Estimation of the degree of polarization through computational sensing

The degree of polarization of a refected field from active laser illumination can be used for object identifcation and classifcation. The goal of this study is to investigate methods for estimating the degree of polarization for refected fields with active laser illumination, which involves the measurement and processing of two orthogonal field components (complex amplitudes), two orthogonal intensity components, and the total field intensity. We propose to replace interferometric optical apparatuses with a computational approach for estimating the degree of polarization from two orthogonal intensity data and total intensity data. Cramer-Rao bounds for each of the three sensing modalities with various noise models are computed. Algebraic estimators and maximum-likelihood (ML) estimators are proposed. Active-set algorithm and expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm are used to compute ML estimates. The performances of the estimators are compared with each other and with their corresponding Cramer-Rao bounds. Estimators for four-channel polarimeter (intensity interferometer) sensing have a better performance than orthogonal intensities estimators and total intensity estimators. Processing the four intensities data from polarimeter, however, requires complicated optical devices, alignment, and four CCD detectors. It only requires one or two detectors and a computer to process orthogonal intensities data and total intensity data, and the bounds and estimator performances demonstrate that reasonable estimates may still be obtained from orthogonal intensities or total intensity data. Computational sensing is a promising way to estimate the degree of polarization.

Computational prediction of the influence of crosslink distribution on the thermo-mechanical properties of epoxies

Experimental studies on epoxies report that the microstructure consists of highly crosslinked localized regions connected with a dispersed phase of low crosslink density. The various thermo-mechanical properties of epoxies might be affected by the crosslink distribution. But as experiments cannot report the exact number of crosslinked covalent bonds present in the structure, molecular dynamics is thus being used in this work to determine the influence of crosslink distribution on thermo-mechanical properties. Molecular dynamics and molecular mechanics simulations are used to establish wellequilibrated molecular models of EPON 862-DETDA epoxy system with a range of crosslink densities and various crosslink distributions. Crosslink distributions are being varied by forming differently crosslinked localized clusters and then by forming different number of crosslinks interconnecting the clusters. Simulations are subsequently used to predict the volume shrinkage, thermal expansion coefficients, and elastic properties of each of the crosslinked systems. The results indicate that elastic properties increase with increasing levels of overall crosslink density and the thermal expansion coefficient decreases with overall crosslink density, both above and below the glass transition temperature. Elastic moduli and coefficients of linear thermal expansion values were found to be different for systems with same overall crosslink density but having different crosslink distributions, thus indicating an effect of the epoxy nanostructure on physical properties. The values of thermo-mechanical properties for all the crosslinked systems are within the range of values reported in literature.

Development of one-dimensional and two-dimensional computational tools that simulate steady internal condensing flows in terrestrial and zero-gravity environments

This dissertation presents an effective quasi one-dimensional (1-D) computational simulation tool and a full two-dimensional (2-D) computational simulation methodology for steady annular/stratified internal condensing flows of pure vapor. These simulation tools are used to investigate internal condensing flows in both gravity as well as shear driven environments. Through accurate numerical simulations of the full two dimensional governing equations, results for laminar/laminar condensing flows inside mm-scale ducts are presented. The methodology has been developed using MATLAB/COMSOL platform and is currently capable of simulating film-wise condensation for steady (and unsteady flows). Moreover, a novel 1-D solution technique, capable of simulating condensing flows inside rectangular and circular ducts with different thermal boundary conditions is also presented. The results obtained from the 2-D scientific tool and 1-D engineering tool, are validated and synthesized with experimental results for gravity dominated flows inside vertical tube and inclined channel; and, also, for shear/pressure driven flows inside horizontal channels. Furthermore, these simulation tools are employed to demonstrate key differences of physics between gravity dominated and shear/pressure driven flows. A transition map that distinguishes shear driven, gravity driven, and “mixed” driven flow zones within the non-dimensional parameter space that govern these duct flows is presented along with the film thickness and heat transfer correlations that are valid in these zones. It has also been shown that internal condensing flows in a micro-meter scale duct experiences shear driven flow, even in different gravitational environments. The full 2-D steady computational tool has been employed to investigate the length of annularity. The result for a shear driven flow in a horizontal channel shows that in absence of any noise or pressure fluctuation at the inlet, the onset of non-annularity is partly due to insufficient shear at the liquid-vapor interface. This result is being further corroborated/investigated by R. R. Naik with the help of the unsteady simulation tool. The condensing flow results and flow physics understanding developed through these simulation tools will be instrumental in reliable design of modern micro-scale and spacebased thermal systems.

