Ramadan Buzakuk

11:00 am
November 9, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

Dynamic CMOS circuits are used in microprocessors as well as in circuits that require high speed and small area. They have many advantages but are not robust in noise tolerance in comparison with the legacy static CMOS circuits.
In this thesis several noise tolerance techniques that can be implemented with dynamic CMOS circuits for robust noise tolerance are studied. A dynamic footed with clock overlapping technique integrated with a load balancing multiple-path transistor sizing algorithm for optimizing performance of noise tolerance and speed while in consideration of process variations is presented. Using a 2-bit weighted binary-to-thermometric converter implemented in 130-nanometer CMOS process as a benchmark circuit, noise tolerance and speed measurements were conducted by Monte-Carlo simulation in process variations. The input noise tolerance for the benchmark circuit was improved by 12.5%. The worst-case delay and standard deviation in process variations were improved by 52.2% and 53.5%, respectively.

Advisor: Dr. Henry Chen

Ruolin Zhou
Advisor: Dr. Zhiqiang Wu
Date: Friday, November 4, 2011
Time: 10:00am
Location: 311RC, EE Department Conference Room
Attendance is Open to All

Abstract
Cognitive Radio (CR) has arisen to be a tempting solution to spectral crowding problem by introducing the opportunistic usage of frequency bands that are not heavily occupied by licensed users. The innovation which makes engineers see CR a possible technology is the Software Defined Radio (SDR). In this dissertation, we first design and implement an intelligent spectrum sensing engine for cognitive radio network, which can accurately estimate the primary user's RF parameters and classify the signal by modulation. Second, with the aid of the intelligent spectrum sensing engine a spectrum mask is provided; meanwhile, a multi-carrier waveform is generated based on spectrally modulated spectrally encoded (SMSE) framework. Therefore, intelligent interference avoidance SMSE-based cognitive radio is implemented and demonstrated using GNU software defined radio (SDR) platform. Third, we propose a novel total ICI cancellation scheme to eliminate the ICI of cognitive radio in high mobility environment. Specifically, we employ the SMSE framework to generate multi-carrier transmission waveforms over non-contiguous frequency bands. Combined with the spectrum sensing engine, the cognitive radio is capable of detecting the availability of each and every subcarrier in the operational bandwidth. By turning off those subcarriers occupied by the primary users, the cognitive radio implements a non-contiguous SMSE transmission. Integrated with total ICI cancellation algorithm, the cognitive radio has the ability to eliminate the ICI due to the frequency offsets caused by mobility. The SMSE-based cognitive radio node has several unique features, making it a flexible, agile, and robust cognitive radio node in mobile communication system.

Corinne Mowrey
Advisor: Dr. Pratik Parikh
Wednesday, 10/19/2011, 9:30 AM
405 Tait Conference Room

ABSTRACT
Order picking is arguably the most expensive operational activity for a distribution center (DC), constituting upwards of 50% of total operating costs. Designing an optimum order picking system (OPS) for a DC depends on several system parameters, such as aisle layout, storage system configuration, storage policy, picking method, and picking strategy. From an aisle layout standpoint, traditional DCs utilize either entirely wide or entirely narrow aisles in their picking systems. Wide aisles allow pickers to pass each other, reducing blocking and requiring fewer pickers. However, the space required for wide-aisle systems is high. Narrow aisles utilize less space than wide aisles, but are less efficient because of the high likelihood of congestion experienced by pickers. Space required for the picking area and labor required to perform picking are two significant costs for a DC's OPS. Traditional approaches focus on minimizing either space or minimizing labor rather than integrating the two objectives. We propose a variation to the traditional orthogonal aisle designs where both wide and narrow aisles are mixed within the system, anticipating that the mixed-width aisles may provide a compromise between space and labor. We develop analytical models for space and travel time for systems that employ randomized storage and traversal routing policies. We illustrate the use of these models by developing a cost-based optimization model to determine the optimal aisle configuration for specific OPSs. The objective of this model is to minimize the total system cost which was divided into two components, space and labor. Results indicate that mixed-aisles appear to be optimal for certain OPSs with randomized storage and traversal routing, with the resulting savings in total cost being as high as $48,000 over pure wide aisle systems. Additional benefits may be realized by using mixed-width aisles for other storage policies, such as class-based, and for semi-automated systems, both of which need further research.

Student: Wenhu Wang
Advisor: Dr. Maher S. Amer
Friday, 10/21/2011, 10:00 AM
399 Joshi Center

Abstract

As the interest in fluid evaporation kinetics keeps increasing, it's inevitably noticed that fullerene nanospheres play an important role on it. In this study, we investigate the C60 nanospheres' effect on the evaporation kinetics and thermal transitions of different solvents (water, chlorobenzene) over the entire range of solubility. According to distinct polarity of different solvent, fullerene solution would behave differently, the trend of increasing in evaporation rate as the concentration increased was observed in aromatic solvents while the rate kept decreasing in water. The result of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and Raman spectroscopy provided an evidence about structuring in water explaining the above phenomena. Our results are in agreement with molecular dynamic simulations and strongly support the notion of molecule structure inside the solution resulting in the observed changes in Evaporation rates and thermal transitions.

Adviser: Dr. Ramana V. Grandhi
Student: Nagesh Aithal
When: Friday, September 16, 2011, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Where: 405 Russ Center, WSU

In a globalized and highly competitive world of product design, collaboration is a necessity to leverage the expertise available among various engineering teams to meet stringent product specifications and strict product delivery schedules. Physical location of teams may span organizational firewalls and different countries. Seamless access must be provided to hundreds of design tools that are utilized by the teams during the product design. Service ORiented Computational EnviRonment (SORCER) is one of the latest inventions in the field of collaborative computational design. SORCER is a service-oriented architecture that enables grid computing through which resources necessary to conduct a particular computational task can be dynamically federated over the heterogeneous network. In this work, several organizations and institutes are teamed up to develop a next generation air vehicle concept. SORCER is used to develop a computational framework in which preliminary computational design tools that are necessary to conduct finite element analysis, reliability estimation, and tradeoff studies are mapped onto a service grid from where they can be federated on the fly during collaborative computational tasks. Developed services are demonstrated through implementation on four structural mechanics problems.

Advisors: Dr. Tarun Goswami, Dr. Bor Zeng Jang

Student: Jace Carter

When: Monday, September 12, 2011 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Where: 292 Joshi Research Center, WSU

There is an economic need to extend the fatigue life of turbine engine rotor disks. The probability of failure during the operation life must be quantified as components are extended beyond their traditional safe-life. Fracture mechanics based probabilistic methods are utilized to predict the probability of failure for components containing manufacturing and fatigue anomalies. The total fatigue life is defined as the cumulative damage of the crack initiation and propagation phases. A micromechanical initiation model uses material properties at the micro-scale to characterize the initiation phase, while short and long fatigue-crack growth models predict the crack propagation phase. A Monte Carlo simulation was used to determine the fatigue-life variability by modeling random material properties in the fatigue models. This methodology is applied to a representative + alloy (Ti-6AL-4V) fan disk to quantify the probability of failure due to manufacturing and fatigue induced anomalies. It is concluded that fatigue damage increases risk past the safe-life limit, but proper inspection planning can maintain the same risk levels in fleet life manage of disk components.

Dan Gorsky
Advisor: Dr. Ramana Grandhi
When: Friday, September 9th, 2011, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Where: 405L Russ Center, WSU

ABSTRACT

In the casting process, regions of porosity can be reduced or eliminated through the implementation of taper, or small angled additions of mass on the boundaries of the cast design, before risers are placed on the casting. Taper supplements the effect of risers so that a smaller riser volume is necessary to make a casting sound. Typically, taper is determined for a casting by using industry guidelines that were developed for simple two-dimensional simplifications of a complex casting. There is no accepted method of defining taper directly on cast geometry aside from using expert opinions to make final decisions on taper locations and size.

An optimization of taper geometries is performed on two-dimensional cast models to determine if a Niyama based optimization of taper directly on a cast design is possible. The Niyama criterion identifies small regions of solidification shrinkage that correspond to shrinkage porosity in casting simulations. The taper optimization was performed on a plate with riser model and a spindle cross section model to determine the effectiveness of the optimization method for multiple geometries. This work concludes that taper optimization based on Niyama constraints is possible and effective, but care must be taken when determining the design space of the taper. It was found that the surface cooling rates of a casting can identify effective regions to taper so that optimizations can yield optimum rather than sufficient solutions.

Nicholas C. Gale

Advisor: Dr. Lang Hong

Date: Friday, September 9, 2011
Time: 10:00 AM
Location: Joshi Center 292, Brandeberry Conference Room
Attendance is Open to All

Abstract

Modern FMCW radar technology provides us the ability to modify the transmission frequency of the system as function of time, which in turn provides the ability to generate multiple output waveforms from a single radar unit. Current low-power multi-waveform FMCW radar techniques lack the ability to reliably associate measurements from the various waveform sections in the presence of multiple targets within the field-of-view. Two approaches are developed to address this problem. The first approach takes advantage of the relationships between the waveform segments to generate a weighting function for candidate combinations of measurements from the waveform sections. This weighting function can then be used to choose the best candidate combinations to form a set of polar-coordinate measurements. The polar measurements derived from this association process are then used as inputs into a tracking framework for roadside surveillance. The second approach models the multi-waveform FMCW radar as a set of independent sensors and uses distributed data fusion to fuse estimates from those individual sensors within a tracking structure. Tracking in this approach is performed directly with the raw frequency and angle measurements from the waveform segments removing the need for data association between the measurements from the individual waveform segments. A distributed data fusion model is used again to modify the radar tracking systems to include a video sensor to provide additional angular and identification information into the system. The combination of the radar and vision sensors form a roadside tracking system. Simulated as well as experimental data are used to both validate the system models and to test the performance of the tracking systems.

Student: Ahmed Hassan
Advisor: Dr. Amir Farajian
When: Friday, September 2, 2011, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Where: 292 Joshi Research Center, WSU

Nanosensors, i.e., sensors based on nanomaterials, have the potential of superior performance owing to their size effect, and can have significant effects on detection of pollutants in the environment. Here we investigate the possibility of NO2 and Li detection using the quantum conductance change in graphene nanoribbon. The optimized structures of the adsorbed NO2 indicated two different geometries where either nitrogen or oxygen was closer to the graphene lattice. As for Li, the optimized adsorption location was at the zigzag edge and above the center of a hexagon (hollow site). The quantum conductance calculations for NO2 adsorption showed semiconductor-to-metal transformation and gap modification for the two adsorption geometries. In the case of Li adsorption, the gap remained almost the same as that of pristine graphene nanoribbon, however, the pseudo-gap was widened upon Li adsorption. These effects are detectable and explain the basis for nanosensor effect in graphene nanoribbons, with superior sensitivity and selectivity.

Aijing Wang

Thesis Advisor: Thomas N. Hangartner, Ph.D.

Co-Advisor: David F. Short, M.S.

Date: Monday, August 29, 2011, 1:00 pm

Place: Tait Conference Room (405 Russ)

Abstract

To allow automatic assessment of computed tomography (CT) images of long bones, the identification of the location of regions of interest is important. The distance between the distal and proximal styloids may act as reference points for bone length; however, the locations of the distal and proximal growth plates represent further important reference features. The current methods to locate these features are manual. In this project, we attempt to find these features automatically.

A CT data set was split into two subsets, a test set, and a validation set. We first extracted basic information from the stack and re-sequenced the slices from proximal to distal in the pre-task. A calibration phantom and its compartments are automatically located. Calibration equations are used to adjust all intensity information to a common scale. For segmentation, three methods were used to detect the region of interest (tibia and radius): Search-Box, Search-Outline and Center Compare-Outline. These methods track the bone of interest from midshaft to both distal and proximal styloids with an outline and extract information such as slice-based region of interest (ROI) area, intensity, intensity standard deviation, trabecular bone density, center of bone etc. Using this information, with the assumption that the area relationship between inner growth plate and midshaft won't change much, the position of the end of the growth plate directed to the midshaft is detected. Further, the position of the styloids relative to the growth-plate position is estimated.

The contour success rates for the ROI for Search-Box, Search-Outline and Center Compare-Outline were 81.9%, 84.7% and 91.5% for legs and 63%, 83% and 89.3% for arms, respectively. The success rates for the growth-plate position estimation for Search-Box, Search-Outline and Center Compare-Outline were 20%, 77.5% and 85% for the leg test set and 10.5%, 64% and 74% for the leg validation set. The success rates for the arm test set was 11%, 67% and 53% and for the arm validation set 6%, 50% and 45%, respectively.

The Center Compare-Outline is the best method for its high success rate for contour and feature position estimation. It doesn't rely on the orientation of the bone as the other methods do. The whole stack gets analyzed satisfactorily while only one threshold based on the center slice is used.

One strength of our method is its automaticity. It only requires a small amount of manual input to assign the distal-proximal direction and to give each bone a seed point; the rest is done automatically. Sometimes there are errors in the growth-plate search process, so visual assessment of the result with possible manual correction is still needed.

Advisors: Dr. George Huang, Dr. Joseph Shang
Student: Caleb Barnes

When: Monday, August 29, 2011 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where: 292 Joshi Research Center, WSU

A numerical simulation procedure for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations capable of variable order accuracy and high-order shock capturing was developed. High-order resolution was achieved using orthogonal polynomial refinement on a Gauss-Lobatto grid. Steep grading phenomena such as shocks are resolved using artificial dissipation and low-pass spatial filters. An adaptive polynomial refinement procedure was implemented to automatically refine the solution in under-resolved regions. Numerical simulations were performed for test cases including a shock-tube problem and shock-entropy wave interaction. Oscillation-free high-order shock capturing was demonstrated and adaptive refinement was shown to produce increasingly accurate results on very course meshes. Future work will include extensions to multi-dimensions and improved artificial dissipation terms.

Advisor: Dr. Tarun Goswami
Student: Mbulelo Makola, BS.

When: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 10:00 AM-11:30 AM
Where: 2200 Conference Room, Miami Valley Hospital, Dayton, OH

A finite element model of the cervical spine including the C2 through C7 levels was developed in order to study the behavior of the cervical spine region. The model was validated in flexion extension, bending, and rotational load scenarios. The model was found to acceptably represent the biomechanical behavior of the cervical spine. The validated cervical spine finite element model was used to study spinal injury and disease processes. The model provided qualitative estimates of load carrying and stress distribution as well as range of motion.

Date: Friday, August 12, 2011 - 8:30 am

Location: 499 Joshi Research Center

Cmt Mbrs: Shaojun Wang, Advisor
Keke Chen
Xinhui Zhang

ABSTRACT

In machine translation, N-gram model is one of the most essential methods to compute probability. As a N-gram model, the probability of word N could be predicted by the N-1 previous word. In another way of saying, the probability of each word is associated to the probability of the whole words sequence.

PLSA stands for Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis. A PLSA model is also a latent variable model. It includes an unnoticed topic with expression of data that happens at the same time. Each word is in a particular document. What we are doing is to combine N-gram and PLSA together with EM algorithm into a fitting model. By directed Mark Random Field, we achieve the goal of investigating this combination of PLSA and N-gram. In a distributed system experiment, we successfully trained as large-scale data as 1.3 billion token corpus. Moreover, we implement a composite of PLSA and 5-gram instead of a trigram. And also, realizing high reduction on perplexity based on N-gram baseline while we exactly improve BLEU score when re-ranking.

Date: Thursday, August 18, 2011 – 3:00 pm

Location:  399 Joshi Research Center

Cmt Mbrs:  Meilin Liu, Advisor
Jack Jean
T.K. Prasad

ABSTRACT

With the limitations given by the power consumption (power wall), memory
wall and the instruction level parallelism, the computing industry has
turned its direction to multi-core architectures. Nowadays, the
multi-core and many-core architectures are becoming the trend of the
processor design. But how to exploit these architectures is the primary
challenge for the research community. To take advantage of the
multi-core architectures, the software design has undergone fundamental
changes.

Sorting is a fundamental, important problem in computer science. It is
utilized in many applications such as databases and search engines. In
this thesis, we will investigate and auto-tune two parallel sorting
algorithms, i.e., radix sort and sample sort on two parallel
architectures, the many-core nVIDIA CUDA enabled graphics processors,
and the multi-core Cell Broadband Engine. We redesign and manually tune
these two parallel sorting algorithms to take advantage of
multiple-level parallelism simultaneously, i.e., thread level
parallelism, loop level parallelism, data level parallelism (SIMD
instructions). At the same time, we try to take advantage of the
high-speed shared memory. The experimental results showed that the
parallel implementation of these two sorting algorithms on these two
multi-core architectures achieved significant performance improvement
compared to the corresponding sequential version.

Xida Sun

3:00 am
August 16, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

One of the key factors of a lithium ion battery to have high energy storage capacity is its anode material. Silicon-based anode becomes very promising for its highest capacity (4200mAh/g) among all the existing anodes. The major problem is the up to 300% volume expansion after intercalation of Li atoms in the silicon anode. In this thesis, I developed and demonstrated that macro porous silicon used as anode can incorporate large amount of Li atoms without fracturing, making it a prime candidate for the anode in Li ion batteries.
Porous silicon was fabricated by using electrochemical anodisation in a solution consisting of Dimethylformamide (DMF) and Hydrofluoric acid (HF wt.49%). By varying the anodization conditions, such as HF concentration, anodization etching time and current density, pores with large aspect ratio up to 100:1 were formed in a p-type (1-20Ohm cm) doped silicon substrate. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) was employed to investigate the morphology of the pores (pore distribution, diameter and depth). The volume percentage of porous silicon wall was calculated by Finite Element Analysis (OOF2). It turns out that the 27.5 % of volume is counted as the wall structure of pore.
The Li insertion capability of porous silicon film anodes is investigated by cyclic voltammetry method (CV) and small constant current discharge/charge analysis. The PS anode shows high cycling stability, manifested by the unchanged porous structure after 10 charge-discharge cycles. As increase of the depth of the pores, the specific capacity increases due to the enlarged surface area. Specific capacity up to 1150mAh/g was achieved. Further increase of the capacity was limited by the penetrability of the electrolyte through the PS structure.

Advisor: Dr. Yan Zhuang

Date: Friday, August 12, 2011 - 10:00 am

Location: 399 Joshi Research Center

Cmt Mbrs: John Gallagher, Advisor
Mateen Rizki
Michael Raymer

ABSTRACT

This thesis investigates the use of an artificial neural network (ANN), in particular a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), to perform function approximation on truth data representing a weapon engagement zone's (WEZ) maximum launch range of a simulated air-to-air missile. The WEZ of an air-to-air missile represents the boundaries and zones of effectiveness for a one-vs-one air-to-air combat engagement [13]. The intent is for the network to fuse table lookup and interpolation functionality into a physically compact and computationally efficient package, while improving approximation accuracy over conventional methods.

In addition to describing new research, this thesis will provide background on WEZs, ANNs, and a review of superficially similar efforts already in the literature. The resulting best network was able to improve approximation accuracy and reduce the amount of truth data needed. With basic feasibility established, future efforts can be focused on more comprehensive comparisons with existing methods and deployment within practical models.

By: Ramzi Ammari

Date: Monday, August 15, 2011 - 11: am

Location: 399 Joshi Research Center

Cmt Mbrs: Jack Jean, Advisor
Yong Pei
Meilin Liu

ABSTRACT

Fall related injuries are the leading cause of death and hospitalization among the elderly. Falls among older people become a major problem facing hospitals and nursing homes. In this study, we put an effort to design a wireless device capable of detecting falls with the hope that this study will provide a path towards better healthcare monitoring and better independent living for the elderly.

In this project, I showed how the fall detection device can be interfaced with different systems to achieve functionality without adding extra cost. For seniors who prefer to stay at their homes and live independently, the device can communicate with their smart phone to request help if needed. For hospitals and nursing homes, an infrared receiver and infrared signals decoding algorithms were implemented to interface with FastFind software to keep track of the location of the residents who fall or request help. There is also an option of having a live video feed from the specific room where the fall was detected.

Prashanth Muppala

10:00 am
August 11, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

This thesis presents a high-frequency wide tuning range all digital phase locked loop (ADPLL) designed using a 90 nm CMOS process with 1.2 V power supply. It operates in the frequency range of 1.9 - 7.8 GHz with wide linearity and high resolution. The ADPLL uses a wide frequency range digital controlled oscillator (DCO) and averaging technique to obtain fast lock time. The operation of the ADPLL includes both a frequency acquisition state and a phase acquisition state. A novel architecture is implemented in a coarse stage to obtain a monotonically increasing wide frequency range DCO for frequency acquisition and a fine control stage is used to achieve resolution of 0.1 MHz for phase tracking and maintenance. Design considerations of the ADPLL circuit components and implementation using Cadence tools are presented. Spectre simulations demonstrate a significant improvement compared to recent architectures with a peak-to-peak jitter value of 15 ps and a root mean square value of 4 ps when locked at 5.12 GHz. The power consumption at 7.8 GHz is 8 mW and the locking time is 3.5 us.

Advisor: Dr. Saiyu Ren

It is important to understand the anatomy of the cervical spine to help diagnose diseases,
deformity, injury, and develop new devices if surgical intervention was warranted. This research
elucidates an anthropometric study carried out from the computer tomography images of trauma
patients that entered the Miami Valley Hospital, Dayton, OH. The literature categorizes the study
in terms of measuring cadavers, X-rays, and using other imaging techniques. Since the literature
consists of linear and angular measurements, present study used those techniques. Subject
demography, such as race and gender, influences the anthropometric measurements and therefore
is a key feature in the design of race or gender specific devices. The vertebrae segments were
sized in terms of area and moment of inertia and compared with published data. Statistical
analysis was performed to the published data, which revealed 128 of 3000 and 133 of 2760
comparisons were significant. Similar trends were found to the measurement carried out with the
CT data for this research. Parametric relationships were summarized. A computer program was
developed to predict the anthropometric features.

By Ming Tan

Friday, August 12, 2011 - 3:00 pm
399 Joshi

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Shaojun Wang, (advisor), Amit Sheth,
Keke Chen, T.K. Prasad, and Xinhui Zhang, (BIE)

This defense is open to the public

ABSTRACT:

The Author proposes the research of building large scale distributed language models (LSDLM) using a rigorous approach that simultaneously accounts for the word lexical information, sentence syntactic structure, and document semantic content to substantially improve the performance of large-scale machine translation (MT) system. Author's current study has shown very promising experimental results.

LSDLM has achieved up to 35% reduction on Perplexity(PPL), while the N-best reranking on state-of-art MT system output obtains approximate 0.8% BlEU score improvement. The future work concentrates on the methods of integrating LSDLM with Koehn's phrase-based decoder and Chiang's syntax-based decoder.

Thomas Spradlin

Advisor: Dr. Ramana V. Grandhi

Tuesday, August 2nd, 1:00 PM

148 Russ Center

ABASTRACT:
Mechanical surface enhancement techniques have been used to successfully
increase the fatigue life of metallic components. These techniques impart compressive
surface residual stresses that reduce the tensile stresses experienced during service
loading. Laser Peening (LP) is a surface enhancement technique that uses high intensity,
short duration laser pulses to create plastic shockwaves in metallic components.
Experimental investigations and limited simulation studies have been conducted to
determine the effects on the fatigue life of simple coupons when key LP parameters are
varied. Used primarily in the aerospace and biomedical engineering fields, LP has been
limited to industries that can afford its currently high development and processing costs.
Reducing these costs requires that LP simulations, which currently require tremendous
amounts of computational power and time due to their complexity, become more time
effective and user accessible. This work seeks to address these needs by reducing the
overall simulation time of large surface LP processing. The first objective of this work is
to reduce the simulation time of an individual LP shot by furthering the development of
an extended duration explicit Finite Element Analysis method. Error between the new
method and the accepted analysis method is calculated to demonstrate the viability of the
new approach. The second objective is to reduce the simulation time of large LP patterns.
A symmetry cell approach is developed and used to create a base unit of an LP shot
pattern, which is used to reproduce the pattern over a large surface. The last objective is
to investigate the effects that the sequencing of LP shots within a pattern can have upon
the fatigue life of the component. Due to interactions between adjacent LP shots, the most
recent shot in an LP pattern will have the largest compressive stresses. By sequencing the
shots in a particular order, the fatigue life of a component can be increased over that of a
generic pattern.

by

Yen-Pin Chen

7:30 pm July 26, 2011

Done by video conference from Chung Yuan Christian University (CYCU) in Chung Li, Taiwan

146 Russ Engineering Building

Advisor: Dr. James A. Menart

Abstract:
Wind energy is an abundant natural resource that people have been trying to tap in recent decades. More and more wind turbines are being built to solve the world's energy shortage problem. For a wind turbine, power extracted from the wind by the rotor and the torque applied to the wind turbine blades are important issues in the design process. Thus there is a need to predict the performance of wind turbine blades using computer modeling. This work shows the results of a computational fluid dynamic simulation developed to predict the air flow field and associated aerodynamic quantities around the moving blades of a wind turbine.

The commercial software package SolidWorks is used to construct the geometrical model. Two commercial CFD codes, SC/Tetra and Fluent, are used to do the fluid simulations. This work was performed in two phases. First a two-dimensional airfoil simulation was modeled to investigate the aerodynamic coefficients CL, CD, and CP for the S809 airfoil. Validation of the CFD model was also examined. The second phase of this modeling work was a three-dimensional model of the flow around the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory's) Phase VI wind turbine rotor. This is a horizontal axis wind turbine with two blades using S809 airfoils. In the three-dimensional model both blades, including rotation, are simulated. Power extracted from the wind by the rotor, torque on the blades due to the wind, pressure distributions on the blades, and air flow velocity distributions around the blades are results presented in this work. Comparisons are made to experimentally obtained results and to others computational results. In general, these comparisons are good. It is believed that some improvements in the computational model over other investigators have been made.

Using this computational tool a detailed study of the effect of yaw angle on power extraction and blade torque is performed. Results are presented for yaw angles of 0, 10, 20, 30, and 60 and wind speeds of 7m/s, 10m/s, 13m/s, 15m/s, 20m/s, and 25m/s. These results indicate that yaw angles up to 20% do not cause more than a 23% reduction in power extraction. This indicates that wind turbines do not have to be perfectly aligned with the wind for optimum operation. At times it may be difficult to align the wind turbine with the wind direction because of rapidly changing wind directions.

Advisor: Dr. Tarun Goswami

Student: Isaac Mabe, BS.

