This work introduces a new methodology to design transportation fuels offering improved efficiency and reduced emissions, aimed to complement both traditional and emerging engine technologies. Many of these emerging technologies are centered around exploiting low temperature combustion (LTC) strategies that offer improved efficiency and reduced emissions. However, a standardized fuel...
Low temperature combustion (LTC) engines offer improved efficiency and reduced emissions over traditional gasoline spark-ignited and diesel compression-ignition engines. The ability to produce fuels optimized for LTC engines could help increase efficiency and therefore improve fuel economy, insomuch that Federal fuel economy standards could be met. Currently, a fuel performance...
In 1976-77 and 2010, Oregon State University (OSU) excavated portions of the enlisted men’s barracks and privy at Fort Hoskins, a Civil War-era fort. In operation from 1856 to 1865, this fort served as part of a security network to protect and monitor the recently created Coast Indian Reservation. The...
Broadband absorption spectroscopy, by way of FTIR, was used to investigate the vapor cloud of a single millimeter sized liquid droplet suspended by a syringe as it evaporates at standard conditions. Single beam data were collected every 8 seconds resulting in a time-resolved record. Species concentrations were tracked using their...
Low-temperature combustion (LTC) engine concepts such as homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) offer the potential of improved efficiency and reduced emissions of NOₓ and particulates. However, engines can only successfully operate in HCCI mode for limited operating ranges that vary depending on the fuel composition. Unfortunately, traditional ratings such as...
A new metric for ranking the suitability of fuels in LTC engines was recently introduced, based on the fraction of potential fuel savings achieved in the FTP-75 light-duty vehicle driving cycle. In the current study, this LTC fuel performance index was calculated computationally and analyzed for a number of fuel...
Liquid transportation fuels require costly and time-consuming tests to characterize metrics, such as Research Octane Number (RON) for gasoline. If fuel sale restrictions requiring use of standard Cooperative Fuel Research (CFR) testing procedures do not apply, these tests may be avoided by using multivariate statistical models to predict RON and...
Engineering education research has led to a greater understanding of the gap in preparedness of students for the engineering industry. Multiple studies comparing the workplace and academic contexts and the participants in those contexts (i.e., students, faculty, and engineering practitioners) have emphasized similarities and differences between the two contexts by...
The noise problem in air conditioning systems is receiving ever
increasing attention because of the importance of noise on a comfortable
human environment. Some work has been done on the solutions
to the noise problem by an investigation of a few system elements.
The acourstical characteristics of dampers become more...
This thesis presents and discusses a method for comparing
the neutron flux of some calculational model with the actual
flux of a critical system. Both the theoretical and experimental
aspects of this method are investigated in this report.
Experiments were performed to find neutron energy dependent
data. These involved the...
The repetitious nature of air conditioning calculation leads to
arithmetic errors and a high cost of designing air conditioning systems.
Short cut calculations are employed to limit the calculation
and the chance of making errors.
Computers with their high speed of calculation and the ability
to make limited "logic's decisions...
Materials with a strong spin Hall effect and Rashba-Edelstein effect have the potential to improve the efficiency of solid-state magnetic memory technologies and other magnetic logic devices. Heavy metals have been identified as having these properties, including the beta crystal phase of tungsten. In this work, we determine the strength...
The droplet formation process in the vicinity of the nozzle exit and the behavior of a spreading droplet during impingement on a smooth glass surface were studied. Two nozzle geometries were tested. The first case was a stiff stainless steel nozzle plate 0.787 mm thick. The second case was a...
The work of engineering education researchers has resulted in the development of research-based instructional strategies (RBISs) aimed at providing educators with means to increase student learning. Research has shown that there is a disconnect between the development of RBISs and their use by educators. Means to make new practices more...
Student engagement in a course plays a vital role in a student’s ability to process and construct knowledge. Student engagement research has investigated how students engage in and out of the classroom on a macro scale, through observation and survey data collection of large student populations, which lack focus on...