Integration of computational models and experimental characterization to study internal frost damage in cementitious materials

The objective of this doctoral research is to investigate the internal frost damage due to crystallization pore pressure in porous cement-based materials by developing computational and experimental characterization tools. As an essential component of the U.S. infrastructure system, the durability of concrete has significant impact on maintenance costs. In cold climates, freeze-thaw damage is a major issue affecting the durability of concrete. The deleterious effects of the freeze-thaw cycle depend on the microscale characteristics of concrete such as the pore sizes and the pore distribution, as well as the environmental conditions. Recent theories attribute internal frost damage of concrete is caused by crystallization pore pressure in the cold environment. The pore structures have significant impact on freeze-thaw durability of cement/concrete samples. The scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission X-ray microscopy (TXM) techniques were applied to characterize freeze-thaw damage within pore structure. In the microscale pore system, the crystallization pressures at sub-cooling temperatures were calculated using interface energy balance with thermodynamic analysis. The multi-phase Extended Finite Element Modeling (XFEM) and bilinear Cohesive Zone Modeling (CZM) were developed to simulate the internal frost damage of heterogeneous cement-based material samples. The fracture simulation with these two techniques were validated by comparing the predicted fracture behavior with the captured damage from compact tension (CT) and single-edge notched beam (SEB) bending tests. The study applied the developed computational tools to simulate the internal frost damage caused by ice crystallization with the two dimensional (2-D) SEM and three dimensional (3-D) reconstructed SEM and TXM digital samples. The pore pressure calculated from thermodynamic analysis was input for model simulation. The 2-D and 3-D bilinear CZM predicted the crack initiation and propagation within cement paste microstructure. The favorably predicted crack paths in concrete/cement samples indicate the developed bilinear CZM techniques have the ability to capture crack nucleation and propagation in cement-based material samples with multiphase and associated interface. By comparing the computational prediction with the actual damaged samples, it also indicates that the ice crystallization pressure is the main mechanism for the internal frost damage in cementitious materials.

Computational study of internal and external condensing flows and experimental synthesis to investigate their attainability and stability in ground-based and space-based environments

This doctoral thesis presents the computational work and synthesis with experiments for internal (tube and channel geometries) as well as external (flow of a pure vapor over a horizontal plate) condensing flows. The computational work obtains accurate numerical simulations of the full two dimensional governing equations for steady and unsteady condensing flows in gravity/0g environments. This doctoral work investigates flow features, flow regimes, attainability issues, stability issues, and responses to boundary fluctuations for condensing flows in different flow situations. This research finds new features of unsteady solutions of condensing flows; reveals interesting differences in gravity and shear driven situations; and discovers novel boundary condition sensitivities of shear driven internal condensing flows. Synthesis of computational and experimental results presented here for gravity driven in-tube flows lays framework for the future two-phase component analysis in any thermal system. It is shown for both gravity and shear driven internal condensing flows that steady governing equations have unique solutions for given inlet pressure, given inlet vapor mass flow rate, and fixed cooling method for condensing surface. But unsteady equations of shear driven internal condensing flows can yield different “quasi-steady” solutions based on different specifications of exit pressure (equivalently exit mass flow rate) concurrent to the inlet pressure specification. This thesis presents a novel categorization of internal condensing flows based on their sensitivity to concurrently applied boundary (inlet and exit) conditions. The computational investigations of an external shear driven flow of vapor condensing over a horizontal plate show limits of applicability of the analytical solution. Simulations for this external condensing flow discuss its stability issues and throw light on flow regime transitions because of ever-present bottom wall vibrations. It is identified that laminar to turbulent transition for these flows can get affected by ever present bottom wall vibrations. Detailed investigations of dynamic stability analysis of this shear driven external condensing flow result in the introduction of a new variable, which characterizes the ratio of strength of the underlying stabilizing attractor to that of destabilizing vibrations. Besides development of CFD tools and computational algorithms, direct application of research done for this thesis is in effective prediction and design of two-phase components in thermal systems used in different applications. Some of the important internal condensing flow results about sensitivities to boundary fluctuations are also expected to be applicable to flow boiling phenomenon. Novel flow sensitivities discovered through this research, if employed effectively after system level analysis, will result in the development of better control strategies in ground and space based two-phase thermal systems.

