Engineering Commons^™

Characterization Of Ground Nozzles For Pesticide Applications, Ryan Henry

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Pesticide applications are a common component of crop production systems in the United States (US). For row crop systems (e.g. corn, soybean, or wheat), pesticides are applied by ground, aerial, or chemigation methods. The exact method of pesticide delivery is not universally regulated/ prescribed in the US, and the equipment and application technique are largely defined by the individual applicator. A wide variety of choices and decisions must be made by applicators to result in a successful pesticide application. Examples of these choices include proper active ingredient(s), carrier volume and equipment (e.g. nozzle type, spacing, and operating pressure) selection while …

A Robotic Device To Assist With In-Vivo Measurement Of Human Pelvic Organ Tissue Properties, Shashank S. Kumat

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Measurement of the biomechanical properties of human pelvic organ tissue without undergoing minimally invasive surgery is desired for diagnostics purposes and take precautionary actions if needed. The biomechanical properties of the bladder change with age and due to diseases. Thus, identification of the viscoelastic properties of the tissue could help in detecting early stages of the disease in the bladder. A literature survey revealed that no device exists that could be used to characterize the biomechanical properties of the human bladder in-vivo. This research contributes towards the development of a diagnostic system that could be used in a medical setting …

The Influence Of Functional Weights On The Performance Of Least Squares Finite Element Formulation On Hybrid Meshes, Anirudh Rajagopal

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

The Least-Squares Finite Element Method (LSFEM) is a numerical method for solving partial differential equations (PDE) approximately by minimizing the L-2 norm of the PDE residuals. Unlike the more common Galerkin approach, this method does not employ integration by parts to reduce the continuity requirements of the basis functions. Instead, the PDE is cast as a first-order system of differential equations, which allows for the solution of primary and secondary variables with the same order of accuracy. In addition, this approach always leads to a direct minimization problem and therefore not subject to the restrictive inf-sup condition and does not …

Application Of Artificial Neural Network For Evaporative Cooling In Data Centres, Feyisola Adejokun

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

A data center is a facility that may be used to house telecommunication or storage devices. Because of the 24/7 required operation of a data center, large segments of a data center are geared towards evacuating heat generated from operating one. Data centers entail multiple operating configurations, great amount of constraints and nonlinear correlations. The need to effectively optimize a data center operation presents a daunting challenge. The data center considered in this research is a test bed modular data center (MDC). Comprising of an Information Technology (IT), DEC and IEC module. Typical MDC are dynamic and complex in nature …

Shape Optimization Of Helical Coil Tube For Maximizing Heat Transfer, Venkat Manoj Kandukuri

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Many researchers have observed the enhancement of heat transfer in coiled tubes compared to straight tubes with the same diameter and length. It is known fact, that in a helical coil tube the maximum axial velocity shifted towards the outer wall of the pipe and imbalance between centrifugal forces and inertial loads to a secondary motion of the fluid in the cross-section of the tube. This secondary motion is responsible for improved transport of heat energy to/from the tube walls. Previous conducted Experimental and computational parametric studies show the relationship between the increased heat transfer and parameters such as pitch, …

Self-Transport Of Liquid Drops Through A Functional Mesh For Removing Sweat Away From Skin, Manasvikumar Oza

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

In this work, a functional mesh is developed to transport liquid drops from one side of the mesh to the other. A theoretical model is established, which has been used to obtain three design criteria. Based on these design criteria, functional meshes have been generated and tested with commercially available sponge attached to the mesh. Finally, such a mesh is demonstrated to be effective to remove sweat from human skin. As an application of this research, the concept of this functional mesh solves existing problems with a sport wear. The current sport wear is capable of absorbing sweat, but not …

Thermal Stress Analysis Of Unidirectional Composite Material By Fem Modeling, Gopal D. Gulwani

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Micromechanics of composite is study of complex mechanism of stress and strain transfer between fiber and matrix within a composite as well as distributions of physical fields inside heterogeneous medium. It was used successfully in predicting accurately physical properties like effective stiffness, effective linear thermal expansion of heterogeneous materials like composite. However, when it comes to strength characteristics of composite especially in transversal direction it failed to predict more accurate results. This thesis is focused on thermally induced stress analysis of unidirectional composite by finite element method. Thermal stresses which are dangerously ignored factor in mechanics of composite usually occur …

The Prescribed Burning Impacts On Soil Water Repellency And Soil Hydrological Properties In Sagebrush-Steppe Ecosystem, Yang Cheng

Dissertations - ALL

Prescribed fire is an important tool for rangeland management in sage-steppe ecosystem, yet the long-term effects of this practice have not been well studied. Previous studies of fire-affected soil water repellency have identified the strength and persistence of SWR after burning in different types of forests but have not identified consistent timelines for post-fire recovery. This study explores the impacts of fire and plant community succession on SWR and infiltration properties to further inform rangeland managers regarding the long-term impacts of prescribed fire on SWR and infiltration properties in sagebrush-steppe ecosystems.

