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Title: Design and simulation of single-crystal diamond diodes for high voltage, high power and high temperature applications
Creator: Suwanmonkha, Nutthamon
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTDESIGN AND SIMULATION OF SINGLE-CRYSTAL DIAMOND DIODES FOR HIGH VOLTAGE, HIGH POWER AND HIGH TEMPERATURE APPLICATIONSByNutthamon SuwanmonkhaDiamond has exceptional properties and great potentials for making high-power semiconducting electronic devices that surpass the capabilities of other common semiconductors including silicon. The superior properties of diamond include wide bandgap, high thermal conductivity, large electric breakdown field and fast carrier mobilities. All of these...
Show moreABSTRACTDESIGN AND SIMULATION OF SINGLE-CRYSTAL DIAMOND DIODES FOR HIGH VOLTAGE, HIGH POWER AND HIGH TEMPERATURE APPLICATIONSByNutthamon SuwanmonkhaDiamond has exceptional properties and great potentials for making high-power semiconducting electronic devices that surpass the capabilities of other common semiconductors including silicon. The superior properties of diamond include wide bandgap, high thermal conductivity, large electric breakdown field and fast carrier mobilities. All of these properties are crucial for a semiconductor that is used to make electronic devices that can operate at high power levels, high voltage and high temperature.Two-dimensional semiconductor device simulation software such as Medici assists engineers to design device structures that allow the performance requirements of device applications to be met. Most physical material parameters of the well-known semiconductors are already compiled and embedded in Medici. However, diamond is not one of them. Material parameters of diamond, which include the models for incomplete ionization, temperature-and-impurity-dependent mobility, and impact ionization, are not readily available in software such as Medici. Models and data for diamond semiconductor material have been developed for Medici in the work based on results measured in the research literature and in the experimental work at Michigan State University. After equipping Medici with diamond material parameters, simulations of various diamond diodes including Schottky, PN-junction and merged Schottky/PN-junction diode structures are reported. Diodes are simulated versus changes in doping concentration, drift layer thickness and operating temperature. In particular, the diode performance metrics studied include the breakdown voltage, turn-on voltage, and specific on-resistance. The goal is to find the designs which yield low power loss and provide high voltage blocking capability. Simulation results are presented that provide insight for the design of diamond diodes using the various diode structures. Results are also reported on the use of field plate structures in the simulations to control the electric field and increase the breakdown voltage.
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Title: Unconstrained 3D face reconstruction from photo collections
Creator: Roth, Joseph (Software engineer)
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This thesis presents a novel approach for 3D face reconstruction from unconstrained photo collections. An unconstrained photo collection is a set of face images captured under an unknown and diverse variation of poses, expressions, and illuminations. The output of the proposed algorithm is a true 3D face surface model represented as a watertight triangulated surface with albedo data colloquially referred to as texture information. Reconstructing a 3D understanding of a face based on 2D input...
Show moreThis thesis presents a novel approach for 3D face reconstruction from unconstrained photo collections. An unconstrained photo collection is a set of face images captured under an unknown and diverse variation of poses, expressions, and illuminations. The output of the proposed algorithm is a true 3D face surface model represented as a watertight triangulated surface with albedo data colloquially referred to as texture information. Reconstructing a 3D understanding of a face based on 2D input is a long-standing computer vision problem. Traditional photometric stereo-based reconstruction techniques work on aligned 2D images and produce a 2.5D depth map reconstruction. We extend face reconstruction to work with a true 3D model, allowing us to enjoy the benefits of using images from all poses, up to and including profiles. To use a 3D model, we propose a novel normal field-based Laplace editing technique which allows us to deform a triangulated mesh to match the observed surface normals. Unlike prior work that require large photo collections, we formulate an approach to adapt to photo collections with few images of potentially poor quality. We achieve this through incorporating prior knowledge about face shape by fitting a 3D Morphable Model to form a personalized template before using a novel analysis-by-synthesis photometric stereo formulation to complete the fine face details. A structural similarity-based quality measure allows evaluation in the absence of ground truth 3D scans. Superior large-scale experimental results are reported on Internet, synthetic, and personal photo collections.
