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Description
Piloerection (known as goosebumps) is mediated by activation of alpha-adrenergic receptors within the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. The study of piloerection is important in multiple fields, from emotion studies to nervous system pathology. This makes piloerection particularly relevant to emotions research. Despite wide-ranging applications, current methods for measuring piloerection are laborious and qualitative. The goal of this study is to build a wearable piloerection sensor through the use of straight-line lasers and photoresistors. The study analyzed methods of detecting and measuring goosebumps, and applied the method of laser scattering as a detection method. This device was designed and tested against a population of seven Arizona State University students. Goosebumps were elicited through conditions of cold, and video clips meant to elicit emotions of awe and sadness. Piloerection was then quantified through two controls of self-identification and camera recording, as well as the new detection method. These were then compared together, and it was found that subjective methods of determining goosebumps did not correlate well with objective measurements, but that the two objective measurements correlated well with one another. This shows that the technique of laser scattering can be used to detect goosebumps and further developments on this new detection method will be made. Moreover, the presence of uncorrelated subjective measurements further shows the need for an objective measurement of piloerection, while also bringing into question other factors that may be confused with the feeling of piloerection, such as chills or shivers. This study further reaffirmed previous studies showing a positive correlation between intense emotions.
ContributorsHemesath, Angela (Author) / Muthuswamy, Jitendran (Thesis director) / Shiota, Michelle (Lani) (Committee member) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Woodland/Alloy Casting, Inc. is an aluminum foundry known for providing high-quality molds to their customers in industries such as aviation, electrical, defense, and nuclear power. However, as the company has grown larger during the past three years, they have begun to struggle with the on-time delivery of their orders. Woodland prides itself on their high-grade process that includes core processing, the molding process, cleaning process, and heat-treat process. To create each mold, it has to flow through each part of the system flawlessly. Throughout this process, significant bottlenecks occur that limit the number of molds leaving the system. To combat this issue, this project uses a simulation of the foundry to test how best to schedule their work to optimize the use of their resources. Simulation can be an effective tool when testing for improvements in systems where making changes to the physical system is too expensive. ARENA is a simulation tool that allows for manipulation of resources and process while also allowing both random and selected schedules to be run through the foundry’s production process. By using an ARENA simulation to test different scheduling techniques, the risk of missing production runs is minimized during the experimental period so that many different options can be tested to see how they will affect the production line. In this project, several feasible scheduling techniques are compared in simulation to determine which schedules allow for the highest number of molds to be completed.
ContributorsAdams, Danielle Renee (Author) / Pavlic, Theodore (Thesis director) / Montgomery, Douglas (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems & Operations Engineering Prgm (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Nuclear power has recently experienced a resurgence in interest due to its ability to generate significant amounts of relatively clean energy. However, the overall size of nuclear power plants still poses a problem to future advancements. The bulkiness of components in the plant contribute to longer construction times, higher building and maintenance costs, and the isolation of nuclear plants from populated areas. The goal of this project was to analyze the thermal performance of nanocrystalline copper tantalum (NC Cu-Ta) inside the steam generator of a pressurized water reactor to see how much the size of these units could be reduced without affecting the amount of heat transferred through it. The analysis revealed that using this material, with its higher thermal conductivity than the traditional Inconel Alloy 600 that is typically used in steam generators, it is possible to reduce the height of a steam generator from 21 meters to about 18.6 meters, signifying a 11.6% reduction in height. This analysis also revealed a diminishing return that occurs with increasing the thermal conductivity on both reducing the required heat transfer area and increasing the overall heat transfer coefficient.
ContributorsRiese, Alexander (Author) / Phelan, Patrick (Thesis director) / Bocanegra, Luis (Committee member) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The initial women pioneers in engineering faced many of the same barriers as women engineers today, including stereotypes, unfair treatment in the workplace, restrictions and lack of opportunities, and lack of recognition. Research shows that these barriers are the primary reason why women’s representation within engineering has been low and slow to increase compared to their representation in other fields such as nursing and science. As of 2013, women still only account for 12 percent of all engineers. Yet, despite the barriers and low numbers, women engineers have demonstrated themselves as capable of succeeding just as much, if not more, than their male peers. Some of the ways they have broken the barriers in engineering have been through focusing on proving their merit, finding alternative paths, leveraging government jobs and programs, finding support among other women engineers, fighting for their right to be engineers, and through being satisfied and interested in their work. This thesis analyzes reasons why women have been underrepresented in the field, major achievements from women engineers, and strategies women engineers have adopted to mitigate barriers. The individual profiles of the women discussed in this thesis come from historical research on pioneer women engineers and interviews from modern day women engineers. Their stories help tell the history of how the experiences of women in engineering have changed and remained the same over the past 140 years. The goal of this thesis is to serve as a resource for young women who want to learn more about women in engineering. The history of women engineers is a story worth sharing to everyone because it could inspire young girls to consider engineering as a path for the future and help shift the mindset of members of society to accept and encourage women engineers.
