This thesis compares the implementation of additive manufactured suspension uprights against subtractive manufactured suspension uprights from concept generation, design, and validation through simulation. Additive manufactured suspension uprights were designed for Global Formula Racing’s 2023 electric vehicle. Utilizing Siemens NX, Nastran, Fusion 360, and Ansys Workbench both subtractive and additive manufactured...
Combustion emissions produced from burning real transportation fuels have many environmental impacts. However, detailed chemistry across multiple phases, time scales, and thermodynamic conditions make predicting combustion emissions challenging. Detailed modeling of the gas phase alone is prohibitively expensive, due to the large size and stiffness of the kinetic models. The...
Aperiodic structures cause significant challenges to subtractive manufacturing methods due to the common features such as inaccessible voids within the structure. Additive man- ufacturing presents an appealing alternative for this purpose. The aim of this research is to test analysis heuristics for validity through application to periodic structures. First, a...
Powder Metallurgy Hot Isostatic Pressing (PM-HIP) is a widely recognized powder metallurgy manufacturing process to produce near-net-shape and net-shape components. During general PM-HIP processes the metal powders are filled within a capsule (die), heated and loaded with high pressure simultaneously, and solidified to form the final product. Due to the...
This thesis aims to explore the effects of organizational and management principles within the context of a student club – an international Formula Student team. Research on the effects of organizational structuring on student club performance tends to be qualitative in nature. While considering the inherent complexity of the human...
With the increased demand for high-quality products, reliable and robust process monitoring has become a key capability for modern manufacturing systems. Through sensors installed in the machinery, the real-time information was measured to assess the state of the processes. The measured data can be used to infer the mechanical, material,...
Improvement behaviors, specifically double loop, have been linked to successful lean implementations. Although the lean literature supports individual cognitive transformation to double loop learning as an important element of lean success, there remains a strategic methodology to achieve sustainable double loop behavior. Perceptions toward behavior and employee satisfaction have been...
This work explores the mechanical properties of single-phase niobium alloy C103 from room temperature to 600°C for the purpose of expanding safe uses of the material into new applications. The study utilizes a symmetrically notched triaxial tensile specimens to manipulate the internal stress field in order to observe the changes...
The cost of long-duration energy storage poses one of the most significant limitations on the penetration of renewables into power grids. Thermochemical energy storage has great potential to reduce this cost through the use of a reversible redox reaction pair that has a high enthalpy of reaction. The chemical nature...
Long field-life systems are those for which operational, as opposed to capital, expenditures dominate the life time cost of the system. In established product categories, operational experience and historical maintenance data allows engineers to make informed decisions influencing maintenance during the early design stages when design changes are at their...
Resilient interdependent critical infrastructures (CIs) can better withstand cascading failures in disruptive events. This study proposes network expansion as a resilience improvement strategy for interdependent CIs and evaluates the influence of topology in interdependent network design for resilience optimization under disruption uncertainty. A resilience score consisting of network complexity and...
Government regulation is an established policy tool for inducing technological innovation in a market. For example, many environmental regulations prescribe performance requirements that industry complies with by innovating aspects of the product design. These design innovations might include updated components, new functionality, or a revised product architecture. However, the effect...
This work investigates the acoustic velocity of gas-liquid mixtures in vertical, co-current flow in a concentric annulus. Acoustic velocity shows promise as a detection parameter for the presence and amount of gas in a liquid flow because of its high sensitivity to gas void fraction in a gas-liquid mixture. However,...
Modulation assistance is widely employed to improve chip management in turning. This process is also known as modulated turning. Modulated turning transforms continuous cutting into intermittent cutting by periodically disengaging the tool tip from the workpiece, resulting in the generation of short, easily managed chips. This novel method improves the...
Healthcare access exhibits differing levels of complexity, often requiring multi-disciplinary approaches to study its barriers and enablers. Though Argentina has achieved nominal universal healthcare coverage through its public healthcare system, full effective coverage has not been achieved. The public system also has a parallel private care system, adding further complexity...
Legged robots have consistently captured our collective imagination through various forms of media, from Hollywood films, anime, and viral Youtube videos of robots accomplishing incredible feats of acrobatics. These robots have the potential to navigate our environments, capable of completing tasks that would otherwise require human intervention. However, developing controls...
