190,541 research outputs found
Development of a bridge fault extractor tool
No full textBridge fault extractors are tools that analyze chip layouts and produce a realistic list of
bridging faults within that chip. FedEx, previously developed at Texas A&M University,
extracts all two-node intralayer bridges of any given chip layout and optionally extracts
all two-node interlayer bridges. The goal of this thesis was to further develop this tool.
The primary goal was to speed it up so that it can handle large industrial designs in a
reasonable amount of time. A second goal was to develop a graphical user interface
(GUI) for this tool which aids in more effectively visualizing the bridge faults across the
chip. The final aim of this thesis was to perform FedEx output analysis to understand the
nature of the defects, such as variation of critical area (the area where the presence of a
defect can cause a fault) as a function of layer as well as defect size
Not Available
No full textNot AvailableDiseases caused by viruses cause heavy crop losses worldwide including India.
Correct diagnosis of viruses is the primary requirement for disease management.
Of the different methods available for diagnosis, serological methods are useful
in the detection of viruses in seeds, plants and insect vectors. The production of
virus specific antiserum is the basis for a successful serological method. The
earliest serological methods such as precipitin tests are low in sensitivity. With
the advent of enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and its subsequent
application to plant virus detection during 1980s, some laboratories in India also
started working on the same. During 1990s, ELISA and its variants became more
popular in many laboratories of India working on plant viruses. During the same
period Indian researchers also used other serological methods such as dot immunobinding
assay (DIBA), immunosorbent electron microscopy (ISEM), electro-blot
immunoassay (EBIA) and florescent antibody technique in the detection of
plant viruses. Immunocapture PCR (IC-PCR) which combines both serology and
PCR has also been used by many Indian researchers in the identification and
characterization of viruses infecting different crops. Lateral flow immunoassay
technology is the recent technique that offers several advantages over traditional
immunoassays, such as procedural simplicity, limited requirement for special
skills or expensive equipment, and rapid results is also gaining importance in the
country. During the last decade, recombinant antibody (rAb) engineering has
emerged as one of the promising approaches in plant virus diagnosis. rAb fragments
in all various formats (Fab, Fv and scFv) can be expressed in different systems including bacteria, insect, yeast, plant and mammalian cells, which can
be used efficiently in various format of ELISA for diagnosis of plant viruses.
India also started a modest beginning in this area now.Not Availabl
Simulation of thermal plant optimization and hydraulic aspects of thermal distribution loops for large campuses
No full textFollowing an introduction, the author describes Texas A&M University and its utilities system. After that, the author presents how to construct simulation models for chilled water and heating hot water distribution systems. The simulation model was used in a $2.3 million Ross Street chilled water pipe replacement project at Texas A&M University. A second project conducted at the University of Texas at San Antonio was used as an example to demonstrate how to identify and design an optimal distribution system by using a simulation model. The author found that the minor losses of these closed loop thermal distribution systems are significantly higher than potable water distribution systems. In the second part of the report, the author presents the latest development of software called the Plant Optimization Program, which can simulate cogeneration plant operation, estimate its operation cost and provide optimized operation suggestions. The author also developed detailed simulation models for a gas turbine and heat recovery steam generator and identified significant potential savings. Finally, the author also used a steam turbine as an example to present a multi-regression method on constructing simulation models by using basic statistics and optimization algorithms. This report presents a survey of the author??s working experience at the Energy Systems Laboratory (ESL) at Texas A&M University during the period of January 2002 through March 2004. The purpose of the above work was to allow the author to become familiar with the practice of engineering. The result is that the author knows how to complete a project from start to finish and understands how both technical and nontechnical aspects of a project need to be considered in order to ensure a quality deliverable and bring a project to successful completion. This report concludes that the objectives of the internship were successfully accomplished and that the requirements for the degree of Degree of Engineering have been satisfied
A new approach to the detail design phase of the IIDE Design Process through insights from software design
No full textDue to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-95).Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.The Engineering Design Process has been described in different ways by means of different approaches. Attempts to compare the Design Process in mechanical engineering with design in other fields have been made. This thesis compares the IIDE (Institute for Innovation and Design in Engineering, Texas A&M University) Design Process with Software Design Processes. A new approach to the IIDE Detail Design Process is proposed based on some insights from an examination of the Software Design Process. The new approach incorporates a logical division of activities in the Detail Design Phase. This helps in efficient execution of Detail Design. This approach views the Detail Design Phase as consisting of the following sub-categories: Data Design, Configurational Design and Procedural Design. Data Design deals with management of information content in the design. Configurational Design enables effective representation and communication of the design. Procedural Design elaborates on the procedural aspects of the design. This thesis also proposes a set of checkpoints to be used to confirm that the necessary attention has been paid to the various phases within the Detail Design Phase. Two design projects, one on "SMART Parking System" and the other on "Design of a Flexible Wire-line Tool Joint" are presented as case studies to demonstrate the application of the new approach that is proposed
Intern experience at CH���M Hill, Inc.: an internship report
No full textIncludes author's vita"Submitted to the College of Engineering of Texas A&M University in partial
fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Engineering."Includes bibliographical referencesA review of the author's internship experience with CH���M HILL, Inc.
