Engineering Commons^™

Design And Experimentation Of Cable-Driven Platform Stabilization And Control Systems, Matthew Newman

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Agricultural researchers are constantly attempting to generate crops superior to those currently in use by the world. Whether this means creating crops with greater yield, crops that are more resilient to disease, or crops that can tolerate harsh environments with fewer failures, test plots of these experimental crops must be studied in real-world environments with minimal invasion to determine how they will perform in full-scale agricultural settings. To monitor these crops without interfering on their natural growth, a noninvasive sensor system has been implemented. This system, instituted by the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at the University of …

Design And Experimentation Of Cable-Driven Platform Stabilization And Control Systems, Matthew Newman

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Agricultural researchers are constantly attempting to generate crops superior to those currently in use by the world. Whether this means creating crops with greater yield, crops that are more resilient to disease, or crops that can tolerate harsh environments with fewer failures, test plots of these experimental crops must be studied in real-world environments with minimal invasion to determine how they will perform in full-scale agricultural settings. To monitor these crops without interfering on their natural growth, a noninvasive sensor system has been implemented. This system, instituted by the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at the University of …

Cyber-Physical System Characterization And Co-Regulation Of A Quadrotor Uas, Seth E. Doebbeling

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

An Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) is a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) in which a host of real-time computational tasks contending for shared resources must be cooperatively managed to obtain mission objectives. Traditionally, control of the UAS is designed assuming a fixed, high sampling rate in order to maintain reliable performance and margins of stability. But emerging methods challenge this design by dynamically allocating resources to computational tasks, thereby affecting control and mission performance. To apply these emerging strategies, a characterization and understanding of the effects of timing on control and trajectory following performance is required. Going beyond traditional control evaluation techniques, …

Development Of The End-Effector Of A Cable-Driven Parallel Manipulator For Automated Crop Sensing, Iman Salafian

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A four cable-driven parallel manipulator (4CDPM), consisting of sophisticated spectrometers and imagers, is under development for use in acquiring phenotypic and environmental data over an acre-sized maize field. This thesis presents the design, controls, and testing of two sub-systems in a 4CDPM: a Center of Mass Balance System (CMBS) and a Drop-Down System (DDS).

One of the factors that influences stability is the center of mass (COM) position of the end effector. An offset in COM can cause a pendulum effect or an undesired tilt angle. A center of mass balancing system is presented in this thesis to minimize the …

Stretch Control Of Adipocyte Insulin Signaling, Tasneem Bouzid

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Obesity and related metabolic disorders have reached global epidemic proportions in recent decades. Excess and hypertrophic adipose tissue has been implicated in the development of various pathological diseases and disorders including Type-2 diabetes mellitus (Type-2 DM). In addition to serving as energy storage for the body, evidence also suggests that adipose tissue behaves as an endocrine organ capable of secreting bioactive cytokines known as adipokines, which mediate insulin signaling pathways in various tissues. Physical exercise has been demonstrated to positively affect insulin signaling activities potentially through increasing the secretion of insulin sensitizing adipokines and/or decreasing the secretion of pro-inflammatory insulin …

Simulation Modeling Approach For Evaluating A Solution Designed To Alleviate The Congestion Of Passenger Flow At The Composure Area Of Security Checkpoints, Maria Luisa Janer Rubio

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In a previous study, we found that replacing the exit roller of a security checkpoint lane for a continuously circulating conveyor could potentially increase the throughput of passengers by over 28% while maintaining the TSA security-waiting time limit (Janer and Rossetti 2016). This study intends to expand this previous effort by investigating the impact of this circulating conveyor on the secondary screening related processes. Leone and Liu (2011) found that imposing a limit on the x-ray screening time, and diverting any item exceeding this limit to secondary screening, could decrease the waiting time by 43%. Our objective is to verify …

Characterization Of The High Frequency Alternating Current Block In The Rat Sciatic Nerve Using Cuff Electrodes And Macro-Sieve Electrodes, Soumyajit Ray

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Tripolar cuff electrodes were designed, fabricated and non-chronically implanted in the sciatic nerve of two-month-old Lewis rats. A proximal constant current stimulus to the nerve was blocked by applying a high frequency sinusoidal signal to the distally placed tripolar cuff electrode. The frequency voltage characteristic of the blocking signal was obtained. Complete block was not achieved using variants of the tripolar cuff design and bipolar cuff electrodes. Single and dual macro-sieve electrode assemblies were designed, fabricated and chronically implanted in the sciatic nerve of Lewis rats. After a four-month period for regeneration four different electrode configurations were tested to enable …

Improving The Floris Wind Plant Model For Compatibility With Gradient-Based Optimization, Jared Thomas, Pieter Gebraad, Andrew Ning

