Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Thermolysis And Kinetics Of Scrap Tyre And Bagasse For Energy Utilization, Petro Ndalila

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

The increase of energy demand has brought concern to find alternative fuel that will at least sustain the requirement. Bagasse and scrap tyre are waste generated in our industrial activities, which can be used in energy production to subsidize the demand. This paper, aim to study the decomposition behaviour and kinetics of biomass (bagasse) and scrap tyre as preliminary stage of fuel sample analysis to be considered for energy production in gasification/combustion or pyrolysis facilities. The behaviour demonstrated with thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA), shows that all samples have high volatile amount release, 84.21% for bagasse and 85.08% for scrap tyre, which …

Analysis Of Factors Affecting Technological Innovativeness In Engineering Enterprises In Tanzania, Emanuel Mjema

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

This paper discusses the technological innovativeness in engineering enterprises in Tanzania and analyses the factors affecting the innovativeness. It starts by analyzing various concepts regarding innovation, then analyzed from documentary review factors affecting innovativeness and then analyzed the innovativeness in Tanzanian enterprises. From the documentary review it was learnt that the following key factors influence technological innovativeness: Existence of innovation management; Existence of market to absorb the products of innovation; Existence of partnership between the universities and the firms; Existence of positive culture and politics towards innovation; The government playing its role to influence innovation; Existence of the right knowledge; …

Modeling Reliability Growth In Accelerated Stress Testing, Jason K. Freels

Theses and Dissertations

Qualitative accelerated test methods improve system reliability by identifying and removing initial design flaws. However, schedule and cost constraints often preclude sufficient testing to generate a meaningful reliability estimate from the data obtained in these tests. In this dissertation a modified accelerated life test is proposed to assess the likelihood of attaining a reliability requirement based on tests of early system prototypes. Assuming each prototype contains an unknown number of independent competing failure modes whose respective times to occurrence are governed by a distinct Weibull law, the observed failure data from this qualitative test are shown to follow a poly-Weibull …

S1nn Gmbh & Co. Kg (Automobile Connectivity Module 1.1), Tyler Alexander Ball

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The results of this report show how when diagnostics were run on the Connectivity Module 1.1, the problems discovered such as potential short-circuiting, 90-degree copper tracing angles, and components overheating/tombstoning were addressed. By using the method of “DMAIC,” which stands for Design, Measure, Analyze, Implement, Control, successful corrections were made. In the first design of the Printed Circuit Board (PCB), 1454 critical issues were found. With the newly designed PCB’s modifications being implemented, only 12 critical issues remained, which were later addressed and corrected. The results from this report are a functional Automobile Connectivity Module 1.1.

Project Management Of High School Shadow And Building An Engineer Day, Andrea M. Carroll

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Building an Engineer Day and High School Shadow are semi-annual outreach events hosted by Cal Poly’s Society of Women Engineers section during fall and spring quarters. The events focus on encouraging women and minorities to take an interest in engineering. These events are the two largest outreach events hosted by The Society of Women Engineers and need to run smoothly in order to provide student attendees with a meaningful experience.

Building an Engineer Day and High School Shadow are currently un-organized and un-planned, which leads to problems with officer retention, increase in expediting process and a low attendance rate at …

Equipment Maintenance And Replacement Decision Making Processes, Michael W. Gage

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

This project contains recommendations for the decision making processes for support and production equipment maintenance and replacement for a large defense contractor. Recent literature has been reviewed to provide perspective on current trends in the field. A complete evaluation of their current processes and systems is included with recommendations on areas for improvement. A decision support system is also proposed to supplement their existing decision making.

Fixture For Carbon Fiber Spar Of Human Powered Helicopter, David John Ikeda, Luis Gonzalez

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The following report describes our contribution to Cal Poly Human Powered Helicopter for the 2012 competition for the Sikorsky Prize offered by the American Helicopter Society. In order to win this prize the team needs to build and fly a human powered helicopter for more than 60 seconds reaching and altitude of 3 meters while staying in a 10 meter square box. Our team was created to support the integration of Carbon Fiber parts, specifically the carbon fiber spars with rotor and landing gears. Precise cutting and accurate drilling was needed and our team was tasked with creating a fixture …