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Title: Parallel computation models : representation, analysis and applications
Creator: Sun, Xian-He
Date: 1990
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Reliability improvement of DFIG-based wind energy conversion systems by real time control
Creator: Elhmoud, Lina Adnan Abdullah
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Reliability is the probability that a system or component will satisfactorily perform its intended function under given operating conditions. The average time of satisfactory operation of a system is called the mean time between failures (MTBF) and. the higher value of MTBF indicates higher reliability and vice versa. Nowadays, reliability is of greater concern than in the past especially for offshore wind turbines since the access to these installations in case of failures is both costly and...
Show moreReliability is the probability that a system or component will satisfactorily perform its intended function under given operating conditions. The average time of satisfactory operation of a system is called the mean time between failures (MTBF) and. the higher value of MTBF indicates higher reliability and vice versa. Nowadays, reliability is of greater concern than in the past especially for offshore wind turbines since the access to these installations in case of failures is both costly and difficult. Power semiconductor devices are often ranked as the most vulnerable components from reliability perspective in a power conversion system. The lifetime prediction of power modules based on mission profile is an important issue. Furthermore, lifetime modeling of future large wind turbines is needed in order to make reliability predictions in the early design phase. By conducting reliability prediction in the design phase a manufacture can ensure that the new wind turbines will operate within designed reliability metrics such as lifetime.This work presents reliability analysis of power electronic converters for wind energy conversion systems (WECS) based on semiconductor power losses. A real time control scheme is proposed to maximize the system's lifetime and the accumulated energy produced over the lifetime. It has been verified through the reliability model that a low-pass-filter-based control can effectively increase the MTBF and lifetime of the power modules. The fundamental cause to achieve higher MTBF lies in the reduction of the number of thermal cycles.The key element in a power conversion system is the power semiconductor device, which operates as a power switch. The improvement in power semiconductor devices is the critical driving force behind the improved performance, efficiency, reduced size and weight of power conversion systems. As the power density and switching frequency increase, thermal analysis of power electronic system becomes imperative. The analysis provides information on semiconductor device rating, reliability, and lifetime calculation. The power throughput of the state-of-the-art WECS that is equipped with maximum power point control algorithms is subjected to wind speed fluctuations, which may cause significant thermal cycling of the IGBT in power converter and in turn lead to reduction in lifetime. To address this reliability issue, a real-time control scheme based on the reliability model of the system is proposed. In this work a doubly fed induction generator is utilized as a demonstration system to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. Average model of three-phase converter has been adopted for thermal modeling and lifetime estimation. A low-pass-filter based control law is utilized to modify the power command from conventional WECS control output. The resultant reliability performance of the system has been significantly improved as evidenced by the simulation results.
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Title: A global modeling framework for plasma kinetics : development and applications
Creator: Parsey, Guy Morland
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The modern study of plasmas, and applications thereof, has developed synchronously with com-puter capabilities since the mid-1950s. Complexities inherent to these charged-particle, many-body, systems have resulted in the development of multiple simulation methods (particle-in-cell,fluid, global modeling, etc.) in order to both explain observed phenomena and predict outcomesof plasma applications. Recognizing that different algorithms are chosen to best address specifictopics of interest, this...
Show moreThe modern study of plasmas, and applications thereof, has developed synchronously with com-puter capabilities since the mid-1950s. Complexities inherent to these charged-particle, many-body, systems have resulted in the development of multiple simulation methods (particle-in-cell,fluid, global modeling, etc.) in order to both explain observed phenomena and predict outcomesof plasma applications. Recognizing that different algorithms are chosen to best address specifictopics of interest, this thesis centers around the development of an open-source global model frame-work for the focused study of non-equilibrium plasma kinetics. After verification and validationof the framework, it was used to study two physical phenomena: plasma-assisted combustion andthe recently proposed optically-pumped rare gas metastable laser.Global models permeate chemistry and plasma science, relying on spatial averaging to focusattention on the dynamics of reaction networks. Defined by a set of species continuity and energyconservation equations, the required data and constructed systems are conceptually similar acrossmost applications, providing a light platform for exploratory and result-search parameter scan-ning. Unfortunately, it is common practice for custom code to be developed for each application-an enormous duplication of effort which negatively affects the quality of the software produced.Presented herein, the Python-based Kinetic Global Modeling framework (KGMf) was designed tosupport all modeling phases: collection and analysis of reaction data, construction of an exportablesystem of model ODEs, and a platform for interactive evaluation and