Computational Engineering Commons^™

Design Optimization Using Cad Parameterization Through Capri, William Emerson Brock V

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Design optimization is one of the many areas of Computational Engineering that is directly applicable to almost any engineering endeavor. The design cycle is a multi-step process, beginning with a Computer Aided Design (CAD) model and ending with an optimized version of that model relative to some objective function. This is accomplished by parameterizing the model, through one of many different algorithms, and finding the ideal value of those parameters with respect to the specified objective. The purpose of this research is to explore the use of a Computational Analysis PRogramming Interface (CAPRI) for utilizing CAD parameters in design optimization …

An Adaptive Hybrid Mesh Generation Method For Complex Geometries, Cameron Thomas Druyor

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

An adaptive hybrid mesh generation method is described to automatically provide spatial discretizations suitable for computational fluid dynamics or other 2D solver applications. This method employs a hierarchical grid generation technique to create a background mesh, an extrusion-type method for inserting boundary layers, and an unstructured triangulation to stitch between the boundary layers and background mesh. This method provides appropriate mesh resolution based on geometry segments from a file, and has the capability of adapting the background mesh based on a spacing field generated from solution data or some other arbitrary source. By combining multiple approaches to the grid generation …

Comparison Of Two Methods For Two Dimensional Unstructured Mesh Adaptation With Elliptic Smoothing, Matthew David O'Connell

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

A new mesh adaptation method for unstructured grids is presented. The technique uses virtual control volumes that are iteratively manipulated to conform the mesh to match either a Riemannianmetric tensor field or an equal distribution of scalar weights. Forcing functions similar to those used for structured grids are employed such that the resulting meshes can be compared with those generated using the new adaptation method. Several test cases using analytic functions to drive the mesh adaptation are also presented and compared with the new method. Mesh adaptation results driven by computed flow field information are also compared to those adapted …

Characterization Of Parallel Application Runtime Sensitivity On Multi-Core High Performance Computing Systems, Padma Priya Veeraraghavan

Purdue Polytechnic Masters Theses

A commonly seen behavior of parallel applications is that their runtime is influenced by network communication load. The way a parallel application is run in a network and the presence of other applications and processes in the network can contribute to a wide range of variations in the runtime. Therefore, in order to achieve consistent and optimal runtimes, it is important to understand and characterize the runtime sensitivity of parallel applications with respect to execution under the presence of network communication load.

In this research, runtime sensitivities for various parallel applications were studied by applying additional network communication load. In …

The Ergo Knife Manufacturability Project: A Prosthetic Device, Caleb Sarris

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Millions of Americans’ upper extremities have been rendered useless or amputated due to injury or illness. Without strength and dexterity in the hand or wrist, these people are in need of tools to help them in everyday activities. The Ergo Knife offers these individuals a way to cope with this way of life as a device that can assist them, primarily in food consumption and can also be expanded to many other applications. The purpose of this project is to further develop the Ergo Knife so that it can better assist these individuals and improve the necessary processes used to …

Cal Poly Wow: Week Of Welcome’S Leader Android Application, Eric Cerney

Computer Engineering

The Week of Welcome Android application aims to improve the efficiency and ease at which Orientation Leaders function during the week long program designed to aid in new student
assimilation to the San Luis Obispo campus and community. It focuses on four utilities combined in
one easy location that Leaders use on a regular basis. They are maps, the online guidebook, budget keeper, and contact list. These four utilities are commonly used by Leaders in their day to day
guidance of new students, making one single application with each tool very desirable to the WOW Program.

Currently there are no …

Chinese To English Introductory Cover Letter Generator, Jason L. Stine

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

The Chinese to English Introductory Cover Letter Generator allows Chinese computer users who know little to no English automatically generate a self-introductory cover letter in good English. As an example, professors in English-speaking countries are increasingly receiving emails from students abroad in countries like China, and these students often need to introduce themselves in order to support their reasons for their message. Unfortunately, more often than not these letters contain poorly written English. This software aims to help solve this issue. Using a combination of a “sentence template” system and intelligent natural language processing software, the program assembles each paragraph …

An Evaluation Of The Eeg Alpha-To-Theta And Theta-To-Alpha Band Ratios As Indexes Of Mental Workload, Bujar Raufi, Luca Longo

