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Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

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Articles 241 - 266 of 266

Full-Text Articles in Mechanical Engineering

A Unified Analysis Of Stiffener Reinforced Composite Beams With Arbitrary Cross-Section, Gianfranco Rios Jan 2009

A Unified Analysis Of Stiffener Reinforced Composite Beams With Arbitrary Cross-Section, Gianfranco Rios

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

A number of methods are available to analyze the laminated composite beams using smear property of laminate stiffness ignoring unsymmetrical behavior of laminates. Some include their effect of laminate but did not include the unsymmetrical effect of the cross-section of the beam. On the other hand, using finite element method to analyze the beam is dependent on the structural configurations including the laminate lay-up sequence. An analytical method was developed from lamination theory in order to study the structural response of composite laminated beams. The present method is capable of predicting the axial and bending stiffnesses, the centroid location, and …


Topology Optimization Using Hyper Radial Basis Function Network, Aditya P. Apte Jan 2009

Topology Optimization Using Hyper Radial Basis Function Network, Aditya P. Apte

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Topology optimization has been conventionally used in automobile and aerospace industries to produce lightweight structures for minimum compliance or maximum fundamental frequency. Today, topology optimization finds application in solving diverse types of problems ranging from medicine to consumer products. Popular continuum based method SIMP fails to provide global solution due to too many variables involved. In this work, a novel hyper radial basis function network is presented as topology description function. The proposed approach provides drastic reduction in number of design variables involved in topology optimization. This makes the use of heuristic global solution possible. Parallel processing, reanalysis formulation and …


Optimal-Control Theoretic Methods For Optimization And Regulation Of Distributed Parameter Systems, Jennifer Dawn Goss Jan 2009

Optimal-Control Theoretic Methods For Optimization And Regulation Of Distributed Parameter Systems, Jennifer Dawn Goss

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Optimal control and optimization of distributed parameter systems are discussed in the context of a common control framework. The adjoint method of optimization and the traditional linear quadratic regulator implementation of optimal control both employ adjoint or costate variables in the determination of control variable progression. As well both theories benefit from a reduced order model approximation in their execution. This research aims to draw clear parallels between optimization and optimal control utilizing these similarities. Several applications are presented showing the use of adjoint/costate variables and reduced order models in optimization and optimal control problems. The adjoint method for shape …


Experimental Investigation Of Flow Boiling And Spray Cooling On Enhanced Surfaces In Fc-72, Gilberto Morenp Jan 2009

Experimental Investigation Of Flow Boiling And Spray Cooling On Enhanced Surfaces In Fc-72, Gilberto Morenp

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

In this study the effect of a recently developed, thermally conductive microporous coating on flow boiling and spray cooling performance was studied using FC-72 as the working fluid. The overall goal is to further increase heat transfer in forced convection systems and in doing so, provide a viable option for future cooling applications. In flow boiling, the coating increased heat transfer coefficients by as much as 400% and produced values exceeding 40,000 W-m-2 K-1. This enhancement is believed to be a result of both an increase in active nucleation sites and a decrease of the superheated liquid layer. It is …


A Mathematical Model Development And Sensitivity Analysis Of Two Photon Polymerization For 3d Micro/Nano Fabrication, Nitin Uppal Aug 2008

A Mathematical Model Development And Sensitivity Analysis Of Two Photon Polymerization For 3d Micro/Nano Fabrication, Nitin Uppal

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Two photon polymerization (2PP) is an effective technique for the fabrication of complex polymeric 3-D micro/nano features using ultrashort pulses from a NIR laser source. The photosensitive material absorbs two photons and initiates the chain polymerization reaction. The interaction of laser pulses with photo responsive resin creates a voxel (volumetric pixel) which defines the resolution of 2PP process. In this work, a mathematical model of the polymerization process that considers the effects of molecular diffusion and polymerization kinetics on the formation of voxel. The increase in temperature upon polymerization and their effect on the polymerization kinetics and molecular diffusion is …


A Least-Squares/Galerkin Split Finite Element Method For Incompressible And Compressible Navier-Stokes Equations, Rajeev Kumar Aug 2008

