Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Energy Storage Control And Requirements For Inverter-Based Microgrids, Mehrzad Mohammadi Bijaieh

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The intermittent nature of distributed renewable sources such as wind or solar requires integration of energy storage systems. In this dissertation a distributed form of the Hamiltonian Surface Shaping and Power Flow Control (HSSPFC) method is used to determine the energy storage requirements of three-phase inverter-based microgrids. The overall control is appropriate to be integrated into a hierarchical control system. As the primary control, a novel dq droop control sets the local references and is supported by a level-zero Hamiltonian controller which includes energy storage feed-forward and feedback, and an inverter feed-forward controls. Here, the energy storage element performs as …

Evaluating The Role Of Energy Demand Prediction And Renewable Energy Utilization On Energy Dependency Management: A Generic System Dynamics Model, Emad Rabiei Hosseinabad

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Supplying energy has become one of the biggest concerns of developed countries due to the growing energy needs in the last decades. Security of energy supply has forced countries to rely more on energy imports from external sources, and become energy dependent to a greater extent. Utilizing available renewable energy resources has been characterized as a reliable indicator to mitigate energy dependency in countries as well as securing the supplying of energy-based needs in the future. This research explores the impact of renewable energies as trustful resources in mitigating energy imports form external sources with investigation of its viability with …

Particle Filters For State Estimation Of Confined Aquifers, Graeme Field

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mathematical models are used in engineering and the sciences to estimate properties of systems of interest, increasing our understanding of the surrounding world and driving technological innovation. Unfortunately, as the systems of interest grow in complexity, so to do the models necessary to accurately describe them. Analytic solutions for problems with such models are provably intractable, motivating the use of approximate yet still accurate estimation techniques. Particle filtering methods have emerged as a popular tool in the presence of such models, spreading from its origins in signal processing to a diverse set of fields throughout engineering and the sciences including …

Assessing Ratio-Based Fatigue Indexes Using A Single Channel Eeg, Lucas B. Coffey

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Driver fatigue is a state of reduced mental alertness which impairs the performance of a range of cognitive and psychomotor tasks, including driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, driver fatigue was responsible for 72,000 accidents that lead to more than 800 deaths in 2015. A reliable method of driver fatigue detection is needed to prevent such accidents. There has been a great deal of research into studying driver fatigue via electroencephalography (EEG) to analyze brain wave data. These research works have produced three competing EEG data-based ratios that have the potential to detect driver fatigue.

Research has …

Novel Topologies Based Rf Filtering Components And Methodologies For Wireless Communication System, Wei Jiang

Theses and Dissertations

Driven by the rapid progress of wireless communication technology in the past several decades, multiple generations of cellular technologies have been developed, deployed, and adopted to provide more convenient communication services to users. Nowadays, the personal hand-held devices, supporting multiple wireless standards, have been a multimedia terminal encompassing elements and functions such as video callers, Internet connectivity, home appliances remote controller, GPS, TV reception, and beyond. In order to accommodate a variety of wireless standards in a single device without imposing a substantial increase in cost and size, current and future RF transceiver front-ends should be designed with more attention. …

Designing And Testing 3-D Printed Wafer-Box With Embedded Pzt Sensors To Identify The Shape Effect On Energy Harvesting, Ahmad Jami Safayet

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Piezoelectric energy has been recently paid attention in the field of alternative energy. Day by day the traditional energy sources including Coal tar and oils are becoming scarce. People are heading to an alternative energy source to meet the future energy demand. Piezoelectric energy is one of the competitive energy sources compared to the conventional renewable energy sources including solar, wind, and geothermal power and so on. This energy production method bears enormous research potential because it can be used as the roadway for a new method of power generation. This research project aimed to identify which shaped wafer-box produced …

Data Analytics For Stochastic Control And Prognostics In Cyber-Physical Systems, Shanshan Bi

