Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Automatic Pmg Controller For Small Applications, William Scott Adkins

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This thesis is used to describe the proof of concept and design for a much needed answer to a major flight time limitation in smaller application drones. All small electric drones and small electric vehicles have the same major problem, short run-times. The average time a multi-rotor helicopter runs is for approximately 20 minutes. The concept idea of the combination of a permanent magnet generator (PMG) and a controller can extend this flight time. The basic idea is to add the similar function an automobile has, which is the alternator. This thesis will include, but not limited to the following …

Average Current-Mode Control, Ankit Chadha

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In this thesis, an average current-mode controller is analyzed for controlling power electronic converters. This controller consists of two loops. An inner loop, which senses and controls the inductor current and an outer loop, which is used to control the output voltage and provide reference voltage for the inner current loop. An average current-mode controller averages out high frequency harmonics it senses from the inductor current to provide a smooth DC component. This can be used as a control voltage for a pulse width modulator and produce switching pulses for the power electronic converters. An average current-mode controller can also …

The Goddard Project, Cassandra Denunzio, Robert Galli, Cameron Perl, Andrew Felicetti, Samuel Cordeiro, Kevin Tierney

Honors Theses and Capstones

The goal of this project was to design and build a robotic dog modeled after Goddard from the 2001 television series, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius. Sheet metal was used for the body of the robot in order to keep the frame lightweight. Goddard travels on two wheels powered by electric motors and two caster wheels. The robot utilizes a Raspberry Pi as its master device and an Arduino Uno in order to control the robot. Essentially, Goddard acts and behaves like an ordinary dog from barking, to moving around, to being a great companion and friend. …

A Probabilistic Technique For Open Set Recognition Using Support Vector Machines, Matthew Scherreik

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Classification algorithms trained using finite sets of target and confuser data are limited by the training set. These algorithms are trained under closed set assumptions and do not account for the infinite universe of confusers found in practice. In contrast, classification algorithms developed under open set assumptions label inputs not present in the training data as unknown instead of assigning the most likely class. We present an approach to open set recognition, the probabilistic open set SVM, that utilizes class posterior estimates to determine probability thresholds for classification. This is accomplished by first training an SVM in a 1-vs-all configuration …

Hierarchical Modulation Detection Of Underwater Acoustic Communication Signals Through Maximum Likelihood Combining, Josh Sanderson

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Modulation detection is important to many communication applications. Much research has been done in this area for radio frequency (RF) signals, but until recently little has carried over to the underwater communication world. Traditional methods include the use of fourth order cumulants or second order cyclostationary features to determine the modulation scheme being used. Many of these methods fail due to the complex and varying nature of the underwater channel. This thesis proposes a new form of hierarchy modulation detection for underwater acoustic communication signals using maximum likelihood combining. The proposed method for hierarchical modulation detection for this research is …

Java Implementation Of Grounded Circumscription For Owl, Ali Akhavan Karbasi

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The semantic web is a new development in the World Wide Web (WWW) supporting machine-readable and machine-understandable data in order to add the "understanding" aspect to current capabilities. This technology involves the use of semantic reasoners, which are software that can infer logical consequences from a set of facts or axioms. Inference can be done in different ways, e.g. based on what is called the open world assumption in which what is not known to be true is simply unknown, and its closed world assumption opposite, which considers what is not known to be true as false. Each of these …

Formula Electric : Powertrain, Mark Allison, Bryan Bidwell, Stuart Hopson, Jackson Smith, Carlos Streegan, Dominic Villa

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The Santa Clara Formula Electric team designed, and manufactured a powertrain for an electric racecar according to the rules prescribed by the SAE International Formula Electric competition. The powertrain is divided into subsystems: the battery pack, battery pack cooling system, motor controller, and the motor. The battery pack was constructed, but full electrical connection of all cells were not made. The pack was not integrated with the motor and motor controller. In addition, due to time constraints, extensive testing could not be completed.

Path Loss In An Urban Peer-To-Peer Channel For Six Public-Safety Frequency Bands, David W. Matolak, Qian Zhang, Qiong Wu

Faculty Publications

We provide path loss data and models for a peer-to-peer wireless channel for an urban environment in six public safety bands, for simultaneous transmission to five spatially separated receiving sites. Results are from measurements in Denver, Colorado. The six frequencies at which we measured are (in MHz) 430, 750, 905, 1834, 2400, and 4860. Both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions were covered, and we quantify path loss exponents and linear-fit standard deviations as functions of frequency and location. Line-of-sight results agree with prior work, but non-line-of-sight exponents, from 3.6-7.3, are generally larger than in most other references.