A Least-Squares/Galerkin Split Finite Element Method For Incompressible And Compressible Navier-Stokes Equations, Rajeev Kumar

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Over the years Galerkin finite element method along with its variants has been used to solve incompressible and compressible Navier-Stokes equations. The Galerkin method which is more suited for self-adjoint type system of equations like in solid mechanics and heat conduction struggles when applied to non self-adjoint type systems like one encountered in fluid dynamics. Velocity and pressure variables have to be approximated using functions which belong to different spaces and must satisfy the tough LBB condition. The least-squares finite element method (LSFEM), which is based on minimizing the l2-norm of the residual, has many attractive advantages over Galerkin finite …


The Development And Testing Of Pulsed Detonation Engine Ground Demonstrators, Philip Koshy Panicker Aug 2008

The Development And Testing Of Pulsed Detonation Engine Ground Demonstrators, Philip Koshy Panicker

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The successful implementation of a PDE running on fuel and air mixtures will require fast-acting fuel-air injection and mixing techniques, detonation initiation techniques such as DDT enhancing devices or a pre-detonator, an effective ignition system that can sustain repeated firing at high rates and a fast and capable, closed-loop control system. The control system requires high-speed transducers for real-time monitoring of the PDE and the detection of the detonation wave speed. It is widely accepted that the detonation properties predicted by C-J detonation relations are fairly accurate in comparison to experimental values. The post-detonation flow properties can also be expressed …


Design For Reliability In Microoptelectromechanical Systems (Moems), Abiodun Abiodun Fasoro May 2008

Design For Reliability In Microoptelectromechanical Systems (Moems), Abiodun Abiodun Fasoro

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is an enabling technology for miniaturization. MEMS consist of micron sized moving mechanical structures and electronics fabricated on a suitable substrate such as silicon. MEMS has found applications in virtually every aspect of human life, ranging from the automobile to the aerospace, and from the telecommunications to the consumer electronic industries. Technology integration has led to several subsets of MEMS e.g. microoptoelectromechanical systems (MOEMS), radio-frequency MEMS (RF MEMS), etc. Together with these added functionalities, by way of technology integration come additional issues and challenges never before experienced by packaging engineers. MEMS and MOEMS package requirements vary widely …


Closed-Form Development Of A Family Of Higher Order Tetrahedral Elements Through The Fourth Order, Sara Elizabeth Mccaslin Apr 2008

Closed-Form Development Of A Family Of Higher Order Tetrahedral Elements Through The Fourth Order, Sara Elizabeth Mccaslin

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

This research is concerned with the development and implementation of a family of tetrahedral elements through the fourth order. The straight-sided tetrahedral elements are developed in closed-form. This work investigates the efficiency of closed-form implementation of stiffness matrices and error estimators compared to numerical implementation. An additional objective is the compaction of closed-form source-code files which require as little storage space as possible, a more pronounced requirement at high p-levels. For the straight-sided elements through p-level 4, the stiffness matrix, equivalent nodal load vectors, and error estimators (based on nodal averaging) are developed using closed-form equations obtained through the use …


Semi-Analytical Complex Variable Based Stochastic Finite Element Method, Weiya Jin Jan 2008

Semi-Analytical Complex Variable Based Stochastic Finite Element Method, Weiya Jin

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The stochastic finite element method (SFEM) is an approach that allows an analyst to define material, load, and geometry parameters as random variables to represent uncertainty in an engineering problem. The method is then used to estimate the probability of exceeding specified performance thresholds. A necessary ingredient for this analysis is consistent, accurate and efficient algorithms for computing finite element response sensitivities. In this work, the semi-analytical complex variable method (SACVM) is introduced as a method for computing accurate response sensitivities of stochastic models. The SACVM incorporates the complex variable method (CVM) with the semi-analytical method (SAM). It takes advantage …


Characterization And Cooling Capacity Enhancement Of A Porous Ceramic Wick Based Coldplate, Mauricio Adrian Salinas Jan 2008

Characterization And Cooling Capacity Enhancement Of A Porous Ceramic Wick Based Coldplate, Mauricio Adrian Salinas

