<p>Engineering students are expected to develop professional skills in addition to their technical knowledge as outcomes of accredited engineering programs. Among the most critical professional skills is the ability to work effectively in a team. Working effectively in teams has learning benefits and also provides an environment for developing other professional skills such as communication, leadership skills, and time management. However, students will develop those skills only if their teams function effectively.</p> <p>This dissertation includes three studies that together inform team formation and management practices to improve team dynamics. The first study investigates mixed-gender team dynamics to determine whether those teams are realizing their potential. The second study explores the relationship of individual psychological safety and students’ team member effectiveness and the moderating effects of team-level psychological safety. The third study explores self-rating bias among first-year engineering students and its relationship to student characteristics and dimensions of team-member effectiveness. </p> <p>Although mixed-gender teams had equal team dynamics with all-male teams, more team facilitation and training are needed to improve the experience of mixed-gender teams. Asian, Black, and Hispanic/Latino students, as well as students with lower GPA, report lower psychological safety, which is associated with lower team-member effectiveness. Team-level psychological safety moderated this effect for Asian and Hispanic/Latino students. Students’ effort in teams was associated with lower self-rating bias, likely an indication of greater self-awareness. Together, these studies and their findings contribute to a broader understanding that there are interrelationships among team composition, team dynamics, and team-member effectiveness, and that these relationships differ based on student characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender, and prior knowledge. This work adds to the body of research demonstrating the importance of teaching students about effective teamwork, conducting regular peer evaluations of team functioning, and interpreting those peer evaluations carefully to avoid perpetuating any biases. This work also demonstrates the usefulness of psychological safety as an important indicator of marginalization.</p>

The desire to produce a learning environment which promotes student motivation, collaboration, and higher order thinking is common within the higher education system of today. Such learning environments also have the ability to address challenges’ Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) students face entering the workforce. Through the vertical and horizontal integration of courses, this research presents how a scaffolded learning environment with a centralized theme of energy can increase motivation and conceptual retention within students. The integration of courses allows students to systematically translate their competency of concepts between energy based courses through experiential learning. The goal of this work is to develop a competency based learning model where students earn a professionally recognizable credential. The credential is earned through demonstrating their mastery of industry desired skills at a level that goes above and beyond the stock curriculum. The result is a more continuous curriculum that enhances multi-disciplinary problem solving while better preparing MET students for the workforce.

Quality drives customer satisfaction, improved business performance, and safer products. Reducing waste and variation is critical to the financial success of organizations. Today, it is common to see Lean and Six Sigma used as the two main strategies in improving Quality. As advancements in information technologies enable the use of big data, defect reduction and continuous improvement philosophies will benefit and even prosper. Predictive Quality Analytics (PQA) is a framework where risk assessment and Machine Learning technology can help detect anomalies in the entire ecosystem, and not just in the manufacturing facility. PQA serves as an early warning system that directs resources to where help and mitigation actions are most needed. In a world where limited resources are the norm, focused actions on the significant few defect drivers can be the difference between success and failure

<div> <p> Aircraft engines require lightweight efficient thermal management devices to improve engine performance at high pressure ratios. Acoustic streaming can provide a viable, lightweight solution to improve the heat exchanger capacity with a reduced drag penalty within engine heat exchangers. This project develops a test section that will experimentally characterize the effect of acoustic streaming on the unsteady heat flux and shear stress within a narrow channel. This is accomplished by careful selection of measurement techniques to monitor the steady and unsteady properties of the flow and iteratively designing the test section with CFD support to converge to an optimal test model. Using CFD support to revise each iteration reduces the experimental cost of developing an effective geometry. </p> <p> Pressure taps and K-type thermocouples are used to monitor the total inlet pressure and temperature as well as the wall surface pressure and temperature. Optical shear stress sensors are selected to monitor the unsteady wall shear stress. A thin film sensor array is designed for high frequency wall temperature measurements which serve the boundary condition for a 1-D heat flux analysis to determine the unsteady heat flux through the wall. The test model consists of two hollow Teflon airfoils that create a narrow channel within a larger flow area. The airfoils create three flow paths within the wind tunnel test section and the area ratio between the measured flow and the bypass flow controls the Mach number of within the measured flow channel. The acoustic waves drive acoustic streaming and are generated by a Rossiter Cavity with L/D =2 which produces pressure oscillations with dominant frequency of 8 kHz in a Mach 0.8 flow. </p> <p> The test geometry successfully achieves <a>Mach 0.8 flow and the 8 kHz signal </a><a href="https://purdue0-my.sharepoint.com/personal/mbutzen_purdue_edu/Documents/MS Thesis/Thesis Living Document.docx#_msocom_1">[BMJW1]</a> from the Rossiter cavity. The successful commissioning sets the stage for future experiments to determine the potential of acoustic streaming as a low weight modification to improve compact heat exchangers. </p> </div> <div><div><div><br> </div> </div> </div>