during the period September 1975 through May 1976 is presented. During this nine month
internship the author worked as an Engineer II in the Industrial Processes discipline of this
large consulting engineering firm... The author's prime responsibility was as one of three
lead design engineers on the design of a large wastewater treatment facility for a pulp mill
in Hoquiam, Washington owned by ITT Rayonier Inc. The work generally consisted of the design
of individual treatment units and associated piping and pumping. The purpose of the project
was to provide wastewater treatment capabilities that would satisfy the effluent limitations
(standards) imposed upon the mill by the State of Washington Department of Ecology and the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The author's assignment also entailed necessary
interaction with the project manager and other CH���M HILL design engineers and support staff
members, the client's representatives, and representatives of two other consulting engineering
firms working on the project. Thus, the internship position at CH���M HILL provided considerable
experience coordinating the author's work with the work of other engineers, guiding the design
and administrative efforts of a support staff, and interacting regularly with the client and
other consulting firms. This broad exposure to a variety of engineering and organizational
problems provided a valuable educational experience
Modelling individual preferences, State of the art, recent advances and future directions.
No full textDespite the above famous statement, individuals have always disputed about individual tastes, and the decision making processes behind consumers’ choices has been a focal interest for decades. Although challenges against the theory of rational behaviour date back to the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944), the dominating approach (at least in the transport field) has been the neoclassical economics assumption of rational decision makers (or even more extreme homo economicus), who always perform well planned and consistent activities, aiming to maximize some subjective measure of value (McFadden, 1999). The reason for this dominance is that economic theory has provided an elegant, rigorous and at the same time relatively easy to implement model, designed to describe individuals’ decisions and to provide quantitative forecasts with well-defined statistical properties. On the other hand, although investigations in psychology have made an impression on economic thought1 , they have tended to generate lists of errors and biases and have mostly failed (with excellent exceptions) to offer a coherent alternative to the rational-agent model (Kahneman, 2003). Psychologists recognise that this complaint is justified, at least partly, because intuitive thought cannot match the elegance and power of formal normative models. However, as Kahneman (2003) points out … “the alternative to simple and precise models is not chaos; psychology offers integrative concepts and mid-level generalizations, which gain credibility from their ability to explain ostensibly different phenomena in diverse domains”. The origin of this divergence relies on the historically different views of the decision-making process between neoclassical economics and psychology. While economists have been interested in mapping from information inputs to choice, treating the decision process as a black box, psychologists’ prime objective has been to understand what happens inside that black box: the nature of these decision elements, how they are established and modified by experience, and how they determine values. McFadden (1999) notes that what has made the distance between the two approaches even bigger is that psychologists view the decision process as dynamic and individual behaviour as local, adaptive, learned, dependent on context, mutable and influenced by complex interactions of perceptions, motives and attitudes. On the other hand, in the economic tradition preferences are primitive, consistent, and immutable (preference rationality), consumers behave as if they possess the formal tools with which to calculate the optimum adequately (perception-rationality), and the cognitive process is simply preference maximization, given market constraints (process-rationality). The models that we (transport researchers) currently use to describe how people choose among a discrete set of alternatives are based on these assumptions of rationality in preference, perception and process. McFadden’s work (1978; 1981) on Generalised Extreme Value (GEV) formulation, which generalised the work of Williams (1977), provides a rigorous foundation for consumer choice modelling derived from economic theory. Although the original formulation of the random utility maximisation (RUM) as a behavioural model followed the economists’ theory of consumer behaviour, it also included “features of the taste template that were heterogeneous across individuals and unknown to the analyst, as well as unobserved aspects of experience and of information on the attributes of alternatives, interpreted as random factors” (McFadden, 2000). This led to the paradigm for generating discrete-choice models (DCM), commonly reported in textbooks (Ben-Akiva and Lerman, 1985; Ortúzar and Willumsen, 2011; Train, 2009), that the random part of the individual utility reflects the modellers’ lack of complete information about all the elements considered by the individual making a choice, which might also include unobserved deviations of individual behaviour from perfect rationality. This paradigm posed the bases for the most important stream of research of the last 30 years. Since McFadden’s work, in fact, research activity in this field has