Practical combustion devices frequently rely upon forced ignition of turbulent fuel/oxidizer mixtures that also contain the product species of combustion. Examples of this include engines that use exhaust gas recirculation (EGR), inter-turbine burners in aircraft engines, and other systems the utilize staged combustion. In this work, the effects of major...
Gas turbine engines for propulsion applications can use fuel as a coolant, exposing the fuel to high temperatures well within the ranges associated with thermal decomposition. Species produced as a result of these processes have been shown to correlate with changes in the combustion performance of the fuels. In this...
This report describes key findings from the classroom implementation study of the Curiosity Machine (CM) design challenges during the Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 semesters at Barack Obama School of Leadership and STEM (BOS) and Michelle Obama School of Technology and Arts (MOS) in Illinois. The study was designed to...
With funding from the Bezos Family Foundation, Battelle, the Columbus Foundation, and the Harold C. Schott Foundation, Explorer at Large (XAL) partnered with the PAST Foundation and Oregon State University (OSU) for a pilot implementation of their videos and instructional materials in Central Ohio schools.
XAL is a new initiative...
"Collaborative filtering algorithms’ performances have been evaluated using a variety of metrics.
These metrics, such as Mean Absolute Error and Precision, have often ignored recommendations for
which they do not have data. Ignoring these recommendations has provided numbers which do not
accurately represent the user experience. Qualitatively we have seen...
In this report, I first introduce three areas of interest to collaborative filtering researchers, namely: (a) how to solve the sparsity and scalability problems in recommendation systems; (b) how to rapidly develop and test collaborative filtering algorithms; and (c) how to apply collaborative filtering to unbounded numeric preference data. In...
The ATRIAS agile humanoid robot, along with a number of other spring-mass walking
machines, currently have two instabilities: one resulting from inertial forces on the torso
which cause the robot to spin like a top, and another resulting from stiff ground collisions
which cause chattering of the point-contact toes. This...
Bipedal locomotion is a complex phenomenon to understand and control, making it difficult for legged robots to achieve the speed, agility, efficiency, and robustness of their animal counterparts. This thesis argues for the use of numerical optimization to investigate and implement bipedal control as it applies to biology, dynamical models,...
Legged locomotion in robotics benefits from engineered hardware dynamics such as configuration-dependent, nonlinear transmissions and compliance. This thesis introduces a novel cable driven leg that allows the design of configuration-dependent transmission ratios while also permitting the addition of compliance in line with the cables to achieve compliant legged locomotion. The...
Groundwater at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Field Research Center (FRC) is contaminated with U(VI) and Tc(VII), has pH values as low as 3.3, and nitrate concentrations as high as 120 mM. The objective of this research was to determine if in-situ bio-immobilization is a viable treatment alternative for this water....