The world's oceans contain tremendous renewable energy potentials. It is estimated that if 0.2% of the ocean's untapped energy could be harnessed, it could provide power sufficient for the entire world [1]. This thesis provides a comprehensive description of the state-of-the-art of ocean energy extraction technologies and lessons learned from...
The quality of a digital image pipeline relies greatly on its color reproduction which should at a minimum handle the color constancy, and the final judgment of the excellence of the pipeline is made through subjective observations by humans.
This dissertation addresses a few topics surrounding the color processing of...
In the 21st century, environmental deterioration is now an indisputable fact. Reliable and economically viable electricity systems based on renewable sources are urgently needed to replace the environmentally detrimental fossil fuels. The feasibility of incorporating renewable-but-intermittent solar and wind energy heavily depends on the development of cost-effective and safe technologies,...
Recent efforts show that microchannel technologies have much to offer the field of nanomanufacturing: the structuring of matter on the order of one billionth of a meter. During the synthesis of nanomaterials, microchannel reactors take advantage of large surface-to-volume ratios to accelerate heat and mass transport. This accelerated transport allows...
A method for preferred color reproduction with a psychophysical study based upon a real-life scene demonstrated application is presented. A color correction matrix optimization algorithm is first introduced which applies additional hue constraints on top of the CIE delta E magnitude error to emphasize the importance of hue in the...
Automatic painterly rendering systems have been proposed but they opted for selecting a single style to generate paintings from images, which lacks the ability of creatively using multiple styles to focus important objects and deemphasize unimportant part of the scenes. We provide a multi-style painting framework to
address this issue...
The paper reports on a large-scale demand model for recreational fishing in Michigan. The model is based on the travel cost method and is specified as a four-level nested-logit. Seasonal participation is modeled by repeating the site choice logit over the course of a season. Data on anglers' trips and...
Cerium oxide nanoparticles were continuously
precipitated from a solution of cerium(III) nitrate and ammonium
hydroxide using a static microchannel T-mixer. Tmixer
synthesis results were compared with synthesis results
from batch precipitation. Findings show that the method of
mixing is important in the ceria precipitation process. Uniform
porous film structures and...
This research looks at the use of PowerPoint as an instructional tool for teaching English language learners (ELL) who studied in a language program at a state university in the Pacific Northwest. The purpose of the research was to discover and to explore the perceptions of PowerPoint supported teaching and...
Oral administration is the most practical way of vaccination of fish. It has advantages over intraperitoneal injection and immersion methods that include no stressful handling, no interference with routine fish husbandry and antigens can be delivered to the fish in their feed.
An oral antigen delivery system was developed for...
The Line Integral Convolution (LIC) is a mainstay of flow visualization. It is, however, computationally intensive, which limits its interactivity. Also, when used to view three-dimensional (3D) vector fields, the resulting images are dense and cluttered, making it difficult to perceive the flow on the interior parts of the field....
In this dissertation, we address action segmentation in videos under limited supervision. The goal of action segmentation is to predict an action class for each frame of a video. The limited supervision means ground truth labels of video frames are not available in training. We focus on three types of...
Recognizing human actions in videos is a long-standing problem in computer vision with a wide range of applications including video surveillance, content retrieval, and sports analysis. This thesis focuses on addressing efficiency and robustness of video classification in unconstrained real-world settings. The thesis work can be broadly divided into four...
In recently years, the finance sector had focused their attention on commerce operation in China.When fisheries farmers decide to increase invent to promote production, they also can't get enough loans because aquaculture is a highest risk sector in agriculture and the commercial banks would prefer others sector in agriculture to...
This dissertation explores mathematical theory of the 3 dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations that consists a set of partial differential equations which govern the motion of Newtonian fluids and can be seen as Newton's second law of motion for fluids. The main interest of this work focuses on how local perturbation...
The thermal degradation of structural materials is considered to be a key factor for evaluating the lifetime of current nuclear power plants. Ni-based and Fe-based alloys, such as 690, 625, 304, and 316, are widely used in nuclear industry as structural components due to the extraordinary corrosion resistance and mechanical...
The upper reach of the Hutuo River flows along the Xin-Ding basin and cuts a transverse drainage
through Xizhou Mountain and Taihang Range into the North China Plain. Previous studies showed
that the Xin-Ding basin was occupied by a lake during the Early-Middle Pleistocene. However,
the timing of the paleolake...
Fusarium proliferatum is a fungus found in soils which produces the mycotoxin group known as fumonisins. Of human concern due to hepato-, nephro- and neurotoxicity, the threat of fumonisins lies within several food items, including corn, wheat sorghum, asparagus and, more recently, garlic. Manifesting as ““garlic rot”,” F. proliferatum infection...
Now in its 10th year, the Gramene database (http://www.gramene.org) has grown from its primary focus on rice, the first fully-sequenced grass genome, to become a resource for major model and crop plants including Arabidopsis, Brachypodium, maize, sorghum, poplar and grape in addition to several species of rice. Gramene began with...