ContributorsDye, Michaela Lynn (Author) / Nystrom, Eric (Thesis director) / Brunhaver, Samantha (Committee member) / Engineering Programs (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The premise of this thesis developed from my personal interests and undergraduate educational experiences in both industrial engineering and design studies, particularly those related to product design. My education has stressed the differences in the ways that engineers and designers approach problem solving and creating solutions, but I am most interested in marrying the two mindsets of designers and engineers to better solve problems creatively and efficiently.
This thesis focuses on the recent appearance of generative design technology into the world of industrial design and engineering as it relates to product development. An introduction to generative design discusses the uses and benefits of this tool for both designers and engineers and also addresses the challenges of this technology. The relevance of generative design to the world of product development is discussed as well as the implications of how this technology will change the roles of designers and engineers, and especially their traditional design processes. The remainder of this paper is divided into two elements. The first serves as documentation of my own exploration of using generative design software to solve a product design challenge and my reflections on the benefits and challenges of using this tool. The second element addresses the need for employing quantitiative methodologies within the generative design process to aid designers in selecting the most advantageous design option when presented with generative outcomes. Both sections aim to provide more context to this new design process and seek to answer questions about some of the ambiguous processes of generative design.
This thesis focuses on the recent appearance of generative design technology into the world of industrial design and engineering as it relates to product development. An introduction to generative design discusses the uses and benefits of this tool for both designers and engineers and also addresses the challenges of this technology. The relevance of generative design to the world of product development is discussed as well as the implications of how this technology will change the roles of designers and engineers, and especially their traditional design processes. The remainder of this paper is divided into two elements. The first serves as documentation of my own exploration of using generative design software to solve a product design challenge and my reflections on the benefits and challenges of using this tool. The second element addresses the need for employing quantitiative methodologies within the generative design process to aid designers in selecting the most advantageous design option when presented with generative outcomes. Both sections aim to provide more context to this new design process and seek to answer questions about some of the ambiguous processes of generative design.
ContributorsElgin, Mariah Crystal (Author) / Bacalzo, Dean (Thesis director) / Gel, Esma (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems & Operations Engineering Prgm (Contributor) / Dean, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Over 50% of the US population has listened to a podcast as of 2019. That is over 144 million people in the US alone that can potentially generate revenue for a podcast host. In 2017, podcast advertising secured revenues of $314 million. It is expected to grow to $659 million by 2020 (Goldberg). There is a growing market of active podcast listeners for advertisers to tap into. There is so much potential in podcasting that Spotify has recently decided that they are willing to spend $400-500 million on this category alone in 2019. In that large figure they have acquired “Gimlet”, a podcasting company, for 230 million and “Anchor”, a creation/distribution platform (Heater).
These massive amounts of investment in podcasting is assuring for the podcast industry that began as recently as the early 2000’s. There is money to be made for the content creators of podcasts as well. This paper focuses on how podcast hosts can generate the most amount of money. The two forms of producing income is by paid advertisements or donations/crowdfunding. I conducted an experiment using my own podcast to test whether paid advertisements or donations were more effective at making money. My hypothesis for this experiment is if I offer a free podcast for the public to listen to and ask for donations then I think less than 10% of listeners will donate. I believe that paid advertisements will generate more revenue than donations because I believe podcast listeners are not generous enough to donate. My research on how to make the most money podcasting is illustrated in the following pages.
These massive amounts of investment in podcasting is assuring for the podcast industry that began as recently as the early 2000’s. There is money to be made for the content creators of podcasts as well. This paper focuses on how podcast hosts can generate the most amount of money. The two forms of producing income is by paid advertisements or donations/crowdfunding. I conducted an experiment using my own podcast to test whether paid advertisements or donations were more effective at making money. My hypothesis for this experiment is if I offer a free podcast for the public to listen to and ask for donations then I think less than 10% of listeners will donate. I believe that paid advertisements will generate more revenue than donations because I believe podcast listeners are not generous enough to donate. My research on how to make the most money podcasting is illustrated in the following pages.
