Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Contrast Enhancement And Visual Effects Based On Gray-Level Grouping, Yen-Ching Chang, Chun-Ming Chang, Li-Chun Lai, Liang-Hwa Chen

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

Contrast enhancement plays a crucial role in the field of image processing. Histogram equalization is a simple and automatic method for contrast enhancement. Conventional contrast-enhancement techniques, such as histogram specification and contrast stretching, require manual parameters to achieve satisfactory results. To automatically produce enhanced results for low-contrast images, a new histogram-based optimized contrast-enhancement technique, called gray-level grouping (GLG), was proposed. GLG performs satisfactorily in dark and low-contrast images and always increases the contrast values to a maximum. Extravagant contrast enhancement typically means sacrificing the visual effects of an image. Through scrutinizing the GLG procedure, we discovered potential limitations and observed …

An Image Display Device Without A Concrete And Definitive Screen, Junewen Chen, Jing-Bin Duan, Li-An Chiu, Chuan-Sheng Hong, Ya-Ping Kang

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

We present a novel and practical hardwareless display system that was developed for the 3-D projection of real objects in the absence of a concrete screen. In this report, the design and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the display of 360°-viewable objects. Images that are projected on an annular stream of aerosol or fluid can penetrate the layerlike aerosols, thereby displaying a 3-D image. Software can be used to normalize the image data to display life-like images of any model, including customers, and various outfits can be added. Moreover, the images can be visualized in full 360°, and the …

Optical Resonators And Fiber Tapers As Transducers For Detection Of Nanoparticles And Bio-Molecules, Huzeyfe Yilmaz

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In recent years, detection of biological interactions on single molecule level has aspired many researchers to investigate several optical, chemical, electrical and mechanical sensing tools. Among these tools, toroidal optical resonators lead the way in detection of the smallest particle/molecule with the real time measurements. In this work, bio-sensing capabilities of toroidal optical resonators are investigated. Bio-sensing is realized via measuring the analyte-antigen interaction while the antigen is immobilized through a novel functionalization method.

Not long ago, detection of single nanoparticles using optical resonators has been accomplished however the need for cost-effective and practical transducers demands simpler tools. A tapered …

Detection Of Parkinson Disease Rest Tremor, Matthew J. Johnson

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Parkinson Disease (PD) is a debilitating and progressive movement disorder that is estimated to affect over six million worldwide. One of the most characteristic symptoms of PD is resting tremor, which involves unintentional and rhythmic muscle oscillations of an afflicted extremity while the muscles of said extremity are relaxed. This study involved measuring the rest tremor of 10 PD subjects, 10 Essential Tremor subjects, and 10 healthy control subjects using two devices. One device was an FDA approved accelerometry system to measure human tremor known as the Tremorometer^TM and the other was a consumer three-dimensional camera known as the …

Efficient Fpga Architectures For Separable Filters And Logarithmic Multipliers And Automation Of Fish Feature Extraction Using Gabor Filters, Arjun Kumar Joginipelly

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Convolution and multiplication operations in the filtering process can be optimized by minimizing the resource utilization using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and separable filter kernels. An FPGA architecture for separable convolution is proposed to achieve reduction of on-chip resource utilization and external memory bandwidth for a given processing rate of the convolution unit.

Multiplication in integer number system can be optimized in terms of resources, operation time and power consumption by converting to logarithmic domain. To achieve this, a method altering the filter weights is proposed and implemented for error reduction. The results obtained depict significant error reduction when …

Steady State Voltage Stability Enhancement Using Shunt And Series Facts Devices, Jahnavi Lakkireddy

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

It is specifically important to focus on voltage stability analysis of the power system to avoid worst case scenarios such as voltage collapse. The purpose of this thesis is to identify methods for enhancing the steady-state voltage stability using FACTS devices and determining their impact on real and reactive power losses, improvement of bus voltage magnitude, and transmission line loadability. To achieve this, FACTS devices such as Static VAR Compensator (SVC), Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM), and Thyristor Controlled Series Capacitor (TCSC) are used in the test system as three separate test cases. The results obtained assist in drawing conclusions on …

