Engineering Mechanics Commons^™

Development And Integration Of Geometric And Optimization Algorithms For Packing And Layout Design, Santosh Tiwari

All Dissertations

The research work presented in this dissertation focuses on the development and application of optimization and geometric algorithms to packing and layout optimization problems. As part of this research work, a compact packing algorithm, a physically-based shape morphing algorithm, and a general purpose constrained multi-objective optimization algorithm are proposed. The compact packing algorithm is designed to pack three-dimensional free-form objects with full rotational freedom inside an arbitrary enclosure such that the packing efficiency is maximized. The proposed compact packing algorithm can handle objects with holes or cavities and its performance does not degrade significantly with the increase in the complexity …

The Effects Of Combined Compression And Aging On The Properties Of Glassy Polycarbonate, Kyle W. Strabala

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Physical aging and plastic flow are known to cause changes in the properties of glassy polycarbonate (PC). Although the individual effects of physical aging and plastic flow have been studied, the combined mechanical and thermal effects have yet to be evaluated for PC at large plastic strains. This work is the first characterization of the combined effects in PC of large plastic flow followed by thermal (physical) aging. To conduct this study, samples were prepared with different extents of plastic compressive strain, up to approximately 50% engineering strain, followed by thermal aging up to 135 °C, with various …

Multiscale Modeling Of Glass Fiber Reinforced Viscoelastic Polymers Subjected To Impact Loads, Victor Ferreira Teixeira

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

New applications for polymer composite materials are occurring at a rapid pace today. These include structural components in the energy, transportation, and biomedical fields.  Many if not all of these new applications will require that part performance is insured with some degree of sustainable damage.  With the growth in the use of composite structures comes the necessity of improved methodologies that can predict more accurately the life and serviceability conditions of composite parts. Damage mechanics in two-phase composite materials is a very complex problem that has challenged researchers for many years. However, most of the available models perform only a …

Me-Em Enewsbrief, June 2009, Department Of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, Michigan Technological University

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering eNewsBrief

No abstract provided.

A Study In The Information Content, Consistency, And Expressive Power Of Function Structures In Mechanical Design, Chiradeep Sen

All Theses

In engineering design research, function structures are used to represent the intended functionality of technical artifacts. Function structures are graph-based representations where the nodes are functions, or actions, and the edges are flows, or objects of those actions. For the consistent description of artifact functionality, multiple controlled vocabularies have been developed in previous research. The Functional Basis is one such vocabulary that provides for a set of verbs and a set of nouns, organized in the three-level hierarchy. This vocabulary is extensively studied in design research. Two major application of this vocabulary are the Design Repository, which is a web-base …

Development Of A Falling Sphere Instrument For High-Resolution Neutral Wind Measurements In The Mesosphere And Lower Thermosphere, Arpan Shah

All Theses

Passive falling spheres launched from small rockets have been used extensively in the past to measure the winds and densities in the mesosphere. In principle, the same technique can be extended to higher altitudes that cover the lower thermosphere, in addition to the mesosphere. The main difficulties are that accelerations decrease rapidly with height due to the decreasing atmospheric density and rigid spheres are required at higher altitudes, which implies larger mass and smaller accelerations. Accelerometers with broad dynamic range and high sensitivity are required for the measurements, but such devices are not readily available. We describe an instrumented falling …

A Priori Analysis Of Subgrid Scalar Phenomena And Mass Diffusion Vectors In Turbulent Hydrogen-Oxygen Flames, Justin Foster

All Theses

Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of high pressure, turbulent H₂/O₂ non-premixed flames employing real gas effects, detailed chemistry, multicomponent, differential, and cross diffusion are conducted. The results of these simulations are analyzed to provide important subgrid information relevant to Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of turbulent combustion. Subgrid filtered scalar dissipation and scalar variances, species concentrations, reaction rates, and flame temperature are presented as a function of mixture fraction. The analysis also includes a detailed comparison of the actual filtered mass flux vectors with their corresponding forms evaluated with the filtered primitive variables. The results show a reasonable correlation …

Development Of A Nonlinear Ride Quality Model To Aid In Tweelå© Parameter Selection, Marc Paradiso

