Every year in the late summer, patches of the Columbia River estuary begin to turn red. These patches are blooms of mixotrophic ciliates (Myrionecta rubra or Mesodinium rubrum/major) (MR) that ingest the chloroplast of their prey, the cryptophytes (CR) Teleaulax amphioxeia (Peterson et al., 2013), and use the acquired organs...
This project discuses the design of a novel apparatus for measuring the interfacial rheological properties of a complex interface while measuring the concentration of redox species within the sub-phase. Preliminary measurements made using the apparatus are also presented. The objective of the preliminary experimentation was to simultaneously measure the interfacial...
Human use of fossil fuels has caused a dramatic shift in the earth’s environment, with global temperatures rising and ecosystem health declining. The need for the human species to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is apparent. This will be achieved by replacing conventional energy resources with sustainable alternatives, and...
Tomato flowers (Solanum lycopersicum) were used as a model system to investigate flower color modification by alteration of the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway, due to their ease of transformation and short time from seed to flowering. Tomato flowers are naturally bright yellow, primarily due to the accumulation of violaxanthin. Violaxanthin is...
Tetrachlorethene (PCE) and trichloroethene (TCE) were common solvents used in the 1970’s that are now frequently observed groundwater contaminants. One method of remediating these contaminants is in-situ bioremediation that uses a dechlorinating microbial population. The microbial population performs the sequential reductive dechlorination of PCE and TCE to cis-1,2-dichloroethene (c-DCE), vinyl...
There has been much controversy in recent years over the leaching of chemicals from plastic water bottles. In this study, two of the most common plastics used in water bottles, polyethylene terphthalate (PETE) and polycarbonate (PC) were studied. The leaching of the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) from polycarbonate (Nalgene ™, Camelback...
Platelets undergo morphological changes essential to hemostasis upon activation at sites of vascular injury. The Rho GTPases Rac1, Cdc42, and RhoA drive these changes. Rho guanine nucleotide dissociation inhibitors (RhoGDIs) bind to the Rho GTPases to block the GDP from dissociating from the Rho GTPases, as well as anchoring the...
The OSU-Benton County Green Stormwater Infrastructure Research (OGSIR) Facility was created to test various methods of stormwater treatment. At this facility, runoff from the Benton County Development Department property is captured and pumped into a bioswale. This bioswale is comprised of layers of rock, gravel, sand, and soil, and is...
The advancement of the US energy grid is a necessary task to undertake as renewable energies like wind and solar power become more and more prevalent in our energy sector. However, due to uncontrollable factors such as wind speed and cloud cover, the intermittence of these energy sources continues to...
Copper antimony sulfide (CAS) is a ternary material that is of research interest for thin film photovoltaic applications due to its high absorption coefficient and tunable bandgap. The material is also ideal for sustainable manufacturing due the constituent elements being earth-abundant and less toxic than solar cell absorbers like gallium...
Swelling soils cause millions of dollars of damage to buildings every year in the Unites States alone. One essential piece to understanding these soils is to understand how water moves through them. Hydraulic conductivity is a measure of how easily water flows through a soil. Currently, the most common method...
Coming of Age is a collection of ekphrastic poetry inspired by photographs taken throughout Oregon between 2012-2018. The collection traces the author's experience as she transitions from teenager to adult, struggles with change and loss, and studies to become a chemical engineer.
Key Words: ekphrastic poetry, prose poetry, poetry, photography,...
The cross over from batch nanoparticle synthesis to continuous synthesis processes is crucial to the commercialization of these materials. This project reports comparative studies of batch and continuous synthese of copper nanoparticles by the polyol method. Continuous synthesis of copper nanoparticles was done utilizing a stainless steel micro-mixer that yielded...
Real transportation fuels contain a wide range of hydrocarbon species, and this complexity poses challenges for modeling. Surrogates with a simpler blend of hydrocarbon reference fuels can approximate the physical and chemical characteristics of real fuels and enable practical simulation of the reacting flows that occur in engines and combustors....
Biosphere models predict the transport of radionuclides in the environment with an end goal of assessing the possible risk to humans. Little data exists to support these mathematical biosphere models. The objectives of this work were to verify foliar uptake in biosphere models using experimental data, compare existing biosphere models...
The widespread use of engineered nanoparticles (ENPs) in industrial applications and consumer products makes their release to the environment inevitable. Understanding the aggregation behavior of ENPs is crucial to understanding their fate, transport and toxicology in aquatic systems. This study investigated the comparability of experimentally-determined and model-estimated attachment efficiencies for...
Highly elastic solutions have been shown to increase contaminant removal from silicon wafers, indicating the possibility for reduced reliance upon hazardous chemicals and expensive technologies during the fabrication of semiconductor devices. The onset of this enhanced removal is explored using rinsing and siphoning experimentswith polymer fluids of high molecular weights...