Doctoral Dissertations

"In this dissertation, several novel cyber fault diagnosis and prognosis and defense methodologies for cyber-physical systems have been proposed. First, a novel routing scheme for wireless mesh network is proposed. An effective capacity estimation for P2P and E2E path is designed to guarantee the vital transmission safety. This scheme can ensure a high quality of service (QoS) under imperfect network condition, even cyber attacks. Then, the imperfection, uncertainties, and dynamics in the cyberspace are considered both in system model and controller design. A PDF identifier is proposed to capture the time-varying delays and its distribution. With the modification of traditional …

Data Fusion Techniques For Biomedical Informatics And Clinical Decision Support, Peng Guo

Doctoral Dissertations

"Data fusion can be used to combine multiple data sources or modalities to facilitate enhanced visualization, analysis, detection, estimation, or classification. Data fusion can be applied at the raw-data, feature-based, and decision-based levels. Data fusion applications of different sorts have been built up in areas such as statistics, computer vision and other machine learning aspects. It has been employed in a variety of realistic scenarios such as medical diagnosis, clinical decision support, and structural health monitoring. This dissertation includes investigation and development of methods to perform data fusion for cervical cancer intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) and a clinical decision support system. …

On-Die Transient Event Sensors And System-Level Esd Testing, Abhishek Patnaik

Doctoral Dissertations

"System level electrostatic discharge (ESD) testing of electronic products is a critical part of product certification. Test methods were investigated to develop system level ESD simulation models to predict soft-failures in a system with multiple sensors. These methods rely completely on measurements. The model developed was valid only for the linear operation range of devices within the system. These methods were applied to a commercial product and used to rapidly determine when a soft failure would occur. Attaching cables and probes to determine stress voltages and currents within a system, as in the previous study, is time-consuming and can alter …

Characterization Of Triboelectric Charging In Data Centers/Display Panel Manufactures, And Emi Visualization Based On Energy Parcels Method In High Speed Interconnections, Atieh Talebzadehghahroudi

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation is composed of five papers. In the first three papers, triboelectric charging, which is the underlying cause of most electrostatic discharge (ESD), during daily human activities in data centers such as well-defined pattern walking, random walking, standing up from a chair, and taking off a sweater is investigated. Further, the effect of environmental condition (temperature and relative humidity), the footwear, and flooring material in building the static voltage and the discharge process are studied.

In the fourth paper, triboelectric charge generation on the glass is investigated during the glass transportation by roller conveyor systems in display manufacturing. The …

A Multiple Scattering Method To Study The Cable Harness Inside A Vehicle Shell, Yansheng Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation contains three major parts. In the first part, a generalized multi-conductor transmission line (GMTL) method is proposed to model a cable harness. In the GMTL method, all wires of the cable harness take the infinity as the reference. In such a way, the GMTL method takes into account not only the transmission-line mode but also the antenna-mode current on the cable harness. Further, by employing the GMTL method and the mixed-potential integral equations (MPIE) method in a multiple scattering (MS) procedure, it enables an efficient and accurate approach to evaluate the current distribution on a cable harness with …

Learning-Based Short-Time Prediction Of Photovoltaic Resources For Pre-Emptive Excursion Cancellation, Huaiqi Xie

Doctoral Dissertations

"There is a growing interest in using renewable energy resources (RES) such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass in power systems. The main incentives for using renewable energy resources include the growing interest in sustainable and clean generation as well as reduced fuel cost. However, the challenge with using wind and solar resources is their indeterminacy which leads to voltage and frequency excursions. In this dissertation, first, the economic dispatch (ED) problem for a community microgrid is studied which explores a community energy market. As a result of this work, the importance of modeling and predicting renewable resources is understood. …

Advanced Topologies Of High-Voltage-Gain Dc-Dc Boost Converters For Renewable Energy Applications, Ahmad Alzahrani