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Current passive cooling methods of aerospace and military, high heat-flux electronics include the use of thermal planes made of exotic metal alloys, which have been designed, at a great expense, to have high thermal conductivity and low density (i.e. light weight). Also, phase change modules composed of a metal matrix saturated with a solid phase change material are being employed for systems requiring a transient cooling scheme such as expendable weapons. This method requires the heat to be transferred from the source location, through the metal matrix (typically a porous aluminum foam), to the available phase change material. Preliminary empirical …


On The Near Field Mean Flow Structure Of Transverse Jets Issuing Into A Supersonic Freestream, Dean Anthony Dickmann Dec 2007

On The Near Field Mean Flow Structure Of Transverse Jets Issuing Into A Supersonic Freestream, Dean Anthony Dickmann

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The near field mean flow structure of transverse jets issuing from a surface into supersonic crossflow is examined using numerical methods and separation topology. The Navier-Stokes solver Falcon, developed at Lockheed Martin, was used to simulate the interaction between the jet and freestream over a flat plate and a generic missile body. The near field flow structure included a l bow shock upstream of the jet interacting with the approaching boundary layer that forms a pair of horseshoe vortices while another l- structure closer to the jet formed a second pair of horseshoe vortices. As the jet was turned downstream …


Methodologies For Automated Microassembly, Mohammad A. Mayyas Dec 2007

Methodologies For Automated Microassembly, Mohammad A. Mayyas

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The development of micromachining technologies has provided wide applications in micro sensing and actuation. However, most of the demonstrated devices are selectively constructed by fabrication processes that are limited to complexity, configuration, dimension, and material variation. The monolithic fabrication has limitations and does not allow the inclusion of multiple components of incompatible processes. Therefore, the construction of 3D microstructures by heterogeneous microassembly is an alternate manufacturing route. In deterministic, monitored or controlled microassembly there has been considerable research in developing, analyzing and applying distributed algorithms for sensor and sensorless based assembly processes. Meso-scale teleoperated work-cells supported by Nano manipulators have …


Stress Distribution And Strength Prediction Of Composite Laminates With Multiple Holes, Brian Esp Dec 2007

Stress Distribution And Strength Prediction Of Composite Laminates With Multiple Holes, Brian Esp

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The major purpose of this study was to investigate failure of composite laminates with multiple unloaded holes in close proximity. The least square boundary collocation method for anisotropic materials was utilized to determine the state of stress. The approach utilized collocation on both the internal and external boundaries, making it relatively easy to implement. The method compared favorably to both published and finite element solutions. A failure prediction approach for an infinite, symmetric and balanced laminate, with two holes in close proximity was presented. The baseline material for consideration was IM7/977-3, a carbon fiber/epoxy lamina. The failure prediction method was …


An Analytical And Numerical Model For Design Of Non- Uniformly Powered Silicon Chips Based On Both Thermal And Device Clock Performance, Abhihit D. Kaisare Dec 2007

An Analytical And Numerical Model For Design Of Non- Uniformly Powered Silicon Chips Based On Both Thermal And Device Clock Performance, Abhihit D. Kaisare

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Silicon chips continue to grow in capabilities, complexity and performance. Silicon chips typically integrate functional components such as logic and level two (L2) cache memory in their architecture. This functional integration of logic and memory results in improved performance of the chip. However, the integration also introduces a layer of complexity in the thermal design and management of silicon chips. As a direct result of functional integration, the power map on a silicon chip is typically highly non-uniform and the assumption of a uniform heat flux across the chip surface has been shown to be invalid post Pentium II architecture. …


Context-Aware Inference System To Capture Design Rationale From Legacy Mcad, Ganeshram Ramji Iyer Nov 2007

Context-Aware Inference System To Capture Design Rationale From Legacy Mcad, Ganeshram Ramji Iyer