been very proactive. Major progress has been made in exploring the potentiality of DCM to improve the ability to effectively reproduce individual behaviour. In particular, this paper draws attention to two streams of research motivated by this work. The first refers to the microeconomic justification of DCM and, in particular, of the utility individuals associate to each discrete alternative. The second stream, and maybe the most productive one, has been concerned with the characterization of the error terms, and in particular the exploitation of the mixed multinomial logit (MMNL) model. Research in both streams has aimed to improve the representation of the true phenomenon. However, the goal has always been that the measurable part of utility should be able to explain (as much as possible) the true behaviour in order to reduce the explanatory power left in the error term. This is correct except that, under the neo-classical theory, the systematic measurable utility was associated only with “rational” behaviour and what deviated from it was classified as error and hence minimised. Unfortunately, major improvements in model fit obtained with complex decompositions of the error term have given a strong signal that there are inherent limitations in the capability of microeconomic theory to explain individual choices and that we are still far from having a satisfactory representation (through known variables) of the real phenomenon. In fact, although RUM “takes a nod towards psychological theory” (Batley and Daly, 2006), the error term cannot be considered to properly explain behaviour that departs from perfect rationality. This is because errors are parameterized in terms of statistical distributions and the psychological concept of irrationality (i.e., not rational in the sense of neoclassical economic theory) is associated to the concept of randomness. As suggested by Ariely (2008), apparent irrationality can indeed be explained and predicted. Illustrious scholars (McFadden, 2000; Ben-Akiva, et al, 2002a) have strongly asserted the need to explore more seriously the suggestions provided by the psychological literature. After a shy start, the last decade has seen a surprising increase in the amount of work in this area (see for example Walker, 2001; Gärling and Axhausen, 2003; Bonsall, et al, 2007). Most of it has concentrated on demonstrating empirically that integrating psychology theory into the economic framework results in tangible improvement in terms of model fit, and interestingly most of it has been based on the MMNL structure. This is a key point, because the last years have also witnessed an increased awareness of the inherent limitations of the MMNL in terms of both estimation and especially prediction. In fact, notwithstanding the clear ability of this model to represent an ample range of behaviours via error term decomposition, several problems implicit in its structure have led analysts to lose confidence in the model. It is interesting then to understand whether or not these new models, which go beyond the rational postulate, still suffer from the above limitations or to what extent these are overcome. This paper presents a critical review of the research developments in the representation of the decision process, and it is structured into two parts. The first is dedicated to reviewing the limitations of the DCM and, in particular, of the MMNL model. Limits due to both the microeconomic theory of the rational user and the exploitation of the error terms will be critically discussed. The second part of the paper reviews research belonging to the non-rational theory. I concentrate on those advances that still rely heavily on the DCM with the aim to discuss to what extent we are really moving forward with respect to the above limitations of the classical MMNL model. Although focusing on research produced in the transport field, the paper provides and relies on several references from the literature in psychology and behavioural economics. Placing an accent on the limitations of current theory is not dictated by a pessimist view. On the contrary, it is intended as a proactive approach; these limitations constitute the starting point for and, above all, should stimulate new research. Another important consideration is that excellent reviews of both microeconomic theory (see McFadden, 2000; Bates, 2007; Jara-Díaz, 2007) and discrete choice models (see Ben-Akiva, et al, 2002b; Ortúzar, 2006; Bhat, 2007) already exist, while a review of their limitations seems yet to be undertaken; at least this is what emerges from research conducted over the last few years. The paper concludes by discussing some open questions raised by the research conducted so far and giving some final thoughts about the amazing challenge unfolding before us over the next years.<br/
Modeling and precision control of ionic polymer metal composite
No full textThis thesis describes the open-loop behavior of an ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) strip as a novel actuator, the empirical force and position models, the control system and the improved dynamic characteristics with the feedback control implemented. Ionic polymer metal composite is a novel polymer in the class of electroactive polymers. IPMC consists of a base polymer coated with electrodes made up of highly conducting pure metals such as gold. The actuation behavior of IPMC can be attributed to the bending of an IPMC strip upon application of voltage across its thickness. The main reasons for the bending are ion migration on the application of voltage and swelling and contraction caused by water content. An experimental setup to study the open-loop force and tip displacement of an IPMC strip in a cantilever configuration was developed, and