The objective of this thesis is to provide an initial demonstration of two-terminal and three-terminal electronic devices employing amorphous multi-component metallic film
(AMMF) electrodes. Such a demonstration is successfully achieved in the fabrication of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) diode and hot electron transistor (HETs) structures employing ZrCuAlNi AMMF electrodes. The ultra-smooth surface...
High data rate transmission has become an important challenge in today digital communication systems. One of the most difficult problems faced by engineers is to transmit data at sufficiently high rates through fading channels. This is the main motivation for the research presented herein. In this thesis, we investigate a...
The objective of this dissertation is to develop amorphous metal thin films (AMTFs) for two-terminal electrical device and nanolaminate applications. Two AMTFs, ZrCuAlNi and TiAl, are investigated in both two-terminal electrical device and nanolaminate applications. Material properties including composition, atomic order, surface morphology, surface potential, and electrical resistivity are explored....
Despite an increase in the number of people who rely on manual wheelchairs, there are still substantial economic barriers to affordable and accessible localization systems. As a result, there is a pressing need to build a versatile yet low cost localization system for manual wheelchairs. Such systems allow users to...
As the fifth generation of mobile communication systems (5G) is being deployed, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) serves as one of its enabling technologies where reliable and ultra low latency communications are achieved while being power and spectrum efficient. This thesis studies the security aspect of massive MIMO system from the...
In this dissertation, we explored multiple coding techniques to reduce energy consumption, improve performance, and secure wireless sensor networks specifically and ad-hoc networks in general. With the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technologies, wireless sensor networks are quickly emerging as an important and key technology in the...
This research presents the design of three nonlinear model predictive controllers (NMPCs) for floating oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy converters (WECs) array to maximize generated power, augmented with the control of the high-speed stop valves (HSSVs). Key to this design is the development of a high-fidelity discretized model for...
An accurate state estimation plays an essential role in power system operation and planning in energy management systems. However, existing multi-area state estimation researches have not focused on the importance of system clustering. The clustering mechanism divides or partitions a system according to user-defined criteria. Few published research works have...
State-of-the-art personal robots need to perform complex manipulation tasks to be viable in complex scenarios. However, many of these robots, like the PR2, use manipulators with high degrees of freedom. High degrees of freedom are desirable from a functionality standpoint, but make the learning task more difficult by adding a...