Articles

Many research works indicate that EEG bands, specifically the alpha and theta bands, have been potentially helpful cognitive load indicators. However, minimal research exists to validate this claim. This study aims to assess and analyze the impact of the alpha-to-theta and the theta-to-alpha band ratios on supporting the creation of models capable of discriminating self-reported perceptions of mental workload. A dataset of raw EEG data was utilized in which 48 subjects performed a resting activity and an induced task demanding exercise in the form of a multitasking SIMKAP test. Band ratios were devised from frontal and parietal electrode clusters. …

A Web-Oriented Multi-Layer Model To Interact With Theatrical Performances, A Baratè, G. Haus, L A. Ludovico, Davide Andrea Mauro

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

This paper presents an innovative approach to online fruition

of theater performances. Web applications like traditional viewers are

already available for the wide audience of Internet users. Our proposal

aims at adding both interactivity and multi-layer fruition, and a way

to manipulate and create new media. The premise to reach these goals

is digitizing a number of heterogeneous materials in order to describe a

single performance comprehensively, e.g. different video and audio-takes

from different perspectives, and a number of related materials such as

scripts, fashion plates, playbills, etc. The format we adopt to encode

such information is based on the …

Interoperation For Lazy And Eager Evaluation, William Jeffrey Faught

Master's Theses

Programmers forgo existing solutions to problems in other programming lan- guages where software interoperation proves too cumbersome; they remake so- lutions, rather than reuse them. To facilitate reuse, interoperation must resolve language incompatibilities transparently. To address part of this problem, we present a model of computation that resolves incompatible lazy and eager eval- uation strategies using dual notions of evaluation contexts and values to mirror the lazy evaluation strategy in the eager one. This method could be extended to resolve incompatible evaluation strategies for any pair of languages with common expressions.

Unstructured Grid Technologies For Hydrodynamic Applications With Bodies In Relative Motion And Mesh Deformation, Lei Ji

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Unstructured grid technologies for hydrodynamic applications with bodies in relative motion and mesh deformation are presented. A parallel universal mesh deformation scheme is developed to manage deforming surface and volume grids for both aerodynamic and hydrodynamic applications. The approach is universal and independent of grid type. Also, it requires minimal inter-processor communication and is thus perfectly suitable to a parallel platform. The original scheme of Allen (2006) has difficulty deforming volume grids in regions near concave geometry features and for abrupt grid resolution changes. Several modifications are proposed to overcome these problems. Grid quality can be improved significantly by adding …

Investigation And Comparison Of Proportional Navigation Guidance And Beam Rider Guidance, Ertac Olgun

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Air defense has an increasing importance in today's wars. To gain the advantage in air combat, pursuit interceptor aircraft, which use Air-to-Air Missiles (AAMs), have become more and more significant. However, these are not sufficient alone. The importance of Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs) also can not be ignored in air defense.

SAMs can use different tactical navigation guidance methods. Of these, two of the more important guidance methods are Proportional Navigation Guidance and Beam Rider Guidance, which are investigated in this thesis. To understand the idea better, a brief description and discussion of missiles are provided. Parts of the guided missiles …

Performance Analysis For Wimax Wireless Systems With Multiple Receive Antennas, Selcuk Taskin

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Broadband wireless access has become the best way to meet the growing demand for fast Internet connections. WiMAX is one of the most promising broadband access technologies that allows fast deployment as well as low maintenance costs. WiMAX allows efficient use available bandwidth by using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) which is an efficient multi-carrier modulation technique. Diversity is a method for improving the reliability of a signal in fading environments by using two or more communication channels and is usually achieved by multiple antenna techniques.

In this thesis, receiver side diversity combining methods are studied and the performance of …

Modeling The Contagion Effect Of Foreclosures Within The Real Estate Market By Use Of Agent-Based Modeling And Simulation, Marshall William Gangel

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Over the last several years, the US financial and real estate markets have experienced a significant recession. During this downturn, the number of real estate foreclosures rose drastically. Recent studies have empirically demonstrated a reduction in real estate values due to foreclosures. The observed reduction in the average value of real estate properties has been labeled the foreclosure contagion effect. The foreclosure contagion effect impacts healthy neighboring properties that surround the foreclosed property as a function of time and distance.