This study conducts follow up research to my Mechanical Engineering Senior Project that was completed in March 2015. It follows the Student Powered Hydro and Entertainment Device (SPHED) as it is used in various middle school and high school classrooms. SPHED has three modules: a power generation module, a hydropower...
Traditional faculty development programs aimed at disseminating research-based pedagogy and innovations at potential adopters have helped increase awareness of these innovations; however, their adoption into engineering classrooms has been limited. This paper aims to present an alternative, pull-oriented approach to faculty development where faculty participants co-develop curricular innovations with engineering...
Steps and Stikes is an Environmental Arts and Humanities capstone thesis project taking the shape of an art film. The video layers contemporary dance with natural and industrial imagery on a foundation of personal narrative. It engages with contemporary environmental discourse as a choreographed essay, questioning why the environmental movement...
I examined, in three separate studies, the active chromatin
structure of the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Yeast contains four proteins having amino acid compositions
typical of the high mobility group (HMG) proteins. Three of these
are eluted from chromatin by 0.35 M NaCl; one is not, but is eluted
by 0.25...
The forests in the Pacific Northwest are highly productive for timber and are a major factor in the economies of the region. The Pacific Northwest is the leading producer of lumber and plywood in the country. The use of harvester-forwarder cut-to-length harvest systems as a method for timber harvests in...
Marine geophysical data from the continental margin of Baja
California and the Gulf of California, and geological and geophysical
data from the Baja California Peninsula and mainland Mexico, outline
the major geologic and tectonic features of the Baja California
Peninsula and the surrounding areas from 24.5° N. Lat. to 27.5°...
Ambient-pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy has been used to study the initial stages of dry thermal oxidation of Si₀.₆₀Ge₀.₄₀(001) grown epitaxially on Si(001). Chemical state resolved AP-XPS was performed at temperatures up to 300 ˚C and O₂ pressures up to 1 mbar. Comparisons were made to Si(001) and Ge(001). The Si...
Two striking characteristics of human beings are the diversity of resources that we use to sustain our lives and the extent to which we engage in coordinated, collective efforts to obtain and consume these resources. Together, these two characteristics are the foundation of human subsistence patterns. In many remote Alaskan...
A theoretical argument is presented to suggest that engineering curriculum be
designed to develop social capital. Additionally, the value of social capital in the
retention of students in the College of Engineering, and the development, role, and value
of social capital in an electrical engineering laboratory is evaluated. Data collected...
Sulfide is an important species to measure in environmental water samples. The
spectrophotometric detection method for reduced sulfur species (sulfide) based on
generation of methylene blue was adapted to work in an apparatus utilizing microfluidic
PDMS mixing and observation cells with flow channels in the 100 μm range. The
benefits...
Situated cognition theory emphasizes the role that social and material contexts have on learning and knowledge application. Several studies of engineering workplace environments have noted differences between the social and material contexts of the workplace and those of undergraduate engineering education. No existing research has studied the social and material...
Background: Studies indicate that problems utilized in traditional undergraduate engineering education do not adequately prepare students for the workforce. Calls to implement authentic, ill-structured problems into upper level engineering experiences may address this issue but adopting authentic engineering problems without considering barriers to adoption of faculty has not been fully...
Improving safety education could contribute to the preparation of better professional engineers. Safety topics are not holistically embedded in transportation course curricula. This thesis explores the current state in which safety is being incorporated in transportation course curricula in terms of design and compares the uses of safety data in...
It is expected that information taught in the context of school will ultimately transfer to workplace settings. To support this transition, educators and researchers advocate for organizing foundational ideas, or concepts, in specific domains of knowing. In the domain of transportation engineering, knowing of concepts, which include "big ideas" such...
Preparing successful engineering undergraduate students for the workforce is imperative and requires students to apply their conceptual understanding of engineering fundamentals to engineering design work. Conceptual understanding is assessed through the use of concept inventories. Learning theories may help explain differences in concept inventory performance. Expert novice theory suggests that...
