Computer-Aided Engineering and Design Commons^™

Designing A Heat Sink For Lithium-Ion Battery Packs In Electric Vehicles, Evan Foreman, Dylan Irvine, Aaron Jackson, Christopher Brandon Remington, Sam Endrizzi

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report addresses the concepts and implementation of fluid cooled heat sink designs for an electric or hybrid vehicle battery. To determine the battery’s temperature and heat flux profile, testing was performed by measuring these values at multiple locations on a lithium-ion pouch battery using heat flux sensors and thermocouples during the charge and discharge cycles of the battery. Once the data was collected and analyzed, trendlines were fit to the heat flux data then used to create equations for the heat flux profile during the discharging stage. Each equation represented a specific region on the battery geometry. Four heat …

Airborne Path Frequency Based Substructuring Method And Its Applications, Rui He

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Frequency based substructuring (FBS) is routinely used to model structural dynamics. It provides a framework for connecting structural subsystems together, assessing path contributions, determining the effect of mount modification, and identifying inverse forces. In this work, FBS methods are extended to include acoustic subsystems and connecting pipes and ducts. Connecting pipes or ducts are modeled using the transfer matrix approach which is commonly used for modeling mufflers and silencers below the plane wave cutoff frequency. The suggested approach is validated using boundary element method (BEM) simulation. Applications of the procedure include determining airborne path contributions, the effect of treating ducts …

A Framework For Sustainable Material Selection For Multi-Generational Components, Ryan T. Bradley

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

The early stages of a product’s design are a critical time for decisions that impact the entire life-cycle cost. Product designers have mastered the first generation; however, they currently do not have the ability to know the impact of their decisions on the multi-generational view. This thesis aims at closing the gap between total life-cycle information and the traditional design process in order to harbor sustainable value creation among all stakeholders involved. A framework is presented that uses a combination of a life-cycle costing methodology and an evolutionary algorithm in order to achieve a sustainability assessment for a true multi-generational …

Computational Modeling Of Cardiac Biomechanics, Amir Nikou

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

The goal of this dissertation was to develop a realistic and patient-specific computational model of the heart that ultimately would help medical scientists to better diagnose and treat heart diseases. In order to achieve this goal, a three dimensional finite element model of the heart was created using magnetic resonance images of the beating pig heart. This model was loaded by the pressure of blood inside the left ventricle which was measured by synchronous catheterization. A recently developed structurally based constitutive model of the myocardium was incorporated in the finite element solver to model passive left ventricular myocardium. Additionally, an …

Inkjet Printing: Facing Challenges And Its New Applications In Coating Industry, Sadegh Poozesh

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

This study is devoted to some of the most important issues for advancing inkjet printing for possible application in the coating industry with a focus on piezoelectric droplet on demand (DOD) inkjet technology. Current problems, as embodied in liquid filament breakup along with satellite droplet formation and reduction in droplet sizes, are discussed and then potential solutions identified. For satellite droplets, it is shown that liquid filament break-up behavior can be predicted by using a combination of two pi-numbers, including the Weber number, We and the Ohnesorge number, Oh, or the Reynolds number, Re, and the Weber number, …

Morphology Of Brain Sulci Trabeculae And Its Effect On Brain During Impacts, Sharlin Anwar

Dissertations and Theses

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an intracranial injury caused by direct contact or non-contact head impacts to the brain. TBI is a major problem that accounts for high incidents of hospitalizations each year. Thus, it is important to understand and predict the occurrence of TBI in an impact. It has been shown that the subarachnoid space (SAS) trabeculae play an important role in damping the effect of an impact, thus reducing the injuries. However, the influence of sulci parameters and the sulci trabeculae in TBI due to impact is unexplored. Studies have shown that inclusion of sulci in brain models …

Offshore Turbine Arrays: Numerical Modeling And Experimental Validation, Thomas Kroll, William Hall, Ian Gagnon

Honors Theses and Capstones

The interaction between wind turbines in a large wind farm needs to be better understood to reduce array losses and improve energy production. A numerical test bed for an array of offshore wind turbines was developed in the open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) framework OpenFOAM. It provides a computational tool which can be used in combination with physical model turbine array studies in the Flow Physics Facility (FPF) at UNH as well as other test facilities.

