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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Description
Agriculture is the second largest water consumer in the Phoenix Metropolitan region, after the municipal sector. A significant portion of the cultivated land and agricultural water demand is from the production of animal feed, including alfalfa (~69% of total cropland area), corn (~8), and sorghum (-3%), which are both exported and needed to support local dairy industry. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the impacts on water demand and crop production of four different crop portfolios using alfalfa, corn, sorghum, and feed barley. For this aim, the Water Evaluation And Planning (WEAP) platform and the embedded MABIA agronomic module are applied to the Phoenix Active Management Area (AMA), a political/hydrological region including most of Phoenix Metro. The simulations indicate that the most efficient solution is a portfolio where all study crop production is made up by sorghum, with an increase of 153% in crop yield and a reduction of 60% of water consumption compared to current conditions. In contrast, a portfolio where all study crop production is made up by alfalfa, which is primary crop grown in current conditions, decreased crop yield by 77% and increases water demand by 105%. Solutions where all study crop production is achieved with corn or feed barley lead to a reduction of 77% and 65% of each respective water demand, with a portfolio of all corn for study crop production increasing crop yield by 245% and a portfolio of all feed barley for study crop production reducing crop yield by 29%.
ContributorsRees, Kendall Marcella (Author) / Mascaro, Giuseppe (Thesis director) / Muenich, Rebecca (Committee member) / Chhetri, Netra (Committee member) / Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Eng Program (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
In this project, we created a code that was able to simulate the dynamics of a three site Hubbard model ring connected to an infinite dissipative bath and driven by an electric field. We utilized the master equation approach, which will one day be able to be implemented efficiently on a quantum computer. For now we used classical computing to model one of the simplest nontrivial driven dissipative systems. This will serve as a verification of the master equation method and a baseline to test against when we are able to implement it on a quantum computer. For this report, we will mainly focus on classifying the DC component of the current around our ring. We notice several expected characteristics of this DC current including an inverse square tail at large values of the electric field and a linear response region at small values of the electric field.
ContributorsJohnson, Michael (Author) / Chamberlin, Ralph (Thesis director) / Ritchie, Barry (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Physics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
Laminate devices have the potential to lower the cost and complexity of robots. Taking advantage of laminate materials' flexibility, a high-performance jumping platform has been developed with the goal of optimizing jump ground clearance. Four simulations are compared in order to understand which dynamic model elements (leg flexibility, motor dynamics, contact, joint damping, etc.) must be included to accurately model jumping performance. The resulting simulations have been validated with experimental data gathered from a small set of physical leg prototypes spanning design considerations such as gear ratio and leg length, and one in particular was selected for the fidelity of performance trends against experimental results. This simulation has subsequently been used to predict the performance of new leg designs outside the initial design set. The design predicted to achieve the highest jump ground clearance was then built and tested as a demonstration of the usefulness of this simulation.
ContributorsKnaup, Jacob W (Author) / Aukes, Daniel (Thesis director) / Sugar, Thomas (Committee member) / Engineering Programs (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
Information technology has become an increasing popular major offered by various universities, and provides the student with notable flexibility regarding courses as there are multiple career paths to suit the person’s specific technical interests. However, the methods universities use to promote their majors, including IT, are not as effective as it needs to be. The mediums currently used are mostly comprised of brochures, flyers, a single web page from the university’s entire website, and some communication with advisors, among others. This can be an issue for many readers as the information is often brief, providing only summaries of what can be expected, and ambiguous statistics that may not accurately or completely reflect the prospects of graduates looking to make a living the rest of their adult lives. This could cause some students to choose a major that may not be their best fit, and changing majors later will be very costly and delay graduation by one or more years. Therefore, the advocation of majors will have be rethought. The IT major offered at ASU is a perfect opportunity to determine whether a major can be promoted through a different approach with a senior capstone project involving a website. This Barrett creative project will act as a subset of the capstone project that will explore an attempt at introducing in interactive element to the website that allows prospective students to get a brief introduction to the computer networking aspect of IT, which includes a real world introductory game, along with more detailed exercises if the user is interested.
