected to result in increased …

Simulation Of A Mos Or Mis Structured Spatial Light Modulator For Terahertz (Thz) Imaging, Md Shahanur Alam

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A large area, square-gate Metal-Oxide/Insulator-Semiconductor (MOS or MIS) structured `Spatial Light Modulator' has been proposed for the Terahertz (THz) imaging at room temperature. This theoretical study has been done entirely by using the MATLAB platform. The 1D Poisson's equation has been solved iteratively by Euler's method with the exact Fermi-Dirac integral for n-doped Si-MOS and GaAs- MIS capacitors in deep accumulation mode. Free carrier density and the potential profile have been found for the degenerate case. The results have been compared with the analytical method, which is approximated by Boltzmann statistics, and clearly, show the difference between the degenerate case …

Threats And Mitigation Of Ddos Cyberattacks Against The U.S. Power Grid Via Ev Charging, Glenn Sean Morrison

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Cars are an ever changing and integral part of modern society. Two of the biggest changes in vehicles today are their heavy integration with wireless communication and the push toward battery powered Electric Vehicles (EV). EV and EV charging stations have become a part of the Internet of Things (IoT). While this connectedness increases the convenience and functionality of the vehicles and charging stations, it also opens them up to a wide range of cyber threats. This thesis examines the potential threats against the EV charging ecosystem through a historical analysis of past cyberattacks and identified vulnerabilities. As EV charging …

Illuminator, Volume 1, Issue 4, Batten College Of Engineering & Technology

College of Engineering & Technology Newsletter

January 2018 issue of Illuminator, a monthly publication of ODU's Batten College of Engineering and Technology.

Waste Heat Recovery From Distributed Rack-Based Fuel Cells Using Thermoelectric Generators, Khosrow Ebrahimi, Alfonso Ortega, Calvin Li, Kazuaki Yazawa, Sean James

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Off-grid power generation has been demonstrated in data centers through the deployment of site-specific centralized power plants utilizing gas turbine or fuel cell-based power generation. Because power is centrally generated, power distribution requires a high voltage power grid within the data center with its ancillary storage and conditioning requirements and equipment. An alternative approach is a completely decentralized distributed power generation system in which fuel cells deployed within individual server racks provide power localized to that rack only. Among other advantages, such an approach also greatly increases the ability to modulate and control power to individual rack units. Because the …

Value Of Water - Economic And Full Value - Michigan Tech University, Rabi Gyawali, Ali Mirchi, David Watkins

All ECSTATIC Materials

Lecture module on Economic and Full Value of water developed by Michigan Tech University (slides).

Lecture draws on two readings:

1. Brett Walton. (2010). The Price of Water: A Comparison of Water Rates, Usage in 30 U.S. Cities. April 26. Circle of Blue WaterNews. Available at: https://www.circleofblue.org/2010/world/the-price-of-water-a-comparison-of-water-rates-usage-in-30-u-s-cities/.
2. Peter Rogers, Radhika de Silva, Ramesh Bhatia. (2002) Water is an economic good: How to use prices to promote equity, efficiency, and sustainability, Water Policy, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-17, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1366-7017(02)00004-1.

Find a companion Jeopardy game -- test your knowledge about the readings, prices, economic values, full values, and more -- under …

Evaluation Of Consumer Drone Control Interface, Thomas William Merrell

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The development and use of consumer grade drones is becoming a larger part of our society for many different applications. There has been a great amount of discussion and constant review of proper operation of consumer drones including proper methods of control. In turn, regulation of such devices has been inconsistent. This study aims to better understand the effects of the three primary control interface methods (line of sight, video aided, and first-person view) on flight performance, situational awareness, and perceived mental workload of the operator. Secondarily, this study aims to provide design recommendations for future interfaces. This study shows …

Malware Analysis Skills Taught In University Courses, Swetha Gorugantu

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Career opportunities for malware analysts are growing at a fast pace due to the evolving nature of cyber threats as well as the necessity to counter them. However, employers are often unable to hire analysts fast though due to a lack of the required skillset. Hence, the primary purpose of the thesis is to conduct a gap analysis between the binary analysis skills taught in universities with those that the recruiters are looking for. Malware can be analyzed using three main types of tools and techniques: high-level profiling, static analysis, and dynamic analysis. These methods provide detailed information about the …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Soil-Native Bacteria In Precipitating Calcite To Stabilize Expansive Soils, Bhaskar C. S. Chittoori, Malcolm Burbank, Md Touhidul Islam

