Engineering Commons^™

Silk As A Biomaterial Paste For Biomimetic Composite, Sang Hyun Park

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Silk is a highly promising biomaterial with unique bio-physicochemical properties, such as excellent mechanical and optical properties, biocompatibility and programmable biodegradability. Among many different types, silk from domesticated silkworm, bombyx mori has received wide attention owing to its availability in virtually unlimited quantities and ease of extraction. In this study, we investigated silkworm silk as a protein glue to realize nacre-like composites. We have employed spin assisted layer-by-layer technique to fabricate ultrathin free-standing biocomposite films. Two different composites have been studied: (i) graphene oxide (GO)/silk and (ii) chitin/silk. From our prior work, it is known that the adsorption of amphiphilic …

State Space Analysis Of Dominant Structures In Dynamic Social Systems, Jeremy B. Sato

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Many systems involving human relationships are modeled as dynamic systems, as diverse as urban population growth, diffusion of innovations, spread of viruses, and supply chain management. A fundamental assumption is that these systems contain variables which accumulate and deplete over time (people, innovation adoptions, infections, and orders), and whose dynamics are determined by societal rules and human decision making processes. These assumptions allow the system to be formally expressed by ordinary differential equations which are often nonlinear and contain multiple state variables and feedback loops. Analytical methods have been developed to identify the dominant feedback loops which primarily influence the …

Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling And Simulations Of Fluidized Bed Reactors For Chemical Looping Combustion, Subhodeep Banerjee

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Chemical looping combustion (CLC) is a next generation combustion technology that shows great promise as a solution for the need of high-efficiency low-cost carbon capture from fossil fueled power plants. To realize this technology on an industrial scale, the development of high-fidelity simulations is a necessary step to develop a thorough understanding of the CLC process. Although there have been a number of experimental studies on CLC in recent years, CFD simulations have been limited in the literature.

In this dissertation, reacting flow simulations of a CLC reactor are developed using the Eulerian approach based on a laboratory-scale experiment of …

Nanostructured Thin Film Synthesis By Aerosol Chemical Vapor Deposition For Energy Storage Applications, Tandeep Singh Chadha

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Renewable energy sources offer a viable solution to the growing energy demand while mitigating concerns for greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. This has led to a tremendous momentum towards solar and wind-based energy harvesting technologies driving efficiencies higher and costs lower. However, the intermittent nature of these energy sources necessitates energy storage technologies, which remain the Achilles heel in meeting the renewable energy goals. This dissertation focusses on two approaches for addressing the needs of energy storage: first, targeting direct solar to fuel conversion via photoelectrochemical water-splitting and second, improving the performance of current rechargeable batteries by developing new …

Nanoparticle Formation In The Flame Synthesis Of Multicomponent Nanostructured Materials For Clean Energy Applications, Jiaxi Fang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation studies the initial stages of particle formation during the combustion synthesis of multicomponent nanomaterials. Combustion is commonly used for the production of nanomaterials at industrial scales and has advantages of high production rates, low waste generation, and scalability. However, there are limitations in being able to apply this synthesis approach to more advanced multicomponent systems. Gas to particle conversion in flames occurs through precursor decomposition, collisional growth, coagulation, condensation, and sintering. There is a fundamental gap in knowledge on the initial stages of particle formation in flames below 2nm due to measurement difficulties and instrumentation limitations. Using a …

Neural Representation Of Vocalizations In Noise In The Primary Auditory Cortex Of Marmoset Monkeys, Ruiye Ni

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Robust auditory perception plays a pivotal function in processing behaviorally relevant sounds, particularly when there are auditory distractions from the environment. The neuronal coding enabling this ability, however, is still not well understood. In this study we recorded single-unit activity from the primary auditory cortex of alert common marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus) while delivering conspecific vocalizations degraded by two different background noises: broadband white noise (WGN) and vocalization babble (Babble).

Noise effects on single-unit neural representation of target vocalizations were quantified by measuring the response similarity elicited by natural vocalizations as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Four consistent response …

Calcium Carbonate Formation In Energy-Related Subsurface Environments And Engineered Systems, Qingyun Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Geologic CO2 sequestration (GCS) in subsurface saline aquifers is a promising strategy to mitigate climate change caused by increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions from energy production. At GCS sites, interactions between fluids and geomedia are important because they can affect CO2 trapping efficiency and the safety of CO2 storage. These interactions include the dissolution and precipitation of minerals. One of the most important minerals is calcium carbonate, because it can permanently trap CO2.