Computational simulations of latent heat thermal energy storage systems - with innovative and first-principles based simulation for the underlying unsteady melting (and solidification) processes

This thesis develops an effective modeling and simulation procedure for a specific thermal energy storage system commonly used and recommended for various applications (such as an auxiliary energy storage system for solar heating based Rankine cycle power plant). This thermal energy storage system transfers heat from a hot fluid (termed as heat transfer fluid - HTF) flowing in a tube to the surrounding phase change material (PCM). Through unsteady melting or freezing process, the PCM absorbs or releases thermal energy in the form of latent heat. Both scientific and engineering information is obtained by the proposed first-principle based modeling and simulation procedure. On the scientific side, the approach accurately tracks the moving melt-front (modeled as a sharp liquid-solid interface) and provides all necessary information about the time-varying heat-flow rates, temperature profiles, stored thermal energy, etc. On the engineering side, the proposed approach is unique in its ability to accurately solve – both individually and collectively – all the conjugate unsteady heat transfer problems for each of the components of the thermal storage system. This yields critical system level information on the various time-varying effectiveness and efficiency parameters for the thermal storage system.

Computational fluids domain reduction to a simplified fluid network

The primary goal of this project is to demonstrate the practical use of data mining algorithms to cluster a solved steady-state computational fluids simulation (CFD) flow domain into a simplified lumped-parameter network. A commercial-quality code, “cfdMine” was created using a volume-weighted k-means clustering that that can accomplish the clustering of a 20 million cell CFD domain on a single CPU in several hours or less. Additionally agglomeration and k-means Mahalanobis were added as optional post-processing steps to further enhance the separation of the clusters. The resultant nodal network is considered a reduced-order model and can be solved transiently at a very minimal computational cost. The reduced order network is then instantiated in the commercial thermal solver MuSES to perform transient conjugate heat transfer using convection predicted using a lumped network (based on steady-state CFD). When inserting the lumped nodal network into a MuSES model, the potential for developing a “localized heat transfer coefficient” is shown to be an improvement over existing techniques. Also, it was found that the use of the clustering created a new flow visualization technique. Finally, fixing clusters near equipment newly demonstrates a capability to track temperatures near specific objects (such as equipment in vehicles).