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The use of chemical additives to stabilize expansive soils is a common practice. However, the environmental concerns associated with the greenhouse gas generation during the production of these chemicals have launched engineers in search of sustainable stabilization alternatives. Microbial induced calcite precipitation (MICP) is a bio-cementation technique that could be a potential solution to this problem. Typically, MICP is achieved via bio-augmentation; however, bio-stimulation was argued to be a more realistic alternative due to its field implementation potential. Hence, in this research study, two expansive soils with varying plasticity characteristics were examined to understand the potential of MICP in treating …

Spoilage Detection In Raspberry Fruit Based On Spectral Imaging Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Karthik Kuchangi Jothi Prakash

Dissertations

Effective spoilage detection of perishable food items like fruits and vegetables is essential for retailers who stock and sell large quantities of these items. This research is aimed at developing a non-destructive, rapid and accurate method which is based on Spectral Imaging (SI) used in tandem with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict whether the fruit is fresh or rotten. The study also aims to determine the number of days before which the fruit rots. This research employs a primary, quantitative and inductive methods to investigate the Deep Learning based approach to detect fruit spoilage. Raspberry fruit in particular has …

Development Of A Dynamic Model And Control System For Load-Following Studies Of Supercritical Pulverized Coal Power Plants, Parikshit Sarda, Elijah Hedrick, Katherine Reynolds, Debangsu Bhattacharyya, National Energy Technology Laboratory

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Traditional energy production plants are increasingly forced to cycle their load and operate under low-load conditions in response to growth in intermittent renewable generation. A plant-wide dynamic model of a supercritical pulverized coal (SCPC) power plant has been developed in the Aspen Plus Dynamics® (APD) software environment and the impact of advanced control strategies on the transient responses of the key variables to load-following operation and disturbances can be studied. Models of various key unit operations, such as the steam turbine, are developed in Aspen Custom Modeler® (ACM) and integrated in the APD environment. A coordinated control system (CCS) is …

H.F. Hauff Electric Pruner Drive Train, Grady Graff

All Undergraduate Projects

The H.F. Hauff Company invests a large amount of money in developing a quality pruner used in everyday agriculture. Modern electric pruners tend to be expensive while manual tree pruning is very physically demanding. A battery assisted pruner that is light-weight, ergonomic, inexpensive to build and powerful enough to cut branches that a nominal apple tree would possess is the direct affiliation that H.F. Hauff devotes its funding too. A team of engineering students from Central Washington University developed a product with consideration to each of these circumstances. Since hand drills have proven to be user friendly and of abundance …

A Comparison Of Real Time Stream Processing Frameworks, Jonathan Curtis

Dissertations

The need to process the ever-expanding volumes of information being generated daily in the modern world is driving radical changes in traditional data analysis techniques. As a result of this, a number of open source tools for handling real-time data streams has become available in recent years. Four, in particular, have gained significant traction: Apache Flink, Apache Samza, Apache Spark and Apache Storm. Despite the rising popularity of these frameworks, however, there are few studies that analyse their performance in terms of important metrics, such as throughput and latency. This study aims to correct this, by running several benchmarks against …

2018 Scholarly Productivity Report, Missouri University Of Science And Technology

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Scholarly Productivity Reports

No abstract provided.

Automating The Crowd-Mapping Workflow With Deep Learning, Lasith Niroshan

Theses

Maintaining updated maps in an ever-changing built environment is important for supporting modern society in many ways. The usage of online crowdsourced maps in particular has gained importance in a wide range of recent location-based applications (route planning/navigation, urban planning, real estate, tourism, etc). However, both traditional map production methods and updating today’s online maps suffer from early obsolescence due to their largely manual map production/update workflows. Significant research efforts have focused on refining techniques to identify changes in raster satellite images, aiming to improve and streamline map production processes. Concurrently, the surge in Internet usage has led to a …

Me-Em 2017-18 Annual Report, Department Of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, Michigan Technological University

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Annual Reports

Table of Contents

• Curriculum Revision
• The Result: MEP I-IV
• ME-EM Research
• Alumni Features
• Enrollment & Degrees
• Graduates
• Faculty & Staff
• Alumni
• Donors
• Contracts & Grants
• Patents & Publications