post-processing analysis. Asymbolic ODE system is constructed for interactive manipulation and generation of a Jacobian,both of which are compiled as operation-optimized C-code.Plasma-assisted combustion and ignition (PAC/PAI) embody the modernization of burning fuelby opening up new avenues of control and optimization. With applications ranging from engineefficiency and pollution control to stabilized operation of scramjet technology in hypersonic flows,developing an understanding of the underlying plasma chemistry is of the utmost importance.While the use of equilibrium (thermal) plasmas in the combustion process extends back to the ad-vent of the spark-ignition engine, works from the last few decades have demonstrated fundamentaldifferences between PAC and classical combustion theory. The KGMf is applied to nanosecond-discharge systems in order to analyze the effects of electron energy distribution assumptions onreaction kinetics and highlight the usefulness of 0D modeling in systems defined by coupled andcomplex physics.With fundamentally different principles involved, the concept of optically-pumped rare gasmetastable lasing (RGL) presents a novel opportunity for scalable high-powered lasers by takingadvantage of similarities in the electronic structure of elements while traversing the periodic ta-ble. Building from the proven concept of diode-pumped alkali vapor lasers (DPAL), RGL systemsdemonstrate remarkably similar spectral characteristics without problems associated with heatedcaustic vapors. First introduced in 2012, numerical studies on the latent kinetics remain immature.This work couples an analytic model developed for DPAL with KGMf plasma chemistry to bet-ter understand the interaction of a non-equilibrium plasma with the induced laser processes anddetermine if optical pumping could be avoided through careful discharge selection.
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Title: Adaptation to visual perturbations while learning a novel virtual reaching task
Creator: Narayanan, Sachin Devnathan
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Introduction and Purpose: The movements we do to perform our day-to-day activities have always been riddled with perturbations, to which we adapt and learn. The studies looking at this aspect of motor learning should consider, the biomechanical differences that exist between individuals and create a novel task that can test every individual without any bias. This was achieved in our study by using a virtual environment to perform a novel motor skill in order to investigate how people learn...
Show more"Introduction and Purpose: The movements we do to perform our day-to-day activities have always been riddled with perturbations, to which we adapt and learn. The studies looking at this aspect of motor learning should consider, the biomechanical differences that exist between individuals and create a novel task that can test every individual without any bias. This was achieved in our study by using a virtual environment to perform a novel motor skill in order to investigate how people learn to adapt to perturbations. Methods: 13 college-age participants (females = 7, Mean = 21.74 +/- 2.55) performed upper body movements to control a computer cursor. Visual rotation of the cursor position was introduced as a perturbation for one-half of the practice trials. Movement time and normalized path length were calculated. One way repeated measures ANOVA was performed to analyze significance between the performance at different times of the task. Results: Significant learning seen while learning the initial baseline task (p<0.0001) and a significant drop in performance upon immediate exposure to the perturbation (p =0.005). No significant adaptation over practice with the perturbation (p = 0.103) or significant after-effects on removal of the perturbation (p = 0.383). Conclusions: Results suggests differences in adaptation when the task is novel when compared to other adaptation studies and such novel tasks trigger a different type of learning mechanism when compared to adaptation."--Page ii.
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Title: Orientation guided texture synthesis using PatchMatch
Creator: Dutka, Rosemary L.
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Texture describes the unique structural patterns that we perceive in the world. Various surface geometric details such as animal fur, plant leaves, and carpets can be thought of as texture. In computer graphics, textures stored as images are ubiquitously used to decorate boundary surfaces of objects. There are multiple approaches to acquire realistic and aesthetically pleasing textures. One of the most popular methods is a process known as texture synthesis, in which we produce seamless...
Show moreTexture describes the unique structural patterns that we perceive in the world. Various surface geometric details such as animal fur, plant leaves, and carpets can be thought of as texture. In computer graphics, textures stored as images are ubiquitously used to decorate boundary surfaces of objects. There are multiple approaches to acquire realistic and aesthetically pleasing textures. One of the most popular methods is a process known as texture synthesis, in which we produce seamless nonrepetitive textures from a small patch of texture sample.In this thesis, we present an orientation guided fast texture synthesis based on an image editing tool, PatchMatch, which is included in PhotoShop. Given an example image, our model adopts a hierarchical process to improve retention of structural texture features at multiple scales. We generalize PatchMatch by using orientation to guide the alignment of texture features, indicated by a planar direction field, in the creation of large texture patches. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we first apply our algorithm in designing new textures with two and four-way symmetry which can be extended to n-way symmetry, and then in enhancing latent fingerprints. Furthermore, our results show empirically that orientation guided PatchMatch has the advantages of providing control over the density of singularities without knowing the exact locations and reducing spurious singularities.