EXPERIMENTAL AND COMPUTATIONAL STUDIES OF ELECTROMAGNETIC CLOAKING AT MICROWAVES

An invisibility cloak is a device that can hide the target by enclosing it from the incident radiation. This intriguing device has attracted a lot of attention since it was first implemented at a microwave frequency in 2006. However, the problems of existing cloak designs prevent them from being widely applied in practice. In this dissertation, we try to remove or alleviate the three constraints for practical applications imposed by loosy cloaking media, high implementation complexity, and small size of hidden objects compared to the incident wavelength. To facilitate cloaking design and experimental characterization, several devices and relevant techniques for measuring the complex permittivity of dielectric materials at microwave frequencies are developed. In particular, a unique parallel plate waveguide chamber has been set up to automatically map the electromagnetic (EM) field distribution for wave propagation through the resonator arrays and cloaking structures. The total scattering cross section of the cloaking structures was derived based on the measured scattering field by using this apparatus. To overcome the adverse effects of lossy cloaking media, microwave cloaks composed of identical dielectric resonators made of low loss ceramic materials are designed and implemented. The effective permeability dispersion was provided by tailoring dielectric resonator filling fractions. The cloak performances had been verified by full-wave simulation of true multi-resonator structures and experimental measurements of the fabricated prototypes. With the aim to reduce the implementation complexity caused by metamaterials employment for cloaking, we proposed to design 2-D cylindrical cloaks and 3-D spherical cloaks by using multi-layer ordinary dielectric material (εr>1) coating. Genetic algorithm was employed to optimize the dielectric profiles of the cloaking shells to provide the minimum scattering cross sections of the cloaked targets. The designed cloaks can be easily scaled to various operating frequencies. The simulation results show that the multi-layer cylindrical cloak essentially outperforms the similarly sized metamaterials-based cloak designed by using the transformation optics-based reduced parameters. For the designed spherical cloak, the simulated scattering pattern shows that the total scattering cross section is greatly reduced. In addition, the scattering in specific directions could be significantly reduced. It is shown that the cloaking efficiency for larger targets could be improved by employing lossy materials in the shell. At last, we propose to hide a target inside a waveguide structure filled with only epsilon near zero materials, which are easy to implement in practice. The cloaking efficiency of this method, which was found to increase for large targets, has been confirmed both theoretically and by simulations.

COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE AEROELASTIC DYNAMICS OF A WIND TURBINE BLADE WITH VARIABLE-SPEED STALL CONTROL

The accuracy of simulating the aerodynamics and structural properties of the blades is crucial in the wind-turbine technology. Hence the models used to implement these features need to be very precise and their level of detailing needs to be high. With the variety of blade designs being developed the models should be versatile enough to adapt to the changes required by every design. We are going to implement a combination of numerical models which are associated with the structural and the aerodynamic part of the simulation using the computational power of a parallel HPC cluster. The structural part models the heterogeneous internal structure of the beam based on a novel implementation of the Generalized Timoshenko Beam Model Technique.. Using this technique the 3-D structure of the blade is reduced into a 1-D beam which is asymptotically equivalent. This reduces the computational cost of the model without compromising its accuracy. This structural model interacts with the Flow model which is a modified version of the Blade Element Momentum Theory. The modified version of the BEM accounts for the large deflections of the blade and also considers the pre-defined structure of the blade. The coning, sweeping of the blade, tilt of the nacelle and the twist of the sections along the blade length are all computed by the model which aren’t considered in the classical BEM theory. Each of these two models provides feedback to the other and the interactive computations lead to more accurate outputs. We successfully implemented the computational models to analyze and simulate the structural and aerodynamic aspects of the blades. The interactive nature of these models and their ability to recompute data using the feedback from each other makes this code more efficient than the commercial codes available. In this thesis we start off with the verification of these models by testing it on the well-known benchmark blade for the NREL-5MW Reference Wind Turbine, an alternative fixed-speed stall-controlled blade design proposed by Delft University, and a novel alternative design that we proposed for a variable-speed stall-controlled turbine, which offers the potential for more uniform power control and improved annual energy production.. To optimize the power output of the stall-controlled blade we modify the existing designs and study their behavior using the aforementioned aero elastic model.