Comparison Of Nonlinear Filtering Methods For Battery State Of Charge Estimation, Klaus Zhang

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In battery management systems, the main figure of merit is the battery's SOC, typically obtained from voltage and current measurements. Present estimation methods use simplified battery models that do not fully capture the electrical characteristics of the battery, which are useful for system design. This thesis studied SOC estimation for a lithium-ion battery using a nonlinear, electrical-circuit battery model that better describes the electrical characteristics of the battery. The extended Kalman filter, unscented Kalman filter, third-order and fifth-order cubature Kalman filter, and the statistically linearized filter were tested on their ability to estimate the SOC through numerical simulation. Their performances …

Optimization Of Reactive Ion Etching (Rie) Parameters For Selective Removal Of Mosfet Gate Dielectric And Evaluation Of Its Physical And Electrical Properties, Hojoon Lee, Samuel Wood

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

The integrated circuit (IC) is dominated by technology using Complementary Metal-oxide-Semiconductor Field-effect Transistor (CMOSFET). In order to put over 300 million transistors on silicon chip requires selective removal of material by Reactive Ion Etching (RIE) which ensures vertical cut thereby increasing packing density of devices on the chip. The gate insulator of CMOS devices plays a crucial role in its electrical performance. In this research gate insulator of MOSFET has been etched by state-of-art technique RIE and its physical and electrical properties have been measured. The gate insulator etching by RIE give rise to charge accumulation on the gate dielectric …

Applications Of Electromagnetic Principles In The Design And Development Of Proximity Wireless Sensors, Md Nazmul Alam

Theses and Dissertations

Sensors and sensing system are playing dominant roles in monitoring the health of infrastructure, such as bridges, power lines, gas pipelines, rail roads etc. Sensing modalities employing Surface Acoustic Waves (SAW), Electromagnetic (EM) and optical have been investigated and reported. Sensors that utilize the perturbation of EM fields as function of the change in the physical structural or material phenomenon are of particular interest because of their inherent synergy with electronic system and diagnostic techniques, e.g. Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR), Joint-Time-Frequency-Domain-Reflectometry (JTFDR). The focus of this work is to study and develop new sensing and monitoring concepts that are based …

Tunable Graphene Chem-Fet And Graphene/Si Heterojunction Chemi-Diode Sensors, Amol Kumar Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Graphene, a two-dimensional material with very high charge carrier concentration, has drawn large research interest for sensing chemical species based upon charge exchange. Atomically thin 2-dimensional arrangement of carbon in hexagonal fashion in graphene, where each carbon atom is attached to 3 neighboring carbon atoms, and presence of π* and π bands imparts it many amazing properties. Some of these properties such as very high mobility, low 1/f and thermal noise, modulation of carrier concentration and Fermi level by electrical, optical, and chemical means, and very high surface to volume ratio make graphene very promising sensing material. In order to …

Model-Free Method Of Reinforcement Learning For Visual Tasks, Jeff S. Soldate, Jonghoon Jin, Eugenio Culurciello

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

There has been success in recent years for neural networks in applications requiring high level intelligence such as categorization and assessment. In this work, we present a neural network model to learn control policies using reinforcement learning. It takes a raw pixel representation of the current state and outputs an approximation of a Q value function made with a neural network that represents the expected reward for each possible state-action pair. The action is chosen an \epsilon-greedy policy, choosing the highest expected reward with a small chance of random action. We used gradient descent to update the weights and biases …

Building Predictive Chemistry Models, Christopher Browne, Nicolas Onofrio, Alejandro Strachan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Density Functional Theory (DFT) simulations allow for sophisticated modeling of chemical interactions, but the extreme computational cost makes it inviable for large scale applications. Molecular dynamics models, specifically ReaxFF, can model much larger simulations with greater speed, but with lesser accuracy. The accuracy of ReaxFF can be improved by comparing predictions of both methods and tuning ReaxFF’s parameters. Molecular capabilities of ReaxFF were gauged by simulating copper complexes in water over a 200 ps range, and comparing energy predictions against ReaxFF. To gauge solid state capabilities, volumetric strain was applied to simulated copper bulk and the strain response functions used …