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

There exist numerous design rationale systems that convert captured information into structured design rationale while providing rationale representation and retrieval. These systems woefully neglect the design rationale that is present in legacy CAD such as 2D drawings and 3D models. The dissertation addresses the issues that arise when dealing with the capture, representation and retrieval of design rationale from the 2D legacy CAD data, specifically the non-form related data (e.g. text and symbols). A definition for design rationale in the CAD domain is presented which forms the basis of the proposed approach. The approach uses a unique context-aware inference system …


Autonomous And Cooperative Multi-Uav Guidance In Adversarial Environment, Ugur Zengin May 2007

Autonomous And Cooperative Multi-Uav Guidance In Adversarial Environment, Ugur Zengin

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The research presented in this dissertation is aimed at developing rule-based autonomous and cooperative guidance strategies for UAVs to perform missions such as path planning, target tracking and rendezvous while reducing their risk/threat exposure level, and avoiding threats and/or obstacles by utilizing measurement information provided by sensors. First, a mathematical formulation is developed to represent the area of operation that contains various types of threats, obstacles, restricted areas, in a single framework. Once constructed, there will be no need to distinguish between adversaries as the framework already contains the information on what needs to be avoided and the level of …


Enhancement Of Pool Boiling Heat Transfer Using Thermally-Conductive Microporous Coating Techniques, Joo Han Kim Dec 2006

Enhancement Of Pool Boiling Heat Transfer Using Thermally-Conductive Microporous Coating Techniques, Joo Han Kim

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The present research is an experimental study of the enhancement of boiling heat transfer using microporous coating techniques. The current research is divided into four major phases. During the first phase, the effects of different metal particle sizes in the coating compound for thermally non-conductive microporous coating on pool boiling performance of refrigerants and water are investigated. The test surfaces, solid copper blocks with 1-cm² base, were tested at atmospheric pressure in saturated FC-72, R-123, and water. Results showed that the surface treatment by non-conductive microporous coating significantly enhanced both nucleate boiling and critical heat flux of all three refrigerants. …


Optimization Of The Tool Path In A Robotic Environment, Mukund Venkatachari Narasimhan Dec 2006

Optimization Of The Tool Path In A Robotic Environment, Mukund Venkatachari Narasimhan

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The rising costs and demand coupled with shrinking energy generating resources has triggered the need for optimum use of energy resources, minimizing the overhead costs and maximizing the profits. Robots have been long touted as a fit replacement of human labor force in manufacturing sectors. Slowly there is increased presence of robots in automobile and electronic industries. Typically they are used for welding, painting, ironing, assembly, pick and place, inspection, and testing. Mass production, fulfilling the ever increasing demand, can be accomplished by robots because of their precision, speed of operation and high endurance capabilities. This dissertation comprises of two …


Analysis And Optimal Design Of Beams Using Radial Basis Function, Yung-Kang Sun Aug 2006

Analysis And Optimal Design Of Beams Using Radial Basis Function, Yung-Kang Sun

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The application of Multiquadric Radial Basis Function (MQ RBF) in the analysis and optimal design of beams are addressed in this dissertation. For static analysis, a new Least Square Collocation (LSC) method is introduced. For buckling and vibration analysis, Rayleigh-Ritz analysis procedures are presented using MQ RBF basis function. Numerical results show that LSC can provide better results than the classical collocation method when the same number of collocation points are used. In vibration analysis, MQ RBF-based Rayleigh-Ritz can be used to calculate natural frequency accurately for several hundred modes. The important question of choosing shift parameters is discussed and …


Crashworthiness Design Optimization Using Surrogate Models, Cheng-Ho Tho Jul 2006

Crashworthiness Design Optimization Using Surrogate Models, Cheng-Ho Tho

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Despite the advances in computer technology, the enormous computational cost associated with the large-scale and complex nonlinear crashworthiness simulations renders it to be impractical to rely exclusively on computer simulations for crashworthiness design optimization. A preferable strategy is to employ the computational efficient surrogate model in lieu of the expensive simulations to facilitate the optimization process and design concept exploration. An added advantage of the surrogate models is that they tends to eliminate the high-frequency numerical noise which may hinder the performance of the direct gradient-based optimization technique by constructing smooth crash responses in the crashworthiness analysis. Even thought the …