When: Tuesday, July 26, 2011 4:15 PM-5:45 PM

Where: 2200 Conference Room, Miami Valley Hospital, Dayton, OH.

Cortical bone is a porous structure. The presence of these pores creates the possibility of a local overstressed area that has the likelihood of premature failure. Some failure modes of the vertebral endplates, for example subsidence which occurs at rates as high as 77 percent, can be better predicted with further understanding of failure mechanisms and the ability to predict those mechanisms. A probabilistic assessment of the pore size and its contribution to the fracture toughness has not been investigated in the cortical shell of the vertebral endplates. This research develops a probabilistic model that has the ability to determine the fracture toughness of a deterministic cortical bone sample versus the probability of exceeding the crack length that causes failure. Also the model can compare the crack size limit to the thickness of cortical bone present. The work presented is a novel approach to determining probabilistic fracture toughness of vertebral cortical bone.

Advisors: Dr. Ramana Grandhi, Wright State University

Dr. Arif Malik, Saint Louis University

Wednesday, July 20, 2011, 3:30 PM

292 Joshi Research Center

ABSTRACT

With the increase in demand for high quality thin gauge metals, improvements to control systems that monitor strip characteristics must first be acquired. During the rewinding of sheet metal, little insight is known as to what stresses are attributed to the actual winding process, not simply those induced by the mill. When winding effects become too severe they will alter control system readings, prompting the need for a rapid model that can predict winding effects and filter them from current control systems. This research develops a new method to determine a 4th order Airy function that rapidly predicts the 2D stress state of the strip and allows for the filtering of winding effects efficiently and accurately. By using curve fits and function approximations, a polynomial equation can be used to predict the stress field without large scale finite elements or cumbersome Fourier series solutions. The new method is compared to finite element analysis results as well as industry data. Future implementation of winding effects can reduce scrap and unwanted surface defects that lower the overall quality of the finished product.

Matthew Riley
Advisor: Dr. Ramana V. Grandhi
Tuesday, 7/19/2011, 9:00 AM
145 Russ Center

ABSTRACT:
Traditional uncertainty quantification techniques in simulation-based analysis and design focuses solely upon on the quantification of parametric uncertainties--inherent natural variations of the input variables. However, in problems with complex or newer modeling methodologies, the variabilities induced by the modeling process itself--known collectively as model-form and predictive uncertainty--can becomesignificant, if not greater source of uncertainty to the problem. As such, for efficient and accurate uncertainty measurements, it is necessary to consider the effects of these two additional forms of uncertainty along with the inherent parametric uncertainty. Additionally, the quantification of these two additional forms of uncertainty can require the introduction of additional data into the problem--such as experimental data--which might not be available for particular designs and configurations, especially in the early design-stage. As such, methods must be developed for the efficient quantification of uncertainties from all sources, as well as from all permutations of sources to handle problems wherefull array of input data is unavailable. This work develops and applies methods for the quantification of these uncertainties with specific application to the simulation-based analysis of aeroelastic structures.

Jason Monnin
Advisor: Dr. Ping He
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
2:00 - 3:00 PM
Tait Conference Room, 405 Russ

Abstract:

Current physiologically-driven operator cognitive state assessment technology relies primarily on electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. Traditionally, gel-based electrodes have been used. However, the application of gel-based electrodes on the scalp requires expertise and a significant amount of preparation time. Additionally, discomfort can occur from the abrasion of the scalp during preparation, and the electrolyte will also begin to dry out over extended periods of time. These drawbacks have hindered operator state assessment technology from transitioning into an operational environment. QUASAR, Inc., (San Diego, CA) has developed a prototype dry electrode system for electroencephalography that requires minimum preparation. A comparison of the dry electrode system to traditional wet electrodes is presented. The results show that initially the EEG recorded by the dry electrode system was quite similar to that recorded by the wet electrodes, but the similarity decreased over a period of eight months. In the application of the cognitive state assessment, the dry electrodes were able to achieve a classification accuracy that is similar to that achieved by the wet electrodes, with no decrease in accuracy over time. The results suggest the dry electrode system is capable of recording electroencephalographic signals to be used in cognitive state assessment, and aid in the transition of that technology into an operational environment. Further work should be conducted to determine the reason why the similarity between recorded EEG from the two systems decreased over time.

Sheena Wallace-Finney

Advisor: Dr. Pratik Parikh

Friday, 7/15/2011, 2:30 PM
405 Russ (Tait)

ABSTRACT

Many companies use distribution centers (DC) as hubs for storing and distributing products to customers (e.g., wholesalers, retailers, or consumers). Order picking, a critical activity in every DC, refers to retrieving products from storage locations to fulfill customer orders. It accounts for over 50% of the DC operating cost. Order picking system design involves several decisions, such as layout of the picking area, storage policy, picking method, material handling equipment, and information technology, to name a few. Aisle configuration (number, length, width, and orientation) is a critical layout decision as it directly affects picker productivity and required space. Previous research in picking system layout optimization has focused on number and orientation of picking aisles, but not on the selection of an appropriate aisle-width (wide or narrow). Wide aisles require more space, but experience less congestion; in contrast, narrow aisles require less space, but may induce congestion among pickers. Congestion leads to a reduction in picker productivity, thus increasing labor cost to satisfy required system throughput. Our focus in this research is in determining the optimal aisle-width by evaluating the cost (labor and space) tradeoffs between wide-aisle and narrow-aisle system configurations for both manual and semi-automated systems. We propose a cost-based optimization model and use previously developed travel-time and picker-blocking models in solving the optimization model. We account for several system parameters, such as space and labor costs, throughput, system size, number of aisles, storage levels, and items picked in a tour in our experimentation. Our results indicate a preference for wide-aisle systems when cost of labor and required throughput are high, while they indicate a preference for narrow-aisle systems when cost of space and number of storage locations are high.

Agasthya Ayachit

11:00 am
July 15, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

Resonant DC-DC converters play an important role in applications that operate at high-frequencies. Their advantages over those of pulse-width modulated (PWM) DC-DC converter have led to the invention of several topologies over the traditional forms of these converters. Series resonant converter is the subject of study in this thesis. By variation in the switching frequency of the transistor switches, the optimum operating points can be achieved. Hence, the steady-state frequency-domain analysis of the series resonant converter is performed. The operational and characteristic differences between the series resonant and parallel resonant and series-parallel resonant configurations are highlighted. In order to understand the converter response for fluctuations in their input or control parameters, modeling of these converters becomes essential. Many modeling techniques perform analysis only in frequency-domain. In this thesis, the extended describing function method is used, which implements both frequency-domain and time-domain analysis. Based on the first harmonic approximation, the steady-state variables are derived. Perturbing the steady-state model about their operating point, a large-signal model is developed. Linearization is performed on the large-signal model extracting the small-signal converter state variables. From the set of differential equations expressed in the form of transfer matrix, the theoretical small-signal transfer functions are plotted using MATLAB. Finally, a design example is provided in order to evaluate the steady-state parameters. The converter is simulated using SABER circuit simulation software and the steady-state parameters are plotted to validate the steady-state parameters. It is observed that the theoretical steady-state values agrees with the simulated results obtained using SABER.

Advisor: Dr. Marian Kazimierczuk

Hema Vijwani
Advisor: Dr. Sharmila M. Mukhopadhyay
When: Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:00 AM - 1:00PM
Where: 292 Joshi Research Center, WSU.
ABSTRACT
The effectiveness of metal-based catalysts can be significantly enhanced by increasing the available surface area relative to the volume through the creation of hierarchical nanostructures. The catalyst demonstrated here is palladium, which is a widely recognized heterogeneous catalyst suitable for a variety of industrial applications such as water purification, hydrogen storage, and electrochemical devices. In this study, a novel multi-scale supporting material developed in this laboratory has been used as a support. It consists of micro-porous graphitic carbon with strongly attached carbon nanotubes. This can increase the surface area by orders of magnitude without increasing the size or weight while still maintaining structural integrity. This allows miniaturization of palladium catalysts structures that are lighter, smaller and offer higher catalytic activity than conventional ones. Several fabrication issues of these structures have been successfully addressed. Detailed micro-structural as well as spectroscopic analysis of the nanoparticles have been performed. Variations of nanoparticle distribution with processing conditions, and the possible ways of controlling this distribution will be presented. Surface spectroscopic analysis indicates that these are metallic zerovalent palladium and do not degrade with time.
The catalytic activity of palladium nanoparticles has been tested via bench-scale experiments for reductive dechlorination of carbon tetrachloride (CT). It is seen that Pd-CNT catalyst is highly effective in the degradation/treatment of CT and similar organic pollutants found commonly in drinking water sources. It was also demonstrated that Pd-CNT can be used repeatedly as the valence state of Pd does not change, and thus can be cost-effective.
Possible impacts of these results on future energy and environmental applications have been discussed.

Advisor: Dr. Tarun Goswami
Student: Dishita Patel
When: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
Where: 2200 Conference Room, Miami Valley Hospital, Dayton, OH.

Abstract
The objective of this investigation is to determine the optimum positions of the prosthesis in total hip arthroplasty that produce least amount of impingement. Theoretical ranges of six basic hip motions were determined under walking, stumbling, internal rotation at 90 flexion and external rotation at 0 extension with 15 abduction, using mathematical models and validated for impingement using finite element analysis. A generalized approach, where impingement does not occur, was developed in this study to understand influence of cup-stem oreintations such as cup inclination, cup anteversion, and stem antetorsion on the design parameters such as head-neck ratio, neck-shaft angle, oscillation angle, and stem offset. Stems with head-neck ratio lower than 2.3 and neck shaft angle greater than 135 did not impinge. For impingement free range of motion, cups should be anteverted more when stems with high neck shaft angle are combined with low stem offset and antetorsion.

I.Iramnaaz

2:00
June 21, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

Biosensors are experiencing a rapidly expanding period due to their potential broad applications in detection of disease and infectious agents, and in monitoring of environmental toxins, etc. Recognition and quantification of biochemical molecule and molecular interactions present great challenges in biosensing.Impedance sensing in the radio frequency (RF) /microwave frequency regime becomes very attractive, in part because bio-molecules exhibit rather large and distinct dielectric properties, and in part because the ionic contributed conductivity of water in most physiological systems is greatly diminished. For instance, it has been reported that tumoral cells exhibit larger values of electrical conductivity and permittivity than normal cells which results in the significant variation of impedance.
The dynamic processes occurring in microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic organisms play key roles in device sensing and can be effectively monitored by impedance characterization. Graphene and its derivatives have attracted much attention for potential applications in biological sensing systems because of their unique 2D structural, surface and electronic properties. In this approach, on-chip integrated impedance bio-sensors are demonstrated using coplanar waveguides (CPWs) as the sensing platform. Absorption of chemicals like Chitosan and DNA on graphene /graphene derivatives leads to remarkable blue-shift of the resonant frequencies. Substrate complex permittivity is extracted from momentum simulations (ADS). The imaginary part of the permittivity indicates significant leakage currents in the graphene/graphene derivatives, Chitosan, and DNA.
In this thesis, a proof-concept of transmission line based RF/microwave frequency has been reported for impedance bio-/chemical-sensor. The results show that adding biomolecules to graphene oxide coated CPW sensors caused significant blue-shift in the resonance frequency and the decrease of the resistance onset of the resonant frequencies, reflecting the change of the complex permittivity of the attached biomolecules. The enabling of registering both the real and imaginary parts of the dielectric constant at RF/microwave frequencies suggests that it is possible to use this approach to detect biomolecules. The experimental results obtained has been verified by performing the 2D simulation. Thus, this method can effectively be used in identification and detection of existing or emerging pathogenic microorganisms, unknown toxins, and viral threat agents.

Advisor: Dr. Yan Zhuang

Veera Venkata Sunil Kumar Vytla
Advisors: Dr. George Huang, Dr. Ravi Penmetsa
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
1:00pm, 292 Joshi Research Center

ABSTRACT

High speed trains are the most efficient means of public transportation. With the increase in speed number of issues related to efficiency, safety and comfort like the aerodynamic drag, structural strength, as well as the noise levels inside and outside of the train etc. need to be considered in the design of high speed trains. There are a large number of parameters from different disciplines that need to be tuned to identify the best design. Evolutionary algorithms have been used extensively in the engineering design optimization problems, but they suffer from a drawback of lack of robustness. One of the objectives of this research is to address the robustness issue of currently available optimization algorithms. A hybrid GA-PSO algorithm combining the benefits of both the GA and PSO algorithms is proposed in this research. The computer simulations required to complete the optimization of this problem are expensive both in terms of computational resources as well as time. To minimize the computational effort an adaptive surrogate model based on kriging was proposed to be used in the optimization process. The optimization algorithm combined with the adaptive surrogate modeling technique is tested on Branin function and was found to be robust and efficient.
The optimization of a high speed train is an MDO problem. MDO problem can be simplified significantly if the problem can be decoupled thereby reducing the complexity of the problem. The objectives considered while finding the optimum design of the high speed train are aerodynamic drag for efficiency, structural strength for safety, and generated noise for human comfort. The objective for comfort, noise levels both inside and outside the train can be used as a decoupling objective between the shape and structural optimizations. The optimization is performed sequentially, first step involves performing the shape optimization which identifies the optimum aerodynamic shape and structural optimization is performed on the optimum shape to identify the structure strong enough to withstand the aerodynamic loads with the least mass.

Michael J. Findler
Advisor: Dr. S. Narayanan, Ph.D., P.E.
Thursday, June 9th 2011
1.00 PM in 146 Russ Center

Abstract

In many complex systems, such as nuclear power plants, etc., human decision makers are
required to make critical decisions in a time-pressured environment. Typically, most of these
applications are dynamic and uncertain and require humans making supervisory control
decisions through monitoring, re-planning, troubleshooting, and control. Due to the critical
nature of decision making, human operators are responsible for the safe and efficient operation
of these applications. However, problems remain, such as increased human error, lack of
situational awareness, and opacity from poorly automated systems, particularly in scenarios
where human operators must make decisions in time-pressured planning.

A key aspect of overcoming these problems is to effectively couple human decision makers
with the computerized systems through user interface design. Context-free research, i.e., research
on 'best' menu structure or set of colors for display screens, is not typically useful in enhancing
operator or system performance in which operators are well motivated. Research on interface
design for complex systems for example, demonstrates that semantic issues such as display
content, level of abstraction, visual momentum across windows, etc., quickly dominate the
effects of the primarily syntactic aspects of the human-computer interface.

While there are broad guidelines for display or user interface design, creating effective
human-computer interfaces for complex, dynamic systems control is challenging. Ad hoc
approaches which consider the human as an afterthought are limiting. This research used a
systematic approach to human / computer interface design that focused on the semantic and
syntactic aspects of display design in the context of human-in-the-loop supervisory control of
intelligent, autonomous multi-agent simulated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

For the practical designer, this research developed a systematic, iterative design process:
design using cognitively sensitive principles, test the new interface in a laboratory situation;
bring in subject matter experts to examine the interface in isolation; and finally, incorporate the
resulting feedback into a full-size simulation. At each one of these steps, the operator, the
engineer and the designer reexamined the results. This presented the operator a more complete
feel for the complex system, and one that evolved with the operator's experience. Individual user
interface components were empirically examined before acceptance into the integrated global
design. This research presents a practical framework that can be systematically applied to the
designing and producing of cognitively sensitive displays in complex, dynamic control systems.

Date: Friday, June 10, 2011

Time: 3:00 PM

Location: 399 Joshi Research Center

Team: Ken Gnau, Randy Woods, and Dave Hall

Advisor: Dr. Thomas Hartrum

Sponsor: Xetron

Abstract

Our Team Project goal has been to research the feasibility and possible implementation of a mesh wireless network using the ZigBee protocol stack and Ad hoc On Demand-Distance Vector routing algorithm (AODV). ZigBee is a personal area network specification based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard that provides low cost and low power consumption communication devices. Its raw data throughput has a maximum of 240kb/s when operating at 2.4 GHz and a range of 10 to 100 meters.

During the implementation phase our team has designed a mesh sensor network comprising of 4 nodes that can pass text messages from end device to coordinator node and also the ability to pass text messages and image files from a network of two network nodes. Our team has the ability to adjust the transmission power settings of the network to allow for setup indoors and outdoors.
This presentation is open to the public.

Christopher Marks
Advisor: Dr. Mitch Wolff
9:00 AM, June 13, 2011, 154 Russ Center

Abstract

Boundary layer separation at Low Reynolds number causes reduced aerodynamic performance in a variety of applications such as MAVs, UAVs, and turbomachinery. The inclusion of a boundary layer separation control system offers a way to improve efficiency in conditions that would otherwise result in poor performance. Many effective passive and active boundary layer control methods exist. Active methods offer the ability to turn on, off, or adjust parameters of the flow control system with either an open loop or closed loop control strategy using sensors. This research investigates the use of a unique sensor called Surface Stress Sensitive Film (S3F) in a closed loop, low Reynolds number separation control system. S3F is an elastic film that responds to flow pressure gradients and shear stress along its wetted surface, allowing optical measurement of wall pressure and skin friction. A new method for installing the S3F sensor to assure a smooth interface between the wall and wetted S3F surface was investigated using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) techniques. A Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) plasma actuator is used to control laminar boundary layer separation on an Eppler 387 airfoil over a range of low Reynolds numbers. Several different DBD plasma actuator electrode configurations were fabricated and characterized in an open loop configuration to verify separation control of the boundary layer. The open loop study led to the choice of a spanwise array of steady linear vertical jets generated by DBD plasma as the control system flow effecter. Operation of the plasma actuator resulted in a 33% reduction in section drag coefficient and reattachment of an otherwise separated boundary layer. The dissertation culminates with an experimental demonstration of S3F technology integrated with a control system and flow effecter for closed loop, low Reynolds number separation control. A simple On/Off controller and proportional integral (PI) controller was used to close the control loop.

LADAR Mapping Program

Date: Thursday, June 9, 2011

Time: 4:00 PM

Location: 399 Joshi Research Center

Team: Stuart Miller, Joe Gerhardt, and Adam Oroszi

Advisor: Dr. Thomas Hartrum

Sponsor: Air Force Research Lab

Abstract

LADAR is remote sensing data collected by measuring distance by return times from specialized laser equipment. These data are typically captured by satellite imagery or unmanned aerial vehicles. Using this data, a 3D visual model can be created of an area of interest for analysis. The model is significant to intelligence analysts because it can provide a high-resolution 3D recreation of a geographic area. The goal of this project is to write a program that interprets this data and creates the 3D model.

This presentation is open to the public

Yogendra Patil

2:00 pm
June 9, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

Global Positioning System (GPS) plays a vital role for providing localization to the autonomous robots. But the quality of the GPS signal degrades in an indoor location and hence GPS cannot be used for indoor localization. Cricket motes are location-aware system that can provide localization service to its users in an indoor location. Cricket motes apply the acoustic ranging technique to find distance between two points. But before a user can use this localization system, assigning a coordinate system to the motes requires manual assistance. This project presents a novel algorithm for self-mapping of the cricket motes when positioned around a rectangular field. The initial mapping of the cricket motes is performed using the trilateration technique so as to get a rough estimate of their position. Then, the logic of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm is applied to obtain positioning accuracy within 5 cm.

Advisor: Dr. Kuldip Rattan

Sustaining attention or vigilance over time often leads to declines in performance referred to as the vigilance decrement. A brain stimulation technology called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) may reduce this decrement. To practically use such technology, however, a model is necessary that provides an indication of vigilance performance, both when stimulation is being applied and not applied. To address this issue, data from a previous study using tDCS was utilized to develop models to predict vigilance performance. The "all possible combinations" regression method produced over 200 models, later screened to 10. The model with the best average %error (8.62 +/- 0.10) used left hemispheric cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFVL) as its sole input term--accounting for approximately 95.7% of the performance variability (linear best-fit slope of 0.8585). When applied to the control stimulation condition, the model had an average %error of 13.40 +/- 0.12 and linear best-fit slope of 0.9278. Such results suggest that CBFVL may be useful as a vigilance performance metric during tDCS applications.

Songling Zhao

3:30 pm
June 8, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

Because wind is a clean and renewable energy, it is in highly demand as an alternative resource of fossil fuels for our daily power supply. Thus, wind turbine technology is wildly applied to convert the wind energy to electrical power. With the size of the wind turbines increased, the maintenance cost of the wind turbines also goes up. Fault diagnosis can significantly helps wind turbines to: reduce the maintenance cost, the machinery breakdown, spare parts inventories, total machine downtime, and overtime expenses, and increase machine life, overall productivity, and profit. The technical challenges for fault diagnosis of the wind turbine are that the wind itself is hardly measureable, and the aerodynamics of the turbine is nonlinear. In this research we will present a robust observer-based fault diagnosis method for wind turbines.
A benchmarked model of wind turbine for fault diagnosis is considered in this thesis. An observer-based fault diagnosis method is formulated to detect and isolate the faults under consideration. For each fault, a fault detection residual is used to indicate the occurrence of the fault, and a set of fault isolation residuals are developed to determine the type and the location of the fault. Each isolation residual is designed based on a particular fault scenario under consideration. The FDI design is achieved by utilizing certain particular structures of the benchmarked model without estimating the wind speed or the aerodynamics of the turbine. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the developed method.

Advisor: Dr. Xiaodong Zhang

Date: Monday, June 6, 2011

Time: 10:00 AM

Location: 399 Joshi Research Center

Team: Phuong Ngo, Emily Weisenberger, Gabriel Lado

Advisor: Dr. Thomas Hartrum

Abstract

A typical Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) is of the scale where the
environment presents natural problems for line-of-sight (LOS)
operations. A UGV may lose LOS of a target behind cars, shrubberies, or
other stationary objects because of its limited LOS. A portable
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that could fly above the UGV helps to
solve this problem. A quadricopter is a potential solution.
Quadricopters are nimble enough to be able to hover above the UGV,
safely take-off of and land on the UGV, as well as maneuver through
tight spaces.

The design team has implemented a software package capable of
identifying targets not within sight of a UGV. The design has
implemented the UAV using the Parrot A.R. Drone quadricopter. The
design incorporates the open source API of the A.R. Drone into the
design team's code. The completed software package gathers images from
the Drone and applies color filtering and edge detection in order to
identify objects not within the LOS of the UGV. A separate laptop
serves as a ground station to control the Drone and identify the
targets. Once a target is identified, a fingerprint of that is sent
back to the laptop stationed on the UGV for later analysis.

This presentation is open to the public.

The 8th annual Robotic Lawn Mower Competition will take place June 2 through June 4, 2010 - a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (with Sunday the 5th as a rain date) at Siebenthaler's Beaver Valley Garden Center in Beavercreek, Ohio. The competition provides a venue for college teams to exercise and display their ingenuity, resourcefulness, and teamwork. Their task is to harness the science of navigation to build autonomously controlled lawn mowers and use them to rapidly and accurately mow a field of grass. Don't just imagine your grass cutting itself, come watch it happen!

Kara L. Hall

Advisor: Dr. Chandler Phillips
Thursday, June 2, 2011
9:00am
292 Joshi Research Center

ABSTRACT

A pneumatic muscle actuator (PMA) is a device that mimics behavior of skeletal muscle by contracting and generating force in a nonlinear manner when activated. PMAs have a high power to weight ratio and possess unique characteristics which make them ideal for human interaction. Due to their nonlinear dynamics, PMAs are difficult to control, presenting challenges in system implementation. Despite these challenges, PMAs have great potential as a source of resistance for strength training and rehabilitation. The main goal of this work was to control a PMA for use in isokinetic exercise, potentially benefiting anyone in need of optimal strength training through a joint's range of motion. This includes astronauts who need to counteract muscle atrophy and bone loss during prolonged spaceflight. The lightweight PMA driven by pressurized air does not need gravity to produce resistance, making it an attractive option for a microgravity exercise device.

The control system developed is based on an inverse three-element phenomenological model and adaptive nonlinear control. The system operates as a type of haptic controller, automatically adjusting resistance to assist a simulated neuromuscular actuator in maintaining the desired velocity. A human quadriceps dynamic simulator (HQDS) was developed so that control effectiveness and accommodation could be tested prior to human implementation. A motor, which produces torque analogous to quadriceps' torque production about the knee, is used in conjunction with the HQDS to simulate neuromuscular actuation. Tracking error results for motor shaft position (simulated joint angle), velocity (simulated lower leg angular velocity), and PMA displacement indicate that the control system is effective at producing PMA displacement and resistance necessary for a scaled, simulated neuromuscular actuator to maintain low-velocity isokinetic movement during simulated concentric and eccentric knee extension. This work is an important step towards human implementation of PMA produced resistance for isokinetic strength training and rehabilitation.

By: Andrew McClain

Date: Wednesday, June 1 2011- 10:00 am

Location: 399 Joshi Research Center

Cmt Mbrs: Meilin Liu, Advisor
Jack Jean
Keke Chen

ABSTRACT

With the rapid growth of semiconductor technology, chip density has increased significantly. As the power exponent is setting hard limits to frequency increases, multi-core and chip level multi-processors have become prevalent in recent years to take advantage of the increasing chip density. In the new generation of processors, multi-core architecture design is becoming the major trend: IBM/SONY/Toshiba's CELL BE processors contain 9cores; NVIDIA GPU contain more than 30 cores.

One of the biggest challenges is to efficiently utilize the computational power provided by multi-core systems. The second challenge to achieving high performance in a computer system is the growing disparity between processor and memory speeds. This thesis examines the problems of sorting, matrix multiplication, and ordinary differential equation initial value problems on two target architectures, the Cell Broadband Engine, and the Nvidia CUDA enabled graphics processor. This thesis first studies how to exploit various levels of parallelism for these application programs. At the same time, the author also tries to explore the use of memory hierarchies and other architecture features to further improve the performance.

Darrell Lochtefeld

Advisor: Dr. Frank Ciarallo

Thursday, May 26, 2011 12:30pm - 1:30pm Room: 292 Joshi Center

ABSTRACT:

Multi-objectivization is the process of reformulating a single-objective optimization problem into a multi-objective problem and solving it with a multi-objective method in order to provide a solution to the original single-objective problem. Prior to recent evidence, such reformulations were thought to make a problem more complex. However, recent research suggests that decompositions in the objective space can lead to useful optimization techniques when coupled with a population-based search.

