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No / Two novel reduced-size, printed spiral antennas are proposed for use in personal communications mobile terminals exploiting the “big low earth orbit” (Big-LEO) satellite system (uplink 1.61–1.63 GHz; downlink 2.48–2.5 GHz). The two proposed antenna give 3.12―6.25% bandwidth at lower resonant mode of 1600MHz, while at the higher resonant mode of 2450MHz a bandwidth of around 6% is obtained. The experimental and simulated return losses of the proposed antennas show good agreement. The computed and measured gains, and axial ratios are presented, showing that the performance of the proposed two antennas meets typical specifications for the intended applications.

Yes / The total energy consumption of many Reverse Osmosis (RO) plants has continuously improved as a result of manufacturing highly impermeable membranes in addition to implementing energy recovery devices. The total energy consumption of the RO process contributes significantly to the total cost of water treatment. Therefore any way of keeping the energy consumption to a minimum is highly desirable but continues to be a real challenge in practice. Potential areas to explore for achieving this include the possibility of optimising the module design parameters and/or the associated operating parameters. This research focuses on this precise aim by evaluating the impact of the design characteristics of membrane length, width, and feed channel height on the total energy consumption for two selected pilot-plant RO process configurations for the removal of chlorophenol from wastewater. The proposed two configurations, with and without an energy recovery device (ERD), consist of four cylindrical pressure vessels connected in series and stuffed with spiral wound membranes. A detailed steady-state model developed earlier by the authors is used here to study such impact via repetitive simulation. The results achieved confirm that the overall energy consumption can be reduced by actually increasing the membrane width with a simultaneous reduction of membrane length at constant membrane area and module volume. Energy savings of more than 60% and 54% have been achieved for the two configurations with and without ERD respectively using process optimization. The energy savings are significantly higher compared to other available similar studies from the literature.

This dissertation details the development of the star spiral antenna and demonstrates the advantages of the star spiral when used in a wideband array with variable element sizes. The wideband array with variable element sizes (WAVES) is a multi-octave array that uses different sized circular Archimedean spirals for each octave of frequency coverage. A two-octave WAVES array has been presented in the literature, but a gap in the two-octave frequency coverage exists along the principal axes. The star spiral antenna was developed to eliminate the performance gap in the WAVES array. The star spiral is a type of slow-wave spiral that also offers array-packing advantages, particularly for the WAVES array. The size reduction that can be achieved with the star spiral is comparable to that of the square spiral, but the star spiral is much more efficient in terms of its expected size reduction compared to its circumference. The far-field patterns, gain, and scan performance of the star spiral are similar to that of the circular Archimedean spiral. The use of the star spiral to eliminate the performance gap in a WAVES array of circular Archimedean spirals is detailed. Furthermore, a three-octave WAVES array of star spirals is built and measured, and the scan performance of the array is investigated via simulation. / Ph. D.

Parkinson’s Disease is a neurological degenerative disease affecting more than six million people worldwide. It is a progressive disease, impacting a person’s movements and thought processes. In recent years, computer vision and machine learning researchers have been developing techniques to aid in the diagnosis. This thesis is motivated by the exploration of hand tremor symptoms in Parkinson’s patients from the Archimedean Spiral test, a paper-and-pencil test used to evaluate hand tremors. This work presents a novel Fourier Domain analysis technique that transforms the pencil content of hand-drawn spiral images into frequency features. Our technique is applied to an image dataset consisting of spirals drawn by healthy individuals and people with Parkinson’s Disease. The Fourier Domain analysis technique achieves 81.5% accuracy predicting images drawn by someone with Parkinson’s, a result 6% higher than previous methods. We compared this method against the results using extracted features from the ResNet-50 and VGG16 pre-trained deep network models. The VGG16 extracted features achieve 95.4% accuracy classifying images drawn by people with Parkinson’s Disease. The extracted features of both methods were also used to develop a tremor severity rating system which scores the spiral images on a scale from 0 (no tremor) to 1 (severe tremor). The results show correlation to the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) developed by the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society. These results can be useful for aiding in early detection of tremors, the medical treatment process, and symptom tracking to monitor the progression of Parkinson’s Disease. / M.S. / Parkinson’s Disease is a neurological degenerative disease affecting more than six million people worldwide. It is a progressive disease, impacting a person’s movements and thought processes. In recent years, computer vision and machine learning researchers have been developing techniques to aid in the diagnosis. This thesis is motivated by the exploration of hand tremor symptoms in Parkinson’s patients from the Archimedean Spiral test, a paper-and-pencil test used to evaluate hand tremors. This work presents a novel spiral analysis technique that converts the pencil content of hand-drawn spirals into numeric values, called features. The features measure spiral smoothness. Our technique is applied to an image dataset consisting of spirals drawn by healthy and Parkinson’s individuals. The spiral analysis technique achieves 81.5% accuracy predicting images drawn by someone with Parkinson’s. We compared this method against the results using extracted features from pre-trained deep network models. The VGG16 pre-trained model extracted features achieve 95.4% accuracy classifying images drawn by people with Parkinson’s Disease. The extracted features of both methods were also used to develop a tremor severity rating system which scores the spiral images on a scale from 0 (no tremor) to 1 (severe tremor). The results show a similar trend to the tremor evaluations rated by the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) developed by the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society. These results can be useful for aiding in early detection of tremors, the medical treatment process, and symptom tracking to monitor the progression of Parkinson’s Disease.

Optical scanning holography (OSH) [1] has the benefit of recording the entire three-dimensional (3-D) volume of a specimen in the form of a two-dimensional (2-D) hologram. Reconstruction of the original volume can be accomplished by applying digital reconstruction or decoding techniques to the recorded hologram. Accurate reconstruction of the 3-D volume and more specifically, the individual 2-D optical sections without artifacts such as out-of-focus haze from adjacent sections has been the focus of much work including algorithms, optical techniques, and combinations of the two. This dissertation presents several different techniques for enhancing the reconstruction of a recorded specimen and its optical sections including the use of optical coding and phase filtering techniques in the traditional OSH optical system. / Ph. D.

The uses for wideband antennas include wideband measurement systems, spread spectrum communications systems, feeds for reflectors and elements in wideband arrays. Here, wideband antennas are discussed and Archimedean spiral antennas are found to be appropriate elements for use in a new type of wideband array referred to as the wideband switched array. The design of an Archimedean spiral and a necessary wideband balun transformer feed structure are presented. To aid in the design, the Electromagnetic Surface Patch Code (ESP) developed by Ohio State University is used. The spiral and feed structure are constructed and measured results are compared to predictions obtained by ESP. / Master of Science

Since the discovery three decades ago, fullerenes as well as metallofullerenes have been extensively investigated. However, almost all known fullerenes follow the classical definition, that is, classic fullerenes are comprised of only pentagons and hexagons. Nowadays, more and more evidence, from both theoretical and experimental studies, suggests that non-classical fullerenes, especially heptagon-containing fullerenes, are important as intermediates in fullerene formation mechanisms. To obtain fundamental understandings of fullerenes and their formation mechanisms, new systematic studies should be undertaken. Although necessary tools, such as isomer generating programs, have been developed for classical fullerenes, none of them are able to solve problems related to non-classical fullerenes. In this thesis, existing theories and algorithms of classical fullerenes are generalized to accommodate non-classical fullerenes. A new program based on these generalized principles is provided for generating non-classical isomers. Along with this program, other tools are also attached for accelerating future investigations of non-classical fullerenes. In addition, research to date is also reviewed. / Master of Science