Optical sensing technologies are pivotal in the manufacturing process, specifically in defect detection, tool condition estimation, and monitoring. The research aims to enhance the accuracy, efficiency, and reliability of manufacturing metrology by employing optical sensing technologies, such as laser profilometers and image processing techniques. The dissertation proposes intelligent and flexible...
In the past two decades, the advancement in data collection and storage have led to the accumulation of complex datasets. Consequently, various industries have sought data-driven solutions to predict and detect anomalies. Temporal patterns have emerged as potential features in prediction models that could improve the performance of the identification...
Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is an innovative method where metal powder is fused together to generate complex geometries. LPBF is used as a technology to reduce material waste, and extensive labor that are often linked to conventional subtractive manufacturing. H13 tool steel is one of the widely used materials...
Humanitarian logistics in the post-disaster phase of an earthquake requires detailed planning about the relief distribution network including assigning available distribution centers (DCs) to the affected areas, distribution of the relief commodities demanded by the affected population, and efficient allocation of the available vehicle fleet for the distribution in a...
Flexible Electronics is a fast developing technology that is set to revamp and revolutionize conventional electronics through the development of devices that are easily conformable to surfaces of any arbitrary geometry. Such devices would have vast applications in areas where the rigidity of traditional silicon based electronics is undesirable, such...
Smoldering combustion in wildland fires is difficult to extinguish, can transition to flaming combustion, and produces a significant amount of pollutants. It is necessary to understand parameters controlling smoldering in order to help predict the smoldering behavior and potentially mitigate these hazards. The wide variety of natural fuels that occur...
Turbulent flow with suspended, non-spherical particles can be found in nature and several industrial applications. Although turbulence with dispersed spherical particles has been studied extensively, modeling the dynamics of non-spherical particles in a turbulent flow has not been studied extensively. Motion of spherical particles in complex flows is typically captured...
Wind power forecasting provides valuable insights for demand response, energy market operation, and plant control optimization. Probabilistic approaches—which capture uncertainty in these complex systems by representing predictions as probability distributions—represent a growing area of research in wind energy science. However, their applications for wind-based hybrid systems, particularly those focused on...
Nickel (Ni)-based alloys with a high chromium (Cr) content are frequently employed in applications where elevated temperatures and/or corrosive environments are present due to their excellent corrosion resistance and mechanical properties. However, a gap exists around the formation, and kinetics of long-range order (LRO) Ni2Cr phase in both model binary...
Small hydrocarbon particles such as soot and soot precursors pose a serious threat to human health and Earth's climate. Understanding the mechanisms by which soot particles form and grow is the first step to reducing the prevalence of these particles. Computational simulations are used to investigate combusting systems which are...
Creating schedules for the job shop manufacturing system is an extremely difficult task. Although researchers have devoted a lot of attention to generating optimal solutions, these solutions are static, thus they do not update as random events occur that disrupt the system. As smart manufacturing has grown, researchers have been...
This study investigates the microstructure and mechanical properties of an austenitic Oxide Dispersion Strengthened (ODS) steel produced by the Laser Directed Energy Deposition (LDED) process using powder feedstock atomized with elemental yttrium. The Microstructure of the samples was characterized by electron microscopy, and mechanical properties were measured using a tensile...
Molten salts have been targeted as a promising coolant for next generation reactors due to their high boiling point, heat capacity, and thermal conductivity. Despite these benefits, molten salt systems present unique materials compatibility issues, highlighted by the aggressive corrosion attack and dealloying typically seen on materials in these environments....
An electrically driven propellant pump (HALE E-Pump) was analysed and tested to determine its viability for use in a bi-propellant launch vehicle for the High-Altitude Liquid Engine (HALE) student rocket team at Oregon State University (OSU). The pump, manufactured in 2022 by students in OSU machine shops, was hydrostatically tested...
Advances in plant construction within the energy and chemical process industries require inexpensive process intensification (PI) technology as a means to reduce plant size for enabling modular construction. One form of PI is microchannel process technology where arrays of microchannels, having hydraulic diameters on the order of 0.1 to 1...
Detonation combustion is of great interest for propulsion devices because of its potential to increase thermodynamic efficiency, reduce the weight of current gas turbine engines, and rapidly accelerate to high Mach numbers. Detonation engines might also have the ability to decrease harmful exhaust products from traditional propulsion methods. In order...