A family and sub-family of algorithms called evolutionary and genetic algorithms respectively are inspired by Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest theory and the concept of modeling evolutionary process. These techniques manage a population of solutions over time. This dissertation investigates Genetic Algorithms (GAs) in both a general categorical sense and as they are applied to multi-objectivization. Multi-objectivization techniques are examined in both empirical and analytical approaches. Many multi- objective algorithms rely on Pareto dominance relationships - such relationships are examined in the context of multi-objectivization. Through study of an abstract problem, job-shop scheduling problems, and the Traveling Salesman Problem, principles governing the design decisions for multi-objectivization are identified. This presentation focuses on the concepts, principles and underlying technologies that support multi-objectivization.

Wright State University Libraries are a USPTO patent and trademark depository library and has access to one of the most powerful patent searching tools, PubWEST (Web-based Examiner Search Tool).

Questions?
Contact Ran Raider, government and legal information coordinator for the University Libraries, at ran.raider@wright.edu or (937) 775-3521.

Orelle Ryan Fogle
Advisor: Dr. Brian Rigling
Date: Friday, May 20, 2011
Time: 10:00 AM
Location: Tait Conference Room
Attendance is Open to All

Abstract
Recently, the use of micro-Doppler (µD) radar signatures for classification has become an area of focus, in particular for the case of dynamic targets where many components are interacting over time. To fully exploit the signature information, individual scattering centers may be extracted and associated over the full target observation. Due to the complexity of the target signature, the automated analysis is very difficult. However, the availability of ultra-fine resolution or micro-range (µR) resolution along with target scattering knowledge, can aid this process immensely. Here, we describe a feature extraction algorithm which utilizes both µD and µR data. We apply this algorithm to measured data to gain knowledge of dismount-radar phenomenology. Specifically, we associate µD/µR features to physical human components resulting in an intuitive and physically-relevant model. Furthermore, the model enables statistical characterization of individual body radar cross-section (RCS).

"Neural-symbolic Integration: Bridging the gap between subsymbolic
neural networks and symbolic logic"

by Professor Pascal Hitzler
Abstract:
Intelligent systems based on symbolic knowledge processing, on the one hand, and on artificial neural networks (also called connectionist systems), on the other, differ substantially. Nevertheless, both of these are standard paradigms in artificial intelligence, and it would be very desirable to combine the robustness of neural networks with the expressivity of symbolic knowledge representation. This is the reason why the importance of the efforts to bridge the gap between the connectionist and symbolic paradigms of Artificial Intelligence is widely recognized and gaining momentum. As the amount of hybrid data containing symbolic and statistical elements as well as noise increases in diverse areas such as bioinformatics or text and web mining, neural-symbolic learning and reasoning becomes of particular practical importance.

In this talk we report on past and recent developments in this area, which are tailored towards the connectionist acquisition and processing of symbolic knowledge. Particular emphasis will be given to the problem of connectionist treatments of knowledge which goes beyond propositional logic, e.g. in the form of first-order predicate logic programs. This includes a report on joint work with Sebastian Bader, Steffen Hoelldobler and Andreas Witzel on the design and implementation of an integrated neural-symbolic learning system which can process such logic programs.

Adam Maleszewski
Advisor: Dr. Sharmila Mukhopadhyay
Monday, May 9, 2011
3:00pm - 4:00pm
Room: 405 RC, Tait Conference Room

Abstract:
The purpose of this project is to form silver nanoparticles (Ag-NP) attached to a hierarchical substrate for possible use in biological applications. The effectiveness of Ag-NP-based biofilters and biosensors may be dramatically enhanced by the use of these hierarchical structures, such as carbon nanotubes (CNT), as they offer a high surface area, bio-mimetic surface suitable for cell-device interactions, while Ag-NP would be a suitable component in many such devices due to its plasmonic surface properties (e.g. in sensor and directed energy applications) and its anti-microbial properties (desirable for fluid filtration due to its lightweight, and, in small doses, low toxicity). Meaningful control over the Ag-NP sizes and degree of adherence has been achieved. The interaction between silver and human epidermal cells as would be present in Ag-NP-based wound dressings has also been investigated in vitro and will be discussed.

By: Timothy Linden

Date: Thursday, May 5, 2011 - 11:00 am

Location: 365 Joshi Research Center

Cmt Mbrs: Ardeshir Goshtasby, Advisor
Jack Jean
Thomas Wischgoll

ABSTRACT

A triangulation-based approach to nonrigid image registration is presented. This method builds upon control point projective registration methods. Control points for this method are located using the Harris point detector.

An analysis is presented for this detector to show its properties. Projective registration is used as the basis for this non-rigid registration method. Details of the projective registration method used are presented. Nonrigid registration is used to spatially align images of a 3-D scene taken from different views. Projective registration approximates the scene geometry as a plane.

This nonrigid approach subdivides the images into small corresponding triangles, to improve the approximation of the scene geometry. Affine transformation functions are used to register corresponding triangles. Finally a refinement step is presented to smooth the transition between adjacent triangles and achieve a smooth registration across the image domain.

Thanks
--
Costa Alimonos
Wright State University
Senator - College of Engineering and Computer Science, Student Government

By Robert Keefer

Wednesday, April 13, 2011
10:00 am - 399 JC

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Nikolaos Bourbakis, advisor, Soon Chung, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, and S. Narayanan (Dean, CECS & Professor, BIE)

ABSTRACT:

While mobile reading devices have been on the market and investigated by researchers in recent years, there is still work required to make these devices highly accessible to the visually impaired. A usability test with one such device revealed gaps in the current state of the art devices. These gaps focus mostly on the user interaction and his or her ability to quickly consume written reading material.

In this dissertation, a voice user interface (VUI) is presented that improves the ability of a blind user of a mobile reading device to interact with written material. The image processing techniques required to facilitate this interaction with a document image are also presented.

Contributions of this research include a model of the VUI, which was validated by user tests of a prototype with visually impaired participants, a document image perspective correction technique, a document image dewarping technique, and a headline identification technique, among others. Three separate user tests with visually impaired participants were used to guide and validate the interaction research. The document image processing techniques, combined to form a document image processing pipeline, were tested on 25 document images. Comparative results from the user tests and processing of the document images are presented in this dissertation.

3:00 pm
April 8, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

Automobiles are becoming increasingly dependent on electric power. Therefore, the health of the vehicular electric power generation and storage (EPGS) system is crucial to ensure reliable power supply to important electric devices for improved vehicle safety, fuel economy, and customer satisfaction. Additionally, it is important to correctly diagnose EPGS system related faults to reduce maintenance costs. In this research project, a model-based state-of-health (SOH) monitoring method for the EPGS system is developed without the requirement of an alternator current sensor. A model representing the dynamic relationship between the battery current and the alternator filed duty voltage cycle is presented. An important model parameter that characterizes the current generation efficiency of the alternator system is adaptively estimated by using a recursive least square algorithm. Based on fault modes and effect analysis, a model-based fault detection and isolation decision scheme is developed for the EPGS system faults under consideration. The SOH monitoring method has been implemented using an EPGS system experimental test bench at GM R&D Center. Real-time evaluation results have shown its robustness and effectiveness.

Advisor: Dr. Zhang

Dr. Thomas P. Russell, a member of the Senior Executive Service, is Director, Air Force Office of Scientific Research in Arlington, Virginia. He guides the management of the entire basic research investment for the Air Force. Dr. Russell leads a staff of 200 scientists, engineers and administrators in Arlington, Virginia, and foreign technology offices in London, Tokyo and Santiago, Chile.

Each year, AFOSR selects, sponsors and manages revolutionary basic research that impacts the future Air Force. AFOSR interacts with leading scientists and engineers throughout the world to identify breakthrough opportunities; actively manages a $510 million investment portfolio encompassing the best of these opportunities; and transitions the resulting discoveries to other components of the Air Force Re-search Laboratory, to defense industries and to other federal agencies. The office's annual investment in basic research is distributed among more than 200 academic institutions, 150 businesses and 200 research efforts within the AFRL.

Dr. Russell has been a visiting scientist at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, an adjunct professor at the Washington State University Shock Dynam-ics Laboratory, and a part-time faculty member at Montgomery College. His principal fields of interest are energetic materials, decomposition/combustion chemistry, det-onation physics/chemistry, high pressure chemistry/physics, and spectroscopy. He has authored more than 100 publications and inventions in these areas. Dr. Rus-sell was appointed to the Senior Executive Service in 2006.

By: Harshal Kamlesh Patni

Date: Monday, March 21, 2011 - 09:30 am

Location: 292 Joshi Research Center (Brandeberry Conference Room)

Cmt Mbrs: Drs. Amit P. Sheth, Advisor Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Ramakanth Kavuluru.

ABSTRACT
Sensors are increasingly being deployed for continuous, real-time monitoring of physical phenomena, resulting in torrents of data streams. This makes analysis to detect meaningful patterns a challenge, especially due to the multi-modal nature of streams. Current Data Stream Management Systems provide mathematical summaries (e.g., min., max., avg.) of how phenomena change over time; however, such summaries are of little value to semantically describe the situation representing the events in real-world. Feature-streams, on the other hand, provide a higher-level of abstraction that are meaningful to human by describing real-world objects and events inherent in low level data. In this work, we present an approach to filter, join and analyze sensor-streams to generate feature-streams in real-time. This is accomplished through the application of ontological domain knowledge in order to filter, integrate sensor data streams to infer the existence of real-world events. The generated feature-streams are publicly accessible on the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud.

Haptic technology is often used to assist people with visual impairment by providing a way of understanding complex visual information. However, existing design approaches have rarely considered the heterogeneous needs of users in the same disability category. Most previous studies on assistive technology have been oriented towards those with total blindness as opposed to those with residual vision (also referred to as low vision). In addition, researchers have paid less attention to older adults with low vision. In this talk, Dr. Kim will present his research on the individual differences in (1) users' capabilities in the haptic modality and (2) user needs in haptic user interfaces, especially associated with age and vision.

Bio:
Hyung Nam Kim is a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech. He has over 8 years hands-on experience conducting various qualitative and quantitative studies related to Accessibility, Usability, Safety/Health Information Design and Social Networking. His research outcomes have been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. He received his MS (2005) and PhD (2010) degrees in Industrial and Systems Engineering (Human Factors) from Virginia Tech.

By Qian Huang

Friday, March 18, 2011 - 10:30 am
399 Joshi

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Thomas Wischgoll, (advisor), Nikolaos Bourbakis, Jack Jean, Saiyu Ren, (EE), and Erik Blasch, (EE)

This defense is open to the public

ABSTRACT:

Volumetric datasets captured by current 64 slice scanners are being popularly applied in clinical environments. The volume information extracted from these makes them a valuable tool for cardiologists to diagnose various types of diseases.

In this work, an algorithm is developed for segmenting the coronary trees started from more numerically precise subvoxel level with the seed positions identified by the user and a 3D surface constrained Delaunay triangle (CDT) mesh generator to visualize the obtained vessel trees. This work also proposes a method to separate the heart volume region from lung tissue and the surrounding body tissue. The experimental results show that these proposed algorithms are capable of extracting boundary points of the coronary vessel trees. The CDT surface mesh can visualize the object's surface more smoothly with subvoxel precision than marching tetrahedra algorithm with voxel precision. The CDT surface mesh can derive surface quantitative data such as to estimate principal curvatures of vessel surfaces, the minimum principle curvature can accurately visualize the local convex or concave shape on the vessels' surfaces, a geometrical property that many vessel researchers are studying its influence on the plaque development inside the vessels.

ABSTRACT During the current economic times, companies are trying to reduce costs by incorporating new strategies into their business plan. These strategies may be based on pricing, product variety, marketing, and innovation. One area where an improvement can bring in a healthy return on investment to the company is its supply chain, in particular the distribution network. Drop-shipping is a distribution strategy whereby customer orders are fulfilled by directly delivering products from the manufacturer’s facility, instead of storing these products at the warehouse. Drop-shipping helps in reducing inventory and material handling costs at the warehouse, but may increase transportation costs due to frequent shipments. This research was motivated by the current operations at a promotional products distributor in the Midwest US. This distributor wanted to evaluate whether or not drop-shipping would reduce their distribution cost and improve customer service. Specifically, the distributor wanted to decide which products to drop-ship and which to stock in the warehouse. We develop a mixed integer programming (MIP) model to categorize the products as ‘to be drop-shipped’ or ‘kept in warehouse’ with the objective of minimizing the total distribution cost. This single-period MIP model assumes deterministic demand, all-unit transportation LTL and parcel rates, and warehouse space constraint. To solve larger problem instances, a Ruin and Recreate (RR) based heuristic is proposed. Numerical results indicate a savings in warehouse space ranging from 28-53% and an additional cost savings of up to 5.2%. A case study involving realistic data obtained from the distributor is presented and avenues for future research in this area are discussed.

10:30 am
March 18, 2011
Tait Conference Room, 405 Russ

ABSTRACT

Dynamic CMOS are widely employed in high-performance CMOS chips due to high speed and less area in comparison with Static CMOS. However, Dynamic CMOS circuits are inherently less tolerant to noises than Static CMOS circuits. This problem becomes more severe with aggressive technology scaling into nanometer process, particularly caused by the charge sharing, the sub-threshold leakage current, the power rail noise and the crosstalk noise. In this thesis, circuit techniques on improving both timing and noise of Dynamic CMOS are presented. A comparison with previous reported work is also presented. Simulations proved that the proposed circuit techniques can achieve a high level of timing optimization and noise tolerance. Finally, the effect of manufacturing process variations is taken into simulation to verify overall performance variation in delay uncertainty.

Advisor: Dr. Henry Chen

Date: Thursday, March 17 2011

Time: 4:00 PM

Location: 365 Joshi Research Center

Team: Stuart Miller, Joe Gerhardt, and Adam Oroszi

Advisor: Dr. Thomas Hartrum

Sponsor: Air Force Research Lab

Abstract:

LADAR is remote sensing data collected by measuring distance by return
times from specialized laser equipment. These data are typically
captured by satellite imagery or unmanned aerial vehicles. Using this
data, a 3D visual model can be created of an area of interest for
analysis. The model is significant to intelligence analysts because it
can provide a high-resolution 3D recreation of a geographic area. The
goal of this project is to write a program that interprets this data and
creates the 3D model.

By: Ashwin Kumar Manjunatha

Date: Monday, March 14, 2011 - 09:15 am

Location: 292 Joshi Research Center
(Brandeberry Conference Room)

Cmt Mbrs: Drs. Amit P. Sheth, Advisor
Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan,
Paul E.Anderson,
Ramakanth Kavuluru.

ABSTRACT

Computing has changed. Lately a slew of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources is at the disposal of the common man. The latter commonly called Cloud Computing (or just Cloud) is democratizing computing by making large computing power accessible to people and corporations around the world easily and economically.

However, taking full advantage of this computing landscape, especially for the data intensive domains has been hampered by many factors. One of the primary factors being the complexity involved in developing applications for a variety of available platforms.

This thesis alleviates many of the issues faced in developing complex Cloud centric applications by using Domain Specific Language (DSL) based methods. The research focuses on two main areas. One area is hybrid applications with mobile device based front-ends and Cloud based back-ends. The other is data and compute intensive biological experiments, exemplified by applying a DSL to metabolomics data analysis. This research investigates the viability of using a DSL in each domain and provides evidence of successful application.

Date: Friday, March 18, 2011

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Location: Joshi Research Center, Room 399

Team: Dave Hall, Ken Gnau, Sean Gentry, Randy Woods

Advisor: Dr.Hartrum

Sponsor: Xetron

Abstract

The purpose of our team project is to research, program and physically
test the feasibility of a ZigBee Protocol Stack using an Ad hoc on
demand distance vector routing protocol (AODV). The wireless sensor
network will comprise of a coordinator node, a mobile node, and two
sensor nodes. Our task is to simulate the transfer of data over a
wireless sensor network with varying topologies. The mobile node will
extract data seamlessly from sensor nodes which are in closest proximity
to the mobile node and transmit the data to the coordinator node.
Objectives also included for the design of an optimal wireless sensor
network is minimizing latency, to reduce energy consumption, and
maintaining maximum signal strength.

Mining Diversified Shared and Alignable Difference Decision Trees Across Multiple Datasets

By Qian Han

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - 10:30 am
384 Joshi

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Guozhu Dong, (advisor), Keke Chen, Pascal Hitzler,
and Zhiqiang Wu, WSU-EE

ABSTRACT:

This dissertation studies the problem of mining shared and alignable difference knowledge structures, especially in the form of decision trees, across multiple datasets. The study is motivated by the importance and usefulness of analogy in human reasoning and creative thinking. The importance and usefulness are supported by research from psychology and cognitive science.
For shared knowledge structures, we first focus on the shared decision tree mining problem. However, one shared decision tree may only present a limited view of shared behaviors between two given datasets. In order to help users to select from multiple diversified perspectives on shared knowledge structures, we then propose the diversified decision tree set mining problem. Algorithms to solve above two problems are discussed in this dissertation proposal, and experimental results on microarray datasets for disease/treatment are reported to evaluate these algorithms.
For alignable difference knowledge structures, we propose the alignable difference decision tree mining problem. In our perspective, alignable differences indicate significant differences in the context of a large amount of similarities. In this dissertation proposal, we consider alignable difference decision trees. Specifically, we introduce alignable differences in general and alignable difference decision trees in particular, and discuss our plan on the study of how to mine alignable difference decision trees.

Date: Tuesday, March 15 2011

Time: 3:00 PM

Location: 399 Joshi Research Center

Team: Derek Baker and Matt Powers

Advisor: John C. Gallagher

Abstract

The goals of this project were to design and program a balloon tracking
system that will allow an antenna mounted on top of Russ Engineering
Center to follow the launches of the high altitude balloon and provide
direct line of sight communication with various systems included in the
balloon payload. The antenna system will eventually be able to provide
live video feeds from the balloon to allow team members and enthusiasts
the ability to observe television feeds from the balloon as it is in
flight. The tracking system will enable the balloon to be tracked with
increased accuracy and provides redundancy for tracking and retrieving
the balloon upon descent. Additionally, the computer software designed
by this team alerts members of the Wright State University High Altitude
Balloon email list to be notified via email that the balloon has
launched (is above 5000 feet) and that the balloon is landing (below
5000 feet).

This project utilized the programming experience of two computer
engineering students to ensure all components of the software were
designed and implemented properly. They derived all necessary equations
and calculated the conversions and look angles required. After
preliminary work was completed, they focused mainly upon developing the
software to interface with an online database to retrieve the real-time
coordinates of the balloon and the necessary code to control the antenna
subsystem. They were solely responsible for testing the functionality
of code and verifying proper implementation.

This project has furthered the progress of the Wright State University
High Altitude Balloon team. It has provided a new interface with which
to communicate with the balloon while it is in flight. With additional
research, future balloon teams will be able to implement a variety of
features using the antenna and tracking system developed by this team.

This presentation is open to the public

Date: Monday, March 14 2011

Time: 10:00 AM

Location: 315 Russ Engineering Center

Team: Lucas Bechtel, Adam Knapke, and Matt Marangoni

Advisors: Thomas Wischgoll and John C. Gallagher

Abstract:

MINCS provides a static model of the Wright State University campus.
The system enables users to navigate the model and interact with other
users through avatars, geometry additions, a location based event
system, and a chat service. Users may explore the exterior of campus and
a blueprint accurate interior of the Joshi Research Center. Additional
geometry may be added/removed, metadata and events may be associated
with points and volumes throughout the model, and these changes are
reflected to all clients. MINCS also facilitates extension and
customization through a C++ programming interface.

Date: Tuesday, March 15 2011

Time: 10:00 AM

Location: 399 Joshi Research Center

Team: Nathan Hodson, Jacob Suchecki

Advisor: John C. Gallagher

Abstract

In anticipation of the Spring 2011 Autonomous Lawnmower competition,
this project represents a complete redesign and rewrite of the core
control software for the Wright State University autonomous robot
lawnmower. The core software is a multithreaded design that interleaves
and coordinates independent control and sensor system threads. The goal
is to provide clean modular structure and well-defined, well-documented,
core robot "system calls" to mediate the interactions of high-level
robot control software and raw hardware. Special consideration was made
for clean maintenance of multiple robot and world coordinate systems and
for easy extensibility when new hardware is added to the robot.

This presentation is open to the public

Bharathwaj Vijayakumar
Advisor: Dr. Pratik Parikh
Master Thesis Defense
Monday, 3/14/2011, 1:00 PM
499 Joshi Research Center

ABSTRACT
Scheduling surgical cases at a hospital is a complex problem. This research focuses on the surgical case scheduling problem faced by a publicly-funded hospital in the Midwest US. Publicly-funded hospitals are typically under tight budget constraints. Consequently, the capacity of resources in such hospitals is fairly fixed. Such hospitals strive to maximize the utilization of their resources through continuous improvement approaches and optimization techniques. Optimization-based approaches proposed in the literature for case scheduling are focused on for-profit hospitals, for which surgery is a revenue-generator, and did not account for many real-world constraints. Novel approaches to model and solve the case scheduling problem for publicly-funded hospitals that account for multi-period, multi-resource, and case priorities are required. We conceptualize this problem as an unequal-sized multi-bin, multi-dimensional dual bin-packing problem. We present a mixed integer programming (MIP) model and a heuristic based on the First Fit Decreasing (FFD) algorithm used for bin-packing problems. The solutions obtained through the FFD heuristic are comparable to that obtained through the MIP model, with an average difference of 0.19%. The heuristic achieves near-optimal solutions in a matter of minutes, when the MIP model takes hours to solve. Future research in this area is discussed, along with a plan to test our model on real data at this hospital.

"Quantitative Computed-Tomography Based Bone-Strength Indicators for the Identification of Low Bone-Strength Individuals in a Clinical Environment"

Tuesday, March 15, 2011
2:30 p.m.
120 White Hall

Advisor: Thomas Hangartner

ABSTRACT

The aim of the current study was to develop quantitative computed-tomography (QCT)-based bone-strength indicators that highly correlate with finite-element (FE)-based strength. We perform a combined numerical-experimental study, comparing FE-predicted surface strains with strain gauge measurements, to validate the FE models of 36 long bones (humerus, radius, femur and tibia) under three-point bending and torsion. The FE models were constructed from trans-axial volumetric CT scans, and the segmented bone images were corrected for partial-volume effects. The material properties (Young's modulus for cortex, density-modulus relationship for trabecular bone and Poisson's ratio) were calibrated by minimizing the error between experiments and simulations among all bones. The resultant R2 values of the measured strains versus load under three-point bending and torsion were 0.96 - 0.99 and 0.61 - 0.99, respectively, for all bones in our data set. The errors of the calculated FE strains in comparison to those measured using strain gauges in the mechanical tests ranged from -6% to 7% under bending and from -37% to 19% under torsion. The observation of comparatively low errors and high correlations between the FE-predicted strains and the experimental strains, across the various types of bones and loading conditions (bending and torsion), validates our approach to bone segmentation and our choice of material properties.

Based on the analysis of the various FE models of the long bones, the location of the CT slice on the bone that showed the highest propensity to fracture was identified for four loading conditions (compression, three-point bending, cantilever bending and torsion). The identified CT slice was then used to derive novel and improved bone-strength indicators. We evaluated the performance of area-weighted (AW), density-weighted (DW) and modulus-weighted (MW) rigidity measures as well as popular strength indicators like section modulus and stress-strain index. We have also developed a novel strength metric, the centroid deviation, which takes into consideration the spatial distribution of the centroids. Here, we observed that the MW polar moment of inertia and the MW moment of inertia were the two top-performers (average r > 0.87) for all bones and loading conditions. The MW centroid deviations correlated highly with the load to fracture for all bones under compression (r >0.83), except for the humerus (r = 0.67).

To test the power of the bone-strength indicators, a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis of the MW rigidity measures that showed the two highest correlations in the femur under compression and three-point bending was performed. QCT scans of a subset of 10 white and 10 black males, who were subjects of a larger study, which reported ethnic differences in bone strength, were used. Results from this small pilot study indicated that the MW section modulus and the MW stress-strain index are the two top performing indicators (area under the ROC curve > 0.79).

Consistently DW or MW rigidity measures produced a statistically significant improvement in capturing bone strength compared to AW rigidity measures. The improvement in MW over DW rigidity measures was small yet statistically significant.

4:00 pm
March 11, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

The objective of this research is to analyze, design and simulate a two-switch forward pulse-width modulated (PWM) DC-DC converter. The Forward PWM DC-DC converter is originally derived from the buck converter by the addition of a transformer. The transformer is mainly used as a safety feature to electrically isolate input and output stages of the power converter and also to scale the voltage or current. The steady-state analysis is presented for the two-switch PWM DC-DC forward converter in continuous conduction mode (CCM). Based on the analysis, the design equations for two-switch PWM forward DC-DC converter are derived. A design example is given. Furthermore, a detailed procedure to design a high-frequency (HF) two-winding power transformer is presented for CCM. The 60 W/ 20 V two-switch forward converter is designed for universal laptop adapter. Simulation results are provided to validate the theoretical analysis.

Advisor: Dr. Kazimierczuk

2:00 pm
March 11, 2011
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

Arc welding machines are typically large, heavy devices that transform an alternating current (AC) input into a low-voltage, direct current (DC) output. Traditionally these high power devices have required steel and copper transformers that account for their bulky size and weight. While the cost of raw materials in electromagnetic components have been increasing the cost of high-power silicon devices has been decreasing. This disparity creates an opportunity for a cost-effective DC-DC switching welder in the consumer market. While DC-DC power electronics are not new to the welding industry, this study, under the commission of a welding equipment manufacturer, aims to develop and prototype a design specifically for an affordable and portable battery-powered welding machine. By eliminating the need for electromagnetic components for isolation and voltage step down and focusing on a DC-DC, battery-powered device, a unique opportunity exists to create a high-feature product with a minimalist design. The design is implemented with a high-current voltage chopping circuit as well as an assortment of feedback, control, and safety circuitry necessary to complete the product. By combining simulation, prototype validation and real-world cost limitations, this project outlines the development of a new product for the welding equipment market.

Advisor: Dr. Kazimierczuk

Carissa Brunsman-Johnson

Advisor: Dean S. Narayanan

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

11:00 am @ 146 Russ

Abstract

Information seeking from websites has become more and more challenging for people who are blind. Screen readers attempt to make that task easier by introducing new commands and functionality but there still exists a fundamental gap in the difficulty for people who are blind compared to their sighted counterparts. This research identifies the strategies used by people who are blind and sighted to create an information seeking model, develop a keyword framework for assisting task performance and an experiment to validate the keyword framework concept for information search and retrieval.