Turbines were modeled as actuator disks with turbulence sources to reduce computational cost. Both k-ϵ and k-ω SST turbulence models were utilized to capture …

The University Of Akron 2015 Sae Zips Baja Off-Road Racing Team 2015 Suspension System Design, Ryan W. Timura

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Baja SAE has been an important part of the University of Akron for the last 20 years. In the early stages, Zips Baja won many races and was one of the best Baja teams around. In more recent years, the teams have not been able to keep up the high place finishes. The 2015 Baja team aims to start a new trend of high place finishes for the years to come. With many design leaders returning from the previous year, passed down knowledge, and experience from last year, it should be an attainable goal.

2015 Zips Sae Baja Brakes And Throttle System, Philip A. Bennett

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The SAE Baja student design team at The University of Akron is one of the longest-standing design teams at the university. The purpose of this team is to design, manufacture, test, and race an off-road vehicle within the guidelines of competition established by the Society of Automotive Engineers. The vehicle is made up of a small number of subsystems including frame, drivetrain, suspension, steering, and braking. The following will discuss all aspects of the design process of the braking and throttle system of the 2015 Zips Baja car. This process includes several steps and considerations such as design goals, system …

Designing A Heat Sink For Lithium-Ion Battery Packs In Electric Vehicles, Dylan Irvine, Evan Foreman, Christopher B. Remington, Aaron Jackson, Sam Endrizzi

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report addresses the concepts and implementation of fluid cooled heat sink designs for an electric or hybrid vehicle battery. To determine the battery’s temperature and heat flux profile, testing was performed by measuring these values at multiple locations on a lithium-ion pouch battery using heat flux sensors and thermocouples during the charge and discharge cycles of the battery. Once the data was collected and analyzed, trendlines were fit to the heat flux data then used to create equations for the heat flux profile during the discharging stage. Each equation represented a specific region on the battery geometry. Four heat …

Design Of An Sae Baja Racing Off-Road Vehicle Powertrain, Eric T. Payne

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

No abstract provided.

Creation Of A Portable, 3d-Printable, Iphone-Compatible Spectrophotometer, Elise K. Grasse

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Spectroscopy is a widely used chemical and medical analysis tool. While spectrophotometers are commonly found in many universities and laboratories, they are not available to all high schools or laboratories in developing countries. The objective of this project was to design a high-quality, 3D-printable, iPhone-compatible spectrophotometer that uses a cell phone camera and interface to collect data. The created 3D-print file will be available to anyone with access to a 3D printer which are increasingly found in many laboratories and schools across the country. A low cost pre-printed kit will also be made for those without access to a 3D …

Structural Analysis Of Integration Of A Non-Cylindrical Cng Fuel Tank, Prathamesh Prashant Deshpande

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The purpose of this study is to computationally model and analyze the vehicle frame which is mounted with a non-conventional, non-cylindrical compressed natural gas (CNG) fuel tank. Integration of this tank in the vehicle underbody will resolve the issue of reduced storage space which is observed in a conventional CNG powered vehicle. This research will ultimately result in making CNG a good alternative to gasoline and reducing the increasing dependency on a single fuel. This tank will be developed in two phases: phase I design of the tank will be a standard rectangular outer box shape with Schwarz P-surface inner …

Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling Of The Effects Of Water Injection In A Diesel Engine, Rabun Z. Wallace

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Water injection has been used in internal combustion engines for many years. It has been used to cool combustion temperatures, reduce emissions, and in some instances clean carbon buildup from the cylinder. Research has shown that the water to fuel mass ratio is most effective between 20-30%, so the upper and lower limit were used for simulations in Converge CFD. To validate the CFD model, a case without water injection was compared to experimental data from Sandia National Laboratory. The predicted in-cylinder pressure and heat release rate showed good agreement with the experimental data. Cases were run with the injection …

Planning Freeform Extrusion Fabrication Processes With Consideration Of Horizontal Staircase Effect, Amir Ghazanfari, Wenbin Li, Ming Leu, Robert Landers

Faculty Publications, Mechanical Engineering

An algorithm has been developed to estimate the “horizontal” staircase effect and a technique is proposed to reduce this type of geometrical error for freeform extrusion fabrication processes of 3D “solid” parts. The adaptive rastering technique, proposed in this paper, analyzes the geometry of each layer and changes the width of each line of the raster adaptively in order to reduce the staircase error and increase the productivity simultaneously. For each line, the maximum width that results in a staircase error smaller than a predefined threshold is determined for decreasing the fabrication time or increasing the dimensional accuracy, or both. …