Continuous Analysis Of Many Internet Connected Cameras, Seth Bontrager, Ahmed Kaseb, Yung-Hsiang Lu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

There are many Internet connected cameras from all over the world containing a lot of useful information that goes undiscovered. Traffic cameras could monitor the amount of congestion on the highway. Outdoor cameras could monitor weather conditions and help develop more accurate weather models. Currently there is no common system that brings this camera data and a way to analyze it together. The goal of CAM² is to create a system that lets users easily access this camera data and perform large-scale analysis on it to extract useful information. The structure of the system includes (i) a website that …

Polymer-Based Thermoelectric Devices, Stuart W. Hilsmier, Edward P. Tomlinson, Bryan Boudouris

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Currently, over 50% of all energy generated in the US is lost as waste heat, and thermoelectric generators offer a promising means to recoup some of this energy, if their efficiency is improved. While organic thermoelectric materials lack the efficiency of their inorganic counterparts, they are composed of highly abundant resources and have low temperature processing conditions. Recently, a new class of redox-active polymers, radical polymers, has exhibited high electrical conductivity in an entirely amorphous medium. In addition, these radical polymers have a simple synthetic scheme and can be highly tunable to provide desired electrical properties. In this study, the …

1d Phonon Bte Solver (Small Scale Heat Transport Simulation), Joseph A. Sudibyo, Amr Mohammed, Ali Shakouri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In current technology, electronic devices shrink to the size of nanometers. The ability to accurately model heat transport to understand the thermal behavior of these small electronic devices becomes increasingly important. Since heat transport is very difficult to measure directly in small electronic devices, simulation becomes an effective means to model heat transport. A user-interactive simulation tool is created to model heat transport in small electronic devices of different lengths. Heat transport is modeled by solving one-dimensional Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) to obtain the transient temperature profile of a multi-length and multi-timescale thin film under constant temperature boundary condition or …

Development Of A Nanomanufacturing Process To Produce Atomically Thin Black Phosphorus, Andrew Stephens, Zhe Luo, Xianfan Xu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Atomically thin black phosphorus (phosphorene) has both unique and desirable properties that differ from bulk black phosphorus. Unlike graphene, phosphorene has a bandgap, which makes it potentially useful for applications in the next generation of transistors. Large-scale applications of phosphorene, like other 2D materials, are limited by current production methods. The most common method of making phosphorene is mechanical exfoliation, which can only produce small and irregular quantities. In this work we investigate a top-down method of producing phosphorene by using a scanning ultrafast laser to thin black phosphorus flakes. Because the bandgap of phosphorene increases as layers are removed, …

Simulation Of Plasmonic Waveguides Based On Long-Range Surface Plasmon Polaritons, Yugang Jing, Alexandra Boltasseva, Nathaniel Kinsey

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The demand for faster and smaller computing devices is growing larger and larger. In the recent decade, research has proven that plasmonic devices have exciting characteristics and performance for next generation on‑chip structures. However, most of these devices contain noble metals and are not CMOS compatible. This work numerically investigates the performance of plasmonic waveguide designs made of TiN, a CMOS compatible material with optical properties similar to gold. Through our work, we demonstrate that TiN nanophotonic devices can be useful for inter-chip connections. A series of simulations using COMSOL Multiphysics were performed to test the performance of these structures. …

Multi-Channel Analysis For Gradient Artifact Removal From Concurrent Eeg-Fmri Studies, Miguel R. Castellanos, Zhongming Liu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Concurrent electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings are susceptible to large amounts of noise due to the static and dynamic magnetic fields present inside the MR scanner. EEG-fMRI studies are conducted to provide better spatial and temporal resolution for each recording, respectively, but the artifacts found in the EEG render the data impossible to interpret. Past studies have focused on signal post-processing techniques which are able to effectively remove noise upon the completion of a study, but there are no techniques able to process the data in real-time without extensive calibration. This research addresses this issue by …

