Purpose: Stereotactic radiation therapy and stereotactic radiosurgery deliver radiation precisely to tumors, using special equipment to position and demobilize patients. The VisionRT system, with its component AlignRT, is a non-invasive stereotactic positioning and tracking system that uses cameras to capture infra-red images of patients, and process these images, to obtain...
There has been increased concern about radiation dose to the female breasts, with approximately 200,000 new breast cancers being diagnosed each year in the United States. The unprecedented increase in the use of radiologic exams on younger women has also raised some additional concerns about how procedures are performed. The...
Sulfur content in fuels is an increasingly critical environmental issue. Hydrodesulfurization removes sulfur from hydrocarbons; however, further desulfurization is necessary in fuels. New methods are required. In this study, micro-scaled single phase oxidative desulfurization is explored. An ultraviolet light-assisted micro-reactor is introduced for desulfurization of dibenzothiophene.
Dibenzothiophene is mixed with...
Low-level nuclear power plant outages in the United States can lead to unanticipated costs, potentially compromising the expected operation lifetime of the plant. Nuclear power plants are complex systems of interfacing components and highly regulated processes. This inherent complexity makes predicting outages from system dependencies very challenging. When outages do...
Global warming problem is becoming an increasingly important environmental concern and CO₂ is considered as the major cause of global warming. Among various methods of CO₂ utilization, conversion of CO₂ to value added chemical products is the most attractive. In this study, a microscale-based corona reactor is introduced for reduction...
Natural convection provides a means for circulating fluids without the use of pumps. This type of system is of great interest for a wide variety of applications, including solar heaters, process industry, and nuclear reactors. Natural convection will play a vital role in the area of passive safety and reliability,...
Small hydrocarbon particles such as soot and soot precursors pose a serious threat to human health and Earth's climate. Understanding the mechanisms by which soot particles form and grow is the first step to reducing the prevalence of these particles. Computational simulations are used to investigate combusting systems which are...
The pulsed sphere benchmark problems are a set of physical experiments that have been used to verify Monte Carlo codes and evaluate nuclear data. All Monte Carlo codes rely on benchmark experiments that test the features of the code to verify that the simulations are producing realistic results. In the...
The pozzolanic reactivity test (PRT) is used to quantify the pozzolanic reactivity of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). The PRT computes reactivity by measuring heat release (Q) and calcium hydroxide (CH) consumption, as interpreted using thermodynamic modeling. The robustness of PRT is examined by experimentally varying CH-to-SCM ratio, solution-to-solid ratio, sulfate...
The Mars Hopper is an alternative extraterrestrial vehicle for the collection of samples from the Martian surface. This thesis studied the engine of the Mars Hopper to assess the validity of the current planned launch cycle according to current parameters. To do this, the engine was simplified to an average...