<p>This research proposes a model for equitable and accessible competency-based regulatory sciences education in sub-Saharan Africa. Access to safe, quality, and effective medical products in sub-Saharan Africa is contingent on strong National Medicines Regulatory Authorities (NMRA) and a strong, highly skilled workforce of regulatory scientists. The literature acknowledges that sub-Saharan Africa has a critical skilled workforce gap in regulatory scientists and an immediate need to develop strategies for sustained human capacity development in regulatory sciences. This need is significantly heightened because of rapidly evolving advances in health and medical product technologies. And as the continent moves towards regulatory harmonization and the deployment of the African Medicines Agency, the continent needs to have a skilled and portable workforce. First, using the framework synthesis type of systematic review of the literature and the survey of experts in regulatory sciences, the research developed a comprehensive competency framework (CF) to serve as the bedrock for developing a competency-based curriculum and training. Next, an online, fully asynchronous proof-of-concept (POC) competency-based regulatory sciences education (CBRSE) module was designed and deployed based on the learning sciences theories. The purposive sampling technique recruited seventeen (n = 17) participants from the Purdue Masters’ Biotechnology Innovation and Regulatory Sciences (BIRS) African cohort to engage in the POC module. The module was evaluated using an end-of-module survey (a modified Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) instrument), indices of students’ engagement, and performance assessments. The CF has eighty-eight (n = 88) competence statements in five clusters, eighty-six (n = 86) of which were ranked as mandatory and two as supplementary competencies. Fourteen (n = 14) students completed the POC module. The triangulation of results from the end-of-module survey, indices of students’ engagement, and performance assessments show that the POC module assisted students in achieving the desired competencies. The research also shows that the dialectics component of the module was not a great enabler of students’ learning. Future researchers, developmental partners, and NMRA could use the competency framework and the CBRSE module’s model to develop education and continuous professional development training in sub-Saharan Africa. </p>

<p>Many industrial organizations invest heavily in modeling and simulation (M&S) to support the design process. The primary business motivation for M&S is as a cheaper and faster alternative for obtaining information towards a better understanding of system behavior or to help with decision making. However, M&S predictions are known to be inexact because models and simulations are mathematical approximations of reality. To ensure that models are applicable for their intended use, organizations must collect evidence that the M&S is credible. Verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification (VVUQ) are the established methods for collecting this evidence. Structured frameworks for building credibility in M&S through VVUQ methods exist in the scientific literature but these frameworks and methods are generally not well developed, nor well implemented in industrial environments. The core motivation of this work is to help make existing VVUQ frameworks more suitable for industry.</p> <p>As part of this objective, this work proposes a new credibility assessment that turns VVUQ results into an intuitive, numerical decision-making metric. This credibility assessment, called the Credibility Index, identifies the important aspects of credibility, extracts the relevant VVUQ results, and converts the results into an overall Credibility Index score (CRED). This CRED score is unique for each specific prediction scenario and serves as an easy-to-digest measure of credibility. The Credibility Index builds upon widely accepted definitions of credibility, well-established VVUQ frameworks, and decision theory.</p> <p>The Credibility Index has been applied to several prediction scenarios for two publicly available benchmark problems and one Rolls-Royce funded subsystem case; all examples relate to the aerodynamic design of turbine-engine compressors. The results from these studies show how the Credibility Index serves as a decision-making metric, supplements traditional M&S outputs, and guides VVUQ efforts. A product feedback study, involving model end-users in industry, compared the Credibility Index to three other established credibility assessments; the study provides evidence that CRED consistently captures all key aspects of information quality when informing end-users on the credibility of model predictions. Due to the industry partnership, this research already has multiple avenues of practical impact, including implementation of the structured VVUQ and credibility framework in an industrial toolkit and workflow. </p>

Upon IRB approval, a corpus of 1,192 texts consisting of three assignments written by a total of 1,736 first year engineering students was compiled, and 117 pedagogical materials were collected. Using an iterative quantitative-qualitative approach to written discourse analysis, instances of formulaic language (4- and 6-word sequences) were identified in the corpus; formulaic language was then coded for the rhetorical functions expected in problem statements as qualitatively identified in the pedagogical materials. Additionally, three discourse-based interviews were conducted with First-year Engineering Faculty. Interview data was coded for themes of effective communication and used to triangulate the findings from the corpus analysis.

