Light-frame construction practices and materials have changed greatly
over the past 100 years. Contemporary research has focused on modern construction; thus, we know a great deal about the behavior of modern lightframe buildings under lateral forces. However, there are many light-frame buildings that were built prior to the introduction of...
This study was conducted to support a research project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The purpose of the NSF research project was to determine how to design kaizen events that result in both short term and long term performance improvements. One of the tools developed to evaluate the...
In the thesis, an application of a genetic algorithm (GA) is considered to solve the vehicle routing problem (VRP) which involves heterogeneous vehicles to serve known customer demands from multiple depots achieving the minimum delivery cost, where each customer must be satisfied by one or more visit(s), and each vehicle...
The fabrication of nano-scale devices is a challenging, but potentially important, technology that has drawn a great deal of interest among researchers. Such nanoscale constructions utilizing a bottom-up approach for device building have many foreseeable applications in areas as diverse as miniaturized electronics, sensors, and biomedical devices.
One of the...
Diffusion bonding cycle times can be a large cost factor in the production of metal microchannel devices. The challenge is to significantly minimize this cost by reducing the bonding cycle time through rapid and uniform heating and cooling within the bonding process. Heating rates in diffusion bonding processes are typically...
For resin based dental restorative composites, one of the major challenges is to optimize the balance between mechanical and optical properties. Although fracture is the second leading cause of dental restorative failures, very limited mechanistic understanding exists on a microscopic level. In the present study, the fracture properties and mechanisms...
Non-destructive commercial ultrasonic grading provides laminated veneer lumber (LVL) manufacturers a means for sorting veneer based on average ultrasonic propagation time (UPT) and/or average dynamic modulus of elasticity (MOEd). While this may provide reliable estimations of modulus of elasticity (MOE), little is known about the influence of veneer defects on...
Micro Energy and Chemical Systems (MECS) devices enable at least two
areas of benefit due to the accelerated heat and mass transfer that can be
accomplished in microchannels. First, MECS devices enable process
intensification; the ability to reduce the volume of space needed to implement
systems of thermal and chemical...
Synthetic adhesives, such as phenol-formaldehyde (PF) resins and urea-formaldehyde (UF) resins, have dominated the wood adhesive market since they were introduced in the wood products industry. Formaldehyde, as a key component in the manufacturing of PF and UF resins, has been classified as a known human carcinogen by the International...
Interest in accounting for environmental impacts of products, processes, and systems during the design phase is increasing. Numerous studies have undertaken investigations for reducing environmental impacts across the product life cycle. Efforts have also been launched to quantify such impacts more accurately. Life cycle energy consumption and carbon footprint are...