In this work, Portland cement was used as a model geomedium to investigate the chemical reactions, mechanical alterations, transport of reactive fluids, and the interplay of all these …

New Tools For Viscoelastic Spectral Analysis, With Application To The Mechanics Of Cells And Collagen Across Hierarchies, Behzad Babaei

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Viscoelastic relaxation spectra are essential for predicting and interpreting the mechanical responses of materials and structures. For biological tissues, these spectra must usually be estimated from viscoelastic relaxation tests. Interpreting viscoelastic relaxation tests is challenging because the inverse problem is expensive computationally. We present here (1) an efficient algorithm and (2) a quasi-linear model that enable rapid identification of the viscoelastic relaxation spectra of both linear and nonlinear materials. We then apply these methods to develop fundamental insight into the mechanics of collagenous and fibrotic tissues.

The first algorithm, which we term the discrete spectral approach, is fast enough to …

Crumpled Graphene Oxide: Aerosol Synthesis And Environmental Applications, Yi Jiang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Environmental technologies, such as for water treatment, have advanced significantly due to the rapid expansion and application of nanoscale material science and engineering. In particular, two-dimensional graphene oxide (GO), has demonstrated considerable potential for advancing and even revolutionizing some of these technologies, such as engineered photocatalysts and membranes. To realize such potential, an industrially scalable process is needed to produce monomeric and aggregation-resistant GO nanostructures/composites, in addition to new knowledge of material properties, behavior, and performance within an environmental context.

Research presented in this thesis addresses both scientific and engineering gaps through the development of a simple, yet robust aerosol-based …

Sound Data Collection And Transmission Noise Reduction, Bradley Cockrel

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The WKU Engineering Department Senior Student Team, The Synchronizers, has been contracted to modify a MTD transmission’s sound characteristics. This project entails developing a sound data acquisition apparatus and method, developing a sound test stand which will fully load the transmission and load characteristics, and suggesting modes of sound modification. The Sound Data Acquisition method entails using a specialized microphone calibrated to operate on IOS devices to measure Sound Intensity. The sound intensity will be found over a collective area, in order to evaluate to the sound power generated. The sound test stand will consist of a system designed to …

Optimizing An Organizational Program For Halton Company, Chandler Clark

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

A team of WKU Mechanical Engineering students is collaborating with Halton Company to create an organizational system for their plant. Each job performed at Halton is custom, leading to several different processes needing to be accounted for at once. The team is designing a program in Visual Studio that will be used to control the progression of the plant as well as store data to optimize future processes involved. Visual Studio will be implemented by summer of 2016 in order to give the team and company time to troubleshoot the program and insert optimizing options into the c ode of …

Code Girl, Amanda Holl

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Despite the growing importance of technology and computing, fewer than one percent of women in college today choose to major in computer science. Educational programs and games created to interest girls in computing, such as Girls Who Code and Made With Code, have been successful in engaging girls with interactive and creative learning environments, but they are too advanced for young girls to benefit from. To address the lack of educational, computer science games designed specifically for young girls, we developed a web-based application called Code Girl for girls age five to eight to customize their own avatars using Blockly, …

The Lagging State Of Renewable Energy In Kentucky, John Evans

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

It is evident that Kentucky's energy landscape is characterized primarily by coal and, to a lesser degree, natural gas and oil. It seems there's almost no room for renewable energy sources in Kentucky’s energy sector despite plentiful evidence of global climate change caused largely by carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Other states are paving the way in the renewable energy industry by investing in solar, wind and geothermal energy among other forms while Kentucky continues to sit back seemingly content with utilizing energy practices that are several decades old. In this project, I will be addressing reasons for the …

Mechanisms And Solutions To The Brittle Solder Joint In Electroless Ni Plating, Xuan Wang, C. Key Chung