All Theses

The ride comfort of a vehicle is very important to both automotive and tire manufacturers. Unfortunately the ride comfort provided by the tire has an inverse relationship with the handling ability of the vehicle. Michelin has sought to decouple ride comfort and handling capability by developing a non-pneumatic tire they have dubbed the TWEEL©. To better understand what effects fitting a TWEEL with specific characteristics would have on the ride comfort of a vehicle a computer simulation was developed to study the effects of TWEEL stiffness and deflection on ride comfort.
The vehicle model used in the simulation is a …

Taxonomy Of Physical Prototypes: Structure And Validation, Ashwin Michaelraj

All Theses

This thesis introduces a taxonomy of physical prototypes, and validates the proposed taxonomy by five different approaches. The proposed taxonomy is validated by, (i) checking the orthogonality of individual elements of the taxonomy, (ii) benchmarking the taxonomy with existing classifications of prototypes, (iii) demonstrating its utility by applying it to classify different prototypes, (iv) building a prototype database containing 35 different prototypes, and (v) consistency evaluation of the prototype database using a description logic based software called ProtŽgŽ.
The results indicate that the proposed taxonomy is capable of distinguishing prototypes with greater accuracy when compared to existing classifications. The orthogonality …

An Evaluation Of Function-Based Representations And Information Archival In Engineering Design, Benjamin Caldwell

All Theses

Recent research in function-based design includes the development of a vocabulary of functions, the Functional Basis, and a repository of products and their functions. Many design tools are being developed around this vocabulary and repository to support conceptual design. The usefulness of these tools, however, is dependent on the quality of the vocabulary and the information contained in the repository. In this research, both the vocabulary and the repository are empirically evaluated to understand their strengths and limitations. A statistical analysis is performed on function models in the repository to determine the frequency of usage of Functional Basis terms. It …

Development, Parameterization And Validation Of Dynamic Material Models For Soil And Transparent Armor Glass, Bhaskar Pandurangan

All Dissertations

Despite the signing of several mine ban treaties in the 1990's, it is widely recognized that there is a landmine crisis. The following are some of the main aspects of this crisis: (a) Millions of unexploded landmines remain deployed all over the world; (b) Thousands of civilians are killed or maimed every year by unintended detonations of the mines; (c) The cost of medical treatment of landmine injuries runs into the millions; (d) the ability of the international community to provide the humanitarian relief in terms of medical services, safe drinking water and food, etc., is greatly hampered by landmine …

Foundations Of Design Method Development, Sudhakar Teegavarapu

All Dissertations

A systematic procedure for developing design methods, tools, and/or processes, referred to as meta-method, is proposed. It is hypothesized that design methods developed without following a systematic procedure are not effective and thus are not widely accepted by industry and academia likewise. The systematic framework provided by the meta-method will ensure 1) faster development of design methods, 2) enable tracking of requirements throughout the development process, 3) facilitate efficient exploration and selection of alternatives, 4) document the development process for future reuse, 5) help in testing and validation of design methods, and 6) bridge gap between multiple disciplines by forming …

Microcantilever-Based Force Sensing, Control And Imaging, Reza Saeidpourazar

All Dissertations

This dissertation presents a distributed-parameters base modeling framework for microcantilever (MC)-based force sensing and control with applications to nanomanipulation and imaging. Due to the widespread applications of MCs in nanoscale force sensing or atomic force microscopy with nano-Newton to pico-Newton force measurement requirements, precise modeling of the involved MCs is essential. Along this line, a distributed-parameters modeling framework is proposed which is followed by a modified robust controller with perturbation estimation to target the problem of delay in nanoscale imaging and manipulation. It is shown that the proposed nonlinear model-based controller can stabilize such nanomanipulation process in a very short …

Multiscale Modeling Of Impact On Heterogeneous Viscoelastic Solids With Evolving Microcracks, Flavio V. Souza

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Multiscale computational techniques play a major role in solving problems related to viscoelastic composite materials due to the complexities inherent to these materials. In the present work, a numerical procedure for multiscale modeling of impact on heterogeneous viscoelastic solids containing evolving microcracks is proposed in which the (global scale) homogenized viscoelastic incremental constitutive equations have the same form as the local scale viscoelastic incremental constitutive equations, but the homogenized tangent constitutive tensor and the homogenized incremental history dependent stress tensor depend on the amount of damage accumulated at the local scale. Furthermore, the developed technique allows the computation of the …