Faculty Publications

The FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady-state (FLORIS) model, a parametric wind turbine wake model that predicts steady state wake characteristics based on wind turbine position and yaw angle, was developed for optimization of control settings and turbine locations. This paper provides details on the recent changes made to the FLORIS model to make the model more suitable for gradient-based optimization. Changes to the FLORIS model were made to remove discontinuities and add curvature to regions of non-physical zero gradient. Exact gradients for the FLORIS model were obtained using algorithmic differentiation. A set of three case studies demonstrate that using …

Learning Homophily Couplings From Non-Iid Data For Joint Feature Selection And Noise-Resilient Outlier Detection, Guansong Pang, Longbing Cao, Ling Chen, Huan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper introduces a novel wrapper-based outlier detection framework (WrapperOD) and its instance (HOUR) for identifying outliers in noisy data (i.e., data with noisy features) with strong couplings between outlying behaviors. Existing subspace or feature selection-based methods are significantly challenged by such data, as their search of feature subset(s) is independent of outlier scoring and thus can be misled by noisy features. In contrast, HOUR takes a wrapper approach to iteratively optimize the feature subset selection and outlier scoring using a top-k outlier ranking evaluation measure as its objective function. HOUR learns homophily couplings between outlying behaviors (i.e., abnormal behaviors …

Performance-Based Liquefaction Triggering Analyses With Two Liquefaction Models Using The Cone Penetration Test, Alex Michael Arndt

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the use of performance-based engineering in earthquake liquefaction hazard analysis with Cone Penetration Test data (CPT). This work builds upon previous research involving performance-based liquefaction analysis with the Standard Penetration Test (SPT). Two new performance-based liquefaction triggering models are presented herein. The two models used in this liquefaction analysis are modified from the case-history based probabilistic models proposed by Ku et al. (2012) and Boulanger and Idriss (2014). Using these models, a comparison is made between the performance-based method and the conventional pseudo-probabilistic method. This comparison uses the 2014 USGS probabilistic seismic hazard models for both methods. …

Fluid Manipulations Using A Piezo Electric Transformer For Sensing And Spray Generation Applications, Zeinab Ramshani

Dissertations

A steady effort has been made on the development of fluid manipulation techniques for sensing and actuating systems. Conventional techniques of fluid manipulation for sensing and spray generation purposes, often need trained staff or high input power and they are complicated, time consuming and expensive. Therefore, it is necessary to develop new systems which can overcome these drawbacks.

In this dissertation, the author has developed piezoelectric-based systems for fluid manipulation. The focus of this dissertation involves novel approaches of enhancing the sensing and actuating systems using the piezoelectric devices. This includes designing a system, which theoretically can overcome the limitations …

Embedding-Based Representation Of Categorical Data By Hierarchical Value Coupling Learning, Songlei Jian, Longbing Cao, Guansong Pang, Kai Lu, Hang Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning the representation of categorical data with hierarchical value coupling relationships is very challenging but critical for the effective analysis and learning of such data. This paper proposes a novel coupled unsupervised categorical data representation (CURE) framework and its instantiation, i.e., a coupled data embedding (CDE) method, for representing categorical data by hierarchical value-to-value cluster coupling learning. Unlike existing embedding- and similarity-based representation methods which can capture only a part or none of these complex couplings, CDE explicitly incorporates the hierarchical couplings into its embedding representation. CDE first learns two complementary feature value couplings which are then used to cluster …

Energy And Performance Balancing Architecture For Asynchronous Data Processing Platforms, Chien-Wei Lo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The semiconductor industry has been increasingly focused on the energy consumption and heat generation in CMOS-based integrated circuits (ICs) for its dominating impact on the system performance and reliability. Without clock-related timing constraints, asynchronous circuits have demonstrated unique flexibility in performance-energy tradeoffs compared to synchronous designs. This dissertation work presents the architecture capable of balancing energy and performance for asynchronous digital signal processing circuits using the Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL). Architecture implementing user-configurable adaptive dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) and data processing core disabling based on the detection and parameterization of system throughput are developed for MTNCL parallel homogeneous and …

Decision Support System For Container Port Selection Using Multiple-Objective Decision Analysis, Rivelino De Icaza

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ports are essential for maritime transportation and global supply chains since they are nodes that connect the sea- and land-based modes of transportation. With containerization and supply chains stimulating global trade, ports are challenged to adjust to changes in the market to create value to their customers. Therefore, this dissertation research focuses on the container port selection decision analysis to provide information to help shipping lines select the best port for their shipping networks. Since the problem is complex, dynamic, and involves multiple and conflicting criteria, the research proposes to use the multi-objective decision analysis with Value-Focused Thinking approach. The …

Characterization Of Nanoparticles Using Solid State Nanopores, Santoshi Nandivada