Medical Applications Of Mrc, Kyle Thackston, Henry Mei, Pedro Irazoqui

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Consistent powering is a limiting reagent for many medical implants and sensors. Powering in-vivo devices in animal studies requires either transcutaneous wiring (limiting mobility and increasing the chance of infection) or an implanted battery (limited lifetime and limits size of device). Wireless power transfer (WPT) would be able to overcome these challenges and permit the use of more advanced implantable devices in a research setting. Magnetic resonance coupling (MRC), an advanced form of inductive charging, allows good transfer efficiencies over significant air gaps, but works best a specific location and frequency, limiting mobility in animal studies. Using band-pass filter theory, …

Improved Microrobotic Control Through Image Processing And Automated Hardware Interfacing, Archit R. Aggarwal, Wuming Jing, David J. Cappelleri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Untethered submilliliter-sized robots (microrobots) are showing potential use in different industrial, manufacturing and medical applications. A particular type of these microrobots, magnetic robots, have shown improved performance in power and control capabilities compared to the other thermal and electrostatic based robots. However, the magnetic robot designs have not been assessed in a robust manner to understand the degree of control in different environments and their application feasibility. This research project seeks to develop a custom control software interface to provide a holistic tool for researchers to evaluate the microrobotic performance through advance control features. The software deliverable involved two main …

Solar-Combined Thermoelectric Power Generation Simulator, Hemanth Mullangi Chenchu, Kazuaki Yazawa, Je-Hyeong Bahk

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Photovoltaic (PV) devices are gaining popularity in harnessing solar energy as a form of sustainable energy source to generate electricity. However, these devices including tandem PV cells are limited to utilizing only high energy photons from the solar spectrum. This curtails their efficiency restricting them from being employed in mega Watts scale power generation. This study develops a software tool that allows engineers to tap into the wasted wavelengths of the spectrum by adding a thermoelectric (TE) module and a bottoming steam turbine cycle thus spreading the use of the spectrum. The tool allows investigating how power output and thus …

Modeling Thermophotovoltaic Rare Earth Based Selective Emitters, Anubha Mathur, Enas Said Sakr, Peter Bermel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) devices convert heat to electricity using thermal radiation to illuminate a photovoltaic (PV) diode. Typically, this radiation is generated by a blackbody-like emitter. Such an emission spectrum includes a broad range of wavelengths, but only higher energy photons can be converted by the PV diode, which severely limits efficiencies. Thus, introducing a selective emitter and filter to recycle unwanted photons could potentially greatly enhance performance. In this work, we consider a rare earth-doped selective emitter structure to increase the number of photons emitted above the bandgap of the photovoltaic (PV) cell, while minimizing the total power emitted below …

Radical Polymers As Anodic Charge Extraction Layers In Small Molecule Organic Photovoltaic Devices, Krystopher S. Jochem, Aditya G. Baradwaj, Bryan W. Boudouris

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices based on the copper (II) phthalocyanine(CuPc)/ fullerene(C₆₀) system are an innovative photovoltaic technology optimal for situations requiring low-cost, transparent, and flexible devices. Furthermore, the high degree of reproducibility of this system allows for the ready study of new OPV technologies. Here, we have used this system to elucidate systematic structure-property-performance relationships for a new OPV anode modifier. The addition of interfacial modifier materials between the organic CuPc/C₆₀ layers and the metallic anode drastically can improve efficiency. Radical polymers are a class of polymers with aliphatic backbones and pendent stabilized radical groups. Here, we …

Visual Feedback On The Effects Of Temperature, Moisture, Relative Humidity, Solar Radiation, Wind And Precipitation On Growth And Production Of Grapes., Justus Karenzi, Calvin Yau, Sunghan Ko, David Ebert

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Weather conditions such as Temperature, Relative Humidity, Solar Radiation, and wind have reportedly been the primary cause to the significant difference in the growth of grape vines across the world. Past research findings have clearly studied the underlying effects of these weather parameters on the growth of grapes, but minimum work has been done on how to accurately turn this data into useful information. This paper aims at providing an overview on how to manage, analyze, and finally visualize the weather data in a way that is convenient to the farmers and can therefore help in the growth of grapes. …

Developing Compact Models For Passive Devices On Ibm 45nm Cmos Soi Technology, Yufei Feng, Yanfei Shen, Saeed Mohammadi