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Title: Multichix, a computer model that projects receipts and expenses for egg production enterprises
Creator: Jacobs, Roger Dean
Date: 1978
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Simulation of batch drying rice
Creator: Chan, Nguyen Kim
Date: 1976
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Suicide, signals, and symbionts : evolving cooperation in agent-based systems
Creator: Vostinar, Anya E.
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Cooperation is ubiquitous in nature despite the constant pressure for organisms to cheat by receiving a benefit from cooperators, while not cooperating themselves. The continued evolution and persistence of countless forms of cooperation is a central topic in evolutionary theory. Extensive research has been done on the theoretical dynamics of cooperation through game theory and the natural examples of cooperation. However, it remains difficult to understand thoroughly the evolution of many...
Show moreCooperation is ubiquitous in nature despite the constant pressure for organisms to cheat by receiving a benefit from cooperators, while not cooperating themselves. The continued evolution and persistence of countless forms of cooperation is a central topic in evolutionary theory. Extensive research has been done on the theoretical dynamics of cooperation through game theory and the natural examples of cooperation. However, it remains difficult to understand thoroughly the evolution of many cooperative systems, due in part to the ancient origins of these systems and the long time scales required to see cooperation evolve in any natural populations. I have systematically analyzed the evolution of three broad types of cooperation: programmed cell death, quorum sensing, and mutualisms (cooperation across species). I have provided evidence that programmed cell death can originate due to kin selection. I have also created two new systems to enable the extensive exploration of factors that affect the evolution of public goods cooperation and mutualism. Using these systems, I determine the effects of environmental factors on the evolution of public goods cooperation and mutualism. By uniting the expansive theoretical work on these forms of cooperation with a fully-controlled experimental system, I contributed to our understanding of how these forms of cooperation can emerge and be maintained in industrial and medical applications that rely on bacterial cooperation.
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Title: Integration of topological data analysis and machine learning for small molecule property predictions
Creator: Wu, Kedi
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Accurate prediction of small molecule properties is of paramount importance to drug design and discovery. A variety of quantitative properties of small molecules has been studied in this thesis. These properties include solvation free energy, partition coefficient, aqueous solubility, and toxicity endpoints. The highlight of this thesis is to introduce an algebraic topology based method, called element specific persistent homology (ESPH), to predict small molecule properties. Essentially ESPH...
Show moreAccurate prediction of small molecule properties is of paramount importance to drug design and discovery. A variety of quantitative properties of small molecules has been studied in this thesis. These properties include solvation free energy, partition coefficient, aqueous solubility, and toxicity endpoints. The highlight of this thesis is to introduce an algebraic topology based method, called element specific persistent homology (ESPH), to predict small molecule properties. Essentially ESPH describes molecular properties in terms of multiscale and multicomponent topological invariants and is different from conventional chemical and physical representations. Based on ESPH and its modified version, element-specific topological descriptors (ESTDs) are constructed. The advantage of ESTDs is that they are systematical, comprehensive, and scalable with respect to molecular size and composition variations, and are readily suitable for machine learning methods, rendering topological learning algorithms. Due to the inherent correlation between different small molecule properties, multi-task frameworks are further employed to simultaneously predict related properties. Deep neural networks, along with ensemble methods such as random forest and gradient boosting trees, are used to develop quantitative predictive models. Physical based molecular descriptors and auxiliary descriptors are also used in addition to ESTDs. As a result, we obtain state-of-the-art results for various benchmark data sets of small molecule properties. We have also developed two online servers for predicting properties of small molecules, TopP-S and TopTox. TopP-S is a software for topological learning predictions of partition coefficient and aqueous solubility, and TopTox is a software for computing element-specific tological descriptors (ESTDs) for toxicity endpoint predictions. They are available at http://weilab.math.msu.edu/TopP-S/ and http://weilab.math.msu.edu/TopTox/, respectively.