ContributorsMaldonado, Marcus (Author) / Radway, Debra (Thesis director) / Bonfigilo, Thomas (Committee member) / Department of Finance (Contributor, Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The Honors Creative Project evolved drastically from start to finish, despite its origin remaining the same. My core goal in this project was to connect two seemingly mutually exclusive aspects of my life, engineering and dance. After conducting an IRB study and using data from my own personal experiences, I was able to see how dance had in fact made me a better engineer. There were skills that I gained and learned in dance that were directly applicable to engineering, and I believe will be critical to my success as an engineer. As the focal point of the project angled towards myself, I had to look deeply into who I am and how I reached this point. I conducted self-reflections on various aspects of my current life and also on the struggles and hardships I overcame during my years at ASU. From these reflections, I learned a lot about myself and how my personal identity has evolved. This identity evolution became the backbone behind my thesis defense. I took my research and self-reflections and designed a series of artwork that I personally designed and painted myself. I my engineering side to conduct the research and collect the data, and then used my artistic side to present my findings to the public in a way that attracted and audience and caused others to reflect upon their own identities.
ContributorsArizmendi, Romann Fuentes (Author) / Olarte, David (Thesis director) / Welz, Matt (Committee member) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
A common design of multi-agent robotic systems requires a centralized master node, which coordinates the actions of all the agents. The multi-agent system designed in this project enables coordination between the robots and reduces the dependence on a single node in the system. This design change reduces the complexity of the central node, and makes the system more adaptable to changes in its topology. The final goal of this project was to have a group of robots collaboratively claim positions in pre-defined formations, and navigate to the position using pose data transmitted by a localization server.
Planning coordination between robots in a multi-agent system requires each robot to know the position of the other robots. To address this, the localization server tracked visual fiducial markers attached to the robots and relayed their pose to every robot at a rate of 20Hz using the MQTT communication protocol. The robots used this data to inform a potential fields path planning algorithm and navigate to their target position.
This project was unable to address all of the challenges facing true distributed multi-agent coordination and needed to make concessions in order to meet deadlines. Further research would focus on shoring up these deficiencies and developing a more robust system.
Planning coordination between robots in a multi-agent system requires each robot to know the position of the other robots. To address this, the localization server tracked visual fiducial markers attached to the robots and relayed their pose to every robot at a rate of 20Hz using the MQTT communication protocol. The robots used this data to inform a potential fields path planning algorithm and navigate to their target position.
This project was unable to address all of the challenges facing true distributed multi-agent coordination and needed to make concessions in order to meet deadlines. Further research would focus on shoring up these deficiencies and developing a more robust system.
ContributorsThibeault, Quinn (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Companies are constantly looking for a way to increase sales and productivity from their workforce. A popular way to spark motivation and competition is through employee sales contests or incentive-based plans. In theory, these contests are geared to include every employee at the sales level in the organization and are thought to boost motivation across the board. But, sales contests receive substantial attention regarding their effectiveness from the academic and professional press due to some unethical incidents happening at large corporations. There have been many studies regarding the effectiveness of contests, but many have inconclusive results and do not produce a definite answer. Because of this, further research is needed to confirm the effectiveness of such contests used in the professional world. Further research would require a study that is much longer in length, as there are many variables that are behind the psychological factors associated to sales contests.
I conducted a study on the effective design, implementation, motivational factors, and takeaways upon completion of such contests. The purpose of this study is to find out whether or not sales contests are an effective way of motivating a diverse workforce. The results suggest that sales contests are a hyper-efficient tool to increase employee motivation but must be prepared for and implemented correctly in order to achieve efficient results. I recommend that sales managers use contests as a tool to gauge the motivational and behavioral changes in their employees resulting from such contests, instead of just trying to gain more revenue. Also, to combat the growing threat of unethical behaviors as a result of running sales contests, leaders need to implement appropriate measures, like unethical behavior diversion courses.
I conducted a study on the effective design, implementation, motivational factors, and takeaways upon completion of such contests. The purpose of this study is to find out whether or not sales contests are an effective way of motivating a diverse workforce. The results suggest that sales contests are a hyper-efficient tool to increase employee motivation but must be prepared for and implemented correctly in order to achieve efficient results. I recommend that sales managers use contests as a tool to gauge the motivational and behavioral changes in their employees resulting from such contests, instead of just trying to gain more revenue. Also, to combat the growing threat of unethical behaviors as a result of running sales contests, leaders need to implement appropriate measures, like unethical behavior diversion courses.
ContributorsWitt, Tyler Lee (Author) / Montoya, Detra (Thesis director) / Dietrich, John (Committee member) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The objective of this paper is to find and describe trends in the fast Fourier transformed accelerometer data that can be used to predict the mechanical failure of large vacuum pumps used in industrial settings, such as providing drinking water. Using three-dimensional plots of the data, this paper suggests how a model can be developed to predict the mechanical failure of vacuum pumps.
ContributorsHalver, Grant (Author) / Taylor, Tom (Thesis director) / Konstantinos, Tsakalis (Committee member) / Fricks, John (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05