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation proposes several advanced power electronic converters that are suitable for integrating low-voltage dc input sources, such as photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, to a high voltage dc bus in a 200 - 960 V dc distribution system. The proposed converters operate in the continuous conduction mode (CCM) and offer desirable features such as low-voltage stresses on components, continuous input currents, and the ability to integrate several independent dc input sources. First, a family of scalable interleaved boost converters with voltage multiplier cells (VMC) is introduced. Several possible combinations of Dickson and Cockcroft-Walton VMCs are demonstrated and compared in terms …

Signal Processing For Microwave Imaging Systems With Very Sparse Array, Xiahan Yang

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation investigates image reconstruction algorithms for near-field, two dimensional (2D) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) using compressed sensing (CS) based methods. In conventional SAR imaging systems, acquiring higher-quality images requires longer measuring time and/or more elements in an antenna array. Millimeter wave imaging systems using evenly-spaced antenna arrays also have spatial resolution constraints due to the large size of the antennas. This dissertation applies the CS principle to a bistatic antenna array that consists of separate transmitter and receiver subarrays very sparsely and non-uniformly distributed on a 2D plane. One pair of transmitter and receiver elements is turned on at …

Probing The Wave Nature Of Light-Matter Interaction, D. E. Boone, C. H. Jackson, A. T. Swecker, J. S. Hergenrather, K. S. Wenger, O. Kokhan, Balša Terzić, I. Melnikov, I. N. Ivanov, E. C. Stevens, G. Scarel

Physics Faculty Publications

The wave-particle duality of light is a controversial topic in modern physics. In this context, this work highlights the ability of the wave-nature of light on its own to account for the conservation of energy in light-matter interaction. Two simple fundamental properties of light as wave are involved: its period and its power P. The power P depends only on the amplitude of the wave’s electric and magnetic fields (Poynting’s vector), and can easily be measured with a power sensor for visible and infrared lasers. The advantage of such a wave-based approach is that it unveils unexpected effects of light’s …

Cryogenic Probe Station At Old Dominion University Center For Accelerator Science, Junki Makita, Jean R. Delayen, Alex Gurevich, Gianluigi Ciovati

Physics Faculty Publications

With a growing effort in research and development of an alternative material to bulk Nb for a superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavity, it is important to have a cost effective method to benchmark new materials of choice. At Old Dominion University's Center for Accelerator Science, a cryogenic probe station (CPS) will be used to measure the response of superconductor samples under RF fields. The setup consists of a closed-cycle refrigerator for cooling a sample wafer to a cryogenic temperature, a superconducting magnet providing a field parallel to the sample, and DC probes in addition to RF probes. The RF probes will …

Optimizing Indoor Location Based Tracking Through Proper Filter Selection And Wireless Sensor Network Design, Matthew R. Bergman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Indoor positioning system (IPS) is a topic that is coming up more and more for various reasons, such as allowing companies to track important objects using radio frequency identification (RFID) and employees with Bluetooth devices inside a facility. Geofencing is one of the biggest topics with IPS and is meant to limit access to a network in specified areas. Devices that incorporate indoor tracking are not initially precise when objects and employees are on the move. This movement requires devices to have a reliable filter for noise and package lose. For this paper, the comparison between extended Kalman filters and …

High Speed, Micron Precision Scanning Technology For 3d Printing Applications, Nicholas Emord

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modern 3D printing technology is becoming a more viable option for use in industrial manufacturing. As the speed and precision of rapid prototyping technology improves, so too must the 3D scanning and verification technology. Current 3D scanning technology (such as CT Scanners) produce the resolution needed for micron precision inspection. However, the method lacks in speed. Some scans can be multiple gigabytes in size taking several minutes to acquire and process. Especially in high volume manufacturing of 3D printed parts, such delays prohibit the widespread adaptation of 3D scanning technology for quality control. The limiting factors of current technology boil …

Power Mobility Sensor Data Collection Verified Through Standardized Pediatric Assessments, Ayshka Elise Rodriguez-Velez