This information seeking model was developed by initially conducting a pilot study and then validating the model using data from another similar study. The model defines information searching strategies used for both participants that were sighted and blind. Several strategies were identified as primary search strategies that were commonly used to information search on a website. The model demonstrated the primary search strategies were keyword based and are a foundation for information seeking on websites for both groups of participants.

A keyword framework for assisting task performance was developed that includes rules and a keyword library to support keyword searches defined in the model for users who are blind. A keyword aid was developed, to test this conceptual framework. The aid was implemented by manipulating the results of the list of links and virtual find commands which are two of the more commonly used primary search strategies for users who are blind. The experiment sought to determine the aids' effectiveness and therefore, measured workload, number of commands used, success and direction. Other metrics such as the time to complete the task was also measured. The workload was determined using the NASA Task Load Index (TLX) score and each subscale was also investigated. Comparisons of the participants who were blind with the aid and without the aid were made as well as comparisons to sighted participants. Age group comparisons and age of blindness were also compared.

The results of the experiment demonstrated that the keyword framework aid did improve the efficiency of information searching tasks for users who are blind by drastically improving their success rate, significantly reducing their workload and number of commands. Efficiency was also improved by significantly lowering the time it took to complete a task.

A primary contribution of this research was to demonstrate that supporting users current strategies for keyword based information searching improves their searches. Implementing the keyword framework can produce a significant difference in how users who are blind search for information on webpages.

PUBLICATIONS

1. Brunsman-Johnson, C. , Narayanan, S., Shebilske, W. , Alakke, G., Narakesari, S. (2011, In press) Modeling Web-Based Information Seeking by Users who are Blind. TIDT Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology.

2. Johnson, C., Stieger, M., Narayanan, S., Haas, M., Urling, S. (Summer 2006). Modeling a Notional Network-Centric Warfare Command Center for Human-Centered Decision Aiding. Information Age Warfare Quarterly, I(2), 5-16.

3. Rao, D. M., Hodson, D. D., Stieger Jr., M., Johnson, C. B., Kidambi, P., & Narayanan, S. (2008). Design and implementation of virtual and constructive simulations using OPENEAAGLES. Deer Park, NY: Linus Publishing.

JAN 28 - If you would like to serve on the Dean's Student Advisory Board, please apply by Jan 28 using the attached application. This is a GREAT LEADERSHIP development opportunity and a chance for your ideas and voice to be heard for the betterment of your fellow students.

FEB 1 - Scholarship Applications should be live on line. All students who have a GPA of at least 3.0 are competitive for an award. Our college has approximately 20 scholarships to award to CECS students aside from the university's campus wide pool . Please watch your Student and Financial Aid Tab in Wings eXpress to access the form. Please be aware that all scholarships have different criteria, while some are based on financial need some are solely based on major or GPA etc. Please contact me about the scholarship application if you have any questions.

FEB 2 & 3 - Engineering Career Fair Prep Work Shop takes place from 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. and 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. (both days). Presented by Karen Fox from Career Services. Register by emailing karen.fox@wright.edu

FEB 9 - Resume Workshop -Sponsored by Reynolds and Reynolds, 145 Russ Center, Presentation by Professional Recruiter at 11:00 a.m. Bring your resume. One on one time with recruiters to review your resume. Free Pizza. Please RSVP by reply email and provide your UID and your Major or 937-775-5001.

FEB 16 - STEM Recruiting Day - for Engineering and Computer Scientist Students. Student Union Apollo Room. Companies who will be accepting resumes are listed on Career Services Web Site. If you don't know about the Wright Search, the site that allows you to post your resume and where employers post their jobs please contact me! Dress to Impress with Resumes in Hand!

FEB 22 - Digital Mixer - Another career fair event especially for CS and IT students looking for jobs. The 2011 Digital Mixer will be *Tuesday, February 22 from 4:30 to 6:30 pm* in the WSU Student Union Apollo Room. This event is not a formal job fair but rather a networking event for companies that hire IT professionals and students majoring in computer science, or other IT related fields. Students from area universities and community colleges are invited. Freshman through graduate students are invited to attend and learn about opportunities in the area and in the IT field. Pre-register at http://career.wright.edu/events/digitalmixer/. Students who register by February 16 can email a resume as a pdf document. Registered employers will be provided with a CD of student resumes. Companies including CDO Technologies, Fifth Third, LexisNexis, Midmark, Ross Group, Speedway SuperAmerica, Standard Register and Reynolds & Reynolds and more will be there.

FEB 25 - Tau Beta Pi, The CECS's honor society, is inducting the largest group of students ever - 48! The Induction will be held at the historical downtown Dayton Engineer's Club at 6:00 p.m.. A separate announcement of inductees will go out soon and everyone is invited to attend the TBP banquet which will be at 7:00 p.m. that evening in the DEC's formal dining room. Congratulations to our student inductees!

MARCH 1 - CECS Continuing Scholarship Application Deadline. Do not delay - you need to write a short essay, put together your activity list, and ask one professor to serve as a reference.

MARCH 21- 11th Annual Trebuchet Contest at the Nutter Center sponsored by the College of Engineering and Computer Science. This event is huge and something everyone has a blast doing whether you are involved as a judge, a volunteer or a spectator - It is for those who like to hurl!!! Dr. Slater from the ME Department, Vickie Slone from the EE Department and Mary Hutcheson from the dean's office lead the charge in making this competitive event happen ... BUT YOUR HELP is needed! Please VOLUNTEER to be a line judge, or a pre-qualifier etc by visiting this web page: http://www.engineering.wright.edu/trebuchet/volunteer-info.shtml. Find out what TREBUCHET is all about here: http://www.engineering.wright.edu/trebuchet/

We hope to see you there!

Adam Blake

blake.29@wright.edu

Student Chair - AIAA: WSU Chapter

This event is all about sharing ideas and advice to help others be successful. The event is targeted for a Young Professional (YP) audience so that they can learn from other local engineers who have carved out unique paths in their careers. This event is geared to help our YPs network and learn from the experience and knowledge of others. ALL are welcome to attend. This event is cosponsored by the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The event will include a social hour, a dinner, and conclude with the panel discussion. The panel will consist of 5 local engineering professionals who will be available to answer all your questions. Additional information can be found on our calendar.

Agenda: Networking Hour 6-7 pm, Dinner 7-7:45 pm, Panel 7:45-9:15 pm

Admission prices: student/guests: $10, YPs/guests: $15, professional mbrs/guests: $20, other/non-mbrs: $25

Featured Panelists
* Fred Schauer, Pulsed Detonation Engine (PDE) Mechanical Engineer and 2009 AIAA Engineer of the Year
* Stephanie Salas-Snyder, Human Systems Engineer/Senior Consultant, Booz Allen Hamilton
* Andy Sparks, Chief of the Control Sciences Division, AFRL Air Vehicles Directorate
* Kathy Stevens, Director, AFRL Materials Directorate
* David Hopper, LtCol, USAF, Deputy Chief, Turbine Division, AFRL Propulsion Directorate

To Attend the Event (must sign up!):

To RSVP, please contact Jamie Johnson at jamie.johnson@afit.edu or call 937-255-7150 with:

1) your full name,
2) number of attendees,
3) member status (AIAA, ASME or SWE) and type (professional, YP, student, etc.) if applicable, and
4) a phone number at which you can be contacted.

36th Annual DCASS -- March 1, 2011-- Holiday Inn, Miamisburg, OH

The priority abstract deadline, Jan 14, and the final abstract deadline, Jan 21, are quickly approaching! Take this opportunity to participate in the 36th Dayton-Cincinnati Aerospace Sciences Symposium by going to http://www.aiaa-daycin.org/dcass and submitting an abstract now!

This year's program goal is to showcase technical presentations that will be divided into twelve parallel sessions in the morning and afternoon. Technical presentations are solicited in all general areas of aerospace S&T, including: fluid dynamics, propulsion, materials, structures, controls, avionics, sensors, human factors, combustion, fuels, turbomachinery, and power. All presentations are limited to 20 minutes, including questions. No written paper is required, and works in development for other technical forums are welcome. Brian Binnie of Scaled Composites and Space Ship One fame will be the keynote speaker for the event. There will also be an opportunity to talk with current AIAA President Mark Lewis.

All information including the Call for Abstracts and Call for Art in Science can be found at our DCASS website:http://www.aiaa-daycin.org/dcass

This year we will once again feature a corporate exhibit to be held simultaneously with the symposium. All corporate sponsors are invited to set up a table to display their companies and talk with both students and professionals.

Best Presentation awards will be given for each technology area. The winners will be recognized at the Dayton-Cincinnati Section Awards Banquet held annually at the end of May. Winners of the Art-In-Science Competition will also be recognized at the Awards Banquet.

Please contact Ray Kolonay Raymond.Kolonay@wpafb.af.mil or Jon Black Jonathan.Black@afit.edu Executive Co-Chairs for the 36th Dayton-Cincinnati Aerospace Sciences Symposium.

ABSTRACT:

In this talk, I'll present an attempt at building a large scale distributed composite language model that simultaneously accounts for local word lexical information, mid-range sentence syntactic structure, and long-span document semantic content under a directed Markov random field paradigm. The composite language model has been trained by performing a convergent N-best list approximate EM algorithm and a follow-up EM algorithm to improve word prediction power on corpora with up to a billion tokens and stored on a supercomputer. The large scale distributed composite language model gives drastic perplexity reduction over n-grams and achieves significantly better translation quality measured by the BLEU score and "readability" of translations when applied to the task of re-ranking the N-best list from a state-of-the-art parsing-based machine translation system.

BIO:

Shaojun Wang received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1988 and 1992 respectively, M.S. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998 and 2001 respectively. From 2001 to 2005, he worked at CMU, Waterloo and University of Alberta as a post-doctoral fellow. He joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University as an Assistant Professor in 2006. His research interest is statistical machine learning, natural language processing, and cloud computing. He is now mainly focusing on two projects: large scale distributed language modeling and semi-supervised discriminative structured prediction, funded by NSF, Google and AFOSR. Both emphasize on scalability and parallel/distributed approaches to process extremely large scale datasets.

By: Chitra Srinivasan

Date: Monday, January 10, 2011 - 11:30 am

Location: 399 Joshi Research Center

Cmt Mbrs: Drs. Thomas Hartrum, Advisor
Mateen Rizki
Yong Pei

ABSTRACT

AFIT Wide Spectrum Object Modeling Environment (AWSOME) is built on an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) which is the meta-model of AWSOME. Transformations happen internally in AWSOME to transform anything in abstract to concrete. Earlier efforts in AWSOME were focused on developing tools to work on the AST. The goal of this thesis is to make AWSOME interoperable with other available tools. To achieve this goal, the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) concept is used. MDA is a framework aimed at portability, interoperability and reusability among different tools. Among many tools that use MDA context, EclipseUML 2008 and Dresden OCL Toolkit were considered to make interoperable with AWSOME.
This thesis focuses on making a model generated by AWSOME to be loaded in to EclipseUML 2008 and a model generated by EclipseUML 2008 to be parsed in to AWSOME. Also the Object Constraints Language (OCL) file generated by AWSOME should be able to be loaded in Dresden OCL Toolkit. The model to model mapping between these tools and the level of interoperability achieved between these tools is discussed in detail. Understanding the different functionalities of these tools and deciding the level of interoperability between the tools played a vital role in the design decisions made. All together three translation or transformation tools were developed to interface EclipseUML 2008 and Dresden OCL Toolkit with AWSOME.

By Alan Herner

Friday, January 7, 2011 - 2:00 pm
399 Joshi Conference Room

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Michael Raymer, Advisor, Travis Doom, Mateen Rizki, Gerald Alter, WSU - Biochemical & Molecular Biology, and Ruth Pachter, AFRL/WPAFB

ABSTRACT:

This dissertation develops and demonstrates a method to measure the uncertainty of secondary structure of protein sequences using Shannon's information theory. This method is applied to a newly developed large dataset of chameleon sequences and to several protein hinges culled from the Hinge Atlas. The uncertainty of the central residue in each tripeptide is computed for each amino acid in a sequence using Cuff and Barton's CB513 as the reference set. It is shown that while secondary structure uncertainty is relatively high in chameleon regions [average = 1.27 bits] it is relatively low in the regions nearest a chameleon [N terminus flank average = 1.12 bits; C terminus flank average = 1.16]. This difference is shown to be highly statistically significant [p = 9.6E-18 and p = 2.9E-12, respectively]. It is also shown that the secondary structure uncertainty of hinge regions declines slightly when compared to areas 6-12 amino acids toward the N terminus end of the hinge [Averages are 1.14 bits and 1.17 bits respectively with a p of 0.041]. The areas 6-12 amino acids toward the N terminus side and C terminus side of the hinge region are also different to a statistically significant degree. [Averages are 1.17 bits and 1.15 bits with a p of 0.021].

A new hand curated database of long helix-extended chameleon sequences was developed. It contains eight sequences of length eight and ninety-nine sequences of length seven. The most previously reported are two sequences of length eight and fifty-six of length seven respectively.

Date: Friday, November 19, 2010 - 10 am

Location: 278 Joshi Research Center

Cmt Mbrs: Ardy Goshtasby, Advisor
Mateen Rizki
Thomas Wischgoll

Abstract

There are different techniques to manipulate certain characteristics within mono videos to create a 3D effect when rendered and viewed. One is to display a selected frame to one eye and a different frame to the other eye so that movement of scene parts on the retina between different frames is interpreted by the viewer as visual disparity and, as a result, creates a 3D scene.

Testing using StereoDisplay, a custom developed application using this technique, showed that it is effective in providing a 3D effect with some videos. Motion of the camera is required for a 3-D effect, restricting the types of videos that are suitable for this display technique. Changing the relative position and orientation of the displayed images is effective in enhancing the 3D experience.

Two additional techniques to generate enhanced videos were evaluated. Calculating the Fundamental Matrix using only corresponding points from images was not always a viable technique to enable perception of 3-D. Aligning the images at the background using a 2D projective matrix proved an effective technique to reduce jitter and enhance the 3D effect.

Elizabeth I Maurer

Advisor: Dr. Sharmila Mukhopadhyay

November 23, 2010
1:00 pm
Room: 292 Joshi Center

Abstract:

Carbon substrates have a wide variety of applications, many of which are enabled by appropriate surface modifications. Use of carbon-based substrates for biological devices in particular can be quite advantageous due to their relative inertness and biocompatibility. Moreover, Graphitic carbon can take many forms ranging from flat sheets to foams, fibers and nanotubes. In this project, larger carbon substrates such as microcellular foam and flat graphite have been modified with carbon nanotubes and their potential use in two types of biological applications were tested. The first study involved investigation of growth as well as proliferation of osteoblast cells on carbon, so that such structures can be used as a scaffold for in-vivo tissue regeneration. The surface modifications that were compared are a collagen coating, a silica film, and a strongly adhered carbon nanotube layer. It was seen that attachment of carbon nanotubes led to highest density and viability of osteoblast cells on the surface indicating their potential benefit in implant and cell scaffolding applications. In the second study, carbon nanotubes were attached on the graphite, and subsequently decorated with gold nanoparticles and a Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) sequence. These nano-structures show advantages in detecting the DH5 E. coli bacterial strain; therefore indicate potential use as a biosensor. Proof-of-concept results indicate increased attachment of gold nanoparticles coated with an RNA capture element compared to uncoated particles to the E. coli. This demonstrates the potential use of this concept in creation of a multi-array sensor for fast and sensitive detection of many types of pathogens. These results clearly show that attachment of carbon nanotubes on larger carbon substrates can provide the basis for several unique biological devices.

DATE/TIME: Thursday, Nov 18, 4:00 PM

LOCATION: Russ 315

Abstract:

The Advanced Visualization and Data Analysis (AViDA) research group has requested the enhancement of their current campus model project by integrating the Joshi building interior, interactive model navigation, metadata, and advanced networking features. The building interior, based off of blueprint data, contains basic architectural features and omits details such as light fixtures and furniture. Model navigation via a game controller provides an easy interface and when attached to avatars establishes a familiar video game feel.

The implementation of metadata attachment in the model enables not only the tagging of rooms but also provides great extensibility for the application. Combined with advanced networking to allow multiple users to explore the world these enhancements push the AViDA campus model to a highly intuitive interactive state per their request.

Group members:
Nathan Hodson
Jacob Suchecki

Presentation:
11:00 am November 17, 2010
Location: 399 JC

Abstract:

In anticipation of the spring 2011 Autonomous lawnmower competition the project goal is to redesign and rewrite the program for Wright State Universities’ existing robotic lawnmower. Implementing a multithreaded design approach is best suited in controlling the sensor rich machine. A master thread controls the operations while numerous slave threads read and write data to or from various sensors on the robot. The C++ code has the ability to read from the on board GPS units as well as control basic movements of the lawnmower. In future weeks the project will provide more autonomous functionality and fulfill the new competition guidelines.

Ashley Whitney-Rawls

Advisor: Dr. Bor Jang

December 3, 2010

10:00am-12:00pm

Room: 365 Joshi Center

Abstract:

There is an economic need to reduce the conservatisms of current lifing methods and extend component life. Extending component usage increases the probability of failure during operation. Therefore, the risk of continued service must be quantified before life extension concepts can successfully be implemented. Defects due to the handling of components during inspection and material fatigue will induce defects during service and need to be included in any analysis of component life extension. Component life extension analysis of an Inconel 718 late stage turbine disk was conducted which accounted for manufacturing, handling, and fatigue defects. The effect of applying an inspection time distribution and percentage of components inspected is also evaluated.

By John Camp

Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - 10:00 am
499 Joshi

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Arthur Goshtasby, Advisor, Thomas Wischgoll, Jack Jean,
Lang Hong, WSU-EE, Kathleen Robinette, AFRL, WPAFB

This defense is open to the public

ABSTRACT:

3-D scanning is a rapidly growing technology. The means to quickly generate detailed and accurate 3-D models has outpaced the ability to process and characterize the scanned objects. Landmarks are an accurate and efficient means by which models can be reconstructed and characterized.

Currently, landmarks are selected either manually or semi-automatically; requiring considerable user time and effort, a process that is prone to error. This research focuses on methods to automatically select landmarks in 3-D range scans.

An automatic landmark selection method is proposed that is based on the principal curvatures of range points. Feature points are generated based on the maximum and minimum principal curvatures calculated fitting a surface to local range points. The selected feature points are invariant to scan rotation and scale. Landmarks are selected using the maximum and minimum principal curvature. A Principal Component Analysis system is implemented to learn the characteristics of landmarks and then locate them in new range images.

By Christopher Koehler

Wednesday, November 17, 2010
2:00 pm - 365 Joshi

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Thomas Wischgoll, Advisor, Arthur Goshtasby, Yong Pei,
Haibo Dong, WSU-MME, and Joerg Meyer, Univ of California, Irvine

ABSTRACT:

Three dimensional integration-based geometric visualization is a very powerful tool for analyzing flow phenomena in time dependent vector fields. Streamlines in particular have many perceptual benefits due to their ability to provide a snapshot of the vectors near key features of complex 3D flows at any instant in time. However, streamlines do not lend themselves well to animation. Subtle changes in the vector field at each time step lead to increasingly large changes between streamlines with the same seed point the longer they are integrated. Path lines, which show particle trajectories over time, suffer from similar problems when attempting to animate them.

Dynamic deformable objects in the flow domain also complicate the use of integration-based visualization. Current methods such as streamlines, path lines, streak lines, particle advection and their many conceptual and higher dimensional variants produce undesirable results for this kind of data when the most important flow phenomena occurs near and moves with the objects.

In this work, I present methods to handle both of these problems. First, the flowing seed point algorithm is introduced, which visually captures the perceptual benefits of smoothly animated streamlines and path lines by generating a series of seed points that travel through space and time on streak lines and timelines. Next, a novel dynamic seeding strategy for both streamlines and generalized streak lines is introduced to handle deformable moving objects in the flow domain in situations where static seeding objects fail for most time steps.

These two methods are then combined in order to visualize the instantaneous direction and orientation of a flow which results from flapping objects in a fluid. Initial tests are performed with a single rigid flapping disk. Further tests were performed on a more complex biologically inspired CFD simulation of the deformable flapping wings of a dragonfly as it takes off and begins to maneuver. For this test, seeds are automatically chosen such that the formation, evolution and breakdown of the leading edge vortex is highlighted as well as the wing wake interactions that occur between the forewings and hind wings.

Jared McCoppin

Advisor: Dr. Daniel Young

November 18, 2010

1:00 pm-2:00 pm

Room: 292 Joshi

Abstract:

Progress in commercializing renewable energy technologies is being advanced by developments in solid oxide fuel cell fabrication. In this work, fabrication of a compositionally graded functional layer was investigated. Resulting cells were characterized for electrochemical performance by polarization and energy impedance spectroscopy. Scanning electron microscope and energy dispersion spectroscopy were used to expose the microstructure and examine the level of compositional gradation.

Dhivya Ammanambakkam Nagarajan

3:30 pm

November 17, 2010

311 Russ

ABSTRACT

The pulse width modulated (PWM) forward DC-DC converter is one of the buck-derived converters and is widely used. High-frequency transformers in PWM converters which have periodic nonsinusoidal currents, give rise to winding losses due to harmonics. Using the Dowell's equation, the winding resistances, including the skin and proximity effects, are determined. Fourier series of primary, secondary and tertiary winding current waveforms are derived for a single-switch three-winding forward transformer. The winding resistances and harmonic winding loss factors , , of the primary, secondary, and tertiary current windings, respectively, are determined for CCM operation. A step-by-step procedure to design a three-winding forward transformer for CCM, including the equations derived for winding losses due to harmonics, are taken into account for transformer design procedure. The derived equations were verified using Matlab simulation and were compared with the Saber Sketch simulation which has good agreement.

Advisor: Dr. Kazimierczuk

Thursday, November 18th 2010

8.30AM in 292 Joshi (Brandeberry Conference Room)

Abstract

Digital photography technologies permit quick and easy uploading of any image to the web.
Millions of images being are uploaded on the World Wide Web every day by a wide range of
users. Most of the uploaded images are not readily accessible as they are not organized so as to
allow efficient searching, retrieval, and ultimately browsing. Currently major commercial search
engines utilize a process known as Annotation Based Image Retrieval (ABIR) to execute search
requests focused on retrieving an image. Even though the information sought is an image, the
ABIR technique primarily relies on textual information associated with an image to complete the
search and retrieval process.

For the first phase of the study, using the game of cricket as the domain, this research compared
the performance of three commonly used search engines for image retrieval: Google, Yahoo and
MSN Live. Factors used for the evaluation of these search engines include query types, number
of images retrieved, and the type of search engine. Results of the empirical evaluation show that
while the Google search engine performed better than Yahoo and MSN Live in situations where
there is no refiner, the performance of all three search engines dropped drastically when a refiner
was added. The other methodology to search for images is Content Based Image Retrieval
(CBIR) which searches for the images based on the image features such as color, texture, and
shape is still at a nascent stage and has not been incorporated in the commercial search engines.
The image features are at a low level compared to the high level textual features. The gap
between the low level image features and the high level textual features is termed as Semantic
Gap. Semantic gap has been the factor that limits the Content Based algorithms to perform
effectively.

This research addresses the issue of the image retrieval problem by systematically coupling the
ABIR and the CBIR algorithms and uses the human input wherever needed to reduce the
semantic gap. The key research question addressed by this study is whether a human integrated
approach helps in better image retrieval. In this research, a systematic study to identify the role
of human annotation in the search and retrieval of images was performed. Results showed that as
long as a subject matter subject is annotating the image, the variability in the performance of
search engines, in measures of precision and recall.
Moreover, empirical results suggested that the human integrated approach results in a better
performance when compared to the pure Annotation Based Image Retrieval or the Content Based
Image Retrieval. Further research can be developed to slowly replace some aspects of the human
input with machine learning algorithms.
One of the primary contributions of the framework was to demonstrate a novel framework which
systematically reduces the semantic gap by using the human input, the ABIR and the CBIR
algorithms. Some of the other contributions include a methodology for systematically evaluating
the effectiveness of the image search engines, and a methodology for using both generic and
domain specific templates for the ABIR and the CBIR algorithms.

Vinayashree Hiremath

10:00 am

November 18, 2010

311 Russ

ABSTRACT

In recent years, signal processing has gained ample significance making high speed and low voltage analog-to-digital converters (ADC) inevitable in numerous applications. Two such ADCs designed in CMOS 90nm technology are presented in this thesis.
In flash ADC, thermometer to binary encoder often becomes bottleneck in achieving high speed. An encoder deploying new CMOS logic, with fewer transistors through the use of pseudo-dynamic circuits is described. This 4 bit flash ADC operates at 5GHz with an average power dissipation of 1.3mW.
Folding and interpolation significantly reduces the number of comparators used in flash architecture. A 6 bit 400MSPS low power folding and interpolating ADC that has a power dissipation of 2.17mW is presented. Output synchronization circuit is not required as folding circuits are used in both fine and coarse converters.
These ADCs can be used as building blocks in high resolution pipeline ADC.

Advisor: Dr. Saiyu Ren

Ramchandra Kotecha

2:00 pm

November 17, 2010

311 Russ

ABSTRACT

Current-mode control is the most popular scheme used for the operation of SMPS (Switch Mode Power Supplies). Current-mode control, also known as current-programmed mode or current-injected control is a multi-loop control scheme that contains an inner current loop and an outer voltage loop. The current loop controls the inductor peak current while the voltage loop controls the output voltage. Outer voltage loop also sets the reference for the inner loop. Several models have been proposed so far to explain the phenomena of current-mode control. Most of these models have been conflicting with each other and have failed to explain the high-frequency effects of the current-mode control. However, most of the models predict the sub-harmonic oscillation at half the switching frequency. Some of the most popular small-signal models that predict the small-signal characteristics of current-mode control scheme have been analyzed and compared in this thesis. A PWM dc-dc buck converter in CCM(Continuous Conduction Mode) has been chosen to explain the behavior of the buck converter in all these models. Small-signal characteristics are generated in MATLAB using the simplified analytical transfer functions by using the small-signal model. Some of the important small-signal characteristics include the current loop gain, control-to-output gain with the current-loop closed and outer loop open, audio susceptibility, and output impedance. The two most important models in consideration are: 1) A New Continuous Time Model and 2) Peak Current-Mode control Model. Despite the fact that both these models predict the instability of current-mode control at a duty ratio of 0.5, these models differ significantly in deriving the expression for the sampling gain. As a result, their small-signal characteristics differ over a wide frequency range. Also, a very less explored average current–mode control is compared with the peak-current mode control based on the similar small-signal characteristics. Some of the advantages of average current-mode control over the peak current mode control are also explained.