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Solid state nanopores are widely used in detection of highly charged biomolecules like DNA and proteins. In this study, we use a solid state nanopore based device to characterize spherical nanoparticles to estimate their size and electrical charge using the principle of resistive pulse technique. The principle of resistive pulse technique is the method of counting and sizing particles suspended in a fluid medium, which are electrophoretically driven through a channel and produce current blockage signals due to giving rise to a change in its initial current. This change in current is denoted as a current blockage or as a …

Statistical Movement Classification Based On Hilbert-Huang Transform, Shanqi Sun

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this project is to introduce an automatic movement classification technique of

finger movement signals using Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT). Due to the nonlinear and

nonstationary processing behavior, movement signals are analyzed with the Hilbert-Huang

Transform (HHT). The slope of auto-correlation function and mean of frequency from first

three Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) was used as feature parameters for each category.

Finally, performing support vector machine (SVM) for pattern classification completes clas-

sifying types of finger movement. According to the records of 669 trial samples of two types

of finger movement signals (thumb and pinky), average accuracy is 93.28%. …

Effects Of Filtration Conditions On Clearance Of Bacteriophage, Rigen Te

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Virus Clearance is one of the major challenges in biopharmaceutical industry, especially in the manufacturing of drugs. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends using several model bacteriophages as surrogates of pathogenic mammalian virus for process validation. In this work, two bacteriophages were tested against 30 kDa, 100 kDa, 300 kDa polyethersulfone (PES) membranes to investigate the effects of pore size on virus clearance. Virus particles were spiked into the protein feed solutions containing bovine serum albumin (BSA) or lysozyme at different concentrations. Besides protein concentration, the effects of feed pH on the filtration performance and virus rejection were also …

Si-Based Germanium Tin Semiconductor Lasers For Optoelectronic Applications, Sattar H. Sweilim Al-Kabi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Silicon-based materials and optoelectronic devices are of great interest as they could be monolithically integrated in the current Si complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) processes. The integration of optoelectronic components on the CMOS platform has long been limited due to the unavailability of Si-based laser sources. A Si-based monolithic laser is highly desirable for full integration of Si photonics chip. In this work, Si-based germanium-tin (GeSn) lasers have been demonstrated as direct bandgap group-IV laser sources. This opens a completely new avenue from the traditional III-V integration approach. In this work, the material and optical properties of GeSn alloys were comprehensively studied. …

A Workflow For Managing Building Information And Performance Data Using Virtual Reality: An Alternative To Bim For Existing Buildings?, Adam Rysanek, Clayton Miller, Arno Schlueter

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Building information modelling (BIM) has carved a growing niche in the construction industry for the support of new building projects. The same cannot be said for existing buildings, where the prevalence of uncertain data, and unclear information, has been difficult to reconcile with the unambiguous nature of BIM parameterization. An opportunity to alleviate these challenges may have arrived from the recent boon of virtual reality platforms for navigating physical environments. This paper demonstrates how labeling of equirectangular images with data or text widgets is possible using publicly-available software libraries. A prototype is presented and tested on a building in Singapore.

Phonon Dispersion And Relaxation Time In Uranium Dioxide, Dallin Parkinson

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

Phonon dispersion branches are used to obtain an effective relaxation time to calculate thermal conductivity of Uranium Dioxide (UO₂). The method presented closely follows that of Deskins’ phonon-phonon interaction that uses a three-phonon process which satisfies momentum and energy conservation. All phonon branches including longitudinal acoustic, transverse acoustic, longitudinal optical and transverse optical are considered in the calculation of the relaxation time.

After one phonon is identified, a scan is initiated to test all phonon combinations that will satisfy the conservation equations. When the scan identifies a valid three-phonon combination a relaxation time is calculated for that combination. …

Visualization And 3d Printing Of A 3d Solar Tracker Model Using Mayavi And Pov-Ray, Aditya Mehra

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

In this work, we have created a realistic model of a solar tracker using Mayavi: 3D scientific data visualization and plotting in Python, Enthought Canopy:a comprehensive Python analysis environment and Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, a ray tracing program which generates photo-realistic images from a text-based scene description, a model of the solar tracker was also 3D printed.