Electricity Markets, Smart Grids And Smart Buildings, Jonathan Falcey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A smart grid is an electricity network that accommodates two-way power flows, and utilizes two-way communications and increased measurement, in order to provide more information to customers and aid in the development of a more efficient electricity market. The current electrical network is outdated and has many shortcomings relating to power flows, inefficient electricity markets, generation/supply balance, a lack of information for the consumer and insufficient consumer interaction with electricity markets. Many of these challenges can be addressed with a smart grid, but there remain significant barriers to the implementation of a smart grid.

This paper proposes a novel method …

Wireless Networks-On-Chips: Architecture, Wireless Channel, And Devices, David W. Matolak, Avinash Kodi, Savas Kaya, Dominic Ditomaso, Soumyasanta Laha, William Rayess

Faculty Publications

Wireless networks-on-chips (WINoCs) hold substantial promise for enhancing multicore integrated circuit performance, by augmenting conventional wired interconnects. As the number of cores per IC grows, intercore communication requirements will also grow, and WINoCs can be used to both save power and reduce latency. In this article, we briefly describe some of the key challenges with WINoC implementation, and also describe our example design, iWISE, which is a scalable wireless interconnect design. We show that the integration of wireless interconnects with wired interconnects in NoCs can reduce overall network power by 34 percent while achieving a speedup of 2.54 on real …

Comprehensive Solution To Scattering By Bianisotropic Objects Of Arbitrary Shape, Chong Mei, Moamer Hasanovic, Jay K. Lee, Ercument Arvas

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

This paper presents a method of moments (MoM) solution for the problems of electromagnetic scattering by inhomogeneous three- dimensional bianisotropic scatterers of any shape. The electromagnetic response of bianisotropy has been described by the constitutive relations of the most general form composed of four 3 X 3 matrices or tensors. The volume equivalence principle is used to obtain a set of mixed potential formulations for a proper description of the original scattering problem. Here, the total fields are separated into the incident fields and the scattered fields. The scattered fields are related to the electric and magnetic potentials which are …

Generation Of A Wide-Band Response Using Early-Time And Middle-Frequency Data Throught The Use Of Orthogonal Fuctions, Woojin Lee, Tapan Kumar Sarkar, Jinhwan Koh, Hong Sik Moon, Magdalena Salazar Palma

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Abstract|Generation of a wide-band response using partial information from the time domain (TD) data and frequency domain (FD) data has been accomplished in this paper through the use of three different orthogonal functions, such as the continuous Laguerre functions, the Bessel-Chebyshev functions, and the associate Hermite functions. In this hybrid approach, one can generate the early-time response using the method of marching-on-in-time (MOT) and use the method of moment (MOM) to generate the middle-frequency response, as the low-frequency data may be unstable. Since the early-time and the middle-frequency data are mutually complimentary, they can provide the missing low- and high-frequency …

Investigation Of New Hampshire Hydropower Potential, Maxwell Murray

Honors Theses and Capstones

The popularity of green and renewable energy has risen sharply in recent years, and hydropower has consistently been the most common form of renewable energy in both the US and the state of New Hampshire. As a result of this strong green movement, government organizations have seen increased pressure to produce figures to the public detailing the amount of hydropower potentially available in the country. Often these figures will depict very attractive numbers for the untapped hydropower potential in the country, yet the data do not seem realistic to anyone familiar with hydropower generation. This paper will attempt to de-rate …

On Noise-Enhanced Distributed Inference In The Presence Of Byzantines, Mukul Gagrani, Pranay Sharma, Venkata Sriram Siddhardh Nadendla, Aditya Vempaty, Pramod Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

This paper considers the noise-enhanced distributed detection problem in the presence of Byzantine (malicious) nodes by suitably adding stochastic resonance (SR) noise. We consider two metrics - the minimum number of Byzantines (alpha_blind) needed to blind the fusion center as a security metric and the Kullback- Leibler divergence (DKL) as a detection performance metric. We show that alpha_blind increases when SR noise is added at the honest nodes. When Byzantines also start adding SR noise to their observations, we see no gain in terms of alpha_blind . However, the detection performance of the network does improve with SR. We also …

Worse-Than-Rayleigh Fading: Experimental Results And Theoretical Models, David W. Matolak, Jeff Frolik

Faculty Publications

This article is motivated by the recent recognition that channel fading for new wireless applications is not always well described by traditional models used for mobile communication systems. In particular, fading data collected for vehicleto- vehicle and wireless sensor network applications has motivated new models for conditions in which channel fading statistics can be worse than Rayleigh. We review the use of statistical channel models, describe our example applications, and provide both measured and modeling results for these severe fading conditions.