COMPUTATIONAL STUDY OF MICROSTRUCTURE-PROPERTYMECHANISM RELATIONS IN FERROIC COMPOSITES

Ferroic materials, as notable members of smart materials, have been widely used in applications that perform sensing, actuation and control. The macroscopic property change of ferroic materials may become remarkably large during ferroic phase transition, leading to the fact that the macroscopic properties can be tuned by carefully applying a suitable external field (electric, magnetic, stress). To obtain an enhancement in physical and/or mechanical properties, different kinds of ferroic composites have been fabricated. The properties of a ferroic composite are determined not only by the properties and relative amounts of the constituent phases, but also by the microstructure of individual phase such as the phase connectivity, phase size, shape and spatial arrangement. This dissertation mainly focuses on the computational study of microstructure – property – mechanism relations in two representative ferroic composites, i.e., two-phase particulate magnetoelectric (ME) composite and polymer matrix ferroelectric composite. The former is a great example of ferroic composite exhibiting a new property and functionality that neither of the constituent phases possesses individually. The latter well represents the kind of ferroic composites having property combinations that are better than the existing materials. Phase field modeling was employed as the computing tool, and the required models for ferroic composites were developed based on existing models for monolithic materials. Extensive computational simulations were performed to investigate the microstructure-property relations and the underlying mechanism in ferroic composites. In particulate, it is found that for ME composite 0-3 connectivity (isolated magnetostrictive phase) is necessary to exhibit ME effect, and small but finite electrical conductivity of isolated magnetic phase can beneficially enhance ME effect. It is revealed that longitudinal and transverse ME coefficients of isotropic 0-3 particulate composites can be effectively tailored by controlling magnetic domain structures without resort to anisotropic two-phase microstructures. Simulations also show that the macroscopic properties of the ferroelectricpolymer composites critically depend on the ferroelectric phase connectivity while are not sensitive to the sizes and internal grain structures of the ceramic particles. Texturing is found critical to exploit the paraelectric«ferroelectric phase transition and nonlinear polarization behavior in paraelectric polycrystal and its polymer matrix composite. Additionally, a Diffuse Interface Field model was developed to simulate packing and motion in liquid phase which is promising for studying the fabrication of particulatepolymer composites.

Computational and Biochemical Approaches to Molecular Epidemiology

Mining activity in Butte, Montana has taken place, or continues to take place, within the urban residence of Butte itself. This has led to urban areas with high concentrations of toxic metals such as arsenic, lead, copper, zinc, mercury and cadmium. Advances in protein study and gene sequencing has opened the possibility of finding molecular biomarkers whose presence, absence or morphological changes could indicate disease processes in populations exposed to environmental toxins. While in principle, biomarkers can be any chemicals or metabolites, as well as proteins and genes that are indicative of exposure to xenobiotics, this study seeks to identify changes in cellular pathways that suggest chronic (or acute) exposure to low-levels of metals associated with historical mining activities on the Butte Hill that could cause oxidative stress or other stress to the cell.

Assessments and Computational Simulations in Support of a Time-Varying Mass Flow Rate Measurement Technique for Pulsatile Gas Flow

This thesis covers the correction, and verification, development, and implementation of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for an orifice plate meter. Past results were corrected and further expanded on with compressibility effects of acoustic waves being taken into account. One dynamic pressure difference transducer measures the time-varying differential pressure across the orifice meter. A dynamic absolute pressure measurement is also taken at the inlet of the orifice meter, along with a suitable temperature measurement of the mean flow gas. Together these three measurements allow for an incompressible CFD simulation (using a well-tested and robust model) for the cross-section independent time-varying mass flow rate through the orifice meter. The mean value of this incompressible mass flow rate is then corrected to match the mean of the measured flow rate( obtained from a Coriolis meter located up stream of the orifice meter). Even with the mean and compressibility corrections, significant differences in the measured mass flow rates at two orifice meters in a common flow stream were observed. This means that the compressibility effects associated with pulsatile gas flows is significant in the measurement of the time-varying mass flow rate. Future work (with the approach and initial runs covered here) will provide an indirect verification of the reported mass flow rate measurements.