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Title: Designing a package for pharmaceutical tablets in relation to moisture and dissolution
Creator: Yoon, Seungyil
Date: 2003
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Modeling and simulations of evaporating spray, turbulent flow, and combustion in internal combustion engines
Creator: Srivastava, Shalabh
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: A multicomponent droplet evaporation model, which discretizes the one-dimensional mass and temperature profiles inside a droplet with a finite volume method and treats the liquid phase as thermodynamically real, has been developed and implemented into a large-eddy simulation (LES) code for evaporating and reacting spray simulations. Single drop evaporation results obtained by the variable property multicomponent model are shown to match with the constant property model in the limiting...
Show moreA multicomponent droplet evaporation model, which discretizes the one-dimensional mass and temperature profiles inside a droplet with a finite volume method and treats the liquid phase as thermodynamically real, has been developed and implemented into a large-eddy simulation (LES) code for evaporating and reacting spray simulations. Single drop evaporation results obtained by the variable property multicomponent model are shown to match with the constant property model in the limiting conditions. The LES code with the multicomponent model is used along with the Kelvin-Helmholtz - Rayleigh-Taylor (KH-RT) droplet breakup model to simulate realistic fuel sprays in a closed vessel and is found to reasonably well predict the experimentally observed non-linear behavior of spray penetration lengths with changing ambient conditions for n-hexadecane and 4 different multicomponent surrogate diesel fuels with 2-8 components. The effects of various modeling assumptions and gas and liquid parameters on the drop and spray evolution and evaporation are investigated in details.A previously studied single piston Rapid Compression Machine (RCM), extended to a twin-piston RCM, is simulated by LES for different stroke ratios of the two pistons, as a precursor to the study of opposed piston two-stroke engines. Opposed piston engines, which have recently generated interest due to their high power density and fuel economy, are mechanically simpler compared to conventional four-stroke engines but involve highly unsteady, turbulent and cycle-variant flows. LES of turbulent spray combustion in a generic single cylinder, opposed-piston, two-stroke engine configuration has been conducted with the two-phase filtered mass density function (FMDF) model, which is an Eulerian-Lagrangian-Lagrangian subgrid-scale probability density function (PDF) model for LES of two-phase turbulent reacting flows. The effects of various geometric parameters, operating conditions and spray parameters on the flow evolution, turbulence, spray and combustion in the engine are studied. The cycle-to-cycle variations in the flow variables like swirl and tumble are found to be significant while those in thermodynamic variables like temperature are negligible. The hybrid LES/FMDF methodology has been applied to simulate non-reacting turbulent spray for single-component and multi-component fuels and the consistency of the method has been established. The effects of spray parameters like nozzle hole diameter, injection pressure and injected fuel temperature on the spray penetration length are found to qualitatively follow experimental trends. Combustion simulations of n-dodecane fuel sprays are carried out for the opposed piston engine with a global kinetics mechanism and the consistency of the LES and FMDF components is demonstrated.
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Title: Modular modeling of engineering systems using fixed input-output structure
Creator: Byam, Brooks Philip
Date: 1999
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: The evolutionary potential of populations on complex fitness landscapes
Creator: Bryson, David Michael
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Evolution is a highly contingent process, where the quality of the solutions produced is affected by many factors. I explore and describe the contributions of three such aspects that influence overall evolutionary potential: the prior history of a population, the type and frequency of mutations that the organisms are subject to, and the composition of the underlying genetic hardware. I have systematically tested changes to a digital evolution system, Avida, measuring evolutionary potential in...
Show moreEvolution is a highly contingent process, where the quality of the solutions produced is affected by many factors. I explore and describe the contributions of three such aspects that influence overall evolutionary potential: the prior history of a population, the type and frequency of mutations that the organisms are subject to, and the composition of the underlying genetic hardware. I have systematically tested changes to a digital evolution system, Avida, measuring evolutionary potential in seven different computational environments ranging in complexity of the underlying fitness landscapes. I have examined trends and general principles that these measurements demonstrate and used my results to optimize the evolutionary potential of the system, broadly enhancing performance. The results of this work show that history and mutation rate play significant roles in evolutionary potential, but the final fitness levels of populations are remarkably stable to substantial changes in the genetic hardware and a broad range of mutation types.