Numerical Study On Capillarity- Dominant Free Surface And Interfacial Flows, Zhaoyuan Wang Apr 2006

Numerical Study On Capillarity- Dominant Free Surface And Interfacial Flows, Zhaoyuan Wang

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The continuum surface force (CSF) method has been extensively employed in the volume-of-fluid (VOF), level set (LS) and front tracking methods to model surface tension forces. Its ability is limited for the surface tension dominant free surface and interfacial flows due to the existence of spurious currents. These currents may lead to disastrous interface instabilities and failure of grid convergence, which are present in all the previous versions of the CSF algorithm. In this study, a coupled level set and volume-of-fluid method (CLSVOF) is employed for interface tracking, which offers more accurate computations of the curvature and the normal vector …


Numerical Study Of Chemically Reacting Viscous Flow Relevant To Pulsed Detonation Engines, Tae-Hyeong Yi Dec 2005

Numerical Study Of Chemically Reacting Viscous Flow Relevant To Pulsed Detonation Engines, Tae-Hyeong Yi

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

A computational fluid dynamics code for two-dimensional, multi-species, laminar Navier-Stokes equations is developed to simulate a recently proposed engine concept for a pulsed detonation based propulsion system and to investigate the feasibility of the engine of the concept.The governing equations that include transport phenomena such as viscosity, thermal conduction and diffusion are coupled with chemical reactions. The gas is assumed to be thermally perfect and in chemically non-equilibrium. The stiffness due to coupling the fluid dynamics and the chemical kinetics is properly taken care of by using a time-operator splitting method and a variable coefficient ordinary differential equation solver. A …


Arc-Heated Gas Flow Experiments For Hypersonic Propulsion Applications, Christopher Matthew Roseberry Dec 2005

Arc-Heated Gas Flow Experiments For Hypersonic Propulsion Applications, Christopher Matthew Roseberry

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Although hydrogen is an attractive fuel for a hypersonic air-breathing vehicle in terms of reaction rate, flame temperature, and energy content per unit mass, the substantial tank volume required to store hydrogen imposes a drag penalty to performance that tends to offset these advantages. An alternative approach is to carry a hydrocarbon fuel and convert it on-board into a hydrogen-rich gas mixture to be injected into the engine combustors. To investigate this approach, the UTA Arc-Heated Wind Tunnel facility was modified to run on methane rather than the normally used nitrogen. Previously, this facility was extensively developed for the purpose …


Experimental Characterization Of Femtosecond Laser Micromachining For Silicon Mold Fabrication And Hot Embossing For Polymer Microreplication, Sunil Ranganath Belligundu Dec 2005

Experimental Characterization Of Femtosecond Laser Micromachining For Silicon Mold Fabrication And Hot Embossing For Polymer Microreplication, Sunil Ranganath Belligundu

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Hot embossing is a fabrication technique employed for replicating microfeatures on a polymer surface that was primarily developed to fabricate MEMS devices for microfluidic applications. This manuscript deals with characterization of the femtosecond laser micromachining (FLM) and hot embossing (HEMM) processes for master mold fabrication on silicon and polymer replication respectively. Given the required size of the features to be fabricated or replicated, process parameters for FLM can be determined using the derived empirical equations, process parameters for the HEMM process can be established using the characteristic plots. A novel two-stage embossing process is developed and introduced that employs polymer …


An Experimental Investigation Of Ionization Of Supersonic Air By A Corona Discharge, Udyavar S. Satyanand Aug 2005

An Experimental Investigation Of Ionization Of Supersonic Air By A Corona Discharge, Udyavar S. Satyanand

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

A technique is developed to ionize supersonic air flow in a shock tube by a weak corona discharge. The driven section of the tube is open to the atmosphere. The shock propagates in the driven section at about 1 km/s by means of an area contraction near the downstream end of the driven section. Air is ionized by a unipolar corona discharge device comprising of a sharp-edged wedge as a high-field electrode inserted in a 41.25 mm (2 in.) ID tube that forms a low-field electrode. The device requires less than 0.5 W. A ring probe, downstream of the corona …