This study uses an agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS} approach to explore the contagion effect of foreclosures. For this research, …

Solving The Vehicle Re-Identification Problem By Using Neural Networks, Tanweer Rashid

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Vehicle re-identification is the process by which vehicle attributes measured at one point on a road network are compared to vehicle attributes measured at another point in an effort to match vehicles without using any unique identifiers such as license plate numbers. A match is made if the two measurements are estimated to belong to the same vehicle. Vehicle attributes can be sensor readings such as loop induction signatures, or they can also be actual vehicle characteristics such as length, weight, number of axles, etc. This research makes use of vehicle length, travel time, axle spacing and axle weights for …

Electronic Warfare By Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Aydin Meric

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Technology continues to evolve rapidly by the day. Developments in technology should be followed closely if a country wants to become more powerful. Nowadays nobody can afford to ignore the importance of Electronic Warfare and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in military applications. Both of them play a crucial role in military operations that they can change the course of a war.

There are different kinds of Electronic Warfare methods that can be applied according to the situations and any evolving circumstances. In the beginning Electronic Warfare was used mainly for defensive purposes, but these days Electronic Warfare is used for …

Enhancing Simulation Composability And Interoperability Using Conceptual/Semantic/Ontological Models, Andreas Tolk, John A. Miller

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Two emerging trends in Modeling and Simulation (M&S) are beginning to dovetail in a potentially highly productive manner, namely conceptual modeling and semantic modeling. Conceptual modeling has existed for several decades, but its importance has risen to the forefront in the last decade (Taylor and Robinson, 2006; Robinson, 2007). Also, during the last decade, progress on the Semantic Web has begun to influence M&S, with the development of general modeling ontologies (Miller et al, 2004), as well as ontologies for modeling particular domains (Durak, 2006). An ontology, which is a formal specification of a conceptualization (Gruber et al, …

Human-Computer Interaction And Human Mental Workload: Assessing Cognitive Engagement In The World Wide Web, Luca Longo

Books/Book Chapters

Assessing the cognitive engagement of a user while seeking and consuming information over the World Wide Web is a key challenge for studying the quality of interactions. Indicators of cognitive engagement are useful for enhancing usability of interfaces, designing adaptable systems but also for analysing user behaviour and performance. For this purpose, we aim to adopt the multifaceted concept of Human Mental Workload, mainly applied in psychology and cognitive sciences, to study individual performance and user engagement in the context of Web. We aim to design a framework in which mental workload can be measured, analysed and explained. This will …

Computational Modeling Of Low Velocity Impact Loading Of Composite With And Without Electrospun Nanofiber, Abu Hasnath Rasel

Theses

The objective of this work is the computational study of composite laminates under high velocity impact loadings. Even with the blessings of modern technology, manufacturing and testing of composites do not always seem to be cost effective. To keep pace with the fast moving global market, a new tool is absolutely necessary that can give reliable results quickly. Over the last decades computational study became a strong and effective tool for the researchers for testing composite materials in a virtual world. The virtual model and the material system of the test specimen can be built in a computer using different …

Polynomial Extension Operators. Part Iii, Leszek Demkowicz, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Joachim Schöberl

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this concluding part of a series of papers on tetrahedral polynomial extension operators, the existence of a polynomial extension operator in the Sobolev space H(div) is proven constructively. Specifically, on any tetrahedron K, given a function w on the boundary ∂K that is a polynomial on each face, the extension operator applied to w gives a vector function whose components are polynomials of at most the same degree in the tetrahedron. The vector function is an extension in the sense that the trace of its normal component on the boundary ∂K coincides with w. Furthermore, the extension operator is …

Trust-Based Techniques For Collective Intelligence In Social Search Systems., Pierpaola Dondio, Luca Longo

Books/Book Chapters

A key-issue for the effectiveness of collaborative decision support systems is the problem of the trustworthiness of the entities involved in the process. Trust has been always used by humans as a form of collective intelligence to support effective decision making process. Computational trust models are becoming now a popular technique across many applications such as cloud computing, p2p networks, wikis, e-commerce sites, social network. The chapter provides an overview of the current landscape of computational models of trust and reputation, and it presents an experimental study case in the domain of social search, where we show how trust techniques …

Automatic Media Segmentation Within Ieee 1599–2008, Antonello D'Aguanno, Luca A. Ludovico, Davide Andrea Mauro

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

This paper deals with the automatic extraction of synchronization data from IEEE 1599-2008, an XML-based standard aiming at a comprehensive description of music. Within such format, audio tracks and video contents related to the same music piece can be referred to the occurrence of symbolic music events. In this way, digital objects are mutually synchronized, too. The goal is to show how timing information can be easily extracted from an IEEE 1599-2008 file, converted into a suitable format, and finally employed in a multimedia editing environment in order to produce an automatic segmentation of media objects.

