Broadband absorption spectroscopy, by way of FTIR, was used to investigate the vapor cloud of a single millimeter sized liquid droplet suspended by a syringe as it evaporates at standard conditions. Single beam data were collected every 8 seconds resulting in a time-resolved record. Species concentrations were tracked using their...
A novel thermal management approach is explored, which uses supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) as a working fluid to manage extreme heat fluxes in electronics cooling applications. In the pseudocritical region, sCO2 has extremely high volumetric thermal capacity, which can enable operation with low pumping requirements, and without the potential for...
The objective of this paper is to demonstrate a method for mechanically characterizing a 25 μm thick elastoviscoplastic hemodialysis membrane and for quantifying the force required to use that membrane in compression sealing. First, methods are developed for mechanically characterizing the thin elastoviscoplastic membrane. Then, a finite element model is...
This thesis examines the effect of aerodynamics on Formula SAE cars. Due to the different objectives of the Formula SAE events, an understanding of the car's complete aerodynamic design is necessary. Using a half car computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model, a series of sensitivity studies are conducted to determine trends...
The purpose of this study is to measure and compare radiation emissions from flames burning large hydrocarbon fuels to assist in understanding how the molecular composition changes radiation emissions. Radiative heat transfer is significant because it is a primary mode of heat transfer for many combustion devices. This study also...
Turbulent flows over rough surfaces are encountered in many engineering and geophysical applications. Flows of this nature, due to their increasing technological interests, have been a subject of rigorous investigation in recent years. Of the particular interest to the oceanographic community is the study of turbulent oscillatory flow over rough...
This thesis details the applications of a new method of agent-based structure synthesis. The goal of this research is to create structures that meet a structural goal within a simulated physics environment. The method proposed works as an iterative process of changing the structure, evaluating the new structure and using...
Assessing student conceptual understanding is a valuable method for gauging specific student learning outcomes but can be difficult and time consuming to measure. This research investigates the potential of automating some intermediary steps of a qualitative analysis of student conceptual understanding with tools from the field of Natural Language Processing...
Assembly time estimation is a key factor in evaluating the performance of the assembly process in an automated assembly process. The overall goal of this study is to develop an efficient assembly time estimation method by generating the prediction model from an experimental design. In order to estimate these times,...
To manage the effects of manufacturing industries on the economy and environment, design tools are needed that will aid engineers to assess manufacturing costs and environmental impacts early in design. The development of cost analyses and environmental assessments can be burdensome, but much of the data used in these analyses...
Robots have the potential to protect health care workers, provide patient care, and ultimately save lives in infectious disease outbreaks. Nevertheless, infectious disease outbreak scenarios present unique technological and social challenges for robotics. This work explores what robots can and should do in the fight against infectious diseases. We present...
The ability to jump allows small robots to traverse rough terrain, clear large obstacles, and quickly reach elevated locations. These abilities have applications in a variety of areas such as, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and urban warfare. The primary focus in current state-of-the-art jumping robots has been on jumping...
Many projects fail because employees and managers have different understandings of project "success" or "value". Other projects fail because managers are unable to effectively align organizational values with those of their employees. This problem is widely understood, but there is little empirical research that specifies the nature and effect of...
Poor material utilization is inherent to conventional manufacturing processes, leading to high material waste and machining times. Additive manufacturing processes attempt to solve this issue by allowing production of near-net shapes, but the processes may be too expensive or infeasible. By leveraging both processes in a single part, the waste...
Variations in heat treatments have significant effects on the microstructure of tool steels. For CPM-M4 tool steel, the changes in microstructure and mechanical properties were observed based off of variations in temperature. Five heat treatments with constant exposure time and variable austenitizing and tempering temperatures were performed on samples of...
Flexible aerodynamic surfaces have been shown to favorably influence flight characteristics at low Reynolds numbers by increasing lift, angle of attack at stall, and resistance to perturbation. The objective of the research presented within this thesis is to investigate the influence of two aspects of flight observed in biological flyers,...
Sustainable product design is becoming an important component of the development of consumer products. Currently there are limited design resources to aid in the creation of environmentally sustainable products. The purpose of this research is to theorize a new method for integrating sustainable design knowledge into the early design phase...
Small and medium-sized enterprises that are characterized by high-mix, low-volume, and highly variable production operations often have unstructured material movement processes that are prone to material handling wastes. These sub-optimal material handling systems are oftentimes a result of small and medium-sized enterprise's limited resources. Current tools to assist organizations in...
Cultural differences between designers and users is an important aspect to consider when designing products for other countries. However, many prominent authors in the human factors engineering field have failed to specifically address how to identify and utilize cultural differences in user interface (UI) design. This research evaluated if design...
Designing a carbon fiber chassis for the Global Formula Race car has historically proven to be both time intensive and difficult. The goal of this thesis is to improve the design process for testing Global Formula Racing team's composite chassis sandwich panels. Consideration was taken regarding Formula SAE rules, and...