Advisor: Dr. Marian Kazimierczuk

Qi Zhang

2:30 pm
November 16, 2010
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

In the distributed large-scale system, the behavior of any subsystem is not only influenced by variables belonging to it (local variables), but also by the variables in other subsystems during its interaction with neighboring subsystems. The effect of the fault in one subsystem will be quickly propagated to other subsystems due to their interconnections. Currently, most of the fault detection and diagnosis schemes are focused on centralized system which do not consider the interaction terms and can not efficiently detect the faults.

In this thesis, a distributed fault detection scheme is developed for a class of large-scale nonlinear uncertain systems with unstructured modeling uncertainty. For each subsystem, a fault detection estimator (FDE) is designed by utilizing local measurements and certain communicated information from neighboring FDEs associated with subsystems that are directly interconnected to the particular subsystem under consideration. Then, under certain assumptions, adaptive threshold for fault detection in each local subsystem is derived, and its robustness property with respect to modeling uncertainty and interactions among interconnected subsystems is also investigated. Also, the fault detectability conditions characterizing the class of faults in each subsystem that can be detected by this approach is analyzed. A simulation example of automated highway systems is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Advisor: Dr. Xiaodong Zhang

Theresa Hill

Advisor: Dr. Hong Huang
November 10, 2010
11:00 am-12:00 pm
Room: 299 Joshi

Abstract:
Progress in commercializing renewable energy technologies is being advanced by developments in Zinc Oxide material science. In this work, key variables affecting zinc oxide sol-gel processing were investigated. Resulting films were characterized for optical transparency by UV-VIS spectrophotometry. Chemical reaction mechanisms within the sol-gel process and Zinc Oxide film crystalline properties were analyzed using Raman spectroscopy. Key variables affecting final film quality were explored.

Huiying Ren

Advisor: Dr. Yanhua Wu

October 29, 2010

9:00am-11:00am

Room: 299 Joshi Center

Abstract:

High spatial resolution PIV experiments are performed in the x-y planes at two different spanwise positions to compare the turbulent boundary layers over smooth, rough forward-facing-steps as well as the rough step's two coarse scale-resolution approximations. The Reynolds number based on the step's mean height Re_h is 3450 and the ratio of boundary layer thickness to the step's height, delta/h is 8. The roughness topography on the top surface of the rough step is replicated from a realistic turbine blade and is intrinsically three-dimensional and highly irregular. The surface topographies of the coarse scale-resolution approximations of the rough step are obtained from a multi-resolutional analysis using discrete wavelet transform (DWT).

Sunil Udaya Simha Moda

Tuesday October 26, 2010

1:00 - 5:00 pm

499 Joshi

ABSTRACT

Direct Injection spark ignition (DISI) technology is helpful for the present day engine to increase the fuel efficiency. Power output and the choice of fuel as the demand and scarcity for fossil fuels are increasing. As a new technology DISI engines are employed in some commercial cars like the Pontiac Solstice using gasoline fuel. The ability of DISI technology to use various range of fuels is not tested in the commercial automotive world. The other advantages of DISI technology over direct injection compression Ignition (DICI) engines reduced compression ratio, reduced injection pressure and reduced operating pressures are not demonstrated in commercial world because DISI engine is still using the gasoline as the fuel. As a new technology DISI engines lack in prior experimental results and combustion co-relations that can be directly used as in the case of conventional engines. The experimental analysis of this technique is very expensive as it involves large number of parameters to be changed each and every time the experiment is done. This makes the experimental analysis of DISI engine a costly and time consuming task. Computational fluid dynamics on the other hand can simulate the combustion process and let researches visualize the process of combustion inside the cylinder.

The ability of DISI engine to work on different fuels in the engine is successfully tested. Two engines, reciprocating and rotary, equipped with DISI technology is simulated in FLUENT. The engines are selected in such a way that they represent the major part of engine family to show that DISI technology is feasible in any type of IC engines. Because of unavailable experimental data on DISI diesel engines, the models used in the thesis are validated with a gasoline DISI reciprocating engine. The validated model is used for parametric study of diesel fuel in DISI engine. It was found that the engine parameters need to be tuned to avoid the undesired effects of diesel fuel. After several parametric changes, combustion and power output which is identical to the experimental validated case are obtained. Hence it has been proved that the diesel fuel can be successfully utilized in DISI engine. This technology is then applied to the rotary engine. Because of the change in geometry and many other specifications, the parameters used for reciprocating engine are not feasible for rotary engine. Therefore a parametric study on rotary engine is carried out to obtain a good combustion and power output.

It is proven successfully in this thesis that DISI technology can be applied to any engine and can use any kind of fuel. However, each and every engine need to be tuned according to its specifications and geometrical constrains to obtain the maximum fuel air mixture and therefore the maximum power output. The thesis explains the influence of parameters on the power output considering the important properties of fuel such as detonation, volatility and density. The behavior of fuel and flow physics inside the cylinder is visually explained. The fuel air interaction, which is very important to have a good air fuel mixture formation, is extensively studied and the methods are developed to time the injector depending on the air turbulence inside the cylinder. The conclusions in this thesis demand the importance of further studies of this technology. The results of the thesis show that this technology can be used as a more energy efficient and echo friendly technology. However, further studies on this technology are essential to build a flawless more efficient technology in the field of IC engines.

Design and Validation of a Sensor Integration and Information Fusion Test-Bed For Image-Based Pattern Recognition Applications

Hrishikesh V. Karvir

Advisor: Dr. Julie A. Skipper

Wednesday, October 27, 2010, 9:30 AM

145 Russ Engineering Center

The College of Engineering and Computer Science Distinguished Speaker Series

Presents

Dr. William Rouse

"Models of Complex Enterprise Networks"

Friday, October 22, 2010
1:00 P.M. - 2:00 P.M.

Gandhi Room
101 White Hall
Wright State University

Dr. William Rouse has over thirty years of experience in research, education, management, marketing, and engineering related to individual and organizational performance, decision support systems, and information systems. In these areas, he has consulted with over one hundred large and small enterprises in the private, public, and non-profit sectors, where he has worked with several thousand executives and senior managers. His expertise includes individual and organizational decision making and problem solving, as well as design of organizations and information systems.

Dr. Rouse is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of multiple professional societies. He has served as Chair of the Committee on Human Factors of the National Research Council and as a member of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.

Department of Electrical Engineering
MS Thesis Defense
Niharika Sonti

1:30 pm
September 30, 2010
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

With the increase in the complexity of control systems design and the demand for more productivity, the possibility of the occurrence of faults in control systems has also significantly increased. In this thesis, a unified method for the fault diagnosis of sensor faults and process faults is developed for a class of Lipschitz nonlinear uncertain systems. The fault detection and isolation (FDI) architecture is comprised of a fault detection estimator and a bank of fault isolation estimators (FIEs), where each FIE is designed, based on the functional structure of a particular fault, in the fault class under consideration. The output residuals are generated, and adaptive thresholds are designed for the detection and isolation of the faults. The effectiveness of the fault detection and isolation algorithm is illustrated by a simulation example of single-link robotic arm. Extensive simulation studies have been conducted using Matlab/Simulink. Based on the nature of the residuals and their corresponding adaptive thresholds, the faults under consideration are successfully detected and isolated.

Advisor: Dr. Zhang

11:00 am
Sept. 17, 2010
Tait Conference Room, 405 Russ

ABSTRACT

Digital microwave receivers play a critical role in many of today's modern radar tracking systems. The need for these digital receivers to push the boundaries in terms of bandwidth and input dynamic ranges (DR) is vital for their use in radar signal tracking. Significant research has been conducted in the area of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) to aid in continuing to enhance the performance capabilities of digital microwave receivers. However, with the advancement and increased complexity of these systems, the need for an efficient and effective adaptive thresholding technique is becoming ever more present. The proposed adaptive thresholding technique utilizes signal magnitude evaluations and multi-stage signal scaling throughout a 128-pt FFT in order to effectively determine the optimal threshold for the microwave receiver. The incorporation of a 10-bit dynamic kernel function, as well as 14-bit word size between FFT stages is used to aid in increasing receiver sensitivity, multi-tone instantaneous dynamic range (IDR) and spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) performance. With the implementation of our adaptive thresholding technique, our receiver's maximum IDR is maintained between 34dB down to 24dB for input signal strengths ranging from -4dBm down to -32dBm. From simulation results incorporating the use of digitized data from our 10-bit Atmel ADC our Multi-Stage Scaling (MSS) receiver design is capable of obtaining an SFDR of 35.91dB using an input signal strength of -7dBm.

Advisor: Dr. Henry Chen

Randy Tobe

Advisor: Dr. Ramana Grandhi
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
10:00 am
292 Joshi (Brandeberry Conference Room)

Abstract:
Damage detection of thermal protection systems is crucial for mission safety of hypersonic vehicles. One critical failure mode of thermal protection systems is fastener failure. An efficient methodology that allows damage detection with minimal experimental training for implementation is desired due to constraints on available laboratory time. This research investigates a methodology to simulate fastener failure with an experimentally validated finite element model. The validated finite element model provides low-frequency mode shapes for healthy and damaged structural states. The modal vectors obtained for the healthy state and each of the damage states are used to calculate modal-based metrics which can be used to detect and localize damage. Two modal-based damage metrics were created in this research (the normalized coordinate modal assurance criterion and the normalized coordinate modal assurance criterion summation) to localize this global damage. These metrics were and compared to existing metrics (modal assurance criterion, partial modal assurance criterion, and coordinate modal assurance criterion). Both of the new damage metrics demonstrated improved damage localization over the other investigated metrics.

Jason King
Advisor: Dr. Ramana Grandhi
August 30, 2010
10:00 a.m.
405 Russ Center (Tait Conference Room)

Abstract:
Due to the inherent natural variability of parameters with reusable launch vehicles, design considerations without use of a reliability or safety index may be unreliable and vulnerable to vehicle failures. Generally in preliminary air vehicle design little information is known regarding design variable uncertainties, consequently requiring a technique that can quantify epistemic uncertainties. Evidence Theory is employed to accomplish this task resulting in a reliability bound of belief and plausibility. Due to the discontinuous nature of the belief and plausibility function it is necessary to implement a continuous function known as plausibility decision to be used to calculate sensitivities that can be implemented in a gradient-based reliability-based design optimization algorithm. This research develops a new plausibility decision approximation that calculates sensitivities with respect to uncertain design variables without introducing extra computational cost or numerical integration. This new metric was demonstrated in a sensitivity analysis as well as a reliability based design optimization of the aeroelastic flutter reliability of a reusable launch vehicle's wing.

Advisor: Dr. Marian K. Kazimierczuk

Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010
Time: 10:00 AM
Location: Russ Engineering 405, Tait Conference Room
Attendance is Open to All

Abstract

Integrated circuit technology continually presses toward higher transistor density and thus smaller dimensions, yet passive components which remain the bulk of the circuit area, surprisingly receive sideline attention. This work addresses a niche area of inductor design as it applies to the 3-dimensional (3-D) integration of active transistors and passive components. Hybrid, 3-D circuits residing on inexpensive silicon substrates can be fashioned using a photosensitive epoxy known as SU-8 which serves as the interposer layer between the substrate and in which the passive components are embedded. The active components, which are known-good-chips, are epoxied into deep reactive ion etched pockets in the silicon substrate. The inductors are fabricated in the SU-8 covering the active chips. This technique saves considerable money and increases the yield of 3-D circuits compared with the high cost of monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs). Solenoid inductor designs were modeled using Matlab incorporating closed-form equations. Herein, that model was developed and verified against both empirical data from fabricated solenoids and against data from a physical simulator in CoventorWare's 3-D electromagnetic software. A design of experiments examined the effect of solenoid geometry on inductance, quality factor and AC resistance. Additionally, solenoids were fabricated with ferromagnetic cores in an effort to study the potential of enhancing the inductance and quality factor. Finally, SU-8 was used as an interposer layer in a 3-D microwave circuit incorporating AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors, as a demonstration of component integration.

Abstract

Computed tomography (CT) has various applications in different fields. In our case, the cone-beam CT scanner is used in the industrial field for qualitative and quantitative assessment of Procter-and-Gamble products. To allow appropriate assessment of the images, the scanner needs to be characterized. We measured linearity of the detector, geometric resolution as well as the effects of scatter and beam hardening. For the latter, we propose solutions to improve the quantitative interpretation of the CT values in the images.

The linearity of the detector elements was tested using the flat fields between 50 and 150 kVp at a number of intervals of anode current. An R-squared test of detector reading versus anode current allowed the identification of bad pixels, and we found 5660 pixels that were below the decided threshold. No correction was done for this, as the software by the manufacturing company already provided a correction.

A forearm phantom made from Plexiglas and aluminum was reconstructed to perform modulation transfer function (MTF) measurements. The images contained 5 circular profiles, and MTF measurements were done on these 5 profiles by an ESF-based fitting procedure. The 10% MTF value was higher at stage position 300 mm (7.2 cycles/mm to 8.5 cycles/mm) than at stage position 550 mm (2.9 cycles/mm to 3.5 cycles/mm) and stage position 700 mm (2.2 cycles/mm to 2.76 cycles/mm). To obtain a higher cut-off value for the 10% MTF, it can be suggested that stage positions should be as close as possible to the source.

A step phantom made from Delrin and a forearm phantom made from Plexiglas and aluminum were used for scatter measurements in projection and reconstruction files, respectively. Three stage positions (300 mm, 550 mm and 700 mm) and three regions on the detector (region 1, region 2 and region 3) were used to conduct experiments for this part of our research. A precise collimator was designed to make the cone beam fit the flat panel detector by calculating the actual source position and determining the necessary size of the cone beam. Data for both the step phantom in projection files and the forearm phantom in reconstructed image files were compared with and without collimator. The collimator, which was used to prevent scatter emanating from the rotating stage, increased projection values for all three stage positions as expected but did not entirely remove the effect of scatter. Stage position 300 mm was completely out of the collimated beam; therefore, the effect of scatter emanating from the rotating stage was not present for data in this stage position. Based on our results we know that the effect of scatter is more prominent for stage positions closer to the detector.

Beam-hardening correction was based on the coefficients created from the step phantom data at 300 mm from the source. A fourth-order polynomial from region 2 was used to correct the forearm-phantom projection data, which were then reconstructed. The applied correction completely removed the cupping associated with the beam-hardening effect. The beam-hardening correction is based on the step-phantom material Delrin; it will work correctly only for materials close to the composition and density of Delrin and might over or under correct for other materials.

"A Contrast Pattern based Clustering Algorithm for Categorical Data"

By Neil K Fore

Friday, August 27, 2010 – 1:30 pm – 384 Joshi

MS Committee: Drs. Guozhu Dong, Advisor, Keke Chen, TK Prasad

ABSTRACT:

The data clustering problem has received much attention in the data
mining, machine learning, and pattern recognition communities over a
long period of time. Many previous approaches to solving this problem
require the use of a distance function. However, since clustering is
highly explorative and is usually performed on data which are rather
new, it is debatable whether users can provide good distance functions
for the data.

This thesis proposes a Contrast Pattern based Clustering (CPC)
algorithm to construct clusters without a distance function, by
focusing on the quality and diversity/richness of contrast patterns
that contrast the clusters in a clustering. Specifically, CPC
attempts to maximize the Contrast Pattern-based Clustering Quality
(CPCQ) score, which can recognize that expert-determined classes are
the best clusters for many datasets in the UCI repository.
Experiments using UCI datasets show that CPCQ scores are higher for
clusterings produced by CPC than those by other, well-known clustering
algorithms. Furthermore, CPC is able to recover expert clusterings
from these datasets with higher accuracy than those algorithms.

"Prognosis: A Wearable System for Health Monitoring of People at Risk"

By Alexandros A. Pantelopoulos

Friday, August 27, 2010 – 3:00 pm – 499 Joshi

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Nikolaos Bourbakis, Advisor, Soon Chung, Yong
Pei, Arnab Show (WSU-EE), and Larry W. Lawhorne, (Geriatrics, One
Elizabeth Place)

ABSTRACT:

Wearable Health Monitoring Systems (WHMS) have drawn a lot of attention
from the research community and the industry during the last decade.
The development of such systems has been motivated mainly by increasing
healthcare costs and by the fact that the world population is ageing.
In addition to that, R&D in WHMS has been propelled by recent
technological advances in miniature bio-sensing devices, smart textiles,
microelectronics and wireless communications techniques.

These portable health systems can comprise various types of small
physiological sensors, which enable continuous monitoring of a variety
of human vital signs and of other physiological parameters such as heart
rate, respiration rate, body temperature, blood pressure, perspiration,
oxygen saturation, electrocardiogram (ECG), body posture and activity
etc. As a result, due to their embedded transmission modules and
processing capabilities, wearable health monitoring systems can
facilitate low-cost unobtrusive and ubiquitous health, mental and
activity status monitoring.

The majority of the currently developed WHMS research prototypes and
products provide the basic functionality of continuously logging and
transmitting physiological data. However, WHMS have the potential of
achieving early detection and diagnosis of critical health changes that
could enable prevention of health hazardous episodes. To do that, they
should be able to learn individual user baselines and also employ
advanced information processing algorithms and diagnostics in order to
discover problems autonomously and detect alarming health trends, and
consequently, inform medical professionals for further assistance.

In an effort to advance the capabilities of a wearable system towards
these goals, we focus in this dissertation on the development of a novel
WHMS, called Prognosis. The developed prototype platform includes the
following innovative features, which constitute the main research
contributions of this work: a) a novel and highly accurate methodology
for classifying ECG recordings on a resource constrained device which is
based on the Matching Pursuits algorithm and a Neural Network, b) a
physiological data fusion scheme based on a fuzzy regular formal
language model, whereby the current state of the corresponding fuzzy
Finite State Machine signifies the current health state and context of
the patient, c) the extension of the decision making methodology based
on a modified Fuzzy Petri Net (FPN) model, d) the integration of a
user-learning strategy based on a neural-fuzzy extension of the FPN, e)
the incorporation of a system-patient dialogue interaction in order to
capture non-measurable patient symptoms such as chest pain, dizziness,
malaise etc and finally f) the prototyping of the system based on a
smart-phone that runs multi-threaded J2ME software for handling multiple
simultaneous Bluetooth connections with off-the-shelf wireless bio-sensors.

Abstract

This research develops and evaluates several different methods for multi-user signal classification via cyclic spectral analysis. The first method uses the spectral correlation function (SCF) through temporal smoothing with the use of higher order cyclic statistics (HOCS) to allow for modulation classification. The second method uses the cyclic temporal cumulant function (CTCF) and the spectral coherence function (SOF) through frequency smoothing. Using a feature-based pattern recognition technique with the SOF can not only determine the number of signals present in the received signal, but can also give signal parameter estimation and group classification performance. The last method conducts further modulation classification by using second and fourth order Cyclic Cumulants. Cyclostationary processing is the foundation of this research and requires no a priori information about the incoming signal parameters; including but not limited to symbol rate, carrier frequency and phase offset. Monte Carlo simulations completed in MATLAB and performance results are given for all aforementioned methods

By Meenakshi Nagarajan

Wednesday, August 18, 2010
10:30 am – 292 Joshi

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Amit P. Sheth, Advisor, Michael Raymer, Shaojun
Wang, John M. Flach, WSU-Psychology, Daniel Gruhl, IBM Research, Almaden,
and Kevin Hass, Yahoo!Research

ABSTRACT:

Over the last few years, there has been a growing public and enterprise
fascination with 'social media' and its role in modern society. At the
heart of this fascination is the ability for users to participate,
collaborate, consume, create and share content via a variety of
platforms such as blogs, micro-blogs, email, instant messaging services,
social network services, collaborative wikis, social bookmarking sites,
and multimedia sharing sites. Today, in addition to any factual
information, we are also able to access conversations, opinions and
emotions that these facts evoke among other users. We are able to ask
questions such as, what are people saying about any news-worthy event or
entity? Can we use this information to assess a population's preference?
Can we study how these preferences propagate in a network of friends?
Are such crowd-sourced preferences a good substitute for traditional
polling methods?

This dissertation is devoted to understanding informal user-generated
textual content on social media platforms and using the results of the
analysis to build Social Intelligence Applications.

The body of research presented in this thesis focuses on understanding
what a piece of user-generated content is 'About' via two sub-goals of
Named Entity Recognition and Key Phrase Extraction on informal text. In
light of the poor context and informal nature of content on social media
platforms, we investigate the role of contextual information from
documents, domain models and the social medium to supplement and improve
the reliability and performance of existing text mining algorithms for
Named Entity Recognition and Key Phrase Extraction.

In all cases we find that using multiple contextual cues together lends
to reliable inter-dependent decisions, better than using the cues in
isolation and that such improvements are robust across domains and
content of varying characteristics, from micro-blogs like Twitter,
social networking forums such as those on MySpace and Facebook, and
blogs on the Web.

Finally, we showcase two deployed Social Intelligence applications that
build over the results of Named Entity Recognition and Key Phrase
Extraction algorithms to provide near real-time information about the
pulse of an online populace. Specifically, we describe what it takes to
build applications that wish to exploit the 'wisdom of the crowds' --
highlighting challenges in data collection, processing informal English
text, metadata extraction and presentation of the resulting information.

Abstract

Children's skeletons mature at different rates, and they can be affected by a variety of factors including disease, hormone imbalance or genetics. The assessment of skeletal maturity is a frequently performed procedure that allows the detection of hormonal, growth or genetic disorders, and it plays an important role in pediatrics. Several methods have been developed to estimating skeletal maturity. Most of the methods evaluate the hand/wrist radiographs using indicators such as the ratios of various bone widths, the onset of their ossification and the epiphyseal-diaphyseal fusion. Among them, the FELS method differs from others in the application of different grades to each indicator and the provision of a confidence limit of the skeletal maturity.

However, skeletal age assessment based on the FELS Method is associated with considerable observer variability. There is also increased pressure on pediatric radiologists to read more and larger sets of radiographs. These problems could be solved by an automated computerized method, which has the potential to reduce the time required to examine the image and to increase the reliability of the analysis. The aim of this project is the development of an automated computer-based analysis method to estimate skeletal age from hand/wrist radiographic images, which could be obtained through not only the traditional x-ray procedures but also using DXA scanners. The analysis was performed in several stages: the preprocessing step, the ROI extraction step and the indicator analysis step. The results obtained from the analysis were then integrated and used to calculate the skeletal age and standard error.

In this study, 174 left hand/wrist radiographs of children between the ages of 8 and 18 years were selected from the FELS Longitudinal Study; 100 of them were used for training and the remainder for testing. DXA images were also obtained for the participants in the testing set and are used to evaluate the possibility of assessing skeletal age based on DXA scanner. The automated analysis was successful in approximately 90% of the training set, 85% of the testing set and 100% of the DXA image set. Manual intervention of the ROIs localization allowed the remaining images to be analyzed.

The grades of all the indicators together with the skeletal age of each participant generated from our analysis method were compared with the reference values provided by two well trained specialists at the Lifespan Health Research Center. Most of the indicators (85%) do not show statistical difference between the observation values obtained from our program and the reference values. By comparing the skeletal age estimated by our program and the specialists, it was found that the analysis of the traditional x-ray images was fairly good; only 9.5% of the training set and 12.5% of the testing set show differences that are larger than 1.5 years. However, the results of the DXA images were worse -- about 34% of this data set show a difference larger than 1.5 years. In addition, the indicators that could not be graded by our program do have some effect on the skeletal age assessment of the children from 8 to 18 years old.

Short Bio:
Marco D. de Tullio graduated cum laude in Mechanical Engineering at the Politecnico di Bari in 2003. He obtained a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the Politecnico di Bari in 2007. During the PhD period, he spent several months at the Center for Turbulence Research of the Stanford University, working on the development of an immersed boundary method for compressible flows. He is now a postdoc researcher at Politecnico di Bari, where he teaches courses of Fundamental Fluid Dynamics and Turbulence. His research is focused on the development and improvement of the immersed boundary technique to compressible flows, with particular emphasis on wall modeling, as well as the application of the immersed boundary technique for incompressible flows to moving and deforming geometries, oriented to biomedical applications.

Recent Publications:
M.D. de Tullio, R. Verzicco and G. Iaccarino: Immersed boundary technique for Large-Eddy-Simulation; Lecture Series – Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, ISSN: 0377-8312, 2010.

M.D. de Tullio, G. Pedrizzetti and R. Verzicco: On the effect of aortic root geometry on the coronary entry-flow after a bileaflet mechanical heart valve implant: a numerical study;
Acta Mechanica, 2010, in press, DOI 10.1007/s00707-010-0361-2.

M.D. de Tullio, A. Cristallo, E. Balaras and R. Verzicco: Direct numerical simulation of the pulsatile flow through an aortic bileaflet mechanical heart valve; Journal of Fluid Mechanics, vol. 622, pp. 259-290, ISSN: 0022-1120, 2009

Tim Leger
Advisor: Dr. Mitch Wolff
Wednesday, August 18th 2010
9AM in 148 RC

Abstract

Developers of aircraft gas turbine engines continually strive for greater efficiency and
higher thrust-to-weight ratio designs. To meet these goals, advanced designs generally feature
thin, low aspect airfoils, which offer increased performance but are highly susceptible to flowinduced
vibrations. As a result, High Cycle Fatigue (HCF) has become a universal problem
throughout the gas turbine industry and unsteady aeroelastic computational models are needed to
predict and prevent these problems in modern turbomachinery designs. This research presents
the development of a 3D unsteady aeroelastic solver for turbomachinery applications. To
accomplish this, a well established turbomachinery Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code
called Corsair is loosely coupled to the commercial Computational Structural Solver (CSD)
Ansys® through the use of a Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) module.

Significant modifications are made to Corsair to handle the integration of the FSI module
and improve overall performance. Temporal based coordinate transformation metrics are
incorporated into Corsair to properly account for fluid grid deformations dictated by the FSI
module. Wall functions with user specified surface roughness are also added to reduce fluid grid
density requirements near solid surfaces. To increase overall performance and ease of future
modifications to the source code, Corsair is rewritten in Fortran 90 with an emphasis on reducing
memory usage and improving source code readability and structure. Domain decomposition in
the radial direction is also incorporated to provide an additional level of parallelization, including
a utility which automatically splits the computational domain optimally based on user input.
Conversion routines and utilities are created to handle differences in grid formats between
Corsair and the FSI module.