Cotextual Android Education, James R. Reed

Master's Theses

With advances in mobile phone hardware, the demand for mobile applica- tions has risen drastically. This has resulted in mobile phones becoming a pop- ular new medium for application development. However, the body of knowledge for contextual examples and tutorials leaves much to be desired. As of January 2010, California Polytechnic State University has offered a mobile development class that teaches students how to write applications for phones running Google’s Android platform. This class aims at taking advantage of students’ current in- terest in mobile applications to teach them about difficult computer science topics. As a corollary, the class hopes …

Winslow Elliptic Smoothing Equations Extended To Apply To General Regions Of An Unstructured Mesh, James Steven Masters

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In any engineering endeavor, it is important to have the ability to efficiently and intelligently break up a region of interest in order to explore and investigate the interesting and dynamic aspects of the system enclosed in the region. In the field of fluid mechanics - and, in particular, computational fluid dynamics - this region breakup (known as discretization) has traditionally been done using structured meshes but, because of their flexibility with capturing real-world geometry, unstructured meshes are being increasingly utilized. Not surprisingly, techniques that have traditionally been reserved for structured meshes are migrating to the world of unstructured meshing …

Terminology Enhanced Ehr: Integration Of Archetypes And Terminology, An Implementation Experience, Sheng Yu, Damon Berry

Reports

The integration of terminology and EHR information models is an important step in the journey towards semantic interoperability. Archetypes and two-level models for EHRs provide a mechanism that not only applies constraints on clinical content but also ensures effective terminology binding. However the lack of a standardised mechanism to bind terminology to the EHR and the difficulty of systematically coding clinical content, has led to a number of possible implementation choices. This study presents a review of the problems that may occur when working with modern terminology systems and discusses some related state of art technologies. The paper aims to …

Use Of Oids And Iis In En13606, Damon Berry, Jostein Ven, Gerard Freriks, David Moner

Reports

No abstract provided.

Electroencephalogram Artifact Removal Using A Wavelet Neural Network, Hoang-Anh T. Nguyen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A wavelet neural network (WNN) technique rs developed for electroencephalogram (EEG) artifact removal without electrooculographic (EOG) recordings. The algorithm combines the universal approximation characteristics of neural networks and the time/frequency property of wavelet, where the neural network was trained on a simulated dataset with known ground truths. The contribution of this thesis is two-fold. First, many EEG artifact removal algorithms, including regression based methods, require reference EOG signals, which are not always available. To remove EEG ai1ifacts, a WNN tries to learn the characteristics of the artifacts first and does not need reference EOG signals once trained. Second, WNNs are …

Stochastic Optimal Control In Nonlinear Systems, Celestin Nkundineza

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

Stochastic control is an important area of research in engineering systems that undergo disturbances. Controlling individual states in such systems is critical. The present investigation is concerned with the application of the stochastic optimal control strategy developed by To (2010) and its implementation as well as providing computed results of linear and nonlinear systems under stationary and nonstationary random excitations. In the strategy the feedback matrix is designed based on the achievement of the objectives for individual states in the system through the application of the Lyapunov equation for the system. Each diagonal element in the gain or associated gain …

A Hybrid Method For Flows In Local Chemical Equilibrium And Nonequilibrium, Nicholas G. Currier

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The primary objective of this work is to develop a more efficient chemically active compressible Euler equation solver. Currently, a choice between the physical accuracy of a finite-rate solver or the computational efficiency of an equilibrium flow solver must be made. The number of species modeled continues to increase with available computational resources. A method of further leveraging the increase in computational power is desired. The hybrid chemistry scheme proposed here attempts to maintain the accuracy of finite-rate schemes while retaining some of the cost savings associated with equilibrium chemistry solvers. The method given uses a full finite-rate flux in …

Fully Anisotropic Split-Tree Adaptive Refinement Mesh Generation Using Tetrahedral Mesh Stitching, Vincent Charles Betro

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Due to the myriad of geometric topologies that modern computational fluid dynamicists desire to mesh and run solutions on, the need for a robust Cartesian Mesh Generation algorithm is paramount. Not only do Cartesian meshes require less elements and often help resolve flow features but they also allow the grid generator to have a great deal of control in so far as element aspect ratio, size, and gradation. Fully Anisotropic Split-Tree Adaptive Refinement (FASTAR) is a code that allows the user to exert a great deal of control and ultimately generate a valid, geometry conforming mesh. Due to the split-tree …