Large quantities of the chemical oil dispersant Corexit were applied in the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf) in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Large data gaps regarding the potential transport, persistence and impact of Corexit in the Gulf existed at the time of the emergency response. Analytical methods for...
The objective of this research is to determine the correlation of lacustrine micro-fossils in Lake Tanganyika to changes in climate and lake levels during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene.
Lake Tanganyika is the second deepest and one of the oldest lakes in the world. The horst and graben geometry...
The photophysical properties of two-dimensional (2D) layered van der Waals (vdW) materials, and their heterostructures are manifestly distinct from crystalline bulk materials. Recently, the discovery of new 2D vdW materials and strongly-bound interlayer excitons in these materials has created a new branch in nanoscience. As such, there are a number...
In order to solve some classic problems in traditional topology optimization, such as unknown material distribution, checker-boarding and curse of dimensionality, this thesis introduces a new method to construct a mechanical structure that can reduce mass and increase stiffness. It uses a graph to represent the skeleton of a structure....
This thesis presents novel findings regarding
symbiotic, physiological, and antigenic characteristics of
representatives from an indigenous soil-borne population
of Rhizobium meliloti. Nodules were sampled from 'Vernal',
'Anchor', and 'Saranac' alfalfa, and the isolates analyzed
serologically. Rhizobium meliloti serogroup 31 was
identified as a dominant nodule occupant, with a greater
and...
Population counts of aquatic insects are a valuable tool for monitoring the water quality of rivers and streams. However, the handling of samples in the lab for species identification is time consuming. An aquatic insect imaging device was designed as part of a system to automate aquatic insect classification and...
In this work, a fully automated approach to synthesis Metal-Organic Frameworks is presented. We use graph to represent the structure of Metal-organic Frameworks and use graph grammars which are backbone rules and functional group rules to generate metal-organic framework. For a given parameter value of the user defined metal-organic framework,...
Understanding the electrical transport properties of graphene provides a basis for determining its future as a potential semiconducting device that can be used for the next generation of transistors and photodetectors. Graphene p-n junctions can also function as field effect transistors, and thus are a logical starting point for I-V...
The study of carrier transport in light-emitting diode (LED) has been researched extensively in the past. However, most studies were implementing voltages above the turn-on voltage of the LED. Research on LEDs well below the turn-on voltage threshold is comparatively scarce for good reasons. When the supply voltage is below...