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Brittle solder joints in Electroless Ni electroless Pd immersion Au (ENEPIG) surface finishes are one of the key reliability issues in electronics assembly. Previous characterization of the reflow process has indicated that interfacial voids formed after solder reflow are responsible for the decreases in solder joint strength. However, the mechanisms behind the formation of these voids in the ENEPIG process remain unclear. In this paper, the interaction between various aspects of the ENEPIG process and solder joint strength were investigated. Surface roughness, morphology, and nano-pitting at the interface between electroless Pd and Ni-P were characterized. The size and density of …

Development Of An Associate Degree Level Course On Lean, Jeremy Espinoza

Master of Technology Management Plan II Graduate Projects

Lean training and education has become a focal point in both industry and the realm of academics; however, the need within the industry remains, and oftentimes companies must take on the additional and high expense of training new graduates once they enter the workforce. Often, the classes that students study in the lean methodology, if any are studied at all, are taught within other disciplines, and the instruction is in a general sense as opposed to in depth and hands on. Within the past eight years it has been referenced in different academic articles that students are not coming into …

Dynamics Of Wrist And Forearm Rotation In 3dof, Allan Peaden

Biomedical Engineering Western Regional Conference

Healthy upper limb movement generally involves multiple degrees of freedom moving in synchrony. Although these movements often appear simple, there are complex underlying forces required to give them their grace. Understanding these forces will both aid in developing our understanding of human motor control, and provide insight for the design of ergonomic and therapeutic devices. One cause for the complexity of these forces is coupling between the various degrees of freedom (DOF), where a displacement or motion in one DOF will induce a force in another. Coupling therefore requires applied compensatory forces in joints not directly involved in an intended …

Effects Of Wrist Orthoses On Wrist Dynamics, Daniel Seegmiller

Biomedical Engineering Western Regional Conference

Wrist orthoses are commonly used to cope with the myriad of disorders associated with the hand and wrist. These orthoses can be complex or simple, physician-prescribed or self-administered, custom-made or off-the-shelf, but one thing they all have in common is the desired goal to alter wrist motion in order to allow healing and facilitate proper wrist function. Although wrist orthoses have been in use for a very long time, there is little to no quantitative research into how they affect the dynamics of the wrist joint. Because the dynamics of the wrist-orthosis system are unknown, it is impossible to predict …

Dr. Elizabeth Vargis To Present At Tedxusu | College Of Engineering, Usu College Of Engineering

College of Engineering News

Aug. 12, 2016 – Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering Dr. Elizabeth Vargis will present at this year's TEDxUSU. Now in its fifth year, TEDxUSU will be held Oct. 28 in the Manon Caine Russell Kathryn Caine Wanlass Performance Hall on USU’s Logan campus.

Nonaffine Rearrangements Of Atoms In Deformed And Quiescent Binary Glasses, Nikolai V. Priezjev

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications

The influence of periodic shear deformation on nonaffine atomic displacements in an amorphous solid is examined via molecular dynamics simulations. We study the three-dimensional Kob-Andersen binary mixture model at a finite temperature. It is found that when the material is periodically strained, most of the atoms undergo repetitive nonaffine displacements with amplitudes that are broadly distributed. We show that particles with large amplitudes of nonaffine displacements are organized into compact clusters. With increasing strain amplitude, spatial correlations of nonaffine displacements become increasingly long-ranged, although they remain present even in a quiescent system due to thermal fluctuations.

Continuous Isolation Of Monocytes Using A Magnetophoretic-Based Microfluidic Chip, Jeff Darabi, Chuan Guo

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Monocytes play an important role in the immune system and are responsible for phagocytizing and degrading foreign microorganisms in the body. The isolation of monocytes is important in various immunological applications such as in-vitro culture of dendritic cells. We present a magnetophoretic-based microfluidic chip for rapid isolation of highly purified, untouched monocytes from human blood by a negative selection method. This bioseparation platform integrates several unique features into a microfluidic device, including locally engineered magnetic field gradients and a continuous flow with a buffer switching scheme to improve the performance of the cell separation process. The results indicate high monocyte …

X-Ray Absorption Fine Structure Of Zno Thin Film On Si And Sapphire Grown By Mocvd, Jieping Xin, Chieh Miao Chang, Chih Han Hsueh, Jyh Fu Lee, Jin Ming Chen, Hao Hsiung Lin, Na Lu, Ian T. Ferguson, Yongjing Guan, Lingyu Wan, Qingyi Yang, Zhe Chuan Feng

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

X-ray absorption fine structure has been used to study the electronic structure, and bond length of ZnO thin films grown on sapphire and Si substrates by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition. X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) of O and Zn K-edge were shown, and a detailed analysis of extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) of Zn K-edge indicates that difference substrates result in the contraction of Zn-O bond length.