ContributorsSchultz, Dillon Maxwell (Author) / Doheny, Damien (Thesis director) / Balyan, Renu (Committee member) / Information Technology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The intention of this report is to use computer simulations to investigate the viability of two materials, water and polyethylene, as shielding against space radiation. First, this thesis discusses some of the challenges facing future and current manned space missions as a result of galactic cosmic radiation, or GCR. The project then uses MULASSIS, a Geant4 based radiation simulation tool, to analyze the effectiveness of water and polyethylene based radiation shields against proton radiation with an initial energy of 1 GeV. This specific spectrum of radiation is selected because it a component of GCR that has been shown by previous literature to pose a significant threat to humans on board spacecraft. The analysis of each material indicated that both would have to be several meters thick to adequately protect crew against the simulated radiation over a several year mission. Additionally, an analysis of the mass of a simple spacecraft model with different shield thicknesses showed that the mass would increase significantly with internal space. Thus, using either material as a shield would be expensive as a result of the cost of lifting a large amount of mass into orbit.
ContributorsBonfield, Maclain Peter (Author) / Holbert, Keith (Thesis director) / Young, Patrick (Committee member) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Human walking is a complex and rhythmical activity that comprises of the brain, nerves and muscles. Neuromuscular disorder (NMD) is a broad term that refers to conditions that affect the proper use of muscles and nervous system, thus also impairing the walking or gait cycle of an individual. The improper gait cycle might be attributed to the lack of force produced at the toe-off stage. This project addresses if it is possible to create an OpenSim model to find the ideal time and force magnitude needed of an assistive force ankle device to improve gait patterns in individuals with NMD.
ContributorsRivera, Jose Luis (Author) / Zhang, Wenlong (Thesis director) / Lockhart, Thurmon (Committee member) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The instruction of students in computer science concepts can be enhanced by creating programmable simulations and games. ASU VIPLE, which is a framework used to control simulations, robots, and for IoT applications, can be used as an educational tool. Further, the Unity engine allows the creation of 2D and 3D games. The development of basic minigames in Unity can provide simulations for students to program. One can run the Unity minigame and their corresponding VIPLE script to control them over a network connection as well as locally. The minigames conform to the robot output and robot input interfaces supported by VIPLE. With this goal in mind, a snake game, a space shooter game, and a runner game have been created as Unity simulations, which can be controlled by scripts made using VIPLE. These games represent simulated environments that, with movement output and sensor input, students can program simply and externally from VIPLE to help learn robotics and computer science principles.
ContributorsChristensen, Collin Riley (Author) / Chen, Yinong (Thesis director) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Most asteroids originated in larger parent bodies that underwent accretion and heating during the first few million years of the solar system. We investigated the parent body of S-type asteroid 25143 Itokawa by developing a computational model which can approximate the thermal evolution of an early solar system body. We compared known constraints on Itokawa’s thermal history to simulations of its parent body and constrained its time of formation to between 1.6 and 2.5 million years after the beginning of the solar system, though certain details could allow for even earlier or later formation. These results stress the importance of precise data required of the material properties of asteroids and meteorites to place better constraints on the histories of their parent bodies. Additional mathematical and computational details are discussed, and the full code and data is made available online.
ContributorsHallstrom, Jonas (Author) / Bose, Maitrayee (Thesis director) / Beckstein, Oliver (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Physics (Contributor) / Materials Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
By studying the workflow used to create the black hole, Gargantua, in Interstellar, artists can understand how to simulate complex astronomical phenomena in other special effects software such as Houdini. This workflow utilizes a balance between scientific realism and artistic interpretation of astronomical phenomena such that simulations can maximize their success in film. Through significant amounts of research and study, the artists at Double Negative generated a scientifically realistic black hole in shape and physical behavior, but made creative decisions when shading and lighting their simulation. I find that DNeg’s workflow integrates well when using Houdini technology. I follow their workflow to generate a series of spiral galaxies in Houdini and find how Houdini’s node network layout allows artists to incorporate both scientific realism and creative approaches to a simulation. A strong understanding of the mechanics of the simulated astronomical event scientifically informs the look and shape of a production, while Houdini’s node network layout makes it easy for special effects artists to manipulate simulations to their own artistic interpretation of astronomical phenomena.
ContributorsJoiner, Jae (Author) / Kim, Sujin (Thesis director) / Lawson, Shawn (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor)
Created2023-05