<p>Moisture can significantly affect flexible pavement performance. As such, it is crucial to remove moisture as quickly as possible from the pavements, mainly to avoid allowing moisture into the pavement subgrade. In the 1990s the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) adopted an asphalt pavement drainage system consisting of an open-graded asphalt drainage layer connected to edge drains and collector pipes to remove moisture from the pavement system.</p> <p>Over the intervening two decades, asphalt pavement materials and designs have dramatically changed in Indiana, and the effectiveness of the pavements drainage system may have changed. Additionally, there are challenges involved in producing and placing open-graded asphalt drainage layers. They can potentially increase costs, and they tend to have lower strength than traditional dense-graded asphalt pavement layers. </p> <p>Given the potential difficulties, the overall objective of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness of the INDOT’s current flexible pavement drainage systems given the changes to pavement cross-sections and materials that have occurred since the open-graded drainage layer was adopted. Additionally, the effectiveness of the filter layer and edge drains were examined.</p><p><br>Laboratory experiments were performed to obtain the hydraulic properties of field-produced asphalt mixture specimens meeting INDOT’s current specifications. The results were used in finite element modeling of moisture flow through pavement sections. Modeling was also performed to investigate the rutting performance of the drainage layers under various traffic loads and subgrade moisture conditions in combination with typical Indiana subgrade soils. The modeling results were used to develop a design tool that can assist the pavement designer in more accurately assessing the need for pavement drainage systems in flexible pavements.<br></p>

Following a grounded theory research model, the research uncovered and presented the state of debris recycling to a national association of demolition contractors to measure their willingness and attitudes towards the growing trend in the circular economy and adapting their business models to incorporate it into their own contracts. The first part was finding the deficiencies in the current model based on government reports and through interviews with county-level emergency managers. Second, successful businesses that already use the circular economy design in their operations were used as exemplars to emulate and their opinions and suggestions were discussed. The outputs of the emergency managers and the successful businesses was folded into the third phase of the research with surveys to the membership of the National Demolition Association (NDA) with multiple-choice, scalar questions and open-ended, opinion-heavy questions throughout. The findings were reported back to the head of the partnering organization, the NDA, to focus outreach, training, and policy advocacy concentration for the national organization as a whole, but to related and tangentially-connected industries to their own.

<p>Online retail sales and grocery/food orders have been breaking records every year. As a result, third-party delivery companies have found an opportunity to get their share from the growing transportation network. Electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming a preferable choice for such large delivery systems due to their environmental benefits. However, EVs have limited-service ranges; therefore, intra-route facilities are needed for EVs to stay operational. These facilities offer charging stations for EVs and storage areas for requests, e.g., food and packages. In this dissertation, we propose a novel <em>Pickup and Delivery Problem</em> (PDP) with EVs and transfers. There are requests to be picked up and delivered. EVs leave their origin depot, serve requests, and return to their destination depot. Unlike the generic PDP, intra-route facilities allow EVs to exchange requests. Thus, a request can be transported by more than one vehicle. In this dissertation, three new problems are introduced, and the following research questions are investigated: 1) "How valuable is to include intra-route facilities and allow transfers in a pickup and delivery network with EVs?", 2) "What is the cost of locating intra-route facilities randomly rather than finding the best locations while creating the routes for EVs?", and 3) "How much can drones improve the delivery speed in a pickup and delivery network with EVs and transfers?". A <em>Mixed-integer Linear Programming</em> (MILP) model and a <em>Simulated Annealing</em> (SA) algorithm are developed and compared with each other to answer the first question. For the second question, a MILP model is formulated; however, due to unreasonable computational runtimes, a SA algorithm and an <em>Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search</em> (ALNS) algorithm are proposed. Finally, a MILP model is developed for the hybrid-fleet problem. The overall results highlight that intra-route facilities shorten the total traveled distance in the PDP network by allowing exchanges and recharging.</p>