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The standard IBM 45 nm technology is widely adopted for industrial and academic purpose by integrates circuit designers. Original models provided by foundry are not accurate, which might cause inaccuracy in circuit simulations. Equivalent circuit models, using RLC elements to simulate electrical component, will effectively deliver their electrical performance. This study consists of four steps to construct these models. First, Cadence Virtuoso, the commercial circuit design software was used to run simulations and extract data for different device parameters. Second, analyzing tools, like Microsoft Excel or Matlab, are used to analyze the extracted data. Then, equations are written for each …

Energy Measurement Of Spdy Protocol On Mobile Platform, Zisheng Liao, Ashiwan Sivakumar, Sanjay Rao

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The past few years have witnessed an explosive growth in mobile Internet data traffic with web browsing being one of the key activities on mobile devices. There is tremendous interest in optimizing mobile web. In this regard, a new protocol called SPDY was introduced by Google to augment web browsing, however it's impact on the device energy consumption is not clearly understood. In this work we evaluate the energy characteristics of SPDY-based web browsing on mobile devices. In order to measure the energy consumption of web activities, we use AT&T’s ARO [1]. This tool is widely accepted and used by …

Simulating Nanoscale Optics In Photovoltaics With The S-Matrix Method, Dalton Chaffee, Xufeng Wang, Peter Bermel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In the push to build high-efficiency solar cells with less materials usage, thin-film solar cells have attracted an increasing amount of interest. Thin films are particularly attractive if they could exhibit light trapping and photon recycling capabilities exceeding those of traditional wafer-based cells. Recent work by Alta Devices demonstrating a record single-junction efficiency of 28.8% with a gallium arsenide thin film cell shows the potential. However, most existing simulation tools do not handle these properties well -- particularly photon recycling. In this work, we develop an improved solar cell simulation tool to accurately predict thin-film performance. It is based on …

Compact Verilog-A Modeling Of Silicon Traveling-Wave Modulator For Hybrid Cmos Photonic Circuit Design, Kehan Zhu, Vishal Saxena, Wan Kuang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A compact Verilog-A model of silicon-based junction traveling-wave Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) is developed for hybrid CMOS and photonic system-level simulation in Cadence environment. Critical device functions such as the voltage dependent change of refractive index, small-signal RLGC parameters for the MZM arms are extracted from the photonic device characterization from OpSIS foundry. Thermo-optical coefficient is also considered in the model. Simulation results including electro-optic S21 is characterized for the phase modulator's bandwidth. Also, transient MZM operation with non-return to zero (NRZ) data transmission at 10 Gb/s and 20 Gb/s rates are demonstrated.

Towards Highly-Integrated Stereovideoscopy For In Vivo Surgical Robots, Jay Carlson

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When compared to traditional surgery, laparoscopic procedures result in better patient outcomes: shorter recovery, reduced post-operative pain, and less trauma to incisioned tissue. Unfortunately, laparoscopic procedures require specialized training for surgeons, as these minimally-invasive procedures provide an operating environment that has limited dexterity and limited vision. Advanced surgical robotics platforms can make minimally-invasive techniques safer and easier for the surgeon to complete successfully. The most common type of surgical robotics platforms -- the laparoscopic robots -- accomplish this with multi-degree-of-freedom manipulators that are capable of a diversified set of movements when compared to traditional laparoscopic instruments. Also, these laparoscopic robots …

Adjustable Resonance Frequency Of Rf-Mems Capacitor By Using Comb- Drive Actuators: A Design Approaches, Agus Santoso Tamsir, Sandy Tannu Wijaya, Dato’ Burhanuddin Yeop Majlis

Makara Journal of Technology

The needs of smaller size RF varactor is a must today, and MEMS comes to be the potential one. In this paper we proposed an adjustable resonance RF-MEMS varactor by using comb-drive actuators placing in each side of the square movable plate. In our preliminary simulation, we found that the device can work properly but some constraints comes such as the dominancies of harmonic resonance frequencies that influences into the nominal capacitances. Therefore for the next step of development we have to find out the window of the structural dimension for a certain spans and a certain operating frequencies.