Identification Of Multiple Oscillation States Of Carbon Nanotube Tipped Cantilevers Interacting With Surfaces In Dynamic Atomic Force Microscopy, Mark Strus, Arvind Raman

Birck and NCN Publications

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have gained increased interest in dynamic atomic force microscopy (dAFM) as sharp, flexible, conducting, nonreactive tips for high-resolution imaging, oxidation lithography, and electrostatic force microscopy. By means of theory and experiments we lay out a map of several distinct tapping mode AFM oscillation states for CNT tipped AFM cantilevers: namely, noncontact attractive regime oscillation, intermittent contact with CNT slipping or pinning, or permanent contact with the CNT in point or line contact with the surface while the cantilever oscillates with large amplitude. Each state represents fundamentally different origins of CNT-surface interactions, CNT tip-substrate dissipation, and phase contrast …

Volume Viscosity In Fluids With Multiple Dissipative Processes, Allan J. Zuckerwar, Robert L. Ash

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

The variational principle of Hamilton is applied to derive the volume viscosity coefficients of a reacting fluid with multiple dissipative processes. The procedure, as in the case of a single dissipative process, yields two dissipative terms in the Navier-Stokes equation: The first is the traditional volume viscosity term, proportional to the dilatational component of the velocity; the second term is proportional to the material time derivative of the pressure gradient. Each dissipative process is assumed to be independent of the others. In a fluid comprising a single constituent with multiple relaxation processes, the relaxation times of the multiple processes are …

Understanding Practical Limits To Heavy Truck Drag Reduction, Drew Landman, Richard Wood, Whitney Seay, John Bledsoe

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

A heavy truck wind tunnel test program is currently underway at the Langley Full Scale Tunnel (LFST). Seven passive drag reducing device configurations have been evaluated on a heavy truck model with the objective of understanding the practical limits to drag reduction achievable on a modern tractor trailer through add-on devices. The configurations tested include side skirts of varying length, a full gap seal, and tapered rear panels. All configurations were evaluated over a nominal 15 degree yaw sweep to establish wind averaged drag coefficients over a broad speed range using SAE J1252. The tests were conducted by first quantifying …

Convergence, Adaptive Refinement, And Scaling In 1d Peridynamics, Florin Bobaru Ph.D., Mijia Yabg Ph.D., Leonardo F. Alves M.S., Stewart A. Silling Ph.D., Ebrahim Askari Ph.D., Jifeng Xu Ph.D.

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Faculty Publications

We introduce here adaptive refinement algorithms for the non-local method peridynamics, which was proposed (in J. Mech. Phys. Solids 2000; 48:175–209) as a reformulation of classical elasticity for discontinuities and long-range forces. We use scaling of the micromodulus and horizon and discuss the particular features of adaptivity in peridynamics for which multiscale modeling and grid refinement are closely connected. We discuss three types of numerical convergence for peridynamics and obtain uniform convergence to the classical solutions of static and dynamic elasticity problems in 1D in the limit of the horizon going to zero. Continuous micromoduli lead to optimal rates of …

Me-Em 2009 Annual Report, Department Of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, Michigan Technological University

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Annual Reports

Table of Contents

• Energy Systems
• Health Systems
• Faculty & Staff
• Students
• Alumni
• Resources
• Graduates
• Publications
• ME-EM Community

Helical Force Flow: A New Engineering Mechanics Model For Biological Materials, Jeffery S. Thomas

Doctoral Dissertations

"The author has long speculated that the prevalence of helical structures in botany and zoology hints to an optimized pathway for force and/or energy transfer. His goal has been to realize an alternative approach to the standard stress analysis used in engineering in order to more efficiently and accurately deal with biological materials. Improved tools for these natural materials should in turn aid the design and analysis of engineered materials. Following the role of a navigator in leaf C. Levesque's book "Breakthrough Creativity", the author typically searches for ideas in a variety of places, including physics, materials science, biomimetics, dimensional …