Disaster Relief Models: Location Of Points Of Distribution, Othman Boudhoum

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project consists of developing a Location Allocation model that focuses on determining the locations of relief supply Points of Distribution (PODs) after a natural disaster and how to assign demand points to them. According to FEMA, PODs are “centralized locations where the public picks up life sustaining commodities following a disaster or emergency” [1]. After each disaster, decisions have to be made to ensure a good delivery of resources in a timely manner. The road infrastructure may be damaged due to the disaster. Some roads might become inoperable, and some bridges are expected to fail. The model studied in …

Single-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem For Home Delivery Of Pharmaceutical Products, Kimberly Starr Harms

Masters Theses

Some retail pharmacies offer home delivery services to establish a competitive advantage in the growing healthcare market. The handling of orders for home delivery includes several internal and external processing and transportation activities. In this work, models were developed for use in a pharmacy delivery system to assist personnel in their daily activities. This work includes standard operating procedures for picking, packing and loading of delivery orders and the assignment and routing of vehicles to deliver customer orders. Results from simulated delivery areas identified interesting tradeoffs when comparing densely populated areas to sparsely populated areas. In addition, recommendations for order …

College Football Rankings: An Industrial Engineering Approach, Brent H. Wiles

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In using an industrial engineering approach, we utilize optimization and mathematical modeling techniques to rank college football teams when viewed as a quadratic assignment problem.

Characteristics And Contributing Factors Of Emergency Vehicle Crashes, Naji Abdelwanis

All Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to determine the contributing factors and characteristics associated with emergency vehicle(EV) crashes in order to generate insights about the emergency crashes. This dissertation consists of three approaches to address the purpose. In the first analysis a binary logistic regression model was used to identify the critical factors associated with EV crashes that resulted in fatality compared to those that did not. In the second analysis, an ordered regression model was used to identify critical factors that contributed to the severity of injuries that EV occupants experience in crashes as well as the effect of …

Use Of Polymer Rapid Tools As Functional Injection Mold Tooling, Sean Derrick

Masters Theses

Conventional tool making for injection molded plastics is expensive, time consuming, and generates a great deal of waste. Presently, industry is waiting for what is commonly referred to as Rapid Tooling (RT). The greatest opportunity for RT implementation would be the use of Additively Manufacturing (AM) technology. Specifically, AM techniques which use a high strength polymer resin substrate.

The following research is an initial feasibility study to determine if Polymer Rapid Tools (PRTs) could be used as functional injection mold tooling. The objective of the research was to determine if a PRT could mold a variety of features to a …

Systematic Parameter Analysis For Selective Laser Melting (Slm) Of Silver-Based Materials., Harald Rieper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is a growing technology for the additive manufacturing of parts and structures. Based on a powder layer technique, a laser locally melts the powder and forms new structures. [1] In this approach, silver-based alloy powders will be used. The processing of this kind of material is considered difficult compared to other powder materials such as mild steels or tool steels. Silver powder is a highly reflecting material and has excellent thermal conductivity. Both properties make it difficult to process using Selective Laser Melting. Due to its high price, industries use silver parts as economically as possible …

Linking Corporate Strategy To Operations : A Critical Review Of Prof. Kaplan’S Theories And The Development Of A Best-Practice Approach., Alexander Bogner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rising speed of change in global frameworks drives international companies into a non-stop changing organization with the need of generating optimal revenues under changing conditions. Regarding to the need to be a flexible and competitive organization the value of a vision and a perfectly streamed strategy to this vision becomes a main success factor for global business. The trend for the need of development of a clear and constant strategy is equally rising with the trend of globalization and intercontinental business companies and therefor the business of strategy consulting rises constantly from the late 1990. Most of the strategy …

Predicting Surgical Flow Disruption Recovery In Cardiothoracic Operating Rooms, Gary Palmer Ii

All Dissertations

Disruptions are common occurrences in a variety of healthcare settings and early research has shown that they are likely contributors to medical errors. For this reason, healthcare researchers have focused on studying and understanding the nature of Surgical Flow Disruptions (SFDs) to increase patient safety and quality of care within the operating room (OR). Many researchers have used simplistic taxonomies to collect and categorize the types of SFD that occur within the OR. Others have gone further to study SFD recovery and have link unrecovered and recovered SFD to minor and major adverse events experienced by patients. This dissertation, focused …

Interaction Model Of Functions In The National Airspace System, Nathan F. Koerschner, Steven J. Landry

