Computational grids are some of the largest computer systems in existence today. Unfortunately they are also, in many cases, the least reliable. This research examines the use of redundancy with permutation as a method of improving reliability in...
Preventive maintenance is a broad term that encompasses a set of activities aimed at improving the overall reliability and availability of a system. Preventive maintenance involves a basic trade-off between the costs of conducting...
High-throughput sequencing has provided a myriad of genetic data for thousands of organisms. Computational analysis of one data type, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) yields insight into gene expression, alternative splicing, tissue specificity gene...
This work presents a novel comprehensive effort to understand the fluid dynamics within orbiting dishes and the effects of the resulting oscillating fluid flow on shear and endothelial cellular responses within the dishes. It is well documented...
Previous experimental studies on static, bio-inspired corrugated wings have shown that they produce favorable aerodynamic properties such as delayed stall compared to streamlined wings and flat plates at high Reynolds numbers (Re ≥ 4x104). The...
Vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) are devices to convert wind energy into electricity. Unlike horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWT) where the main rotor shaft is set horizontally, VAWTs use vertical rotor shaft. Unlike HAWTs, VAWTs can be...
The vast knowledge of nucleic acids is evolving and it is now known that DNA can adopt highly complex, heterogeneous structures. Among the most intriguing are the G-quadruplex structures, which are thought to play a pivotal role in cancer...
Aortic Valve Bypass surgery has found renewed interest to researchers due to its application in high-risk patients with severe aortic stenosis. This therapy consists of construction of a conduit containing a bioprosthetic or mechanical valve from...
The focus of this dissertation work is the formulation and improvement of anemia management process involving trial-and-error. A two-stage method is adopted toward this objective. Given a medical treatment process, a discrete Markov representation...
Orbital shakers are commonly used in the cell culture industry due to their ease of use, but the fluid dynamics of this system have not been extensively modeled as the system is difficult to quantify analytically. It is desirable to understand how...
Mishaps in prenatal development can influence mammary gland development
and, ultimately, affect susceptibility to factors that cause breast cancer. This research was
based on the underlying hypothesis that maternal dietary composition during...
A connected matching in a graph is a set of disjoint edges such that, for any pair of these edges, there is another edge of the graph incident to both of them. This dissertation investigates two problems related to finding large connected matchings...
Wind power has the potential to provide access to electricity to areas lacking the resources to create industrial power plants, as well as supplement residential energy supplies. The low resource investment and ease of installation make it ideal...
This thesis looks at the optimization of fluid flow and mass transfer using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in a micro fluidic coulter counter. CFD will be used to solve equations of fluid flow and mass transfer to see how molecules within the...
Human arylamine N-acetyltransferase (NAT) is a phase II cytosolic enzyme that occurs as two isozymes, NAT1 and NAT2. This family of polymorphic enzymes catalyzes the detoxification and/or activation of many aromatic and heterocyclic amine drugs and...
Business logistics; Production management; Manufacturing processes; Industrial efficiency
In today's competitive business environment, companies face enormous pressure and must continuously search for ways to design new products, manufacture and distribute them in an efficient and effective fashion. After years of focusing on reduction...
Symmetric piezoresistive microcantilever beams have been demonstrated in previous research to be capable of sensing the presence of surrounding gas. This occurs as the damping effect of the gas changes the beam resonance behavior. Device...
High solids processing of biomass slurries provides the following benefits: maximized product concentration in the fermentable sugar stream, reduced water usage, and reduced reactor size. However, high solids processing poses mixing and heat...
Wind energy provides an attractive power source as an alternative to fossil fuels because it is abundant, clean, and produces no harmful emissions. To extract more energy from the wind we need to increase the wind turbine size. However, the...
Current wind power technology is not economically feasible throughout most of the United States due to low average wind speeds. A design for a small-scale wind concentrator device suitable for use in areas of low wind velocity was tested using...