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The collaboration between the School of Engineering and the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of North Florida has introduced the possibility of creating a new environment for pediatric physical therapy assessments. There are currently no methods for remotely monitoring children with impairments. However, with embedded sensor technology in the form of power mobility and accepted therapy assessment tools, remote monitoring can become a possibility. As a part of this work, a ride-on toy car was developed as a remote monitoring device and a case study with a child with a mobility impairment was used as a proof of …

Coupling Radio Frequency Energy Via The Embedded Rebar Cage In A Reinforced Concrete Structure For The Purpose Of Concrete Degradation Sensing, Ryan Campiz

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on utilizing an energy harvesting system in which a dedicated Radio Frequency (RF) power source transmits RF power via rebar in a reinforced concrete column. The RF power is received and decoupled by a receiver, and is then rectified, boosted, and stored as electrical energy in a supercapacitor, later to be used to make measurements, process data, and communicate to the source via rebar. Two design attempts are presented in this study: (a) one uses single line conduction at 2.4 GHz for RF power transfer; (b) the other uses a more conventional two-line conduction at 8.0 kHz …

Architectures For Real-Time Automatic Sign Language Recognition On Resource-Constrained Device, James M. Blair

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Powerful, handheld computing devices have proliferated among consumers in recent years. Combined with new cameras and sensors capable of detecting objects in three-dimensional space, new gesture-based paradigms of human computer interaction are becoming available. One possible application of these developments is an automated sign language recognition system. This thesis reviews the existing body of work regarding computer recognition of sign language gestures as well as the design of systems for speech recognition, a similar problem. Little work has been done to apply the well-known architectural patterns of speech recognition systems to the domain of sign language recognition. This work creates …

Subspace Clustering Using Ensembles Of K-Subspaces, John Lipor, David Hong, Yan Shuo Tan, Laura Balzano

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Subspace clustering is the unsupervised grouping of points lying near a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces. Algorithms based directly on geometric properties of such data tend to either provide poor empirical performance, lack theoretical guarantees, or depend heavily on their initialization. We present a novel geometric approach to the subspace clustering problem that leverages ensembles of the K-subspaces (KSS) algorithm via the evidence accumulation clustering framework. Our algorithm, referred to as ensemble K-subspaces (EKSS), forms a co-association matrix whose (i,j)th entry is the number of times points i and j are clustered together by several runs of KSS with random …

Enhancements In Alginate Microencapsulation Technology & Impacts On Cell Therapy Development, Marwa Belhaj

Theses and Dissertations

Biodegradable alginate microcapsules (MC) are recently becoming widely used in the biomedical field, and have shown effectiveness as a drug delivery system. Alginate has been used in microencapsulation due to its simple gelling process, biodegradability, excellent biocompatibility, and its stability under in-vivo conditions. Alginate polymer is a natural polysaccharide derived from brown seaweed and has the ability to polymerize rapidly in the presence of cations to form a porous matrix. In order to advance the previous system for efficient protein and peptide delivery, we further lyophilized the peptide-filled microcapsules and we were able to rehydrate, and test them for sustained …

Photovoltaic Inverter Control To Sustain High Quality Of Service, Yan Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The increasing penetration of distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) generation presents both challenges and opportunities for distribution systems. The intermittent nature of solar irradiance may lead to power quality degradation. At the same time, PV inverters –if properly designed and operated– can be used to improve power quality. The goal of this dissertation is to develop power flow optimization methods for power distribution networks with high penetration of PV generation. The approaches proposed in this dissertation have been tested using the modified version of the IEEE 34-node distribution system and the IEEE 123-node distribution system, as well as the validated model …

Quantifying Time Retarded Electromagnetic Fields And Their Applications In Transmission Lines, Brandon Thomas Gore

