Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Filtering by
- Creators: School of Music, Dance and Theatre
- Creators: Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Eng Program
Water heaters that are manufactured for swimming pools come in several forms, most of which require an electrical input for a source of power. Passive-circulation systems, however, require no electrical power input because fluid circulation occurs as a result of thermal gradients. In solar-based systems, thermal gradients are developed by energy collected from sunlight. The combination of solar collection and passive circulation yields a system in which fluids, particularly water, are heated and circulated without need of assistance from external mechanical or electrical sources. The design of such a system was adapted from that of forced-circulation solar collector systems, as were the equations describing its thermodynamic properties. The design was developed based on such constraints as material corrosion resistance, overall system cost, and location-controlled size limitations. The thermodynamic description of the designed system was adjusted on the basis of the designed system’s physical aspects, such as the configuration and material of each component within the solar collector. Numerical analysis performed with the altered thermodynamic equations projected a total energy gain of 7.39 W between 9:00 and 10:00 A.M. and a total energy gain of 13.12 W between 4:00 and 5:00 P.M. The temperature of heated water exiting the collector system was projected to be 17.62°C in the morning and 25.56°C in the afternoon. The morning projection utilized an initial fluid temperature of 12°C and an ambient air temperature of 13°C, while the afternoon projection utilized an initial fluid temperature of 17°C and an ambient air temperature of 22°C. Field testing of the designed passive thermosyphon solar collector system was performed over a period of about one month with one temperature measurement taken at the collector outlet in the morning and another taken in the afternoon. For an ambient air temperature of 13°C, the linear regression developed from the morning dataset yielded an outlet water temperature of 20°C and that for the afternoon dataset yielded an outlet water temperature of 39°C for an ambient air temperature of 17°C. The percentage error between the projected and measured results was 13.51% for the morning period and 52.58% for the afternoon period. Numerical simulation and field data demonstrated that while the collector system operated successfully, its effects were limited to the volume of water immediately surrounding the outlet of the system; the rate of circulation within the system was too low for there to be a meaningful increase in the temperature of the water body at large. The stated results demonstrate that while the particular configuration of passive circulation solar collection technology developed in this instance is capable of transferring solar thermal energy to water without additional energy sources, significant modifications are necessary in order to improve the effectiveness of the technology. Such changes may come from improvements in material availability or alterations to the configuration of components of the collector system.
Jane Austen’s depictions of musical performers and listeners in her novels suggest her belief that musical performances should strengthen intimacy between people, both between listeners and performers as well as among listeners. Austen commends music for its power to increase intimacy through honest expressions of taste, which more often arise in private performances, but she warns against its power to decrease intimacy through pretentious displays of taste, which more often arise in public performances. Austen’s belief that music allows for this healthy intimacy indicates that music has great significance in society. Austen suggests that music has a greater importance to everyday life than many may originally suppose, as it is a universal connection between people. Ultimately, Jane Austen’s perspective of music’s great power both to expose pretentiousness and to cultivate intimacy should lead all of her readers to recognize and respect music’s true power and to consider seriously the importance and role of music in their own lives.
Animal shelters are stressful environments for dogs and a plethora of research has been conducted on interventions aimed at improving the welfare of these animals. One type of intervention is social interaction, either between dogs and people or dogs and conspecifics. To investigate the types of social interaction dogs engage in and the impact of that contact on their welfare, 12 dogs were enrolled to participate in group sessions with other dogs, supervised by staff, in a shelter setting. There were three, 15-minute sessions per day across three days in which groups of two to four dogs were observed and recorded on video. These videos were then analyzed per dog for three types of interactions: dog-dog, dog-human, and dog-environment. It was found that the dogs spent significantly more time engaging with the staff members in the room than with conspecifics or the environment. Physiological measurements, including cortisol and S-IgA levels, were taken using urinary and fecal samples obtained both in the morning prior to these interaction sessions and after the final interaction of the day. No significant correlations were found between the amount of time that the dogs spent in each type of interaction and dogs’ cortisol or S-IgA levels. However, smaller statistical effects suggest that human interaction may correspond with decreased stress the day after interaction while conspecific interaction may be related to increases in stress the following day. Overall, these findings suggest that social interaction, particularly with people, may be beneficial, and should be further explored as a method to enhance the well-being of shelter dogs.
The aim of this project was to create an original sound design and score for the ASU SOMDT production of HEDDATRON, by Elizabeth Meriwether. Composition and sound design was done primarily with a modular synthesizer. All audio editing was done in Reaper, and the cues were programmed in Qlab.
As the return to normality in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic enters its early stages, the necessity for accurate, quick, and community-wide surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 has been emphasized. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been used across the world as a tool for monitoring the pandemic, but studies of its efficacy in comparison to the best-known method for surveillance, randomly selected COVID-19 testing, has limited research. This study evaluated the trends and correlations present between SARS-CoV-2 in the effluent wastewater of a large university campus and random COVID-19 testing results published by the university. A moderately strong positive correlation was found between the random testing and WBE surveillance methods (r = 0.63), and this correlation was strengthened when accommodating for lost samples during the experiment (r = 0.74).