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Title: IFLMAPS : an interactive farm level marketing and production simulator intended for research, teaching and extension applications
Creator: Rister, M. Edward (Milton Edward)
Date: 1981
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Experiments and model development of a dual mode, turbulent jet ignition engine
Creator: Tolou, Sedigheh
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "The number of vehicles powered by a source of energy other than traditional petroleum fuels will increase as time passes. However, based on current predictions, vehicles run on liquid fuels will be the major source of transportation for decades to come. Advanced combustion technologies can improve fuel economy of internal combustion (IC) engines and reduce exhaust emissions. The Dual Mode, Turbulent Jet Ignition (DM-TJI) system is an advanced, distributed combustion technology which can...
Show more"The number of vehicles powered by a source of energy other than traditional petroleum fuels will increase as time passes. However, based on current predictions, vehicles run on liquid fuels will be the major source of transportation for decades to come. Advanced combustion technologies can improve fuel economy of internal combustion (IC) engines and reduce exhaust emissions. The Dual Mode, Turbulent Jet Ignition (DM-TJI) system is an advanced, distributed combustion technology which can achieve high diesel-like thermal efficiencies at medium to high loads and potentially exceed diesel efficiencies at low-load operating conditions. The DM-TJI strategy extends the mixture flammability limits by igniting lean and/or highly dilute mixtures, leading to low-temperature combustion (LTC) modes in spark ignition (SI) engines. A novel, reduced order, and physics-based model was developed to predict the behavior of a DM-TJI engine with a pre-chamber air valve assembly. The engine model developed was calibrated based on experimental data from a Prototype II DM-TJI engine. This engine was designed, built, and tested at the MSU Energy and Automotive Research Laboratory (EARL). A predictive, generalized model was introduced to obtain a complete engine fuel map for the DM-TJI engine. The engine fuel map was generated in a four-cylinder boosted configuration under highly dilute conditions, up to 40% external exhaust gas recirculation (EGR). A vehicle simulation was then performed to further explore fuel economy gains using the fuel map generated for the DM-TJI engine. The DM-TJI engine was embodied in an industry-based vehicle to examine the behavior of the engine over the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) driving schedules. The results obtained from the drive cycle analysis of the DM-TJI engine in an industry-based vehicle were compared to the results of the same vehicle with its original engine. The vehicle equipped with the DM-TJI system was observed to benefit from 103033% improvement in fuel economy and 103031% reduction in CO2 emission over the EPA combined city/high driving schedules. Potential improvements were discussed, as these results of the drive cycle analysis are the first-ever reported results for a DM-TJI engine embodied in an industry-based vehicle. The resulting fuel economy and CO2 emission were used to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of a DM-TJI engine. The cost-benefit analysis followed the economic and key inputs used by the U.S. EPA in a Proposed Determination prepared by that agency. The outcomes of the cost-benefit analysis for the vehicle equipped with the DM-TJI system were reported in comparison with the same vehicle with its base engine. The extra costs of a DM-TJI engine were observed to be compensated over the first three years of the vehicle's life time. The results projected maximum savings of approximately 2400 in 2019 dollars. This includes the lifetime-discounted present value of the net benefits of the DM-TJI technology, compared to the base engine examined. In this dollar saving estimate, the societal effects of CO2 emission were calculated based on values by the interagency working group (IWG) at 3% discount rate."--Pages ii-iii.
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Title: Improving the representation of irrigation and groundwater in global land surface models to advance the understanding of hydrology-human-climate interactions
Creator: Felfelani, Farshid
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Hydrological models and satellite observations have been widely used to study the variations in the Earth's hydrology and climate over multitude of scales, especially in relation to natural and human-induced changes in the terrestrial water cycle. Yet, both satellite products and model results suffer from inherent uncertainties, calling for the need to improve the representation of critical processes in the models and to make a combined use of satellite data and models to examine the...