5 Ghz Band Vehicle-To-Vehicle Channels: Models For Multiple Values Of Channel Bandwidth, Qiong Wu, David W. Matolak, Indranil Sen

Faculty Publications

In Sen and Matolak's earlier paper, 5-GHz-band vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) channel models were presented for channel bandwidths of 5 and 10 MHz. In this paper, we provide additional tapped delay line models for bandwidths of 1, 20, 33.33, and 50 MHz based upon the data used in Sen and Matolak's paper. We provide tables of channel parameters for five types of V2V channel classes and also include example tap correlation coefficients. Root-mean-square delay spread values are summarized, as are values of bandwidth for which the channel frequency correlation takes values of 0.7 and 0.5. As with the results from Sen and …

Fabrication Of Silicon Photovoltaic Micro-Particles For Low-Cost Solar Energy Generation, Siddhartha Kala

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The relatively high cost of the high quality semiconductor materials (typically silicon) and complex conventional techniques for the fabrication of solar cells result in the overall high cost of the commercially available solar cells. Although, research in the field of solar technologies has been going on for a long time, but, utilization of solar energy still remains limited to a very few applications, owing to the high manufacturing costs and lower efficiency. In this work we present a new solar technology based on silicon photovoltaic micro-particles and demonstrate a fabrication technique for such particles. The photovoltaic micro-particles can be manufactured …

The 5 Ghz Airport Surface Area Channel: Part Ii, Measurement And Modeling Results For Small Airports, Indranil Sen, David W. Matolak

Faculty Publications

This paper describes results from a channel measurement campaign performed at several small airports in the U.S. in the 5-GHz band. This paper is a companion to another paper, which describes channel models for large airports. We classify the small airport surface channel into three propagation regions based upon different delay dispersion conditions. The channel characteristics of these regions in the delay and frequency domains are discussed with examples. We provide empirical stochastic channel models (of different bandwidths) to accurately represent the channel on the airport surface area for all propagation regions. The models are provided in the form of …

Vehicle-Vehicle Channel Models For The 5 Ghz Band, Indranil Sen, David W. Matolak

Faculty Publications

In this paper, we describe the results of a channel measurement and modeling campaign for the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) channel in the 5-GHz band. We describe measurements and results for delay spread, amplitude statistics, and correlations for multiple V2V environments. We also discuss considerations used in developing statistical channel models for these environments and provide some sample results. Several statistical channel models are presented, and using simulation results, we elucidate tradeoffs between model implementation complexity and fidelity. The channel models presented should be useful for system designers in future V2V communication systems.

Channel Modeling For Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communications, David W. Matolak

Faculty Publications

Physical layer channel modeling is critical for design and performance evaluation at multiple layers of the communications protocol stack. In this article we describe and provide results for modeling vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless channels. V2V settings produce some unique conditions, and due to these conditions, V2V channels often exhibit greater dynamics than many conventional channels and, in addition, can also exhibit more severe fading. Thus, new channel models are needed to characterize this setting in order to evaluate contending transmission schemes and aid in V2V communication system design. A brief review of key statistical channel parameters is provided. Then both analytical …

Spectrally Shaped Generalized Mc-Ds-Cdma With Dual Band Combining For Increased Diversity, Wenhui Xiong, David W. Matolak

Faculty Publications

A new multicarrier spread spectrum modulation scheme is proposed in this paper. This scheme uses sinusoidal chip waveforms to shape the spectrum of each subcarrier of a multicarrier direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS) signal. As a result, each subcarrier has two distinct spectral lobes, one a lower sideband (LSB) and the other an upper sideband (USB). By properly selecting the parameters of the sinusoidal chip waveforms, the two sideband signals can be made to undergo independent fading in a dispersive fading channel. These two independently-faded sideband signals, when combined at the receiver, provide diversity gain to the system. Our analysis …

3d Outside Cell Interference Factor For An Air-Ground Cdma ‘Cellular’ System, David W. Matolak

Faculty Publications

We compute the outside-cell interference factor of a code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system for a three-dimensional (3-D) air-to-ground (AG) "cellular-like" network consisting of a set of uniformly distributed ground base stations and airborne mobile users. The CDMA capacity is roughly inversely proportional to the outside-cell interference factor. It is shown that for the nearly free-space propagation environment of these systems, the outside-cell interference factor can be larger than that for terrestrial propagation models (as expected) and depends approximately logarithmically upon both the cell height and cell radius.

Surface-To-Surface Transition Via Electromagnetic Coupling Of Coplanar Waveguides, Robert W. Jackson, David W. Matolak

Faculty Publications

A transition is investigated which couples coplanar waveguide on one substrate surface (a motherboard) to coplanar waveguide on another substrate surface (a semiconductor chip or subarray) placed above the first. No wire bonds are necessary. A full-wave analysis using coupled line theory is presented and verified experimentally. The use of this transition for coupling to millimeter-wave integrated circuits is discussed.