As climate change contributes to larger and more severe wildfires in California, areas of fire refugia – considered unburned and low-severity burn patches – are playing an increasingly important role in sustaining ecosystem resilience, maintaining biodiversity, and supporting post-disturbance recovery. At the same time, climate refugia – which are areas...
Prototyping is a crucial step in product design and development, but it is also known as the highest sunk cost. The top 20 Research and Development (R&D) department spends 142 billion dollars, yet 40 to 46 percent of this money goes into developing products that cannot even make to the...
The first part of the dissertation chronicles irrigation technology changes to progressively improve water application efficiency, water use efficiency, irrigation water productivity and crop production. Technological innovation in irrigation, from 6000 BC to present, has been driven by an unchanging need to provide support for growing populations. The first irrigation...
Growing populations and industrialization rates across the world are leading to increased food and energy demand. The challenge of meeting this demand while also mitigating climate change impacts serves as a driving force for the development of renewable energies technologies. This study focuses on the role of Agrivoltaic systems in...
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is known as the process of implementation of damage detection and characterization strategy. The method is widely used in modern critical equipment to minimize the risk of failures. While a significant effort has been devoted by researchers for the detection of faults in situations including periodic...
Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) technology is a rapidly developing technological marketspace. This thesis focuses on micro, tethered, coaxial UASs and the development of an electrically-tethered observation platform (ETOP). The thesis details the current status of the technology as well as current products on the market. Stability considerations, critical when adding...
Tropical peatlands play an important role in global climate system by storing an immense of carbon that had been accumulated over thousands of years. Peatlands provide another important ecosystem service by regulating the hydrology. It is believed that peatlands act like a giant sponge by absorbing substantial amounts of water...
Lower atmospheric flux measurements are a difficult subset of atmospheric data to accurately collect. The interplay of cost, precision, specialty, resolution and repeatability compound an already difficult experimental problem. In response to this, a new, novel instrumentation approach to measuring within the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is introduced.
The combination...
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...
Micro air vehicles (MAV's) and small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAV) are remotely piloted or autonomous aircraft with a take-off mass range between 50 g and few kilograms. These vehicles, as well as natural fliers such as bats and insects, utilize a variety of elastic wing structures including thin membranes. Over...