Several technical and economic obstacles currently hamper the industrial development of ethanol from biomass. One of the key bottlenecks is the slow kinetics of the enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose, and the subsequent rate reduction as the...
Cancer accounts for nearly one-quarter of deaths in the United States, exceeded only by heart diseases. Despite the development of various strategies to treat cancer, it remains one of the most deadly diseases worldwide due to the limited effects...
Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is an electrokinetic force capable of attracting or repelling neutrally charged particles due to a non-uniform electric field [1, 2]. Positive dielectrophoresis attracts particles in the region of the highest electric field...
Nosocomial infections; Catheterization--Complications; Drug resistance in microorganisms
Catheters represent an essential part of the management of critically and chronically ill patients. However, their use is often plagued by catheter related blood stream infections (CRBSIs), which are associated with increased morbidity, hospital...
The thesis focuses on improving the flowrate of the Knudsen gas pump. The Knudsen pump uses thermal transpiration as the driving mechanism to pump gas. It is a motionless gas pump as the pump does not require any moving actuators for pumping. The...
This thesis is based on experimental work on electrochemically mediated charge transfer effects on Single-walled carbon nanotube bundles. The study of these effects are very important towards understanding the sensitivity of gases on nanostructures...
Rising environmental concerns due to our rising population ad energy demand along with our excessive dependence on fossil fuels has created an urgent need to find clean, renewable and carbon free source of energy. Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water...
Understanding of the band structure of the new nano materials is essential to have a deeper insight into their optical and electrical properties. Along with the existing techniques used for characterization of nano-materials, it is also important...
Parents of children with disabilities; Grief; People with mental disabilities--Family relationships
This dissertation is an investigation into the intensity, nature, predictors, and time
course of grief that parents of adult children with a severe mental illness experience. This
is an area of research that has not been fully understood or...
Various vision tasks are usually confronted by appearance variations due to changes of illumination. For instance, in a recognition system, it has been shown that the variability in human face appearance is owed to changes to lighting conditions...
III-nitrides (InN, GaN, AlN) are some of the most promising materials for making blue light emitting diodes (LED), blue laser diodes (LD) and high power, high temperature field effect transistors (FET). Current techniques produce GaN films with...
Brief Overview of the Problem: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a government funded agency, provides both legislative and judicial powers for emissions monitoring in the United States. The agency crafts laws based on self-made regulations...
Hematite synthesized by low pressure oxygen plasma has been shown previously to exhibit promising characteristics as a photo-anode for a photoelectrochemical water splitting cell. It is cheap, stable and has a 2.1 eV bandgap and exhibits a...
Age-related macular degeneration (ARMD) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP) are the two leading causes of blindness in the world today. Despite enormous efforts and advances in clinical treatment of eye diseases, there is no established method or cure of...
The use of monochloramines in the potable water supply industry has been selected as the disinfectant method of choice due to a longer term of effectiveness and less toxic by-products than the previous choice of chlorine. In spite of the benefits...
In the electronic and microfabrication industry, die separation is one of the most critical steps in producing an undamaged, stand-alone micro-scale device. For silicon based devices, it is the predominant step governing resistance to die failure...
This dissertation describes (1) size-dependent electrochemical oxidation/stripping of gold and silver nanoparticles (NPs), (2) alloying of copper with gold nanoparticles at underpotential deposition potentials, (3) electrochemical characterization...
School employees--discipline; Labor laws and legislation--United States; Privacy, Right of--United States; Labor discipline--United States
The right to discipline a P-12 public school employee for off-duty conduct remains unclear. Historically, society has held teachers up to a higher standard of conduct than persons in most other professions. The researcher traced the...
Knee--Mechanical properties; Knee--Pathophysiology; Gait in humans; Osteoarthritis
Osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee is associated with decline in functional capacity and ultimately leads to Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA) in many of these patients. Exercise regimens prior to surgery may potentially enhance pre and post TKA...
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...