real time controllers were implemented. In open loop, the force response of the IPMC strip of dimensions 25 mm x 3.9 mm x 0.16 mm to a 1.2-V step input is studied. The open-loop rise time was 0.08 s and the percent overshoot was 131.62 %, while the settling time was about 10 s. Based on this open-loop step response using a least-square curve-fitting methodology, a fourth-order empirical transfer function from the voltage input to the force output was derived. The tip displacement response of an IPMC strip of dimensions 23 mm x 3.96 mm x 0.16 mm to a 1.2-V step input was also studied. The step response exhibited a 205.34 % overshoot with a rise time of 0.08 s, and the settling time was 27 s. A fourth-order empirical transfer function from the step input to the tip displacement as output was also derived. Based on the derived transfer functions lead-lag feedback controllers were designed for precision control of both force and displacement. The control objectives were to decrease the settling time and the percent overshoot, and achieve reference input tracking. After implementing the controllers, the percent overshoot decreased to 30% while the settling time was reduced to 1.5 s in case of force control. With position control, the settling time was reduced to 1 s while the percent overshoot decreased to 20%. Precision micro-scale force and position-control capabilities of the IPMC were also demonstrated. A 4 ?N force resolution was achieved, with a force noise of 0.904-?N rms. The position resolution was 20 ?m with a position noise of 7.6-?m rms
Intern experience at the Texas Transportation Institute: an internship report
No full text"Submitted to the College of Engineering of Texas A&M University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Engineering."Includes vita (leaf 91)Includes bibliographical references (leaf 57)This report discusses the author's engineering experience at the Texas
Transportation Institute (TTI), Texas A&M University from March 1974 through July 1977. A
report of this experience plus twelve additional hours of academic course work were
substituted for an internship according to requirements established by the College of
Engineering. Although the author could not retroactively establish objectives of the type
associated with a typical internship, the work experience gained could be related to the two
general objectives of an intership: 1. To demonstrate an identifiable contribution to the
organization in which the intern served, and 2. To enable the intern to become aware of the
non-technical aspects of working as an engineer in a non-academic environment. While a member
of the Texas Transportation Institute staff, the author worked on a number of projects in the
areas of highway traffic engineering research and the preparation of continuing education
courses for transportation engineering officials. These assignments were contained within the
Urban Transportation Systems Division of TTI. This report delineates the author's contribution
to four particular projects and discusses the technical as well as non-technical experience
gained from each. Having been exposed to more engineering situations than many of the other
Doctor of Engineering students, the author has already formulated some rather specific
milestones for the future. The Doctor of Engineering program is discussed in conjunction with
its potential for helping the author attain these career goals and objectives. Also, some
thoughts are presented regarding the Doctor of Engineering as a viable alternative to the
Ph.D. in preparing for a career in engineering higher education
Fabrication of nanoadjuvant with poly-ɛ-caprolactone (PCL) for developing a single-shot vaccine providing prolonged immunity [Corrigendum]
No full textPrashant CK, Bhat M, Srivastava SK, et al. Int J Nanomedicine. 2014;9:937–950.On page 937, the author affiliations have been listed incorrectly. The correct author list is as follows:Chandravilas Keshvan Prashant1Madhusudan Bhat2Sandeep Kumar Srivastava2Ankit Saxena3Manoj Kumar4Amar Singh3Mohammed Samim5Farhan Jalees Ahmad6Amit Kumar Dinda21Faculty of Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, India; 2Department of Pathology, 3Department of Transplant Immunology and Immunogenetics, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India; 4Centre for Biomedical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India; 5Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, India; 6Department of Pharmaceutics, Faculty of Pharmacy, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, IndiaRead the original articl
Haemaphysalis davisi Hoogstraal, Dhanda and Bhat 1970
No full text41. Haemaphysalis davisi Hoogstraal, Dhanda and Bhat, 1970b. An Oriental species whose adults and nymphs have been found on Artiodactyla: Bovidae and Cervidae, and Perissodactyla: Equidae; adults alone have been collected from Carnivora: Felidae and Mustelidae. There are no records of Haemaphysalis davisi causing human parasitism. M: Hoogstraal et al. (1970b) F: Hoogstraal et al. (1970b) N: Hoogstraal et al. (1970b) L: unknown Redescriptions M: Geevarghese and Mishra (2011) F: Geevarghese and Mishra (2011) N: Geevarghese and Mishra (2011) Note: Hoogstraal et al. (1970b) state that Haemaphysalis neumanni, a synonym of Haemaphysalis longicornis in Dhanda and Rao (1964), is in fact Haemaphysalis davisi.Published as part of Guglielmone, Alberto A., Petney, Trevor N. & Robbins, Richard G., 2020, Ixodidae (Acari: Ixodoidea): descriptions and redescriptions of all known species from 1758 to December 31, 2019, pp. 1-322 in Zootaxa 4871 (1) on page 160, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.4871.1.1, http://zenodo.org/record/442334
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