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The National Airspace System (NAS) is comprehensively described by five functions derived from big-picture goals: (1) conflict detection and resolution, (2) controlling aircraft states, (3) traffic flow management, (4) controlling passenger states, and (5) controlling company resources. It can be reasonably assumed that these functions interact in some way; this interaction is currently unknown. A model of the entire NAS would be helpful in discovering these interactions, yet no such comprehensive model exists. To address this problem an agent-based state-based model was created in MATLAB. To date, only functions (1) and (2) were implemented. Running the model shows that there …

Quantitative Measurement Of Intuitiveness Of Visualization Techniques, Jeongjoon Boo, Ji Soo Yi

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

More and more visualizations and infographics are being adopted as a part of data communication (e.g., news articles and personal blogs) because they can not only present more details succinctly but also allow viewers explore data by themselves. However, when an information provider needs to decide which type of graphs, there is not much reliable information out there. For example, we do not know what portion of general public understands how to comprehend a type of graph, such as a scatter plot, without any explanation. Thus, the aim of this project is to quantify the level of intuitiveness of different …

Pulsed Laser Coating Of Bioceramic (Hap) And Niti Nanoparticles On Metallic Implants, Aayush Goswami, Gary J. Cheng

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

This research deals with increasing the biocompatibility of the bio implants which have a global market valued more than $94.1 billion . The surface of the metal alloys used for the bone implants need to be coated with bio compatible materials like HAp(Hydroxyapatite), graphene, etc. in order to promote the growth of cells(osteoblasts) on the surface of the implants. Various techniques like plasma spray coating, ion beam sputter coating, etc. have been used before to coat such materials on a substrate, however these have faced problems of coating quality. In order to perfect this coating, that is make it more …

Design, Development, And Testing Of A Conformal Power Control Interface For Thrust Vectoring Aircraft, David Rozovski

Open Access Dissertations

Over the last five years, a new power control inceptor for tiltrotor aircraft, known as the Rotational Throttle Interface (RTI) was designed and built. Prior to the RTI, no tiltrotor inceptor had been able to simultaneously indicate both the direction and magnitude of thrust conformally. The purpose of the RTI is to provide an interface that maps to the intended vehicle response throughout ALL ranges of operation. Doing so is expected to reduce confusion that may have contributed to several tiltrotor accidents

Two tests were conducted with the RTI, one at the NASA Vertical Motion Simulator, and one at Canada's …

Algorithmic And Mathematical Programming Approaches To Scheduling Problems With Energy-Based Objectives, Kan Fang

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation studies scheduling as a means to address the increasing concerns related to energy consumption and electricity cost in manufacturing enterprises. Two classes of problems are considered in this dissertation: (i) minimizing the makespan in a permutation flow shop with peak power consumption constraints (the PFSPP problem for short) and (ii) minimizing the total electricity cost on a single machine under time-of-use tariffs (the SMSEC problem for short). We incorporate the technology of dynamic speed scaling and the variable pricing of electricity into these scheduling problems to improve energy efficiency in manufacturing.The challenge in the PFSPP problem is to …

Human Cognitive Performance In Healthcare Information System Environment And Its Application On Nursing Tasks, Byung Cheol Lee

Open Access Dissertations

The US healthcare system has serious issues in care quality and patient safety. Patients often do not receive the care they need or the given care service cause harm. In addition, the significant amounts of medical and medication errors occur, and recurring adverse drug events due to damaging side effects from medications threaten patient safety. To solve these issues, healthcare information systems (HIS) have been recommended in various care processes. Though several studies have confirmed the benefits and usefulness of the systems (Cordero, Kuehn, Kumar, & Mekhjian, 2004; Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 2000; Sittig, Krall, Kaalaas-Sittig, & Ash, 2005; Weiner …

Low Volume Dispensing With High Speed Dispensers, Sunny Agarwal

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

With the high pace of innovation in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, there has been an increasing demand for more energy efficient and environmental friendly products. This research relates to a complex process of fluid dispensing at low volumes on a printed circuit board. Currently, a more refined non-contact dispensing terminology named “Streaming” is widely used to stream out material at low volumes for various applications. The key solution is to frame a dispensing method that lends itself most closely to the requirements of a specific production process.