Fuzzy-Genetic Algorithm Approach To Generate An Optimal Meta-Architecture For A Smart, Safe & Efficient City Transportation System Of Systems, Rahul Alaguvelu, David M. Curry, Cihan H. Dagli

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A city's transportation infrastructure deeply affects its citizens' quality of life-from the freshness of food to the amount of frustration felt while commuting to work. Providing an optimal infrastructure has the possibility of dramatically improving the population's well-being. Since the transportation infrastructure is a system-of-systems (SoS) [1], it may be modelled and optimized for a given set of objectives [2]. In this manner, the city resources can be optimized for multiple objectives such as commute time, overall throughput, and sustainability. This is made possible by using a fuzzy assessor to map the individual objectives into a single overall fitness value …

Bayesian Networks To Assess The Newborn Stool Microbiome, William E. Bennett Jr.

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In human stool, a large population of bacterial genes and transcripts from hundreds of genera coexist with host genes and transcripts. Assessments of the metagenome and transcriptome are particularly challenging, since there is a great deal of sequence overlap among related species and related genes. We sequenced the total RNA content from stool samples in a neonate using previously-described methods. We then performed stepwise alignment of different populations of RNA sequence reads to different indices, including ribosomal databases, the human genome, and all sequenced bacterial genomes. Each pool of RNA at each alignment step was subjected to compression to assess …

Precast Concrete Pavement Practices Overview, Shiraz Tayabji

JTRP Affiliated Workshops

No abstract provided.

Overview Of Illinois Tollway Precast Panel System, Steve Gillen

JTRP Affiliated Workshops

No abstract provided.

Super-Slab® Precast Pavement System, Dan E. Moellman

JTRP Affiliated Workshops

No abstract provided.

Precast Concrete Pavement Practices—Generic System Use In Michigan, Texas & California, Shiraz Tayabji

JTRP Affiliated Workshops

No abstract provided.

Shape Optimization Of Supersonic Bodies To Reduce Sonic Boom Signature, Junhui Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In recent years there has been resurgence of interest by aerospace industry and NASA in supersonic transport aircraft. In recent studies, the emphasis has been on shape optimization of supersonic plane to reduce the acoustic signature of sonic boom resulting from the supersonic aircraft at high altitude in cruise flight. Because of the limitations of in-flight testing and cost of laboratory scale testing, CFD technology provides an attractive alternative to aid in the design and optimization of supersonic vehicles. In last decade, the predictive capability of CFD technology has significantly improved because of substantial increase in computational power, which allows …

Multi-Point Measurements Of The Aurora With A Cubesat Swarm, J. Brent Parham, Aleks Zosuls, Brian Walsh, Joshua Semeter

Small Satellite Conference

Space weather research is data-starved and small satellites offer an opportunity to the community. Over the past few years, Boston University’s Center for Space Physics has been developing a 6U CubeSat that deploys a small swarm of magnetometers to measure the fine-scale structure of the Birkeland currents that create the Aurora. By using direct three-axis measurements, spatially distributed, we hope to probe the plasma currents and fuse the data with other data products from ground-based optical and radio measurements. Boston University’s broad expertise in space physics and engineering systems offers a strong platform to foster a close relationship between those …

High Voltage Power Supply Design For Photo Multiplier Tube, Anand Antony, Nikunj Agrawal

Small Satellite Conference

CubeSats are playing a vital role in the development of new compact technologies for small satellites and because of their promising potential, the CubeSats have been widely embraced by universities for conducting space research projects. IITMSAT is a student driven Nano-satellite embraced by IIT Madras leading to the development of Space-based Proton-Electron Energy Detector (SPEED). It is a payload that is being developed to be launched on-board IITMSAT. The scientific objective of the payload is to gather data on the variations in the charge particle flux below the inner Van Allen radiation belts. SPEED is designed to obtain energy spectra …