The resulting aeroelastic solver is validated using two simplified configurations. First,
the well understood case of a flexible cylinder in cross flow is studied with the natural frequency
of the cylinder set to the shedding frequency of the Von Karman streets. The cylinder is self
excited and demonstrates the correct exchange of energy between the fluid and structural models.
The second validation case is based on the fourth standard configuration and demonstrates the
ability of the solver to predict the dominant vibrational modes of an aeroelastic turbomachinery
blade. For this case, a single blade from the fourth standard configuration is subjected to a step
function from zero loading to the converged flow solution loading in order to excite the
structural modes of the blade. These modes are then compared to those obtained from an in
vacuo Ansys® analysis with good agreement between the two.

Dissertation title: Privacy-Preserving Attribute-Based Access Control in
a Grid

Time: 1:30 am - 3:00 pm, August 3, Tuesday, 2010

Place: Tait conference room, 405 Russ Center

Committee members:
Soon M. Chung (Advisor, CSE, WSU)
Nikolaos Bourbakis (CSE, WSU)
Yong Pei (CSE, WSU)
Xinhui Zhang (BIHFE, WSU)
Chansu Yu (ECE, Cleveland State University)

Abstract

A Grid community is composed of diverse stake holders, such as data
resource providers, computing resource providers, service providers, and
the users of the resources and services. In traditional security systems
for Grids, most of the authentication and authorization mechanisms are
based on the user's identity or the user's classification information.

If the authorization mechanism is based on the user's identity,
fine-grained access control policies can be implemented but the
scalability of the security system would be limited. If the
authorization mechanism is based on the user's classification, the
scalability can be improved but the fine-grained access control policies
may not be supported.

We developed an enhanced version of the Community Authorization Service
(CAS) which supports centralized, fine-grained access control by
managing the memberships, service types, resource objects and security
policies of a Virtual Organization (VO). The current CAS provides
fundamental solutions regarding user privacy, authentication and
authorization,but it has some limitations due to its centralized
management of the security policies of a VO, in terms of scalability,
flexibility and interoperability. We enhanced the CAS to support diverse
security requirements within a dynamic Grid environment by enabling the
CAS server to publish a proxy certificate embedding additional
attributes of users. It allows the service providers to support
customized services by analyzing the attributes of users and security
policies.

Previous researches on privacy-preserving in a Grid have focused on
protecting the data stored in a data server and on securing the
communication to protect exchanged data. The issue of preserving the
privacy of users has not been a major issue in the security domain.
However, as on-line transactions prevail and diverse user attributes are
required for authorization decision, the privacy-preserving becomes an
important issue.

Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) employs multiple attributes for
authorization decision, which enables the security system to be
flexible, interoperable, and multifunctional. However, ABAC has
disadvantages with regard to privacy-preserving because it requires the
circulation of the user attributes which can increase the risk of
privacy violation. To enhance the privacy-preserving capability of ABAC
in a Grid, we developed an attribute release control mechanism to
publish an optimal set of attributes that are essential to access a
desired resource (or service), while exposing least amount of sensitive
user information. To facilitate the selection of an optimal set of
attributes, we also developed Security Policy Publication Service (SPPS)
which retrieves the access condition from the access control policies in
eXtensible Access Control Markup Language(XACML) and converts it into a
Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) of attributes. We modified the Shibboleth
Identity Provider and GridShib for the implementation of our
privacy-preserving ABAC, and the performance analysis shows that the
overhead of the proposed system is very small.

Joy E. Davis
Advisor: Dr. Nathan Klingbeil
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
10:00 a.m.
Tait Conference Room
405 Russ Engineering Center
Wright State University

Abstract:

Laser and electron beam-based additive manufacturing of Ti-6Al-4V are under consideration for
application to aerospace components. A critical concern for these processes is the ability to
obtain a consistent and desirable microstructure and corresponding mechanical properties of the
deposit. Based on the Rosenthal solution for a moving point-heat source, recent work has
developed simulation-based process maps for the thermal conditions controlling microstructure
(grain size and morphology) in beam-based deposition of semi-infinite geometries, where a
steady-state melt pool exists away from free-edges. In the current study, the Rosenthal solution is
modified to include the effects of free-edges. This is accomplished by superposition of two pointheat
sources symmetrically approaching one another, with the line of symmetry representing the
free-edge. The result is an exact solution for the case of temperature-independent properties.
Dimensionless results for melt pool geometry, solidification cooling rate and thermal gradient are
determined with MATLAB, and plotted as a function of distance from the free-edge. Results for
2-D and 3-D geometries are verified with finite element analysis for both small-scale and largescale
(higher power) processes. Results are further plotted on solidification maps to predict
trends in grain size and morphology for Ti-6Al-4V. Results suggest that melt pool geometry is
more sensitive to free-edges than solidification microstructure particularly for small-scale
processes. This is an important result for process developers.

Satya Sahoo

July 29, 2010 at 9:30am; 380 Joshi

Ph.D. Committee: Drs. Amit Sheth, Advisor, Krishnaprasad
Thirunarayanan, Michael Raymer, Nicholas Reo, (Biochemistry &
Molecular Biology), Olivier Bodenreider (National Library of
Medicine, Nat’l Institutes of Health), and William York, (Dept of
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology – Univ of Georgia)

Abstract:

Provenance metadata, describing the history or lineage of an entity,
is essential for ensuring data quality, correctness of process
execution, and computing trust values. Traditionally, provenance
management issues have been dealt with in the context of workflow or
relational database systems. However, existing provenance systems
are inadequate to address the requirements of an emerging set of
applications in the new eScience or Cyberinfrastructure paradigm and
the Semantic Web. Provenance in these applications incorporates
complex domain semantics on a large scale with a variety of uses,
including accurate interpretation by software agents, trustworthy
data integration, reproducibility, attribution for commercial or
legal applications, and trust computation. In this dissertation, we
introduce the notion of “semantic provenance” to address these
requirements for eScience and Semantic Web applications.

In addition, we describe a framework for management of semantic
provenance by addressing the three issues of, (a) provenance
representation, (b) query & analysis, and (c) scalable
implementation. First, we introduce a foundational model of
provenance called Provenir to serve as an upper-level reference
ontology to facilitate provenance interoperability. Second, we
define a classification scheme for provenance queries based on the
query characteristics and use this scheme to define a set of
specialized provenance query operators. Third, we describe the
implementation of a highly scalable query engine to support the
provenance query operators, which uses a new class of materialized
views based on the Provenir ontology, called Materialized Provenance
Views (MPV), for query optimization.

We also define a novel provenance tracking approach called Provenance
Context Entity (PaCE) for the Resource Description Framework (RDF)
model used in Semantic Web applications. PaCE, defined in terms of
the Provenir ontology, is an effective and scalable approach for RDF
provenance tracking in comparison to the currently used RDF
reification vocabulary. Finally, we describe the application of the
semantic provenance framework in biomedical and oceanography research
projects.
========================

Thank you.

Best,
Satya Sahoo
http://knoesis.wright.edu/researchers/satya

Department of Electrical Engineering
MS Thesis Defense
Hithesh S. Uliyar

2:00 pm
August 5, 2010
311 Russ

ABSTRACT

Automotive vehicles are becoming increasingly dependent on electric power, and this trend will accelerate. The health of the vehicular electric power generation and storage (EPGS) system is crucial to enhance vehicle safety, fuel economy, and customer satisfaction. In this research, a state-of-health (SOH) monitoring method is developed for automotive EPGS system, focusing on alternator related faults. Parity relations, characterizing the correlation among EPGS system signals under normal operating conditions, are generated using principal/minor component analysis techniques. Based on a design of structured residuals, the faults under consideration, including shorted diodes, belt slippage, and regulator fault, are successfully detected and isolated. The effectiveness of the diagnostic algorithm is illustrated by using Matlab/Simulink based EPGS Simulation model.

Advisor: Dr. Zhang

Department of Electrical Engineering
MS Thesis Defense
Thomas Salvatierra

10:00 am
August 3, 2010
292 Joshi

ABSTRACT

Analog magnetic tape remains the medium of choice for sound recording
applications where high-fidelity audio reproduction is required. Some of
this inherent fidelity is sacrificed during the tape playback process;
an optimized playback preamplifier is therefore critical to the
performance of the medium. Existing tape playback methods integrate the
voltage generated across the reproduce head to obtain a voltage signal
directly proportional to the remanent magnetic flux of the tape. An
alternate playback method proposes the use of a transresistance
amplifier to convert magnetic flux-proportional reproduce head current
directly to voltage. This eliminates the need for voltage integration
and minimizes the amount of equalization performed upon playback. The
size and complexity of the circuit are likewise reduced. A practical
transresistance playback preamplifier is designed and its performance is
evaluated against selected integrating playback preamplifiers. PSPICE
simulation verifies that the proposed design offers a significant
reduction in harmonic distortion, as well as improved transient
response, magnitude response, and phase margin.

Advisor: Dr. Kazimierczuk

Maurissa S. D'Angelo

Advisors: Dr. S. Narayanan and Dr. D. Reynolds

Date: Monday, June 21, 2010
Time: 11:00 AM
Location: Joshi Center 292, Brandeberry Conference Room
Attendance is Open to All

Abstract
This Virtual Reality Rehabilitation (VRR) research shows promise in becoming a standard practice for long term amputee rehabilitation. Exceptional rehabilitation is not universally available to all disabled individuals due to circumstances which limit patient care such as a limited number of trained personnel, limited access to therapy in remote areas, limited patient feedback, limited visits under insurance policies and differing expertise of personnel. Providing real-time, objective feedback will help to continuously improve the quality of life of amputee individuals and provide standardized baseline techniques. The research described in this dissertation expands the use of virtual reality systems to amputee rehabilitation. A virtual reality system with performance metrics was designed, developed and tested. The effectiveness of real time feedback through self visualization was investigated. This virtual reality system integrated real time kinematic data into a virtual reality system. Subjects participated in a baseline session, three intervention sessions and a final training session. This VRR study, incorporating real-time feedback and objective performance metrics, provided a successful baseline demonstration for future research using VRR to improve gait techniques and enable more efficient and effective rehabilitation for amputees and other disabled individuals. To the knowledge of the dissertation team, this was the first study documenting a successful VRR gait-based strategy in patients with lower limb amputations.
Selected Publications

M. D'Angelo, S. Narayanan, D. B. Reynolds, S. Kotowski, and S. Page, "Application of virtual reality to the rehabilitation field to aid amputee rehabilitation: findings from a systematic review." Disability and rehabilitation. Assistive technology, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 136-142, January 2010.

D'Angelo J. and D'Angelo M. "Final Report: Next Generation Aircraft Wiring Insulation" NAVAIR 2007; 1-53.

D'Angelo M. and D'Angelo J. "Final Report: Individual Cooling Equipment" U. S. Army 2006; 1-69.

Ghannoum, M. and D'Angelo, M. "Anidulafungin: a potent antifungal that targets Candida and Aspergillus." Infectious Disease in Clinical Practice 2005;13:165-78.

Nisha Kondrath
Advisor: Dr. Marian K. Kazimierczuk

ABSTRACT
Current-mode control is a commonly adopted method of regulation for pulse-width modulated (PWM) dc-dc power converters in industry, but is not well understood. The advantages of current-mode control over the voltage-mode control include inherent overload and short circuit protection, faster response, line-noise rejection, and multiple converter paralleling. Current-mode controlled system consists of (1) an inner-current loop and (2) an outer-voltage loop, which sets the reference voltage to the inner loop. To ensure stable operation of the multi-loop converter, all the sequential loops in the circuit should be stable with sufficient degree of stability. The research in this dissertation is focused on the relative stability of the inner-current loop in peak current-mode (PCM) controlled PWM dc-dc converters operating in CCM. The inner-current loop dynamics is investigated using perturbation theory. Taking the discrete nature of the inner-current loop operation into account, a closed-loop transfer function for the current loop is derived in the z-domain. An equivalent sample-and-hold approximation along with modified Padé approximation are used to derive an approximate closed-loop transfer function in the continuous s-domain. A general expression for the loop gain of the inner-loop, independent of the converter topology, is derived. Using the loop gain, a measure of relative stability for the inner loop is developed. A design procedure is developed for the inner-current loop based on the developed measure of stability margin. Saber Sketch simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the presented theory. The dynamic behavior of the inner-current loop of peak current-mode controlled PWM dc-dc buck converter operating in CCM is modeled and verified using experimental results.

Attendance is open to all.

Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010 Time: 11:00 am Place: Joshi 292 (Brandeberry Conference Room)

Nisha Kondrath received the B.Tech. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), Kerala, India, and Wright State University (WSU), Dayton, OH, in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Her research interests are in power electronics, high-frequency PWM dc-dc converters, inverters, alternative energy sources, power semiconductor devices, and high frequency power magnetics. She has also served as a reviewer for several journal and conference publications such as IEEE Trans. on Power Electronics, IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, and ISCAS. She was also the Chair of the IEEE student chapter, WSU for one year. Ms. Kondrath is a member of Tau Beta Pi, IEEE Power Electronics Society, and Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Association, USA.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
JOURNAL PAPERS
1) N. Kondrath and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Bandwidth of current transformers," IEEE Transactions on
Instrumentation and Measurements, vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 2008-2016, June 2009.
2) N. Kondrath and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Inductor winding loss including harmonics in non-isolated PWM
dc-dc converters operating in CCM," IET Proceedings on Power Electronics, (in press).
3) N. Kondrath and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Control current for peak current-mode controlled PWM DC-DC
converters without slope compensation," IET Proceedings on Power Electronics, (accepted).

4) N. Kondrath and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Comparison of wide-frequency and high-frequency duty ratio-to-inductor current transfer functions of DC-DC PWM buck converter in CCM," IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, (after first revision).
5) N. Kondrath and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Generalized expression for loop gain of inner-current loop of peak current-mode controlled PWM DC-DC converters in CCM," IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II, (submitted).

CONFERENCE PAPERS
6) N. Kondrath and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Power stage duty ratio-to-inductor current and forward-path control-to-output transfer functions of peak current-mode controlled DC-DC PWM buck converter in CCM," in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium for Circuits and Systems, Paris, France, May 31-June 2, 2010, pp. 2734-2737.
7) N. Kondrath and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Margins of stability of inner-current loop of current-mode controlled PWM DC-DC converters," in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium for Circuits and Systems, Taipei, Taiwan, May 24-27, 2009, pp. 1985-1988.
8) N. Kondrath and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Analysis and design of common-diode tapped inductor PWM buck converter," in Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Nasheville, TN, Sept. 29-30, 2009.
9) N. Kondrath and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "DC voltage transfer function and component stresses of common-diode tapped inductor PWM boost converter," in Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Orlando, FL, Nov. 3-5, 2008.
10) N. Das (Kondrath) and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Applications of silicon carbide power devices in three-phase voltage-fed induction motor drives for electric vehicles," in Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Nasheville, TN, Oct. 22-24, 2007.
11) N. Das (Kondrath) and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Applications of silicon carbide power devices in power electronics," in Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Indianapolis, IN, Sept. 18-20, 2006.
12) N. Das (Kondrath) and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "Power losses and efficiency of buck PWM DC-DC power converter," in Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Indianapolis, IN, Oct. 23-26, 2005.
13) N. Das (Kondrath) and M. K. Kazimierczuk, "An overview of technical challenges in the design of current transformers," in Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Indianapolis, IN, Oct. 23-26, 2005.

AWARDS
- Ph.D. Assistantship, Wright State University

- DAGSI Competitive Scholarship 2005 -2008

- Electrical, Manufacturing, and Coil Winding Association Scholarship 2005 -2007, 2009

- Received Excellence in Teaching Award for teaching assistants from the College of Engineering and Computer Science, Wright State University, Dayton, OH for the academic year 2007–2008

- Elected to Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society in 2006

- Commendation from Lt. General, U. S. Air Force, for instructional support to Wright STEPP program, 2006

- Received Dayton Area Graduate Study Institute (DAGSI) research scholarship for the academic years 2006–2009

- Received Electrical, Manufacturing, and Coil winding Association scholarship for the academic years 2005–2007

Selected Publications
Journal Articles
- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Harmonic winding loss in buck DC-DC converter for discontinuous conduction mode," accepted for publication in IET Power Electronics, vol. 3, 2010

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Two-switch flyback PWM DC-DC converter in discontinuous-conduction mode," accepted for publication in International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications, (2010), early view published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/cta.672

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Winding loss due to harmonics in high frequency transformers for DC-DC converters in discontinuous conduction mode," accepted for publication in IET Power Electronics, vol. 4, 2011

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Two-switch flyback PWM DC-DC converter in continuous-conduction mode," accepted for publication in International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications, vol. 38, 2010

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Two-transistor Zeta-flyback DC-DC converter with reduced transistor voltage stress," IET Electronics Letters, vol. 46, no. 10, 2010, pp. 719-720

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Zero-current transition two-switch flyback PWM DC-DC converter," IET Power Electronics, under review

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Transformer winding loss with nonsinusoidal waveforms for PWM DC-DC converters in continuous conduction mode," IET Power Electronics, under review

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Isolated two-transistor Zeta converter with reduced transistor voltage stress," IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II - Express Briefs, under review

Conference Proceedings
- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Two-switch flyback-forward PWM DC-DC converter with reduced switch voltage stress, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Paris, May 30 – June 2, 2010

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Review of zero-current switching flyback PWM DC-DC converters," Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Nashville, TN, September 29 – October 1, 2009

- Veda Prakash Galigekere, Dakshina Murthy Bellur, and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "An overview and simulation of DC-DC and Z-source grid connected inverters," Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Nashville, TN, September 29 – October 1, 2009

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "PSpice and MATLAB Applications in Teaching Power Electronics to Graduate Students at Wright State University," ASEE North Central Section Conference, Dayton, OH, March, 2008

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "DC-DC Converters in Electric Vehicle Applications," Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Nashville, TN, October, 2007

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Active-clamp circuits for flyback PWM DC-DC converter," Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Indianapolis, IN, September, 2006

- Dakshina Murthy Bellur and Marian K. Kazimierczuk, "Performance Evaluation of Flyback Converter," Proceedings of Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference, Indianapolis, IN, October, 2005

Dissertation Defense – S. Josef Tritschler

Abstract — Portable electronic devices and crafts such as unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAV's) may benefit greatly from the ability to extract
power from overhead distribution power lines on a temporary basis to
power electronics or charge on-board batteries. However, most of the
current literature on the subject of energy scavenging is focused on
micropower and other small-scale applications. Several high-power
energy scavenging methods are investigated with an emphasis on relating
physical sensor dimensions with output power. A novel power scavenging
mechanism is introduced that shows excellent correlation between
theoretical and experimental performance. In addition, a universal
power supply is proposed which may be interfaced with an overhead
distribution line of 4.16 – 34.5 kVAC to create a temporary source of
high-quality regulated power for portable device electronics and battery
charging.

Attendance is open to all.

Advisor: Dr. Marian K. Kazimierczuk
Date: Thursday, May 27, 2010
Time: 1:00 pm
Place: Brandeberry Conference Room / Joshi 292

1) DELCO - automobile starting system (Charles Kettering)
2) Apple Computer – affordable personal computer (Steve Wozniak)
3) Hewlett-Packard – audio oscillators (Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard)
4) Motorola – the car radio (William P. Lear) and …
5) Maybe your business or invention!

Working on an idea for a new product but don't know what to do next? The Wright State University Libraries is helping beginning inventors and small businesses learn what steps are needed to receive a patent for their ideas. A free beginners patent workshop will be held Thursday, March 19th from 6:00pm-9:00pm in Room 241 of the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library.

Designed for the novice inventor, the workshop offers basic patent information and invention search techniques using the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Web site and other databases. Literature from the USPTO will also be distributed during the workshop.

Wright State's library is a U.S. Patent and Trademark Depository Library and houses one of the most powerful patent searching tools, PubWEST. It is the same patent database used by the patent examiners at the USPTO in Alexandria, Virginia.

Seating for the workshop is limited. Register online at http://www.libraries.wright.edu/about/events/ or contact Ran Raider, patent and trademark reference specialist for the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library, at ran.raider@wright.edu or by calling (937) 775-3521.

Wednesday, March 11
153 Russ Center
7:30PM

Resume Workshop, come dressed to impress because we will have a special appearance from Karen Fox (Assistant Director Career Services, liaison to CECS). She will be reviewing and presenting information on résumés along with evaluating how you present yourself.

Feel FREE to come in for FREE refreshments also.

For more information, contact Holly Zelnio, SWE President, at zelnio.4@wright.edu.

Description: Engineers, researchers, and other IEEE Xplore users are invited to attend this session to learn time saving search techniques for finding technology content using the IEEE Xplore database. During this live demonstration, participants will learn how to get improved research results to increase productivity.
-- presented by IEEE Client Services Manager, Ruth Wolfish.

The seminar will be followed by a brief IEEE Student Chapter interest meeting.

Pizza and special prizes provided by IEEE.

Registration: https://www.libraries.wright.edu/register/html/4dm1n/list_event.php

For more information contact:
Phil Flynn, Engineering Librarian
phil.flynn@wright.edu
937.775.2533

• FIRST LEGO League Ohio State Championship, 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM, Nutter Center
  

• CECS Club Fair, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM, Russ Lobby (Contact: Cindy Oakley)
  
• Voting for Mr. & Ms. Engineer, All day, Russ Lobby (Contact: Charlie Fox)
  

• Dodge Ball Tournament (BMES), 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Student Union Gym (Contact: Amanda Adkins)
  
• Movie Night (NSBE), 7:30 PM, 153 Russ (Contact: Da'Ves Malone)
  
• Voting for Mr. & Ms. Engineer, All day, Russ Lobby (Contact: Charlie Fox)
  

• Nerd Fashion Show (WEC), 1:00 PM, Russ Lobby
  
• "Pi" Eating Contest (Tau Beta Pi), 2:00 PM, Russ Lobby - Show up in the lobby to participate in either the girls heat or the guys heat.
  
• Dodge Ball Tournament (BMES), 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Student Union Gym (Contact: Amanda Adkins)
  
• Voting for Mr. & Ms. Engineer, All day, Russ Lobby (Contact: Charlie Fox)
  

• Human Mario Cart (SWE), 12:30 PM, Russ Lobby (Contact: Holly Zelnio)
  
• Dodge Ball Tournament (BMES), 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Student Union Gym (Contact: Amanda Adkins)
  
• Voting for Mr. & Ms. Engineer, All day, Russ Lobby (Contact: Charlie Fox)
  

• Egg Drop Competition (WEC and ASME), 11:00 AM, Russ Lobby (Contact: Maria Fullenkamp or Wesam Helou)
  
• Crowning of the 2009 Mr. and Ms. Engineer, 11:55 AM, Russ Lobby
  
• "Pi" A Prof (Tau Beta Pi), 12:00 PM, Russ Lobby (Contact: Casey Bevington) - Highest bidder gets to throw the pie! Watch as some of our most popular professors get pied.
  
• Dodge Ball Tournament Finals (BMES), 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Student Union Gym (Contact: Amanda Adkins)
  

Have some fun during National Engineers Week! Get a team together and sign-up for dodge ball! This event is for faculty, staff, and students!

Dodge Ball Tournament

Hosted by BioMedical Engineering Society (BMES)
February 17-20, 2009
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Download rules and sign-up sheet

Sign-up sheets are due in Engineering Club Room (163 Russ) by: February 13th at 5:00 PM

Format: 6 on 6 Games

Cost: $6.00 per team

Monday, February 9, 2009
1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Student Union Apollo Room

Bring copies of your resume to distribute and come professionally dressed.

Visit the Career Services website for more information including tips on preparing for the event and a list of the participating employers.

http://career.wright.edu

NSBE's mission is to increase the number of culturally responsible Black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally and positively impact the community.

Da'Ves Malone
Wright State University
National Society of Black Engineers
Chapter President
davesmalone@hotmail.com

Monday, February 16, 2009
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Assess is a test for students preparing to study engineering in college. It offers high school students a "snapshot" of their thinking and reasoning ability within subject areas important to success in college engineering or technology programs. Students answer the questions in the test, verify their answers, and work with the solutions provided on the day of the test. Students find out the content area in which they have a solid grounding and those in which they need to spend more time.

Several options are available on the test day. Parents may attend a special session just for them while the students are taking the test. We also offer tours of the Russ Engineering Center and the campus after the test is completed.

• Parents Session 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
  
• Tour of Russ Engineering Center 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  
• Tour of WSU campus 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

The informational session for parents is a great opportunity to get answers to questions on the college search process, our engineering and computer science programs, general information on Wright State, and anything else that comes to mind.

To register to take the test, please download the registration form and mail it, along with the $10 fee, to the address provided on the form.

Saturday, February 28, 2009
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Student Union

During Wright From the Start, students interested in Wright State can discuss their academic goals and interests with members of the faculty, take a campus tour, and learn more about college life. Information sessions on Financial Aid, Housing, Student Life, and more are offered throughout the day.

REGISTER for Wright from the Start now!

Special Engineering Event after Wright From the Start:

Stay after Wright from the Start to learn more about the College of Engineering and Computer Science
Saturday, February 28, 2009
12:15 p.m.
Student Union Apollo Room

Learn about our 8 majors during special sessions from each of our departments, hear from our Dean and get your specific questions answered!

For more information about the Special Engineering Event, contact Ann Wright at ann.wright@wright.edu or by phone at 937-775-5011.

Digital Mixer

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Student Union Apollo Room

Employers in the IT industry will be available to talk to students, faculty and staff about co-op, internship, and career employment opportunities; job shadowing and mentoring; information about industry trends and expectations.

Faculty and Staff may register online and see a lit of participating employers at: http://career.wright.edu/events/digitalmixer/facultystaff/index.html

Students may register online, see a list of participating employers, and review tips for preparing at: http://career.wright.edu/events/digitalmixer/students/index.html

Questions about this event?
Contact Julie Todd, Assistant Director, Career Services, julie.todd@wright.edu

Guerilla Tactics in Job Search

Presented by Sean Barrett, Senior Systems Engineer at Ball Aerospace

Friday Jan 30, 2009
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
UCIE Conference Room, E190 Student Union

FREE Admission

This workshop will tell you how to write a resume that gets read and how speak to impress in interviews and networking.

Sean Barrett is not only lauded for his skills at work but as a presenter to businesses and community. He screens candidates at career fairs and recruits for his company. Use this opportunity to meet him and benefit from his experience.

Bring questions and bring a resume if you have one. Light refreshments will be served.