Student engagement has been the focus of much engineering education research, in large part due to its ties to student learning. Widely considered to be a meta-construct, student engagement is often broken down into behavioral, emotional, and cognitive components. Reasons for ongoing research on student cognitive engagement are twofold: educators...
Student engagement is key for learning in the classroom, and different levels of engagement have led to greater learning. The ICAP framework distinguishes these different levels of engagement by different overt behaviors, but little is known about how to measure different forms of engagement in the classroom. This article will...
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Shane A. Brown
Student engagement is key for learning in the classroom, and different levels
Engineering practitioners solve problems in various ways; it is plausible that they often rely on graphs, figures, formulas and other representations to reach a solution. How and why engineering practitioners use representations to solve problems can characterize certain problem-solving behaviors, which can be used to determine particular types of problem...
Background
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded multiple research projects dedicated to the development of research and evidence based instructional strategies in an effort to improve the state of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in the US. These efforts have led to an abundance of research based...
Evaluation of teaching is used to examine and improve teaching quality in higher education. The literature consists of best teaching evaluation practices that have been developed, yet there is little research that has been conducted which investigates teaching evaluation practices in engineering programs. This thesis represents two manuscripts that explore...
The purpose of this thesis is to explore civil engineering students’ and professional civil engineers' understanding of concepts within statics and fluid mechanics. The studies described herein begin to examine theories of situated cognition utilizing concept inventories, which are sets of multiple-choice questions where the incorrect answers are based on...
As people learn new concepts, they experience a process termed conceptual change. There are several theories that attempt to explain conceptual change, and this paper uses the framework theory to explain how students learn mechanics of materials. Semi-structured interviews with ninety students were qualitatively analyzed for this research in an...
The objectives of this study were to: (1) determine if individual
differences in the learner characteristics of field dependence, state
and trait anxiety, age, sex, and prior computer experience were related
to performance in operating a computer system; (2) to determine if
differences in performance would occur as a result...
Nucleation in atomic layer deposition (ALD) determines how many cycles are required to initiate growth and to form a continuous film. Nucleation has been exploited for the formation of nanoparticles, catalysts, and for area-selective ALD. Although sometimes overlooked or misrepresented in ALD reports, nucleation is also critical for multicomponent ALD...
Increasing temperatures in western North America are expected to result in a decline in winter snowpacks, earlier snowmelt, and a shift in the timing of streamflows, with an increasing fraction of streamflows occurring earlier in the water year and drier conditions during the summer. However, few streamflow datasets have associated...
The ability of Streptococcus diacetilactis to inhibit a variety of
food-borne pathogens and spoilage organisms in milk and broth cultures
was demonstrated. Test organisms inhibited included Pseudomonas
and Alcaligenes species, Eschericia coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus
aureus, Clostridium perfringens and Vibrio parahaemolyticus.
In general, approximately 99.0% and 99.9% inhibition was
observed in...
A Bayesian approach to the analysis of a two-phase linear
regression model is given. It is assumed that the regression model is
continuous at the change point. The likelihood function is expressed
in a form which explicitly contains the continuity restriction. The
natural conjugate prior distribution for the likelihood function...
The major thrust of this research was to design, test, and
perfect an accurate and effective assessment technique, which would
result in becoming an assessment model. For the purpose of developing
this assessment model, the employment need for full-time
instructors of occupational subjects in the community colleges within
the state...
The rising cost of higher education in the United States has created increases in tuition at colleges as well as growing demand from students and families for sources of support in attending college. Over the past decade, beginning with the creation of the Kalamazoo Promise in 2005, local governments and...
Streamflow patterns are a result of the interaction of many factors, including climate, vegetation, geology, and topography. Analyses indicate that streamflow patterns have changed around the United States over the past century, raising questions about the possible role of climate variability as a driver of water yield. This thesis examines...
In November of 2006 an intense rainstorm of tropical origin, known colloquially as the "Pineapple Express," inundated the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, initiating numerous periglacial debris flows on several of the
stratovolcanoes in the Cascade Range of Oregon and Washington. These debris flows rapidly aggrade channels, deposit...