Effects Of Intentional Electromagnetic Interference On Analog To Digital Converter Measurements Of Sensor Outputs And General Purpose Input Output Pins, David A. Ware

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

As technology becomes more prevalent, its application to safety and security in critical systems continues to increase. This leads to an increased dependence on sensors to provide an accurate view of the environment surrounding an application. These sensors can also be exploited by a malicious individual to attack a system and compromise its safety or security. These attacks change the reported value of a sensor so that it doesn't reflect the real situation. The systems in a car can be used as an example of this. Cars can have numerous sensors that measure a variety of things, including the car's …

Facilitation Of Nanoscale Thermal Transport By Hydrogen Bonds, Lin Zhang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Thermal transport performance at the nanoscale and/or of biomaterials is essential to the success of many new technologies including nanoelectronics, biomedical devices, and various nanocomposites. Due to complicated microstructures and chemical bonding, thermal transport process in these materials has not been well understood yet. In terms of chemical bonding, it is well known that the strength of atomic bonding can significantly affect thermal transport across materials or across interfaces between materials. Given the intrinsic high strength of hydrogen bonds, this dissertation explores the role of hydrogen bonds in nanoscale thermal transport in various materials, and investigates novel material designs incorporating …

Development And Application Of Hydraulic And Hydrogeologic Models To Better Inform Management Decisions, Trinity L. Stout

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Water is one of the most important and limited resources in regions with little rainfall. As populations continue to grow, so does the need for water. Individuals in water management positions need to be well informed in order to avoid potential negative effects concerning the overall quality and amount of water available for both people and the environment. In order to provide better information for these individuals, computer models and mathematical relationships are commonly developed to estimate the outcome of different situations regarding surface water and groundwater. Along these lines, this study focused on two modeling studies that provide information …

Heat Transfer Analysis Of Localized Heat-Treatment For Grade 91 Steel, Jacob D. Walker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Many of the projects utilizing Grade 91 steel are large in scale, therefore it is necessary to assemble on site. The assembly of the major pieces often requires welding in the assembly; welding drastically changes the superior mechanical properties of Grade 91 steel that it was specifically developed for. Therefore, because of the adverse effects of welding on the mechanical properties of Grade 91, it is necessary to do a localized post weld heat treatment.

In this study a localized post weld heat treatment is used to gather experimental data. The data is then used to derive unknown heat transfer …

Best Practices For Volume Flow Rate Measurements Using Piv At The Exit Of A Turbulent Round Jet, Robert Schaap

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is an optical flow measurement technique that is used to measure volume flow rate at the exit of a turbulent, round nozzle. The objective of this thesis is to determine how to best make this measurement. The quality of the measurement is affected by a range of data acquisition parameters and how data are processed. Measurements are made over a range of different flows using the two main types of PIV: Two Component (2C), which uses one camera, and Stereo, which uses two cameras, similar to human eyes. Previous work done for data acquisition and processing …

Is It We Or They? The Effect Of Identity On Collaboration And Performance In Buyer-Supplier Relationships, Siqi Ma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today’s scale-driven and technology-intensive global economy, collaboration becomes the supply chain’s core capability (Liker and Choi, 2004). A well-developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations gives companies a significant competitive advantage (Kanter, 1994). Retailers are increasingly relying on their suppliers to reduce costs, improve quality, and develop new processes and products faster than their rivals’ vendors can. On the other hand, suppliers benefit from retailers that they are able to monitor store-level demand in real time in order to ensure the top-selling items are in-stock or the accuracy and timeliness of retailer’s demand forecast. Previous literature has shown …

Well-Tuned Algorithms For The Team Orienteering Problem With Time Windows, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pieter Vansteenwegen, Kun Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TOPTW) is the extension of the Orienteering Problem (OP) where each node is limited by a predefined time window during which the service has to start. The objective of the TOPTW is to maximize the total collected score by visiting a set of nodes with a limited number of paths. We propose two algorithms, Iterated Local Search and a hybridization of Simulated Annealing and Iterated Local Search (SAILS), to solve the TOPTW. As indicated in multiple research works on algorithms for the OP and its variants, determining appropriate parameter values in a statistical …

Proactive And Reactive Coordination Of Non-Dedicated Agent Teams Operating In Uncertain Environments, Pritee Agrawal, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Domains such as disaster rescue, security patrolling etc. often feature dynamic environments where allocations of tasks to agents become ineffective due to unforeseen conditions that may require agents to leave the team. Agents leave the team either due to arrival of high priority tasks (e.g., emergency, accident or violation) or due to some damage to the agent. Existing research in task allocation has only considered fixed number of agents and in some instances arrival of new agents on the team. However, there is little or no literature that considers situations where agents leave the team after task allocation. To that …

Pivot-Based Metric Indexing, Lu Chen, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Christian S. Jensen, Hanyu Yang, Keyu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The general notion of a metric space encompasses a diverse range of data types and accompanying similarity measures. Hence, metric search plays an important role in a wide range of settings, including multimedia retrieval, data mining, and data integration. With the aim of accelerating metric search, a collection of pivot-based indexing techniques for metric data has been proposed, which reduces the number of potentially expensive similarity comparisons by exploiting the triangle inequality for pruning and validation. However, no comprehensive empirical study of those techniques exists. Existing studies each offers only a narrower coverage, and they use different pivot selection strategies …