For more questions: contact Manasi Kakade at kakade.4@wright.edu

Note: Sean Barrett is a senior systems engineer at Ball Aerospace who also screens candidates at career fairs (including WSU) and recruits for the company. This is not only an informative session but an opportunity for students to meet him and talk with him.

The workshop will feature recruiters, an interviewer, and engineers with hiring experience from Booz Allen Hamilton Engineering Consulting Firm. The group also plans to feature someone from the academic resume perspective.

When: Wednesday, February 4th at 6:30 PM
Where: The Atlantis Room (E157) in the Student Union

There will be food and refreshments at the event. All CECS students are invited to attend.

For more information contact Holly Zelnio, SWE President, at zelnio.4@wright.edu.

Open Advising Day

Thursday, February 5
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Russ Engineering Center Lobby

No appointment necessary! Walk-in and get your questions answered by College of Engineering and Computer Science advisors and University College advisors!

• Obtain Advisor Approval for Spring Registration
  
• Talk with Advisors, Faculty and Staff
  
• Learn about Degree Programs, Classes, Careers and the College
  
• Get Answers to Your Questions
  
• Bring Your DARS Report for Up-to-Date Advising

Wednesday, January 21st
6:30 PM
Tait Conference Room (405 Russ Center)

If you have any questions, contact Holly Zelnio, SWE President, at zelnio.4@wright.edu

Students are encouraged to attend a Recruiting Day Prep Camp session to prepare and maximize your time at the the event. Learn useful tips on how to prepare your resume, professional dress, how to work the fair, and interviewing tips.

You must sign up in advance to attend one of the sessions. To register, email karen.fox@wright.edu and state the date you will attend. The sessions will start at 2:00 p.m. and last approximately one hour. Space is avaiable if you forgot to sign up.

Session Dates
Session 1 - January 15, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM, Room 163 Student Union
Session 2 - January 22, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM, Room 163 Student Union

January 21, 2009
12:00 PM
Tait Conference Room (405 Russ)

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Raymond R. Hill (BIE)

ABSTRACT
Real-world scenarios are complex dynamic systems that are often overloaded with information. Human operators, constantly monitor and control these systems, assess the situation and often make decisions under time pressure. However, this supervisory control paradigm in a dual-task environment can be a very challenging task. Existing interface design methodologies have not delved deeply enough into defining information displays for complex, dynamic, time-critical, dual-task environments with capabilities for rapid task change awareness and task resumption while continuously maintaining situation awareness. This research focuses on designing user displays with techniques to support performance in
such dual-task environments. This research provides a means to realize an “at-a-glance” decision making environment.

1. Mahadevan, S., and Hill, R. R. (Submitted). Survey on Multi-task Environments and Challenges in Designing User Interface for Time-Critical Complex Dual-Task Supervisory Control Systems. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part C: Applications and Reviews.
   
2. Mahadevan, S., Hill, R. R., Gripper, M., Militello, L., and Bowers, D. (2008). Interruptions: Influence on Trust and Coordination in Small Virtual Teams. Presented at the 2008 Industrial Engineering Research Conference, Vancouver, Canada, May 17-21.
   
3. Mahadevan, S., and Hill, R. R. (2007). Visualization Methodologies for Supervisory Control in Complex Multi-Task Time-Critical Environments. In G. Bayraksan, W. Lin, Y. Son, and R. Wysk, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2007 Industrial Engineering Research Conference, Nashville, May 19-23.

The presentation will cover copyrights, patents, trade secrets and trademarks. You will learn what researching tools are available on the internet, IP web sites, and general requirements for applying for patent, copyright, or trademark protection.

This workshop is offered with support of the United State Patent and Trademark Office and the University Libraries. The Dunbar Library houses the U.S. Patent and Trademark Depository Library collections and one of the most powerful patent searching tools, PubWEST (Web-based Examiner Search Tools). The collection also contains information on trademarks, IP business planning, and other materials to support inventors, small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Seating for the free workshop is limited. Register online at http://www.libraries.wright.edu/find/gov/patent/workshops.html or contact Ran Raider, patent and trademark reference specialist for the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library, at ran.raider@wright.edu or by calling (937) 775-3521.

Through a series of team matches, students put their trebuchets and game-winning strategies to the test with winners advancing to the big tournament and trying to win bragging rights as the "Trebuchet Competition Champions!"

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information about the Trebuchet Competition, please visit http://www.engineering.wright.edu/trebuchet/ or contact Dr. Joe Slater (MME) by email at treb-dudes@wright.edu.

Tuesday, January 13th
7:30 PM
Tait Conference Room (405 Russ Center)

Topic: Discuss upcoming tour schedule, a few social events, and fundraising.

If you have any questions, contact Nick Dittes, ASME President, at wsuasme@gmail.com.

Wednesday, January 14th
7:30 PM
153 Russ Center

If you have any questions, contact Da'Ves Malone, NSBE President, at davesmalone@hotmail.com.

Saturday, February 21 - WSU vs. TBA (ESPNU Bracketbuster)
Dr. Dan Krane (CoSM)
"The Science (and Pseudoscience) of DNA Profiling"

Saturday, February 28 - WSU vs. Green Bay
Dr. Mike Raymer (CECS)
"Bioinformatics: Swimming in a Sea of Data"

Contact Info:
Athletics Department
356 Nutter Center
Phone: 937-775-2771
http://www.wsuraiders.com

Saturday, February 14
Dr. Elizabeth Sorensen (CoNH)
"Pregnancy at Center Court"

Dr. Sorensen, one of WSU's two NCAA Faculty Athletic Representatives, is a tireless advocate for student-athletes.

When the Forwards get too forward and the Guards forget to guard, the NCAA calls Dr. Beth Sorensen. In 2008 Dr. Sorensen co-authored the 2008 NCAA Gender Equity Pregnant and Parenting Student-Athletes: Resources and Model Policies to support institutional pregnancy policy development. In 2009 she will present "Debunking the Myth of Pregnancy Doping" at the NCAA Scholarly Colloquium and "Best Practices" to the 2009 Women's Basketball Coaches National Convention. Dr. Sorensen's work has been featured on ESPN's Outside the Lines, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Athletic Business, Athletic Management, Training & Conditioning, and the NCAA News. Just in time for Valentine's Day, Dr. Sorensen will discuss strategies she used to bring pregnancy to the NCAA's center court.

Saturday, February 21
Dr. Dan Krane (CoSM)
"The Science (and Pseudoscience) of DNA Profiling"

Dr. Krane has testified more than 75 times as an expert in DNA profiling. His consulting company, Forensic Bioinformatics (www.bioforensics.com) reviews testing results from hundreds of criminal cases each year. Twice appointed by governors of Virginia to the Commonwealth's Scientific Advisory Committee that oversees the policies and practices of Virginia's Department of Forensic Science. The BBC has called him "the world's leading expert on low copy number DNA testing."

Known for his ability to help juries, a variety of different TV audiences and large undergraduate classes understand molecular biology, Dr. Krane will show why DNA profiling is the gold standard of forensic science. He'll explain how surprisingly easy steps (like having analysts interpret test results without knowing what a suspect's DNA profile is) could make DNA testing a better standard. You will be surprised at how differently you watch TV crime shows after hearing his talk!

Saturday, February 28
Dr. Mike Raymer (CECS)
"Bioinformatics: Swimming in a Sea of Data"

Dr. Raymer's research harnesses the power of computers to solve problems with medicine, pharmaceutical drug discovery, and the life sciences. His research area - bioinformatics - is changing the way that diseases are identified, understood, and treated. Known for making mathematical and scientific concepts accessible and understandable to undergraduate students and non-scientists, Dr. Raymer co-authored the best-selling textbook Fundamental Concepts of Bioinformatics.

Dr. Raymer will discuss how pharmaceutical drugs are discovered and developed. He will show the ways that computers and computer scientists are helping medical doctors and biologists pave the way to better treatments for the individual biology of each unique, individual patient.

Wednesday, January 7th
6:30 PM
Tait Conference Room (405 Russ Center)

Topic: Discuss activities for Winter Quarter including E-Week.

If you have any questions, contact Holly Zelnio, SWE President, at zelnio.4@wright.edu

January 12, 2009
10:00 AM
Brandeberry Conference Room (292 Joshi Research Center)

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Raymond R. Hill (BIE)

ABSTRACT
The classic vehicle routing problem considers the distribution of goods to geographically scattered customers from a central depot using a homogeneous fleet of vehicles with finite capacity. Each customer has a known demand and can be visited by exactly one vehicle. Each vehicle services the assigned customers in such a way that all customers are fully supplied and the total service does not exceed the vehicle capacity. In the split delivery vehicle routing problem, a customer can be visited by more than one vehicle, i.e., a customer demand can be split between various vehicles. Allowing split deliveries has been proven to potentially reduce the operational costs of the fleet.

This research efficiently solves the split delivery vehicle routing problem using three new approaches. In the first approach, the problem is solved in two stages. During the first stage, an initial solution is found by means of a greedy approach that can produce high quality solutions comparable to those obtained with existing sophisticated approaches. The greedy approach is based on a novel concept called the route angle control measure that helps to produce spatially thin routes and avoids crossing routes. In the second stage, this constructive approach is extended to an iterative approach using adaptive memory concepts, and then a variable neighborhood descent process is added to improve the solution obtained. The second approach presents a new solution diversification scheme based on concentric rings centered at the depot that partitions the original problem. The resulting subproblems are then solved using the greedy approach with route angle control measures. Different ring settings produce varied partitions and thus different solutions to the original problem are obtained and improved via a variable neighborhood descent. The third approach is a learning procedure based on a set or population of solutions. Those solutions are used to find attractive attributes and construct new solutions within a tabu search framework. As the search progresses, the existing population evolve, better solutions are included on whereas bad solutions are removed from it. The initial set is constructed using the greedy approach with the route angle control measure whereas new solutions are created using an adaptation of the well known savings algorithm of Clarke and Wright (1964) and improved by means of an enhanced version of the variable neighborhood descent process. The proposed approaches are tested on benchmark instances and results are compared with existing implementations.

AWARDS
[1] Nominated 2007 MAGS Distiguished Master's Thesis Competition, Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools, November, 2006.
[2] Graduate Student Excellence Award, Wright State University, May, 2005.

JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS
[1] Aleman, R. E. and Hill, R. R. (2008, December). A Tabu Search with Vocabulary Building Approach for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Split Demands. Submitted to Computers & Operations Research.
[2] Aleman, R. E., X. Zhang and R. R. Hill. (2008, November). An Adaptive Memory Algorithm for the Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem. Accepted for publication in the Journal of Heuristics, Special issue on Advances in Metaheuristics.
[3] Aleman, R. E., X. Zhang and R. R. Hill. (2008, November). A Ring-Based Diversification Scheme for Routing Problems. To appear in the International Journal of Mathematics of Operational Research.

REFEREED CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS
[1] Aleman, R. E., X. Zhang, R. Hill (2007, June). A Constructive Heuristic for a Time-Dependent Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem. The Seventh Metaheuristics International Conference, Montreal, Canada.
[2] Aleman, R. E., Zhang, X., and R. R. Hill (2007, May). Application of Multiperiod Generalized Assignment Problem To UAV Planning. In G. Bayraksan, W. Lin, Y. Son, and R. Wysk (Eds), Proceedings of the 2007 Industrial Engineering Research Conference, Nashville, TN, pp. 269-274.
[3] Aleman, R. E., X. Zhang, R. Hill (2006, November). Application Of Vehicle Routing and Multiperiod Assignment Problem To UAV Planning, Proceedings of the XIII Latin-Iberoamerican Conference Of Operations Research: CLAIO 2006, Montevideo, Uruguay.
[4] Aleman, R. E. (2005). Application of Multiperiod Generalized Assignment Problem To UAV Planning, Proceedings of the WSU Engineering Graduate Student Symposium, Dayton, OH.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS (ABSTRACTS)
[1] Aleman, R. E., X. Zhang, R. Hill (2007). A Routing Algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles And Dynamic Targets. INFORMS International Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
[2] Aleman, R. E., X. Zhang and R. R. Hill (2006). Application of Vehicle Routing and Multiperiod Assignment Problem to UAV Planning. INFORMS Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA.
[3] Aleman, R. E., X. Zhang and R. R. Hill (2006). The Vehicle Routing Problem Applied to Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles: A New Variant. INFORMS Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA.
[4] Aleman, R. E. (2006) Application of Vehicle Routing and Multiperiod Assignment Problem to UAV Planning. 2nd Annual Dayton Engineering Sciences Symposium, Dayton, OH.

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
[1] A Routing Algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles And Dynamic Targets, with X. Zhang and R. Hill. INFORMS International Meeting 2007, Puerto Rico, July 8-11, 2007.
[2] A Constructive Heuristic for a Time-Dependent Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem, with X. Zhang and R. Hill. The Seventh Metaheuristics International Conference, Montreal, Canada, June 25-29, 2007.
[3] Application of Multiperiod Generalized Assignment Problem To UAV Planning, with X. Zhang and R. Hill. Industrial Engineering Research Conference, Nashville, TN, May 19-23, 2007.
[4] Application Of Vehicle Routing and Multiperiod Assignment Problem To UAV Planning, with X. Zhang and R. Hill. XIII Latin-Iberoamerican Conference Of Operations Research: CLAIO 2006, Motevideo, Uruguay, November 27-30, 2006.
[5] Application of Vehicle Routing and Multiperiod Assignment Problem to UAV Planning, with X. Zhang and R. Hill. INFORMS Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, November 5-8, 2006.
[6] The Vehicle Routing Problem Applied To Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles: A New Variant, with X. Zhang and R. Hill. INFORMS Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, November 5-8, 2006.
[7] Application of Vehicle Routing and Multiperiod Assignment Problem to UAV Planning, 2nd Annual Dayton Engineering Sciences Symposium, Dayton, OH, October 30th, 2006.
[8] Application of Multiperiod Generalized Assignment Problem To UAV Planning, 2005 WSU Engineering Graduate Student Symposium, Dayton, OH, May 25th, 2005.
[9] Messenger Robot Remotely Controlled Through a TCP/IP network, Invited Speaker, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, March, 2003.

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Joseph Slater (MME)

ABSTRACT
Previous research has suggested that the damping of specimens that have a hard ceramic coating applied on them is proportional to the thickness of the coating. This would indicate that the damping is a volume dependent material property. Since thickness variations are likely in an actual application it is essential that the role that coating thickness plays in the damping effectiveness is understood. For this research a series of tests were conducted using substrate beams of 90 mil Ti-6Al-4V, coated with 3 mils of an air plasma sprayed NiCrAlY bond coat followed by a Titania-Alumina ceramic blend coating applied via air plasma spray in one of three thicknesses (5 mil, 10 mil and 15 mil). Four specimens were coated at each thickness for a total of 12 specimens. The system loss factor and natural frequencies were measured for each specimen at each stage to determine the contributions of the bare beam, the bond coat and the ceramic coating. This information was used with the dimensions at each stage to determine the material properties (storage modulus, loss modulus and loss factor) for the bond coat and the ceramic. The material properties of a thickness-independent material must be the same for all thicknesses and differences in the results of different thickness specimens allow the ability to determine and quantify a thickness effect.

Friday, November 21, 2008
10:00 AM
Student Union Atlantis Room (E157)

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Raghavan Srinivasan (MME)

ABSTRACT
Trace additions of boron have been shown to decrease the as-cast grain size in alpha + beta and beta titanium alloys. Two metastable beta titanium alloys: Beta21S and Ti5553 with 0.1 wt% B and without boron additions were used in this investigation. Significant grain refinement of the as-cast microstructure and precipitation of TiB whiskers along the grain boundaries was observed with boron additions. Beta21S and Beta21S-0.1B alloys were annealed above the beta transition temperature for different times to investigate the effect of boron on grain size stability. The TiB precipitates were very effective in restricting the beta grain boundary mobility by Zener pinning. A model has been developed to predict the maximum grain size as a function of TiB size, orientation, and volume fraction. Good agreement was obtained between model predictions and experimental results.

All four alloys were solution treated and aged for different times at several temperatures below the beta transus to study the kinetics of alpha precipitation. Though the TiB phase did not provide any additional nucleation sites for alpha precipitation, the grain refinement obtained by boron additions resulted in accelerated aging.

An investigation of the thermomechanical processing behavior showed different deformation mechanisms above the beta transus temperature. The non-boron containing alloys showed a non-uniform and fine recrystallized necklace structure at grain boundaries whereas uniform intragranular recrystallization was observed in boron containing alloys. Micro-voids were observed at the ends of the TiB needles at high temperature, slow strain rates as a result of decohesion at the TiB / matrix interfaces. At low temperatures and faster strain rates microvoids were also formed due to fracture of TiB needles.

• B Cherukuri, R Srinivasan, S Tamirisakandala and D. Miracle, “The influence of trace boron addition on grain growth kinetics of the beta phase in Ti-15Mo-2.6Nb-2Al-0.1Si titanium alloy.” Submitted to Scripta Materialia, 2008.
  
• B Cherukuri, R Srinivasan and S Tamirisakandala, “Microstructural stability and Heat treatment of Boron modified Beta-Titanium alloys.” Proceedings, International Symposium for Research Scholars, Dec-2006, Madras, India.
  
• B. Cherukuri and R. Srinivasan. “Optimization of the Equal Channel Angular Extrusion processes for strain homogeneity” Materials Science Forum Vols.539-543 (2007). PP.3655-3660.
  
• B. Cherukuri, R. Srinivasan and P.Chaudhury. “Energy Savings in Forging and Heat treatment of an Aluminium alloy Subjected to Severe plastic Deformation”, TMS Letters, Vol-3 No-2 (2006) PP.61-62.
  
• B. Cherukuri and R. Srinivasan. “Properties of AA6061 processed by multi-axial compressions/forging (MAC/F)”. Materials and Manufacturing processes, Vol-21 No-6 (2006) PP.512-518.
  
• R. Srinivasan, B. Cherukuri and P.Chaudhury. “Scaling up of Equal Channel Angular Pressing (ECAP) for the production of Forging stock”, Materials Science Forum Vols.503-504 (2006). PP.371- 378.
  
• B. Cherukuri, T. Nedkova and R. Srinivasan. “A comparison of the properties of SPD processed AA-6061 by ECAP, multi-axial compressions/forgings (MAC/F) and Accumulative roll bonding (ARB), Mater. Sci. Eng. A 410-411(2005) 394-397.
  
• P. Chaudhury, B. Cherukuri and R. Srinivasan. “Scaling up of Equal Channel Angular Pressing (ECAP) and its effect on mechanical properties, microstructure, and hot workability of AA 6061”, Mater. Sci. Eng. A 410-411(2005) 316-318
  
• B. Cherukuri, R. Srinivasan and P.Chaudhury. “Acceleration of precipitation processes in AA6061after Severe Plastic Deformation (SPD)”, Process heating/Reheating, 37-42 (2005) MS&T – 2005, Pittsburgh, PA.

Thursday, November 20, 2008
1:00 PM
148 Russ Engineering Center

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Raymond R. Hill (BIE)

ABSTRACT
There is little argument that modern military systems are very complex, both in terms of the resources in time and money to develop them and the infrastructure that is required to produce trained operators. To properly execute human systems integration during the acquisition process, systems built to train operators must be developed that optimize training. Consequently, the training system community would benefit from simulation models that provide the ability to make accurate predictions of training processes, and allow the decision maker to specify an optimum combination of operator performance after training and the cost of that training. The goal of this research is the construction of a model of human learning using time to complete a task as a performance measure. While past research has explored the nature of functions to characterize human learning, this study will examine processes used to build a model that considers task performance as a function of training methods used to instruct a task, the nature of the task being taught, and the ability of the human to retain skill over a specified period of nonuse. An empirical study was performed to collect data from individuals completing tasks typically performed by sensor operators assigned to military unmanned aircraft systems. The tasks performed covered a range of activities that require varying combinations of human perceptual, cognitive and motor skills. The data was fitted to a set of models that were used to predict the performance outcome of a task similar in task type to those used to build the model. Results are reported and recommendations for future research are offered.

PUBLICATION
Fitzgerald, P.C., Andrews, D.H., Crabtree, M.S., Doyal, J.A., Meador, D.P., & Walsh, W.J. (2008). Incorporating training effects in modeling and simulation software. In Proceedings CSER 2008, Conference on Systems Engineering Research, in press.

If you have any questions, contact Joy Davis, WEC President, at davis.297@wright.edu.

WEC Director Positions

Director of Graduate Relations: As Director of Graduate Relations you are expected to work towards getting the graduate students more active in the club. In the past this has been done by seeking graduate students to give presentations on their research projects. It is also this director’s job to get feedback from grad students if/when needed.

Director of Activities: As Director of Activities for the Wright Engineering Council (WEC) you have the responsibility of planning any engineering activities that WEC hosts. In the past WEC has hosted events such as various Nintendo Tournaments, card tournaments, and traditional programs. These traditional programs encompass E-week activities, the Fall Retreat, and Welcome Week activities.

Director of Public Relations: As Director of Public Relations your main goals are to continuously keep the email list for the Wright Engineering Council updated at all times and keeps good relations between the community and WEC. There are bulletin boards outside of 163 Russ that are maintained by the Director of Public Relations. Keeping an updated email list involves adding and removing member’s names as needed. In addition to the email list, you manage the WEC email account. Also, you should stay updated with what the community is involved in so that WEC may help at any time.

Director of Freshman Relations: As Director of Freshman Relations your main job will be getting the freshman involved in the college. This position extends out of WEC and encompasses any club. The main goal is to provide the guidance incoming freshman should get when it comes to deciding where to get involved. The main programs this director runs are the mentoring program and the egg drop competition.

Director of Industrial Relations: As Director of Industrial Relations you are expected to serve as WEC’s connection to campus and community sponsors. In the past this director has gone to local companies and tried to get donations for various WEC activities. Also past directors have gone to people at WSU like Pam Davis and get anything they can. Past donations have ranged from free food at activities to the car for the Car Smash. This director also tries to find other beneficial opportunities with companies like tours. Basically this position tries to build and maintain relationships with anyone that can help WEC.

Director of Finances: As the Director of Finances you will be expected to watch the WEC budget. You will be the only other person who can authorize any budgetary expenditure, aside from the president. You will also play a large role when it comes time to go before SOBC for funding for our next year. One other facet of this position is fundraising, if/when necessary.

President: As the President you are expected to be the person people can go to with their questions. You are the person who plans and runs the weekly meetings each quarter. It is expected that you will develop a strong relationship with the Dean’s office as that is the prime place to get information from concerning what WEC can do to help the college as a whole. You will be the representative that goes to the CECS President meetings held by the Senator for the college. The President also helps in any way that they can, whether is be simple motivation for the other directors or even taking on their own project/event.

Director of Web Communication: *appointed* As the Director of Web Communication you will be expected to maintain and update the WEC website as often as necessary. These updates can be as simple as the minutes for that week’s meetings and upcoming activities or as complex as revamping the website. Ultimately this position is what you make of it. If you are interested in the position, contact the President for the next year.

Vice President (previously director of internal affairs): *appointed* As the Vice President you will be expected to control the access to the Club Room. This person will essentially serve as a scribe for the general meetings and for the directors’ meeting and will serve as assistant to the president. They are also in charge of the newsletter. If for any reason the president cannot continue their duties you would assume the rule of president. If you are interested in the position, contact the President for the next year.

Monday, November 10, 2008
11:00 AM
292 Joshi Research Center

• Phillips, C.A., M.J. Gerschutz, D.B. Reynolds, D.W. Repperger J.L. Serres, and S.R. Mohler. Dynamic Control Modeling of an Antagonist Pneumatic Muscle when Performing a Simulated Knee Extension Task. Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine 2008: 79 (3), 235.

• Serres, J.L., D.B. Reynolds, C.A. Phillips, M.J. Gerschutz and D.W. Repperger. Characterization of a Phenomenological Model for Commercial Pneumatic Muscle Actuators. Computers Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering (August 2008)
  
• Serres, J.L., D.B. Reynolds, C.A. Phillips, D.R. Rogers, and D.W. Repperger. Characterization of a Pneumatic Muscle Test Station with Two Dynamic Plants in Cascade. Computers Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering (November 2008)
  
• Serres, J.L., C.A. Phillips, D.B. Reynolds, S.R. Mohler, D.R. Rogers, D.W. Repperger and M.J. Gerschutz. Lower Extremity Resistive Exercise Device Utilizing an Antagonistic Pneumatic Muscle Actuator. Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine (November 2008)

• Garber, J.L., D.B. Reynolds, and C.A. Phillips. Dynamic Characterization of Pneumatic Muscle Actuators. 2nd Annual Dayton Engineering Science Symposium. October 31, 2006.
  
• Serres, J.L., D.B. Reynolds, and C.A. Phillips. A Test Apparatus for the Characterization of a Festo Pneumatic Muscle Actuator. 3rd Annual Dayton Engineering Science Symposium. October 29, 2007.
  
• Serres, J.L., D.B. Reynolds, and C.A. Phillips. Dynamic Modeling of Pneumatic Muscle Actuators for Physical Therapy Applications. Society of Engineering Science 45th Technical Meeting. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. October 12-15, 2008.

If you have any questions, please contact Holly Zelnio, SWE President, at zelnio.4@wright.edu

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Ramana V. Grandhi (MME)

Abstract
Design of turbine engine components is constrained by both iteration time and prediction uncertainty. Use of accurate reduced-order models enables a thorough exploration of the design space that leads to high performance components. This work develops three reduced-order modeling approaches for turbomachinery design. The first develops a Probabilistic Gradient Kriging approach to efficiently model the uncertainty in predicted failure probabilities caused by small sample statistics. The second develops turbine engine airfoil modal response approximation based on eigensensitivity analysis, principal component analysis geometric reduction, and Taylor series response expansion. The third predicts mistuned rotor forced response using nominal and non-nominal mode approximation in a Craig-Bampton Component Mode Synthesis framework.

Awards and Scholarships

• Affiliate Societies Council of Dayton Award for Outstanding Professional Achievement, 2007
  
• Propulsion Directorate Scientist and Engineer of the Year, 2004
  
• Air Vehicles Directorate Reserve Company Grade Officer of the Year, 2004
  
• Dayton Area Graduate Studies Institute (DAGSI) Competitive Scholarship, September 2003.

• Brown, J. M., Grandhi, R. V., "Reduced-order models for airfoil forced response," International Journal of Rotating Machinery, Vol. 2008, Article ID 387828, 12 pages.
  