The objectives of this study were: 1) To explore …

Statistical Mechanical Treatments Of The Optical Properties Of Cadmium Selenide Quantum Dots, Amogh Srihari

Dissertations - ALL

Semiconductors that exist in the nanoscale are referred to as Quantum Dots (QDs). This distinction is made because in the nanoscale, semiconductors behave much differently compared to their bulk counterparts. QDs possess band gaps that change based on their size and this unique property enables them to emit different colors, rendering them useful in a number of applications. QDs are widely used in LED technology and are becoming commonplace in biological applications involving in-vivo imaging. Efforts have gone into making QDs viable for photovoltaic applications as well. Although a lot is understood about the effects of size and shape on …

Kinetics Of Ketone Hydrogenation Over Supported Ru Catalysts, Omar Abdelrahman Ali Abdelrahman

Dissertations - ALL

A kinetic investigation of the production of y-valerolactone (GVL) via the aqueous phase hydrogenation of levulinic acid (LA) over supported Ru catalysts was carried out, in order to understand how to better design a hydrogenation catalyst for such biomass catalytic strategies. At temperatures representative of biomass processing, the reaction proceeds first through the reduction of the LA ketone group to its corresponding alcohol, 4-hydroxypentanoic acid (HPA), which subsequently produces GVL via intramolecular esterification in solution. The governing kinetics of LA hydrogenation were found to be insensitive to the identity of the support material on which Ru catalysts were prepared. Conversely …

Sensor Management For Localization And Tracking In Wireless Sensor Networks, Nianxia Cao

Dissertations - ALL

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are very useful in many application areas including battlefield surveillance, environment monitoring and target tracking, industrial processes and health monitoring and control. The classical WSNs are composed of large number of densely deployed sensors, where sensors are battery-powered devices with limited signal processing capabilities. In the crowdsourcing based WSNs, users who carry devices with built-in sensors are recruited as sensors. In both WSNs, the sensors send their observations regarding the target to a central node called the fusion center for final inference. With limited resources, such as limited communication bandwidth among the WSNs and limited sensor …

Neuromorphic Learning Systems For Supervised And Unsupervised Applications, Qiuwen Chen

Dissertations - ALL

The advancements in high performance computing (HPC) have enabled the large-scale implementation of neuromorphic learning models and pushed the research on computational intelligence into a new era. Those bio-inspired models are constructed on top of unified building blocks, i.e. neurons, and have revealed potentials for learning of complex information. Two major challenges remain in neuromorphic computing. Firstly, sophisticated structuring methods are needed to determine the connectivity of the neurons in order to model various problems accurately. Secondly, the models need to adapt to non-traditional architectures for improved computation speed and energy efficiency. In this thesis, we address these two problems …

Selective Dynamic Analysis Of Virtualized Whole-System Guest Environments, Andrew William Henderson

Dissertations - ALL

Dynamic binary analysis is a prevalent and indispensable technique in program analysis. While several dynamic binary analysis tools and frameworks have been proposed, all suffer from one or more of: prohibitive performance degradation, a semantic gap between the analysis code and the execution under analysis, architecture/OS specificity, being user-mode only, and lacking flexibility and extendability. This dissertation describes the design of the Dynamic Executable Code Analysis Framework (DECAF), a virtual machine-based, multi-target, whole-system dynamic binary analysis framework. In short, DECAF seeks to address the shortcomings of existing whole-system dynamic analysis tools and extend the state of the art by utilizing …

Parameters That Affect Parallel Processing For Computational Electromagnetic Simulation Codes On High Performance Computing Clusters, Hongsik Moon

Dissertations - ALL

What is the impact of multicore and associated advanced technologies on computational software for science? Most researchers and students have multicore laptops or desktops for their research and they need computing power to run computational software packages. Computing power was initially derived from Central Processing Unit (CPU) clock speed. That changed when increases in clock speed became constrained by power requirements. Chip manufacturers turned to multicore CPU architectures and associated technological advancements to create the CPUs for the future. Most software applications benefited by the increased computing power the same way that increases in clock speed helped applications run faster. …

Studies Of Cell Motility And Differentiation In Complex 3d In Vitro Microenvironment, Jing Wang