This thesis addresses a common knowledge gap that was identified amongst the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) competition design teams at Oregon State University. Students that join the SAE teams at Oregon State University typically do not have experience using physically collected data during a design process. This leads to...
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...
High-pressure torsion (HPT) is an effective severe plastic deformation (SPD)
technique to produce bulk nanostructured materials (BNMs). These BNMs often show a combination of exceptional mechanical and physical properties. Processing of single metals and alloys by HPT has been understood that the homogenous microstructures can be achieved throughout the disk...
Projects and Project Management (PM) are increasingly becoming an integral part of how businesses operate and create value. Project-oriented industries such as IT and software development, construction, health care, public sector, and universities, are expected to contribute up to $20.2 trillion USD to the Global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by...
Social robots benefit from a sense of humor, which requires the ability to recognize and adapt to human responses during playful interactions. Past work on humorous robots has classified audience responses with audio-based and preliminary visual-based methods following the joke punchline. Building on this progress, we conducted a survey of...
The monolithic (plate type) Uranium 10 wt.\% Molybdenum (U-10Mo) fuel system is promising for a variety of applications, most notably for the replacement of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuels with low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel in United State High Performance Research Reactors (U.S. HPRRs).
Phase transformations and secondary phase formation...
For this project, we designed a soot modeling software to produce a full particle density function. This model uses the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo with a full conditioning particle selection method to capture soot nucleation and coagulation in a diffusion flame. We investigate the use of graphic processing units as...
Pillars in modern vehicles provide structural integrity by surrounding the windows and joining the roof with the frame. Although they protect the driver and passengers, A-pillars also create obstruction zones by limiting drivers' forward field of view leading to unforeseeable accidents or mishaps. We argue that providing a better pillar...
This dissertation presents novel, field-activated smart material systems for the actuation and control of autonomous robots. Smart materials, a type of material whose properties can be changed with an external stimuli, represent a promising direction to expand upon existing robotic control and actuation methods, particularly in the sub-fields of soft...
Robotic Bipedal locomotion holds the potential for efficient, robust traversal of difficult terrain. The difficulty lies in the dynamics of locomotion which complicate control and motion planning. Bipedal locomotion dynamics are dimensionally large problems, extremely nonlinear, and operate on the limits of actuator capabilities, which limit the performance of generic...
Metallic glasses (MGs), also called amorphous metals, are metals or metallic alloys trapped in a disordered glassy state. Their amorphous nature and absence of features such as crystal lattices and defects (dislocations, grain boundaries etc.) endows them with a host of properties that far surpass those of common crystalline materials....
Integrated Distributed Electric Augmented Lift (IDEAL) applies upper-surface blowing in a novel way using an array of electric ducted fans (EDFs) to achieve electric short take-off and landing to meet the growing need for urban air transportation. Additional research on the use of vortex generators (VGs) to reduce flow separation...
High Entropy Alloys (HEA) exhibit unusual properties and are gaining interest as new materials for challenging applications in the aerospace, hypersonic and medical fields. The application of HEAs have been limited by the development of powder production at scale. A recently developed process of plasma spheroidization by 6K, inc. has...
Electrodeposition is a versatile polymer deposition technique to create nano-microscale materials using an electrical field generated from a charged droplet of solution and a grounded collector. Electrospinning or electrospraying can occur during electrodeposition, leading to the creation of nanofibers or bead-like materials depending on the process parameters. Photopolymerization of the...
As bipedal robots move ever closer to being integrated into all manner of real world envi-ronments there is a necessity to push their dynamic capabilities to meet or exceed those of humans and animals. Advancements must be made to address ordinary challenges that arise everyday in the same environments that...
This thesis presents novel feedback and feedforward control system design strategies for active to passive vibration mitigation of residual vibrations on high speed machine tools. Residual vibrations on high-speed machine tools are triggered when the machine axes (table) undergo large accelerations, which induce sudden inertial forces and excite the lightly...
Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) is a process commonly used to create additively manufactured metal parts. The flexibility and complexity allowed by the LPBF process provides opportunity for significant advancement in multiple industries as parts can be customized in shape and function for specific needs. These benefits can be compounded...
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a popular tool for solving control tasks, with multiple works focusing on the complex and dynamic task of locomotion. However, the naive application of reinforcement learning to this problem often produces maladaptive policies that exploit the model or reward function. This results in behavior that...