This study represents a detailed approach of dispensing low volumes of materials in …

The Role Of Third Party Logistics Providers (3pls) In The Adoption Of Green Supply Chain Initiatives, Edward Sweeney, Pietro Evangelista, Maria Huge-Brodin, Karin Isaksson

Practitioner Journals

The increasing importance of environmental sustainability has sharpened the focus on the need for innovative approaches to the purchasing of transport and logistics services. This article points out some of the challenges that purchasers of transport and logistics services, as well as their suppliers in the third party logistics (3PL) industry, are facing. These include the need for closer collaboration between 3PLs and their customers, as well as developing systems for the robust assessment of the environmental sustainability of services. The article is based on several years’ research experience inIreland,ItalyandSweden.

Evaluation Of Team Quality, Shiva Rama Krishna Murthy Bhagavatula

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The ever-increasing competitive pressure and sizes of the global markets have forced organizations from both manufacturing and healthcare sectors to rely more on teams. Therefore the success or the failure of an organization depends largely on the overall quality of the teams within that organization. This increased attention towards teams has forced many organizations to focus on improving the overall quality of their teams. This study has three main objectives. The first objective is to structure a comprehensive list of attributes affecting the overall quality of a team in manufacturing and healthcare sectors. The second objective is to use a …

An Optimization Model For Class Scheduling At A Dance Studio, Chirag Ojha

All Theses

Scheduling has been a large area of research for decades. A substantial amount of work has been done to express, classify, and solve scheduling problems. Most of these problems are computationally difficult to solve and require complex algorithms. In this thesis, we develop a mixed-integer linear program for a real world optimization problem at a dance studio. Similar to a university, the students in this studio request a particular class and instructors teach the classes under constrained resources such as a limited number of classrooms. The priorities of instructors as well as dancers are included to further mimic reality. Experimental …

The Assignment Problem With Dependent Costs., Ghazal Tariri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Assigning workers, each with their own skill set, to tasks which demand different skills in an efficient manner is a challenging problem that often requires workers to receive additional training. The training of workers is very costly with Training Magazine’s Annual Industry Report stating 58.5 billion dollars were spent in 2007 on employee training in the United States. Therefore assigning workers to tasks in such a way as to minimize the overall training costs is an important problem in many organizations. In this research, the assignment problem with dependent cost is considered, i.e. the training cost associated with assigning a …

Parameterizing Analytical Models To Support An Empirically Based Warehouse Design Methodology, Lisa Thomas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research in the area of warehouse design is characterized by a myriad of analytical models that address one, typically small and isolated, area of the warehouse. These models, although important in gaining insight into one question of warehouse design, are of limited value when one considers the larger question of overall warehouse design. Thus, research in the area of overall warehouse design typically consists of procedure-driven processes based on qualitative factors and not the quantifiable results of analytical models.

In contrast, practitioners have significant empirical data related to how a design alternative performs in an industry, a company, or a …

Organization Of Information For Reversible Causes Of Pulseless In-Hospital Cardiac Arrest: A Randomized Control Trial Using A Cognitive Aid, Meera Ramachandran

All Theses

More than 200,000 in-hospital cardiac arrests are treated each year in the US with 21% survival rate. According to American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines, many causes for these arrests could be successfully treated if identified early. Such causes can be generalized as 'reversible causes'. Medical doctors identify the reversible causes associated with an arrest by recalling them from memory, using a mnemonic. In this study, using a cognitive aid such as an iPad application, the mnemonic was modified and causes were displayed alphabetically, and tested along with a new method that rank-ordered the reversible causes based on the patient context, …

Joint Location And Dispatching Decisions For Emergency Medical Service Systems, Hector Toro-Diaz

All Dissertations

Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems are a service that provides acute care and transportation to a place for definitive care, to people experiencing a medical emergency. The ultimate goal of EMS systems is to save lives. The ability of EMS systems to do this effectively is impacted by several resource allocation decisions including location of servers (ambulances), districting of demand zones and dispatching rules for the servers. The location decision is strategic while the dispatching decision is operational. Those two decisions are usually made separately although both affect typical EMS performance measures. The service from an ambulance is usually time …

A Methodology For Designing Airports For Enhanced Security Using Simulation, Oliver Nwofia, Christopher A. Chung

Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering

With the advent of the new security measures, today’s airports have become increasingly complex and congested. Air and passenger traffic continues to increase; consequently, the need for intelligent design concepts is required. Unlike all other existing airport designs that focused exclusively on operational performance, this study focused on the development of a new airport terminal design methodology that takes a proactive approach to minimizing the effects of security disruptions while simultaneously maximizing operational performance and passenger flow. The study addressed the impact of security operations on both the design of airport facilities and passenger flows, and discussed options and scenarios …