Vertical Stress And Stability Of Interburden Over An Abandoned Pillar Working Before Upward Mining: A Case Study, Jinwen Bai, Guorui Feng, Shanyong Wang, Tingye Qi, Jian Yang, Jun Guo, Zhen Li, Xianjie Du, Zehua Wang, Yunlou Du, Yujiang Zhang

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Upward mining of the residual coal seam over an abandoned pillar working is one of the effective measures to alleviate the contradiction between limited resources and increased consumption. Interburden stability over an abandoned pillar working plays a significant role in guaranteeing the safety of upward mining; however, it has not yet been extensively studied and understood. In this study, the vertical stress of the interburden over an abandoned pillar working was first investigated. The mechanical model of the interburden was established and the damage conditions were analysed. Then, the stability of the interburden over 38502 abandoned workings in Baijiazhuang coal …

Hardware Security And Vlsi Design Optimization, Hao Xue

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Microelectronic circuit is ubiquitous component of modern electrical devices. The increasing complexity and professionality of phases in microelectronic supply chain bring more global cooperation to integrated circuit (IC) production. Therefore, providing a secure environment for microelectronic circuit design does not ensure the integrity of the hardware since any participator of IC fabrication has the opportunity to implant a malicious alteration in original IC design. Especially overseas chip-fabrication is a vital potential threat for national defense products. In theory, anyone who has access to fabrication process can tamper with the original design, with the potential to change function, modify parametric properties …

Multi-Scale And Multi-Modal Streaming Data Aggregation And Processing For Decision Support During Natural Disasters, Shruti Kar

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

With the surge in digital information systems, there is a data deluge from various sources that can be analyzed and integrated to produce relevant, reliable and actionable information, for better decision making. We employ multi-modal data (i.e., unstructured text, gazetteers, and imagery) for an aggregate level analysis and location-centric demand/request matching in the context of disaster relief. After classifying the Need expressed in a tweet (the WHAT), we leverage OpenStreetMap to geolocate that Need on a computationally accessible map of the local terrain (the WHERE) populated with location features such as hospitals and housing. Further, our novel use of flood …

Real-Time Path Planning And Obstacle Avoidance For Mobile Robots With Actuator Faults, Ravindra Vibha Bellur

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

In this research, a fault-tolerant path planning and obstacle avoidance algorithm is implemented for mobile ground robots. The fault-tolerant system architecture consists of the following three components: (1) an online fault diagnosis module for detecting and estimating actuator faults in the mobile robot; (2) a localization and mapping module for dynamic terrain mapping and obstacle detection; (3) a path planning and obstacle avoidance module for generating way points from a given point to the desired destination, avoiding the detected obstacles and moving along these way points. The online fault diagnostic information is used to compensate for the effect of faults, …

Development Of An Ios App For Learning Intonation Of Wind Instruments, Swathi Pamidi

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Learning music instrument is a challenging task for a beginner without constant guidance from an instructor. The primary objective of this thesis research is to design and develop an iOS mobile / iPad learning app that helps users to learn and practice intonation for a suite of wind instruments by themselves with comfort and ease through app-provided tuning and charting guidance and app-assisted self-assessment. Particularly, our successfully-implemented app provides the following features to enhance the user's learning experience: 1 ) Provides learners easy-to-access information for the fingering and tuning techniques of wind instruments by converting Dr. Shelley Jagow's book - …

Isolation And Onboarding: Gender Bias In Aviation Training Documents, William Hart

Technical Communication Capstone Course

There is a growing interest in male-dominated industries and the challenges women face finding their place within the workplace community. Yet, there seems to be little research on how training documents, generally created by technical communicators, may isolate and limit women who seek to pursue careers in these fields. Technical communication and gender scholars have examined women in the technical communication field and gender bias in male-dominated industries but have not yet examined gender stereotypes in training documents. Training documents are designed to provide written instructions and a reference guide for job functions, workplace rules, orientation, and company policies. This …

Quality Improvement Of Recycled Concrete Aggregate Using Polymers, Ahmed Ali Abdrabbou

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Crushed concrete is one of the main resources for sustainable material. As this material should not be wasted, this research aims to assess the reuse of crushed concrete material as a resource of sustainable construction material. In this thesis, two types of polymer were mixed with crushed concrete to improve its fragmentation resistance, water absorption, and permeability. Water base polymer is an eco-friendly and cost-effective material, which has been used frequently to improve the quality of crushed concrete. This thesis contributes to the improvement of crushed concrete performance by improving the aggregate properties when it is mixed with a polymer, …