Pb(Zr₁₋ₓTiₓ)O₃ (PZT) is a common piezoelectric and ferroelectric thin film material with a wide variety of applications, including ferroelectric random access memories, novel thin film transistors, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The most common substrate for PZT in all of these areas has been platinum-coated silicon. Alternative substrates are desired for...
This work introduces the design and fabrication of a green-sourced and mostly biodegradable microbial fuel cell for use in soft robotic applications from environmental sensing to wastewater remediation. Theorized from other biodegradable fuel cells, this prototype achieved maximum power densities of 4.0 x 10−4 W/m2 in the single-chambered design and...
The measurement of extensional viscosity is important in many chemical, biomedical, agricultural, and engineering applications. The determination of extensional viscosity is generally difficult, expensive, and inaccessible outside of research labs. The development of a smartphone application (app) that could use a phone’s high-speed camera to measure this parameter could open...
This project explores the relationship between microsecond-timescale dynamic surface tension (DST) and measurable thermal inkjet printing parameters. Dynamic surface tension affects many aspects of printing, including printing speed and ink drop shape. In addition to this, DST is a physical input parameter for HP’s in-house computational fluid dynamics program. HP...
Safety culture is a vital part of any organization. It describes how employees, on all levels, perceive safety at the particular organization. Measuring safety culture is fundamental to determining the environment of the organization. Using different measurement methods, including surveys, changes can be made to increase safety and improve safety...
The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of recombinant lignin degrading enzyme, maganese peroxidise (rMnP), to detoxify inhibitors for theoptimization of ethanol production from lignocellulosic biomass. The negative effects of inhibitors: vanillin, furfural, hydroxymethylfurfural, and syringaldehyde on Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Pichia pastoris yeast cell growth in revealed...
Nanoparticles (NPs) are generally defined as particles <100 nanometers (nm) in size in one dimension. Despite increasing industrial usage of TiO2 NPs in sunscreens, cosmetics, and water remediation little is known of their environmental behavior. The primary goal of this research was to develop a rapid method for determining the...
Innovative nanoelectromechanical switches (NEMS) have the prospects to reduce device actuation voltages as compared to traditional semiconductor devices. Current research on NEMS seeks to avoid irreversible adhesion at the nanoscopic level, which results in device failure. Minimizing leakage currents and increasing device longevity are additional goals of this approach. The...
Assembly and genotyping of polyploid genomes poses many problems due to the complex nature of polyploid data, including the inability to determine allelic dosage and mixed inheritance patterns. This study was the first application of POLiMAPS genotyping on whole genome sequences without using cross information. In this study, whole genome...
This paper presents a brief history of social dance at Oregon State University (OSU) and discusses its key elements and context. Social dance has been part of campus life at OSU since the university was founded. Initially, dance was a social activity and means to interact with others, but as...
Platinum and palladium surfaces are utilized as catalytic surfaces in the chemical industry. Understanding how hydrogen atoms interact with the metal surfaces will allow for further advancement in this area. Specifically, the interaction of hydrogen on the surface and subsurface of these metals was investigated using density functional theory calculations...
The memristor is a resistive switching random access memory (RRAM) with a basic metal/insulator/metal (MIM) structure. These nano devices are nonvolatile, have a conceptually simple crossbar device structure, are power efficient and have the capability of switching between high and low resistance states in nanoseconds making them promising to replace...
Monitoring phenylalanine (Phe) levels in the blood of individuals with phenylketonuria (PKU) is a critical component of therapy. Existing tests for PKU require high-resource laboratories, which are not available to many populations and cannot provide the real-time feedback required for effective therapy monitoring. It would be ideal to develop an...
Global energy needs are continuously increasing while fossil fuels remain an uncertain resource. With a growing population and demand for energy, alternative energy sources are being pursued to power the future. Fossil fuels are an unsustainable resource that brings along problems of climate change and atmospheric pollution. Concentrated solar power...
The inhibitory effects of Corexit 9500A, Alaska North Slope Crude oil (ANSC), and mixtures of the two on the ammonia-oxidizing bacteria, Nitrosomonas europaea, and the ammonia-oxidizing archaea, Nitrosopumilus maritimus, were investigated. Corexit 9500A was found to be minimally toxic to both microorganisms with concentrations of 2000 and 3000 ppm yielding...
Titanium dioxide, in the anatase form, is a photocatalyst and has applications in water pollution reduction. Efficiency can be improved with a graphene substrate, which delays electron-hole recombination and may reduce the band gap. In this work, we determine if graphene can also act as a morphactant, changing the shape...
Anti-reflective coatings are applied to substrates to increase the transmittance of light in the visible range of wavelength 400 – 800 nm through the substrate by changing the refractive index at the surface and directing more light through the substrate rather than being reflected away. This project investigated the possibility...
Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline compounds formed from reacting a metal ion with an organic ligand. They represent a promising new avenue in materials science for gas separations and storage. Certain MOFs, in particular Mg-MOF-74, have shown a strong affinity for the capture of CO2. This project investigated a known...
Insoluble surfactants are unique molecules that have the ability to manipulate interfacial properties, becoming useful in numerous applications such as detergents, wetting agents, emulsifiers, foaming agents, dispersants, and more. Interfacial rheology is a field that attempts to characterize the flow properties of insoluble surfactants by exerting a stress on the...
A system to reversibly extract Pb²⁺ ions from aqueous solutions using spiropyran functionalized nanofibers was proposed. Spiropyrans are photochromic compounds which undergo a conformational change that alters their physical properties and makes Pb²⁺ binding possible upon irradiation with UV light (365 nm). Irradiation with green light (525 nm) reverses this...
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline porous material distinguished for high free empty volume and pore tunability. MOF-74(Ni) was previously shown to be effective in adsorbing carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen. Microwave-assisted synthesis of MOF-74(Ni) was shown to lower reaction time from days to hours. In this thesis, experimental conditions of...
The capability of Pluronic® F68 to stabilize human recombinant Factor VIII in solution was
assessed using zeta potential measurements. Hemophilia A is a genetic disorder in which the
body is missing Factor VIII (FVIII) from the blood coagulation cascade. The pharmaceutical
industry developed recombinant Factor VIII (rFVIII), the largest cloned...
Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) is a promising technique for the production of
biologically safe, wear resistant and corrosion protective coatings for orthopedic
applications. In this work, the impact of coating thickness and surface preparation on the
hardness (H), elastic modulus (E), wear resistance, and delamination of ALD Al2O3 films
is...
The purpose of this project was to optimize the biomass growth of Schizochytrium limacinum SR21. This was achieved by studying the effect of various concentrations of glucose, use of pure glycerol and purified crude glycerol as alternative carbon sources, and inhibition of cell growth with the presence of copper. The...
The purpose of this project was to optimize the biomass growth of Schizochytrium limacinum SR21. This was achieved by studying the effect of various concentrations of glucose, use of pure glycerol and purified crude glycerol as alternative carbon sources, and inhibition of cell growth with the presence of copper. The...
As nanoparticle (NP) research and development expands, the significance of NP biodistribution effects on toxicity increases. A reliable method for measuring NP biodistribution is critical. Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) is capable of accurately quantitating NP biodistribution within embryonic zebrafish with incredibly high precision. Before HSI processing, the embryo must be sectioned...
A system of Photoactuated Droplet Microfluidics (PDM), in which a droplet of
fluid is moved by way of the manipulation of the wettability of a spiropyran
functionalized surface via irradiation with ultraviolet and visible light, was proposed. The
photochromic behaviors of several species of spiropyran were studied and a procedure...
Stormwater picks up pollutants as it flows over impervious surfaces before ending up in water resources. Best management practices are implemented to remove pollutants from stormwater. Puralytics manufactures a stormwater treatment product called the LilyPad. The LilyPad consists of a titanium dioxide nanoparticle photocatalyst immobilized on polypropylene substrate. Treatment of...
T. pseudonana biosilica and live cells was explored as a biosensor for detection of the explosive compound 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT) in aqueous solution. The diatom frustule is an intricately nanostructured, highly porous biogenic silica material derived from the shells of microscopic algae called diatoms. This material emits strong visible blue photoluminescence...
The inhibitory effects of (Ag⁺) and silver nanoparticles (Ag NP) 3-5 nm in diameter (stabilized with polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP)) and 20 nm (stabilized with citrate) on nitrification rates of the model ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) Nitrosomonas europaea were investigated. Experimental solutions contained HEPES buffer and ammonia (NH₃) in the presence and absence...
Effective storage and release of low-to-moderate temperature thermal energy (e.g. solar thermal or geothermal) could be transformational for applications such as space heating/cooling, domestic hot water, or off-grid cooking. Good candidates for thermal energy storage in this temperature range include latent heat storage (LHS) systems and thermochemical energy storage (TCES)...
Incompatibility between Fenton’s Reagents and a potassium dichromate COD test provides interference that prevent accurate measurements of the concentration of organics from oxidized samples. Several treatment options were tested to remove this interference. Oxidation of reagents was eliminated as a potential method for removal of interference due to sample contamination....
The Micralyne microfluidic toolkit (μTK) was an instrument built by Micralyne in the early 2000’s. It was built for electrophoresis and has a sensitive laser-induced fluorescence detection system. The updates to the system were upgrading the control GUI from running in LabVIEW 5 (Windows XP, 2000) to LabVIEW 2012 (Windows...