Theses and Dissertations

Modern baseband signaling that facilitates the passing of information over high speed interconnects such as copper twin-ax cable and printed circuit boards supports single line data rates of 100 Gbps. Next generation bandwidth requirements of electrical links are approaching frequencies up to 50 GHz. Yet, signal integrity engineers that analyze these interconnects rely on models with underlying assumptions and limited extensions beyond those proposed in the 19th century to describe per unit length characteristics of Resistance, Inductance, Conductance, and Capacitance (RLGC) for transatlantic telegraph cable. An excluded phenomenon is the time retarded behavior of electromagnetic fields. The aim of this …

Novel Wideband Ebg Structures For Isolation Improvement Between Cosite Antennas, Paul John Czeresko Iii

Theses and Dissertations

As the number of installed antennas increases on a structure, the available real estate to do so without each antenna interfering with the others diminishes. Electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structures are one way to mitigate this cosite interference with compact antenna installations. While a host of EBG structures and types (3-D, planar etc.) have been proposed and studied historically, it has been found that planar EBG structures tend to provide very narrow bandwidths for both antenna design and cosite interference reduction. This research focuses on the design of EBG structures intended to achieve greater than 20 dB of isolation improvement …

Structurally Integrated Reconfigurable Wideband Array For Conformal Applications, Michael Damon Wright

Theses and Dissertations

Structurally integrated conformal antennas offer significant advantages over traditional bolt on antennas, especially for air vehicle applications. The ability to leverage the entire structure allows for unconventionally large antennas and arrays to be implemented in a manner which does not detract from the aerodynamic, structural or aesthetic qualities of the vehicle. Works along this line have included Slotted Waveguide Antenna Stiffened Structures (SWASS), conformal helix and spiral antennas, Log Periodic Dipole Arrays (LPDA), and other antennas.

An area which has not been investigated to date is the possibility of implementing reconfigurable antennas in a structural environment. There are inherent challenges …

Study Of 4h-Sic And Alxga1-Xn Based Heterojunction Devices For Ultraviolet Detection Applications, Venkata Surya Naga Raju Chava

Theses and Dissertations

Ultraviolet (UV) detectors are important for their applications in flame detection, furnace gas control systems, plume monitoring etc. Due to their wide band-gap, 4H-SiC (Eg=3.26eV) and III-V semiconductors such as GaN (Eg=3.4eV), AlxGa1-xN (Eg=3.4eV to 6.2eV) etc., are excellent candidates for visible(��cut-0ff=400nm) and solar blind(��cut-0ff=290nm) UV detectors. Conventional SiC UV detectors suffer from poor UV responsivities due to reflection/absorption/transmission losses caused by the metal electrodes used in those detectors.

In the first part, a novel bipolar transistor with epitaxial graphene(EG)/p-SiC (30μm)/n+-SiC substrate was fabricated and characterized. The 2-3 ML thick, transparent and conducting, EG used in this work was grown …

Role Of Mammary Microenvironment In Promoting Left-Right Differences In Tumor Progression, Metastasis, And Therapeutic Response, Huda Issa Atiya

Theses and Dissertations

Metastasis is the main cause of death in breast cancer patients; however, there are currently no treatments available to treat or prevent metastasis. This is in part because regulators of metastasis are not yet fully understood. Over the past century researchers began to study metastasis regulators by different hypotheses, such as the seed and soil hypothesis which focuses on studying the role of cancer cells, the seeds, and the tissue microenvironment, the soil, in regulating metastasis. Although lots of studies have focused on the microenvironment of metastatic sites and their roles in regulating metastasis, limited studies have focused on the …

Energy-Efficient Region Shift Scheme To Support Mobile Sink Group In Wireless Sensor Networks, Yongbin Yim, Kyong Hoon Kim, Monther Aldwairi, Ki Il Kim

All Works

© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Mobile sink groups play crucial roles to perform their own missions in many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. In order to support mobility of such sink groups, it is important to design a mechanism for effective discovery of the group in motion. However, earlier studies obtain group region information by periodic query. For that reason, the mechanism leads to significant signaling overhead due to frequent flooding for the query regardless of the group movement. Furthermore, the mechanism worsens the problem by the flooding in the whole expected area. To deal with …