Dissertations - ALL

Cell behaviors, such as motility and differentiation, which are highly regulated by the complex 3D in vivo microenvironment, have been extensively studied in the past decades to better understand the mechanisms of development, disease, and healing. Due to the highly complex nature of the in vivo environment and limited resources and access to study cell behaviors in vivo, great efforts have been made to develop in vitro systems to mimic the in vivo microenvironment for a better understanding of cell-microenvironment interactions. However, most of the commonly used in vitro systems are static, which cannot mimic the dynamics of the microenvironment …

Robust Kullback-Leibler Divergence And Its Applications In Universal Hypothesis Testing And Deviation Detection, Pengfei Yang

Dissertations - ALL

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is one of the most fundamental metrics in information theory and statistics and provides various operational interpretations in the context of mathematical communication theory and statistical hypothesis testing. The KL divergence for discrete distributions has the desired continuity property which leads to some fundamental results in universal hypothesis testing. With continuous observations, however, the KL divergence is only lower semi-continuous; difficulties arise when tackling universal hypothesis testing with continuous observations due to the lack of continuity in KL divergence.

This dissertation proposes a robust version of the KL divergence for continuous alphabets. Specifically, the KL divergence …

Improving The Efficiency Of Energy Harvesting Embedded System, Yukan Zhang

Dissertations - ALL

In the past decade, mobile embedded systems, such as cell phones and tablets have infiltrated and dramatically transformed our life. The computation power, storage capacity and data communication speed of mobile devices have increases tremendously, and they have been used for more critical applications with intensive computation/communication. As a result, the battery lifetime becomes increasingly important and tends to be one of the key considerations for the consumers. Researches have been carried out to improve the efficiency of the lithium ion battery, which is a specific member in the more general Electrical Energy Storage (EES) family and is widely used …

Formation Flight For Fuel Saving In Coronet Missions Of Kc-135r And F-15c/E, Christopher Allen Kniffin

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

The fuel saving benefit of formation flight has been demonstrated through theoretical and computational analyses, simulation, wind tunnel and flight tests. When an aircraft flies in a specific region in the wake of another aircraft, it experiences upwash, which results in reduced drag and thus reduced thrust requirement. One specific USAF mission that can potentially benefit from formation flight is coronet missions. In a coronet mission, fighter aircraft are escorted and refueled, as needed, by tanker aircraft over a long range. During the flight, the receiver aircraft fly in formation with the tanker but outside of the wake of the …

Final Design Report: Grasp Data Acquisition Project Axon Vr, Michael Erberich, Jack Schultz, Tyler Yeaman

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Final Design Report: Allergen Mixing Assistant (Ama) Micro-Refrigeration Redesigning, Mitchell Parks, Minwoo (Michael) Suh

Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

Allergen Mixing Assistant (AMA) by Xtract Solutions is a device designed to more “effectively refrigerate, organize, and mix allergenic extracts”. Although Xtract Solutions intended the product to be fully automated, the company has decided against its automation and declared its current design as a minimum viable product whose components are too expensive, difficult to source and complex. Therefore, Cal Poly AMA design team - Mitchell Parks and Minwoo Suh - has decided to replace these expensive components with much more economical alternatives as shown below:

Stirling cooler

→

Thermoelectric (Peltier) cooler

Custom Arduino

Controller Card

→

TEC Thermostat *** …

Biofuel Gasification For Residential Heating, Bryan Duke, Courtney Mcintosh, Jeron Hogan

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Autonomous Golf Cart Firmware, Gerik Kubiak

Computer Engineering

The Autonomous Golf Cart Project is a project sponsored by the Cal Poly Robotics Club. The multidisciplinary team is adding sensors and electronics to a regular golf cart with the goal to drive the golf cart around campus without and human input. This task requires a plethora of hardware and firmware to control that hardware. The firmware provides an interface for higher level software to then control the hardware and therefore drive the golf cart. This report is focused on the hardware modifications and the firmware used in order to drive the golf cart from a computer.

Electronic Deer Warning System, David Zhuo, Anlang Lu

Computer Engineering

Deer-vehicle collisions (DVCs) are extremely dangerous, often injuring or even killing drivers. Unfortunately, this form of automotive accident is commonplace in the United States. According to the NHTSA, DVCs result in 200 human deaths a year.2

Despite these deadly incidents, there currently are no deployed federal or state systems for preventing DVCs. There are many consumer electronic deer deterrent products, but their long-term effectiveness is questionable.3 In fact, there does not appear to be much research into electronic deer deterrent systems. Aside from constant audio output and electric shock, no other means of electronic deterrent exist. Even if fixed deterrents …

