Assembly planning is a crucial task for every manufacturing product. In general, assembly operations consume more than 30% of the total manufacturing time and cost. Therefore, any effort in optimizing assembly will have a significant impact on the economic success of manufacturing. Finding an optimal assembly plan by hand is...
Implementing multicomponent diffusion in numerical combustion studies is computationally expensive due to the challenges involved in computing diffusion coefficients. As a result, mixture-averaged diffusion treatments or simpler methods are used to avoid these costs. However, the accuracy and appropriateness of the mixture-averaged diffusion model has not been verified for three-dimensional...
Realizing the vast amount of energy available in ocean waves, an industry has emerged that is progressing towards the deployment of grid–connected wave energy converters. Likely to be deployed in arrays, a challenge to the wave energy industry is maximizing the energy production of such arrays. We have been developing...
There has been serious interest in hydrogen as a source of energy in the United States due to its capability of delivering a sustainable, carbon-free energy future. Currently, most hydrogen in the United States is produced via the steam methane reforming of natural gas, which converts methane to hydrogen through...
This thesis uses the manuscript option, and consists of a previously-published paper and a paper that has been accepted for publication. Manuscript One details an independent confirmatory study to Choo et al. (2014), which demonstrated that correlations exist between personality type and the outcome of concept ideation methods. This is...
The substantial wave energy resource of the US Pacific Northwest (i.e. off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and N. California) is assessed and characterized. Archived spectral records from ten wave measurement buoys, operated and maintained by the National Data Buoy Center and the Coastal Data Information Program, form the basis...
The world is currently using an unsustainable system of meeting its transportation
needs with oil. This system is taking a toll on the world environment and on global politics.
The physical availability of oil is the system’s most immediate problem and will most likely
bring about a transition away from...
A system which allows the computer to capture sketches
made by a mechanical designer is described. The system not
only recognizes basic features as they are sketched, but it
also reasons the spatial relationships between features and
builds a high level abstract representation (feature model)
of the artifact. The temporal...