• Brown, J. M., Grandhi, R. V., "Probabilistic gradient kriging to efficiently predict failure probability confidence intervals," AIAA Journal [submitted August 2008].
  
• Brown, J. M., Grandhi, R. V., “Optimally reducing statistical uncertainty through cost-based sample sensitivity index,” 9th AIAA/ISSMO Symposium and Exhibit on Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimization, AIAA-2002-5533, Atlanta, GA, 4-6 September, 2002.
  
• Brown, J. M., Grandhi, R. V., “Minimization of mistuned rotor response through an evolutionary algorithm,” in Proceedings of the 2003 ISSMO: Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization Conference, Lido di Jesolo, Italy, 19-23 May, 2003.
  
• Brown, J. M., Slater, J. C., Grandhi, R. V., “Probabilistic analysis of geometric uncertainty on modal response,” in Proceedings of the ASME Turbo Expo 2003: Power for Land, Sea and Air, GT2003-38557, Atlanta, GA, 13-16 June, 2003.
  
• Brown, J. M., Grandhi, R. V., “Probabilistic analysis of geometric uncertainty on blade alone forced response,” in Proceedings of the ASME Turbo Expo 2004: Power for Land, Sea and Air, GT2004-53959, Vienna, Austria, 14-17 June, 2004.
  
• Brown, J. M., Grandhi, R. V., “Probabilistic high cycle fatigue assessment process for integrally bladed rotors,” in Proceedings of the ASME Turbo Expo 2005: Power for Land, Sea and Air, GT2005-69022, Reno, NV, 6-9 June, 2005.
  
• Brown, J. M., Grandhi, R. V., “Probabilistic gradient kriging to efficiently predict failure probability confidence intervals,” 49th AIAA Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Conference, AIAA-2008-1715, Schaumburg, IL, 7-10 April, 2008.

You may also talk with Dick Rathbun in the Dean's Office for additional information and to obtain the Dean’s Letter which is required to be submitted with your application.

Thesis and Dissertation Preparation Workshop
Thursday, October 30, 2008
9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon (with continental breakfast beginning at 8:30 a.m.)
E-163 Student Union ("Discovery" A&B).

Students in programs requiring completion of a thesis or dissertation are encouraged to attend. Also, any interested faculty or staff members are welcome. There is no charge for the workshop.

Reservations can be made by contacting the School of Graduate Studies, E344 Student Union, telephone 775-2976, fax 775-2453, e-mail john.kimble@wright.edu or lisa.lewandowski@wright.edu.

Program

9:00 – 9:30 a.m.
Statistical Planning and Analysis
Harry J. Khamis, Director, Statistical Consulting Center (SCC), and Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and Community Health, School of Medicine and Department of Mathematics and Statistics

9:30 – 10:00 a.m.
Putting It All Together: The Thesis/Dissertation Process
William A. Feld, Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry

10:00 – 10:15 a.m.
Refreshment Break

10:15 – 11:00 a.m.
Research and Citation Support - University Libraries
Sue Polanka, Head of Reference and Instruction, University Libraries

11:00 – 11:15 a.m.
The Student Technology Assistance Center (STAC)
Will Davis, Coordinator, STAC, University Libraries

11:15 – 11:30 a.m.
Copyright Basics and Fair Use
Karen Wilhoit, Associate University Librarian for Collections, University Libraries

11:30 a.m. – 12:00 noon
School of Graduate Studies Guidelines and Wrap-up
John M. Kimble, Associate Director, and Lisa M. Lewandowski, Graduate Graduation Services Coordinator and Thesis/Dissertation Coordinator, School of Graduate Studies

SWE is going Trick-or-Canning on Wednesday, October 29th from 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM.

Meet in the Russ Lobby at 5:30 PM. SWE is collecting canned goods for St. Vincent De Paul. Dress in a costume if you would like and be prepared to have some fun!! Everyone is welcome!

If you have any questions feel free to email Holly Zelnio, SWE President, at zelnio.4@wright.edu

Monday October 6
6:00 PM
405 Russ (Tait Conference Room).

We will be discussing upcoming activities that will be going on this year. There will be pizza for those who attend. Hope to see you there!

Amanda Adkins
Biomedical Engineering Society President
adkins.32@wright.edu

Monday, October 6
7:30 PM
Tait Conference Room (405 Russ)

They will be discussing upcoming activities. There will be pizza for those who attend. Hope to see you there!

Holly Zelnio, SWE President
zelnio.4@wright.edu

The first Wright Engineering Council meeting will be held Monday, September 22 in 499 Joshi at 6:30 pm.

Snacks will be provided!

We will be discussing upcoming social events, the NAESC regional conference in Toledo, Ohio, and our club challenge team. See you all tonight!

If you have any questions, contact Joy Davis (WEC President) at davis.297@wright.edu

BBQ on the Bricks (outside of Russ) and Club Fair
Friday, September 12
11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Plan to relax after your first week of fall classes!

Besides great (FREE) food there will be some crazy games and super prizes!

CMT on Tour: Jason Aldean with special guest Lady Antebellum

OR

The Jim Gaffigan Show

Start out the year WRIGHT and by getting involved in a student organization!!

For more information, contact Joy Davis (davis.297@wright.edu) or Charles Fox (fox.74@wright.edu)

Abstract Deadline: September 26, 2008

Abstract submission is now open for the 4th Annual Dayton Engineering Sciences Symposium (DESS) at Wright State University. Sponsored by the Dayton Section of ASME, the symposium is designed to facilitate communication between members of the regional technical community, as well as to provide a forum for students, both undergraduate and graduate, and researchers/practitioners to present their work. The symposium program will include several parallel sessions in the morning and afternoon, a luncheon, an industry exhibition, and a Keynote Address. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes, including time for questions. No written paper is required. The Dayton Section of ASME will confer “Best Presentation” awards at the annual Section Awards Banquet in late Spring, 2009.

The theme this year will be “Energy”, and we’ve arranged for Mr. William (Bill) Harrison of AFRL’s Propulsion Directorate to deliver the keynote speech. Mr. Harrison is currently the Propulsion Directorate’s Technical Advisor for Fuels and Energy, and he was recently detailed as Senior Advisor to the OSD’s Assured Fuels Initiative, which has positioned the USAF as a leader in certifying aircraft to use synthetic fuel blends.

Abstract Submission: Abstracts are solicited in all areas of engineering science. Specific topic areas are expected to include: Applied Engineering; Biomechanics; Computer Engineering; Controls Science; Design & Optimization; Electronics & Sensors; Engineering Education; Fluid Mechanics; Industrial & Human Factors; Materials & Processing; Nanotechnology; Power, Propulsion, & Energy Systems; Structures & Solid Mechanics; Thermal Sciences; Engineering Innovation; and Undergraduate Design Projects.
Abstracts are limited to 150 words and must be submitted online through the symposium web site:

http://www.cs.wright.edu/~asme/DESS.htm

Registration:
All symposium registrations must be processed online through the conference website. Registration rates are as follows:
General Registration: $100
ASME Member Registration: $75
General Student Registration: $25
ASME Student Member Registration: Free
Student Presenter Registration: Free

Registration fee includes admission to all technical sessions, conference program and booklet of abstracts, continental breakfast, all day coffee and refreshments, and choice of box lunches.

Friday, August 2, 2008
10:00 AM
145 Russ Engineering Building

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Ramana V. Grandhi (MME)

Abstract
Fretting wear is an accumulation of damage that occurs at component interfaces that are subjected to high contact stresses coupled with low amplitude oscillation. The key to fretting wear reduction in metallic contacts is the mitigation of galling at the interface, followed by the control of debris production and the rheology of active wear debris. Once the thin surface species of the metallic interfaces is dispersed, adhesion between the contacting nascent surfaces causes the inception of severe surface deformation and material transfer or removal. This is extremely apparent in the fretting wear of aerospace materials such as titanium alloy and nickel alloy contacts. However, the literature suggests that nickel alloy contacts perform very well in sliding and reciprocating wear contacts at elevated temperatures due to the formation of what is often called a ‘Glaze’ oxide layer. The current state of literature describes the composition of the glaze layer as NiO. The focus of this dissertation was to provide experimentation and analysis of temperature effects on the lubricious tribofilm formation that occurs in nickel contacts. This was accomplished by testing commercially pure nickel coatings and thick nickel oxide surfaces. The enhanced understanding of the fretting performance of nickel oxides aided in the development of nickel graphite based self-lubricating coatings. These coatings were then proved to reduce fretting wear damage within Ti6Al4V mated surfaces over a wide temperature range.

Publications

Journal Papers

• C. Hager, Jr., J. Sanders, and S. Sharma, “Characterization of Mixed and Gross Slip Fretting Wear Regimes in Ti6Al4V Interfaces at Room Temperature,” Wear, 257 (2004) 167-180.
  
• C. Hager, Jr., J. Sanders, and S. Sharma, Gross Slip Fretting Wear Analysis of Aluminum Bronze Coatings for Ti6Al4V Aerospace Components, Conference Proceedings of the 19th International Conference of Surface Modification Technologies, August 1-3, 2005 St. Paul Minnesota, pg 10-16.
  
• C. Hager, Jr., J. Sanders, and S. Sharma, “Effect of high temperature on the characterization of fretting wear regimes at Ti6Al4V interfaces,” Wear, 260 (2006) 493-508.
  
• C. Hager, Jr., J. Sanders, and S. Sharma, “Unlubricated Gross Slip Fretting Wear of Metallic Plasma Sprayed Coatings for Ti6Al4V Surfaces,” Wear, 265 (2008) 439-451.
  
• C. Hager, Jr., J. Sanders, S. Sharma, A. Voevodin, and A. Segall, “Effect of Temperature on Gross Slip Fretting Wear of Cold-Sprayed Nickel Coatings on Ti6Al4V Interfaces,” Tribology International, Submitted and Revised.
  
• C. Hager, Jr., J. Sanders, S. Sharma, and A. Voevodin, “The Use of Nickel Graphite Coatings for the Mitigation of Gross Slip Fretting Wear on Ti6Al4V Interfaces,” Wear, Submitted.
  
• C. Hager, Jr., J. Hu, C. Muratore, A. Voevodin, and R. Grandhi, “The Mechanisms of Gross Slip Fretting Wear on Nickel Oxide/Ti6Al4V Mated Surfaces,” Wear, to be Submitted.

• C. Hager*, Jr., J. Sanders*, S. Sharma, A. Voevodin, and A. Segall, “The Effect of Temperature on Gross Slip Fretting Wear of Cold Sprayed Nickel Coatings on Ti6Al4V Interfaces,” Presented at the annual STLE 2008, Cleveland, Ohio, May 19-22, 2008.
  
• C. Hager*, Jr., J. Sanders, and S. Sharma, “Gross Slip Fretting Wear Analysis of Aluminum Bronze Coatings for Ti6Al4V Aerospace Components,” Presented at the ASM ISEC/SMT conference, St. Paul, Minnesota, August 1-3, 2005.
  
• C. Hager, Jr., J. Sanders*, and S. Sharma, “Gross Slip Fretting Wear Analysis of Thermal Spray Coatings for Ti6Al4V Aerospace Components,” Presented at the annual STLE 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada, May 15-19, 2005.
  
• C. Hager, Jr., J. Sanders*, and S. Sharma, “Gross Slip Fretting Wear of Plasma Sprayed Coatings for Ti6Al4V,” Presented at the 10th National Turbine Engine High Cycle Fatigue Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 8-11, 2005.
  
• C. Hager*, Jr., J. Sanders, and S. Sharma, “Anti-Fretting Coatings for Aerospace Applications,” Presented at the STLE 2004, Toronto, Canada, May 17-May 20, 2004.
  
• C. Hager*, Jr., J. Sanders, and S. Sharma, “Effect of Temperature on Fretting Wear Slip Regimes at Ti6Al4V Interfaces,” Presented at the 9th National Turbine Engine High Cycle Fatigue Conference, Pinehurst, NC, March 16-19, 2004.
  
• C. Hager*, Jr., J. Sanders, and S. Sharma, “Evaluation of Fretting Wear Regimes at Ti6Al4V Interfaces,” Presented at the 40th Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science, Ann Arbor, MI October 13-15, 2003.
  
• C. Hager*, Jr., J. Sanders, S. Sharma, and T. Back, “Development of Fretting Wear Test Methodologies for the Evaluation of New Dry Film Lubricants,” Presented at the STLE 2003, New York, NY, April 28-May1, 2003.
  
• C. Hager*, Jr., J. Sanders, and S. Sharma, “Evaluation of Slip Regimes Under Fretting Wear Conditions at Ti6Al4V Interfaces,” Presented at the 8th National Turbine Engine High Cycle Fatigue Conference, Monterey, CA, April 14-16, 2003.

August 18, 2008
10:30 AM
199 Joshi Center

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Nathan Klingbeil (MME)

ABSTRACT
Recent work has proposed a dissipated energy theory of fatigue crack growth in layered materials under mixed-mode loading. An inherent assumption of this prior work is that a perfect crack exists along the interface joining the top and bottom layers. The current work extends the approach of previous studies to incorporate a grading of plastic properties between the two layers through parametric finite element modeling with ABAQUS. An elastic-plastic 2D model using 8-node biquadratic elements was used to map the plastic dissipation of a two layer specimen with a grading of plastic properties parallel to the crack face. This property gradient allows for a more realistic representation of the plastic dissipation accumulated during a steady state cracking configuration. As a result, more accurate fatigue crack growth rates in layered material systems can be predicted. It was found that incorporation of a graded layer increased the amount of plastic dissipation. While this graded layer effect cannot be ignored, plastic dissipation is still dominated by the mode of loading.

Publications and Presentations

• N.W. Klingbeil, J.S. Daily, C.M. Baudendistel. A Dissipated Energy Approach to Fatigue Crack Growth in Ductile Solids and Layered Materials. Key Engineering Materials, 378-379: 385-404, 2008.
  
• D. Car, S.T. Bailie, J. Estevadeordal, C.M. Baudendistel, D. Gebbie, Fluidic Control Studies for Diffusion Enhancement in Axial Compression Systems, 44th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit, January 2006.
  
• Dayton-Cincinnati Aerospace Sciences Symposium, March 2007, ‘Effect of a Graded Layer on Plastic Dissipation During Fatigue Crack Growth’
  
• Dayton-Cincinnati Aerospace Sciences Symposium, March 2006, ‘Plastic Dissipation in Mixed-Mode Fatigue Delamination of Ductile Bimaterial Interfaces’
  
• Dayton Engineering and Science Symposium, March 2006-2007, ‘Validation of a Dissipated Energy Theory for Fatigue Crack Growth Under Mixed-Mode Loading’
  
• AIAA, March 2006-2007, ‘Validation of a Dissipated Energy Theory for Fatigue Crack Growth Under Mixed-Mode Loading’ - Best Presentation Award

• Dayton Area Graduate Studies Institute Fellowship 2008
  
• Dayton Area Graduate Studies Institute Student/Faculty Research Scholarship 2005 and 2008
  
• WSU Outstanding Teaching Assistant 2006
  
• Graduate Council Scholars Scholarship 2005
  
• Dean’s Commendation 2005
  
• Outstanding Student in Mechanical Engineering at WSU 2005
  
• Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society

November 2-6, 2008
Rhode Island Convention Center
Providence, Rhode Island

Organized by the International Microelectronics And Packaging Society

For more information, please visit the IMAPS website at http://www.imaps2008.org

RefWorks is available to all WSU faculty, staff, and students.

Workshops are offered:
Wednesday, September 24, 12-1 p.m., Room 241 Dunbar Library
Wednesday, October 1, 7-8 p.m., Fordham Library (Med. Sci. Building)
Wednesday, October 14, 2-3 p.m., Room 241 Dunbar Library
Friday, October 24, 12-1 p.m., Fordham Library (Med Sci. Building)

Please register at: http://www.libraries.wright.edu/workshops

If you can't make the workshop - request an individual appointment here:
http://www.libraries.wright.edu/services/request/researchrequest.html

Presented by Suman Niranjan

Tuesday, July 29, 2008
11:00 AM
145 Russ Center

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Frank Ciarallo (BIE)

ABSTRACT
The research in this dissertation involves the study of several multi-echelon inventory systems with stochastic capacity and intermediate product demand. Specifically we analyze the behavior of the system which consists of several intermediate product demands. The analysis is primarily three fold i) developed update (relational) equations for all the multi-echelon inventory systems under several inventory allocation policies, ii) develop two simulation optimization approaches 1) OptQuest framework, and 2) IPA (Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis) framework, used to minimize the total cost of the inventory systems that satisfy the desired customer service level, iii) obtain numerical results for all the multi-echelon inventory systems under several scenarios and instances, and perform an extensive analysis and implications of the results.

The research done in this dissertation differ from earlier works, since it considers a complex (combination of serial and assembly systems) multi-period multi-echelon inventory system with several sources of demand (specifically intermediate product demands). We obtain the optimal base-stock levels for each node in the system that satisfies the required customer service level. A SIO (Simulation based Inventory Optimization) approach is used to obtain the optimal base-stock level for the system under several inventory allocation policies. We consider a system which is closer to the actual world and can be used to solve contemporary issues like, 1) manufacturing firm that produces finished products as well as spare parts, 2) manufacturer – warehouse – distribution center – retail outlets etc. I am not aware of any work that studies the impact of inventory allocation polices for multi-period in a multiechelon inventory system, and obtains optimal base stock level for each node using an IPA framework. Moreover the optimal base-stock level for each node is obtained under realistic conditions like
stochastic demand, stochastic capacity, and lead time.

Presented by Vasu Chakravarthy

July 31, 2008
9:00 -11:00
145 Russ Center

Faculty Advisors:
Dr. Arnab K. Shaw (EE) and Dr. Zhiqiang Wu (EE)

Abstract
Recent studies suggest that spectrum congestion is mainly due to the inefficient use of spectrum rather than its unavailability. Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) and Cognitive Radio (CR) are two terminologies used in the context of improved spectrum efficiency and usage. The advent of CR has created a paradigm shift in wireless communications and instigated a change in Federal Communication Commission (FCC) policy towards spectrum regulations. Spectrum overlay and underlay techniques fall within the hierarchical DSA model and enable primary and secondary users to coexist while improving overall spectrum efficiency. As addressed here, spectrum overlay exploits unused spectral regions while spectrum underlay exploits underused spectral regions. Similar to Ultra Wide Band (UWB) transmissions, underlay approaches utilize much more spectrum than overlay approaches and operate below the noise floor of primary users.

Spectrally modulated, spectrally encoded (SMSE) signals, to include Orthogonal Frequency Domain Multiplexing (OFDM) and Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA), are candidate CR waveforms. The SMSE structure supports and is well-suited for CR-based Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications. This dissertation provides a novel, soft decision CR framework that extends the previously developed SMSE framework to achieve synergistic benefits of overlay and underlay techniques. The extended framework provides considerable flexibility to design overlay, underlay and hybrid overlay/underlay waveforms that are scenario dependent. Overlay/underlay framework flexibility is demonstrated by applying it to a family of SMSE signals, including OFDM, MC-CDMA, Carrier Interferometry MC-CDMA (CI/MC-CDMA) and Transform Domain Communication System (TDCS).

Friday, August 22nd, 2008
1:00-3:30 p.m.
Student Union Apollo Room

The Student Employment Job Fair provides an opportunity for WSU students to find work study as well as regular employment opportunities.

For more information, contact Career Services at (937) 775-2556 or visit their website at http://career.wright.edu

Thursday, July 24, 2008
1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Student Union Apollo Room

Bring copies of your resume to distribute and come professionally dressed.

Visit the Career Services website for more information including tips on preparing for the event and a list of the participating employers.

http://career.wright.edu

Designed for the novice inventor, the workshop offers basic patent information and search techniques for using the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Web site and other databases. Literature from the USPTO will also be distributed during the workshop.

Wright State’s library is a U.S. Patent and Trademark Depository Library and houses one of the most powerful patent searching tools, PubWEST. It is the same patent database used by the patent examiners at the USPTO in Alexandria, Virginia.

Seating for the workshop is limited.
Register online at www.libraries.wright.edu/find/gov/patent/workshops.html or contact Ran Raider, patent and trademark reference specialist for the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library, at ran.raider@wright.edu or by calling (937) 775-3521.

The Dayton Linux Users Group (DLUG, a Special Interest Group of Dayton Microcomputer Association) meeting will be in Room 145 of Wright State University's Russ Engineering Center at 7:00 PM on Thursday, June 19.

We will devote the first 45 minutes to an hour of topics aimed at helping get new Linux users (newbies) up to speed, and include a short Q & A period. After that is the main presentation of more advanced topics. If you want to have a particular command, program, or topic discussed, or have any suggestions for future meetings, or wish to make a presentation, please contact the Linux-SIG Planning Team.

The topic for this month's meeting will be a panel discussion of "How to Introduce and Encourage Linux Use to Resistant Organizations". They will discuss experiences they have encountered when trying to start implementation of Linux projects and suggest how to improve them. Also, Michael Gilbert will continue his monthly "in-security" series - security issues that have popped up within the past month.

We would like to have a brief GPG key signing party. You will need to be present to participate and bring at least one form of government issued photo ID, printed copies (one for each participant - probably a dozen will be more than enough) of your Key ID, Key Type, Hex Fingerprint and Key Size info, and a pen
or pencil. See www.cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/gpg-party.html#ss3.2 for details.

($5 pre-registration/$7 at the door)
PRIZE awarded to the winner!

Thursday, May 8, 2008
E157 Student Union
8:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Tickets may be purchased at the Student Union Box Office or by contacting Leroy Long (long.86@wright.edu) or Chris Williams (williams.476@wright.edu)

Sponsored by the National Society of Black Engineers

ENGINEERS GRADUATING IN NOVEMBER 2008 OR MARCH 2009:
If you have not been inducted into the Order of the Engineer, you are encouraged to participate in the upcoming pre-commencement steel ring ceremony.

Friday, November 21, 2008
7:00 PM
Engineers Club of Dayton
(110 E. Monument St., Dayton, Ohio 45402)

Dinner will be available before the Order of the Engineer Ceremony at the Engineers Club. Friends and family are invited to attend dinner before the event. Specials available the night of the event will include Beef Tips and Noodles ($18.95) and Stir Fry ($18.95). Download the Engineers Club dinner menu

The Order of the Engineer is a fellowship of engineers that have accepted the "Obligation of an Engineer." The Obligation is the formal statement of an engineer's responsibilities to the public and to the profession; it is publicly accepted by an engineer during the ring ceremony. This ceremony is an optional activity that students may choose to participate in before spring commencement.

Additional information and registration forms are available online at: www.engineering.wright.edu/ooe
Registration and $15 fee must be received by November 14, 2008.

For more information and to submit registrations, please contact Jenny Garringer (jenny.garringer@wright.edu) in 405 Russ. Rings are available to try-on for sizing.

June 19, 2008
8:30 AM
154 Russ

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Ramana V. Grandhi (MME)

Abstract

The work performed investigates the system design and optimization of an undersea vehicle. The system design is driven by the available components, the missions the vehicle is required to perform, and the performance the system configuration yields. The system design consists of three design modules: path planning, component selection and sizing, and structural analysis. The path planning module uses a novel application of the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm named Path Planning by Additive Freedom. Additionally, the unknown aspects of the mission space through which the path propagates are dealt with using an uncertainty quantification method known as Evidence Theory. Component selection and sizing are performed using the naval design tool SNARC. This program uses a branch and bound technique called the A* algorithm to choose the components that should be used in the system and what size they should be according to the mission profiles provided by the path. The structural analysis is performed using the ABAQUS finite element program to calculate the structural reliability of the system. This module uses the structure sizing data, as well as the hydrodynamic and hydrostatic forces from the mission profile, to calculate the system's reliability with respect to a buckling failure, the most common structural failure in undersea vehicles.

Selected Publications and Presentations

• Benanzer, T.W., Grandhi, R.V., and Krol, W.P., “System Design of Undersea Vehicles subject to Mission Performance,” Engineering Optimization. Submitted May 2008.
  
• Benanzer, T.W., Grandhi, R.V., and Krol, W.P., “Reliability-Based Optimization of Design Variance to Identify Critical Tolerances,” Advances in Engineering Software. Accepted May 2008.
  
• Benanzer, T.W., Grandhi, R.V., Krol, W.P., and Riley, M.E., “System Design of Undersea Vehicles subject to Mission Performance,” 12th AIAA/ISSMO Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimization Conference, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. September 2008.
  
• Benanzer, T.W., Grandhi, R.V., and Krol, W.P., “System-Level Design and Optimization of a UUV Using Integrated Path Planning and Component Sizing,” ASNE Automation and Controls Conference, Biloxi, MS. December 2007.
  
• Benanzer, T.W. and Grandhi, R.V., “Cost Reduction via Optimization of the Distributions of Random Variables,” 11th AIAA/ISSMO Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimization Conference, Portsmouth, VA. No. AIAA-2006-7060 September 2006.

Dissertation Committee Members:
Dr. Ramana Grandhi, Ph.D., Wright State University (Chair)
Dr. Haibo Dong, Ph.D., Wright State University
Dr. Gregory Reich, Ph.D., Air Force Research Laboratory
Dr. Ravi Penmetsa, Ph.D., Wright State University
Dr. Jay Kim, Ph.D., University of Cincinnati

June 5, 2008
1:00 PM
Tait Conference Room (405 Russ)

Faculty Advisor
Dr. Brian D. Rigling (EE)

Abstract

Optical tomosynthetic imaging of 3-D objects from disparate 2-D images has been limited in the past by a lack of algorithmic enforcement of physical constraints, in particular within-scene obscuration and object self-occlusion. This paper presents a stochastic observation model of a tomosynthetic collection that explicitly includes an obscuration operator that is unknown by the sensor. The expectation-maximization algorithm is used to iteratively estimate the obscuration operator and to reconstruct the 3-D volume of interest. Explicit inclusion of obscuration effects greatly enhances the spatial and spectral accuracy of 3-D results without use of costly post-processing techniques. Performance metrics are introduced and the resultant receiver operating characteristics are presented.

Publications and Presentations

• Virtual Confocal Microscopy
  Presented at: IS&T/SPIE Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging Science and Technology, January, 2007
  
• Simultaneous RF/EO Tracking and Characterization of Dismounts
  Co-authored with Jason M. Blackaby and Brian D. Rigling, WSU, Submitted to Institution of Engineering and Technology, Spring 2008

RSVP by June 9th at www.engineering.wright.edu/awards

A listing of the student and faculty winners will be announced soon.