Power Distribution:Protection Analysis, Avneet S. Samra

Electrical Engineering

The objective of this project is to build a radial distribution system that operates on a lower voltage. The system consists of a transmission line protected by a SEL-351 Relay, a three- phase transformer protected by a SEL-587 Relay, and a three-phase induction motor protected by a Cooper Form 6 Controller. The SEL-351, SEL-587, and the Cooper Form 6 Controller are microprocessor-based relays that are used to provide protection under faulted conditions. When a fault is detected in the system, the closest upstream relay sends a trip signal to its assigned local breaker. The SEL-351 provides overcurrent protection for the …

Experimental Evaluation Of Structural Steel Coating Systems, Elias Anis Toubia, Sadra Emami

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Faculty Publications

Departments of transportation (DOTs) currently use the conventional three-coat system as the predominant choice for the corrosion protection of steel bridge structures. Eliminating one step in the coating process could potentially save time and cost associated with lane closures and traffic control costs. This research paper evaluates several two-coat systems based on the zinc-rich primer and polysiloxane topcoat technology. All samples were conditioned and coated in a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled paint booth, simulating common field ENvironmental CONditions (ENCON) (ENCON 1: 25 °C/50% RH, ENCON 2: 10 °C/40%RH, and ENCON 3: 32°C/80% RH). Accelerated weathering tests were performed on 435 coated samples …

Design And Validation Of An Electro-Hydraulic Pressure-Control Valve And Closed-Loop Controller, Jerry Boza

Dissertations

Electro-hydraulic pressure-control valves are used in many applications, such as manufacturing equipment, agricultural machinery, and aircrafts to name a few. They are often used to actuate hydraulic clutches, such as those found in power shift transmissions. A traditional pressure-control valve with open-loop control algorithm is typically used in clutch applications. This scheme often results in inconsistent or undesirable system behavior due to the nature of open-loop control as well as the nonlinear system dynamics and uncertainties.

In this research two new electro-hydraulic pressure-control valves were designed in order to decouple the valve and control port (hydraulic) dynamics. This was achieved …

Indoor Localization Of Mobile Devices Based On Wi-Fi Signals Via Convex Optimization And Bregman Divergence, Osamah Ali Abdullah

Dissertations

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) have been the subject of intense academic and industrial research due to the significance of such systems in a wide range of applications. Applications of IPS include indoor navigation and its associated user services, especially by users in large complex buildings, by emergency healthcare services to locate a patient, and people with vision impairments. IPS can also play an important role in other applications that require tracking and observation, such as those used in care for the elderly or security purposes. Therefore, much research has been focused on IPS methods that fingerprint the Received Signal Strength …

The Effect Of Process Parameters And Surface Condition On Bond Strength Between Additively Manufactured Components And Polymer Substrates, Bharat Bhushan Chivukula

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Additive patching is a process in which printers with multiple axes deposit molten material onto a pre-defined surface to form a bond. Studying the effect of surface roughness and process parameters selected for printing auxiliary part on the bond helps in improving the strength of the final component. Particularly, the influence of surface roughness, as established by adhesion theory, has not been evaluated in the framework of additive manufacturing (AM). A full factorial design of experiments with five replications was conducted on two levels and three factors, viz., layer thickness, surface roughness, and raster angle to examine the underlying effects …

Direct Quadrature Method Of Moments With Delumping For Modeling Multicomponent Droplet Vaporization, Simcha L. Singer

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A multicomponent droplet vaporization model which combines the computational efficiency of continuous thermodynamic approaches with the detailed species information provided by discrete component models has been developed. The Direct Quadrature Method of Moments (DQMoM) is used to efficiently solve for the evolution of the nodes and weights of the equivalent liquid-phase mole fraction distribution without assuming any functional form. The novelty of the approach is an inexpensive delumping procedure that is used to reconstruct the time-dependent mole fractions and fluxes for all discrete species. When applied to a vaporizing kerosene droplet, agreement between the full discrete component model, which solves …

Enhancements In Localized Classification For Uterine Cervical Cancer Digital Histology Image Assessment, Peng Guo, Haidar A. Almubarak, Koyel Banerjee, R. Joe Stanley, L. Rodney Long, Sameer K. Antani, George R. Thoma, Rosemary E. Zuna, Shelliane R. Frazier, Randy Hays Moss, William V. Stoecker

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Background: In previous research, we introduced an automated, localized, fusion-based approach for classifying uterine cervix squamous epithelium into Normal, CIN1, CIN2, and CIN3 grades of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) based on digitized histology image analysis. As part of the CIN assessment process, acellular and atypical cell concentration features were computed from vertical segment partitions of the epithelium region to quantize the relative distribution of nuclei.

Methods: Feature data was extracted from 610 individual segments from 61 images for epithelium classification into categories of Normal, CIN1, CIN2, and CIN3. The classification results were compared against CIN labels obtained from two pathologists …