Show moreHydrological models and satellite observations have been widely used to study the variations in the Earth's hydrology and climate over multitude of scales, especially in relation to natural and human-induced changes in the terrestrial water cycle. Yet, both satellite products and model results suffer from inherent uncertainties, calling for the need to improve the representation of critical processes in the models and to make a combined use of satellite data and models to examine the variations in the terrestrial hydrology. The representation of irrigation and groundwater-two major hydrologic processes with complex reciprocal interplay-in large-scale hydrological models is rather poorly parameterized and heavily simplified, hindering our ability to realistically simulate groundwater-human-climate interactions. This dissertation advances the physical basis for irrigation and groundwater parameterizations in global land surface models, leveraging the potential of emerging satellite data (i.e., data from GRACE and SMAP satellite missions) toward a more realistic quantification of the impacts of human activities on the hydrological cycle. A comprehensive global analysis is developed to examine the historical spatial patterns and long-term temporal response, i.e., the terrestrial water storage (TWS), of two models to natural and human-induced drivers. Human-induced changes in TWS are then quantified in the highly managed global regions to identify the uncertainties arising from a simplistic representation of irrigation and groundwater. The potential of improving irrigation representation in the Community Land Model version 4.5 (CLM4.5) is then investigated by assimilating the soil moisture data from SMAP satellite mission using 1-D Kalman Filter assimilation approach. The new irrigation scheme is then tested over the heavily irrigated central U.S. Next, the existing groundwater module of CLM5 is broadly evaluated over conterminous U.S. and a new prognostic groundwater module is implemented in CLM5 to account for lateral groundwater flow, pumping, and conjunctive water use for irrigation. In particular, an explicit parameterization for the steady-state well equation is introduced for the first time in large-scale hydrological modeling. Finally, the impacts of climate change on global TWS variabilities and the implications on sea level change are examined for the entire 21st century using multi-model hydrological simulations. The key findings and conclusions from the aforementioned multi-scale analysis and model developments are: (1) in terms of TWS, notable differences exist not only between simulations of hydrological models and GRACE but also among different GRACE products, therefore, TWS variations from a single model cannot be reliably used for global analyses; (2) these differences significantly increase in projections of TWS under climate change, however, models agree in sign of change for most global areas; (3) TWS is expected to decline in many regions in southern hemisphere, but increase in northern high latitudes, projected to accelerate sea level rise by the mid- and late-21st century; (4) constraining the target soil moisture in CLM4.5 using SMAP data assimilation with 1-D Kalman Filter reduces the bias in the simulated irrigation water by up to 60% on average, improving irrigation and soil moisture simulations in CLM4.5; (5) the new groundwater model significantly improves the simulation of groundwater level change and promisingly captures most of the hotspots of groundwater depletion across the U.S. overexploited aquifers; and (6) the simulation with the lateral groundwater flow substantially enhances the TWS trends relative to the default CLM5. These results and findings could provide a basis for improved large-scale irrigation and groundwater modeling and improve our understanding of hydrology-human-climate interactions.
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Title: Regional climate response to land use and land cover change in contiguous United States
Creator: Nikolić, Jovanka
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Future land use and land cover (LULC) pattern in the Contiguous United States (CONUS) is expected to be significantly different from that of the present, and as an important surface forcing for earth's climate system, the potential changes in LULC will contribute to climate change at all scales (local, regional to global). While numerous studies have examined how the earth's climate will respond to the anthropogenic increase of greenhouse gas concentrations in the earth's atmosphere, this...
Show moreFuture land use and land cover (LULC) pattern in the Contiguous United States (CONUS) is expected to be significantly different from that of the present, and as an important surface forcing for earth's climate system, the potential changes in LULC will contribute to climate change at all scales (local, regional to global). While numerous studies have examined how the earth's climate will respond to the anthropogenic increase of greenhouse gas concentrations in the earth's atmosphere, this research aims to quantify the response of several climate variables to the expected LULC change in the CONUS using simulations from a regional climate model. The research is composed of three individual studies. The first study assesses the sensitivity of simulated low-level jet (LLJ) characteristics on changes in LULC pattern. As a prominent weather and climate process responsible for transport of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico northward into central CONUS, LLJ plays an important role in the hydrological cycle and wind energy generation over the Great Plains. Therefore, it is important to quantify the potential changes in jet characteristics, such as jet speed, height and frequency, under the influence of LULC change. The second study investigates the impact of LULC change on frost indices - the dates of last spring frost and first fall frost and the length of frost free seasons. Frost is one of the major factors affecting the growth and development of plants and crop production. Future changes in LULC could make some regions more beneficial, while others more harmful to agricultural practice. Finally, the third study examines the potential impact of the changes in LULC pattern on future wind energy resources. As a zero carbon energy resource, wind energy helps limit greenhouse gasses emissions and mitigate climate change. Knowledge gained on where in the CONUS wind power class would likely to change from unsuitable or marginal to suitable, and vice versa, as a result of LULC change can be useful for future wind farm sitting and for making better informed energy policies.
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Title: Computer simulations of high-energy heavy ion collisions
Creator: Kortemeyer, Gerd
Date: 1997
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

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