Matching Items (3,058)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

ContributorsMunoz Zavala, Jaira (Author) / Weidner, Lauren (Thesis director) / Meeds, Andrew (Committee member) / Neubauer, Mary (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor)
Created2023-12
ContributorsMunoz Zavala, Jaira (Author) / Weidner, Lauren (Thesis director) / Meeds, Andrew (Committee member) / Neubauer, Mary (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor)
Created2023-12
Description
This research explores the potential use of microwave energy to detect various substances in water, with a focus on water quality assessment and pathogen detection applications. There are many non-thermal effects of microwaves on microorganisms and their resonant frequencies could be used to identify and possibly destroy harmful pathogens, such

This research explores the potential use of microwave energy to detect various substances in water, with a focus on water quality assessment and pathogen detection applications. There are many non-thermal effects of microwaves on microorganisms and their resonant frequencies could be used to identify and possibly destroy harmful pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses, without heating the water. A wide range of materials, including living organisms like Daphnia and Moina, plants, sand, plastic, and salt, were subjected to microwave measurements to assess their influence on the transmission (S21) measurements. The measurements of the living organisms did not display distinctive resonant frequencies and variations in water volume may be the source of the small measurement differences. Conversely, sand and plastic pellets affected the measurements differently, with their arrangement within the test tube emerging as a significant factor. This study also explores the impact of salinity on measurements, revealing a clear pattern that can be modeled as a series RLC resonator. Although unique resonant frequencies for the tested organisms were not identified, the presented system demonstrates the potential for detecting contaminants based on variations in measurements. Future research may extend this work to include a broader array of organisms and enhance measurement precision.
ContributorsChild, Carson (Author) / Aberle, James (Thesis director) / Blain Christen, Jennifer (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2023-12
ContributorsGuevara, Jose Antonio (Performer) / Novak, Gail (Pianist) (Performer) / Boyd, Liam (Performer) / Fern, Ellie (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2023-10-29
190729-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Digital signal processing accelerator architectures are designed to provide either high-energy efficiency or high programmability depending on the targeted application and use case. For example, Domain Adaptive Processor (DAP), a highly reconfigurable array architecture, designed by University of Michigan, for signal processing workloads is highly energy efficient but difficult to

Digital signal processing accelerator architectures are designed to provide either high-energy efficiency or high programmability depending on the targeted application and use case. For example, Domain Adaptive Processor (DAP), a highly reconfigurable array architecture, designed by University of Michigan, for signal processing workloads is highly energy efficient but difficult to program. DAP consists of 8x8 array of Processing elements (PE) with each PE containing four heterogeneous SUB-PEs. Each SUB-PE has its own instruction memory and is capable of executing Very Large Instruction Word (VLIW) instructions. Unfortunately, instructions have to be written for every cycle of computation for each SUB-PE used in the application and handcrafted such that all the inter-PE dependencies are synchronized. This thesis builds up on prior work at Arizona State University(ASU) to make DAP more programmable. First, the compiler back-end developed at ASU is extended with more features. Prior work introduced DAP Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), an assembly instruction format, and proposed a compiler framework, called DAP Assembler, with optimization passes to reduce the complexity of programming applications in DAP. While this back-end infrastructure helped generated code with relative ease compared to Very Large Instruction Word (VLIW) code by hand, the output of the code generated was not software-pipelined and the code generated for each Processing Element(PE) had to be manually synchronized. So in this thesis, DAP Assembler tool is extended to support software-pipelining for high throughput applications. Further, a generic synchronization tool is proposed to synchronize instructions in a multi-PE setup and integrated with DAP Assembler to generate synchronized high-throughput application code. Second, a Multi-Level Intermediate Representation(MLIR) based compiler front-end infrastructure is proposed to first lower the application code written by the programmer to an Intermediate Representation (IR) that is suitable for generic array architectures and then further converted to DAP-specific IR that can be used for generating machine code for DAP using DAP ISA. This two stage process enables this infrastructure to be more easily adapted to other array architectures. The first conversion pass uses a designer-provided modular hardware architecture information, called Resource Registry, to allocate operations in the input IR to resources in the Resource registry and capture all data movement. While the resource registry changes from architecture to architecture, the conversion pass algorithm is generic and can be used for other architectures. The second conversion pass is more geared towards DAP and integrates DAP specific constructs to generate optimized instruction in DAP ISA. Multiple kernels such as matrix multiplication, vector-vector addition were implemented using this infrastructure and the code generated by the tool verified to be functionally correct.
ContributorsMurugan, Narayanan (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali Dr (Thesis advisor) / Akoglu, Ali Dr (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel Dr (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
189897-Thumbnail Image.png
Description

My Honors Thesis was a creative project in which I created a new course, The Road to Women’s Economic Empowerment (SGS 494). This course explores how different societal features affect the agency and economic development of women worldwide. We begin by defining women’s agency and conceptualizing the barriers to women’s

My Honors Thesis was a creative project in which I created a new course, The Road to Women’s Economic Empowerment (SGS 494). This course explores how different societal features affect the agency and economic development of women worldwide. We begin by defining women’s agency and conceptualizing the barriers to women’s economic empowerment. Barriers include gender norms, health conditions, degradation of environmental and/or natural capital, discrimination, and skewness in political representation. Each barrier is given further investigation through case studies in a variety of countries. We end the course by looking at policies and laws in different countries, evaluating their success and failures to improve women’s economic and social autonomy. This is an online course which includes video interviews and podcasts from scholars and activists, a quiz every other week, video posts which enable discussion of material with peers, and a final project to apply the concepts introduced in class.

ContributorsBecerra, Lindsay (Author) / Mueller, Valerie (Thesis director) / Hinojosa, Magda (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2023-12
158617-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Kuwait is committed to implementing the Kyoto Protocol in “Vision 2035” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by shifting to the use of wind and solar energies [1]. The specific goal of the Vision 2035 is for renewables to comprise 15% of Kuwait’s electrical generation by 2030. Wind and solar are

Kuwait is committed to implementing the Kyoto Protocol in “Vision 2035” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by shifting to the use of wind and solar energies [1]. The specific goal of the Vision 2035 is for renewables to comprise 15% of Kuwait’s electrical generation by 2030. Wind and solar are abundant in Kuwait and can easily provide 15% of the total electrical generation. However, there are three significant obstacles. The first is Kuwait currently depends heavily on rapidly diminishing fossil fuels which are the major sources of CO2, NOx, and SOx emissions. Unfortunately, current plans are to build two conventional power stations by 2024. The purpose is to cover the energy needs for growing population. The second problem is that Kuwait has a very small land area. Consequently, there is limited space to build new utility-scale renewable power stations. The third issue is the low electricity tariff provides little incentive for the population to save energy. Offshore wind farms have the potential to provide thousands of GWh/yr to accomplish the goals of Vision 2035. Kuwait has a vast untapped supply of offshore wind energy. Specifically, there are eight offshore locations in which 50 turbines could be built each, for a total of 400 turbines. Using 4.2 MW turbines, this would provide 1.68 GW of wind energy, and increase the renewable portion of the electrical energy production to 13.93% (including Shagaya renewable park). Installing battery storage with the proposed wind turbines could provide fast ramp response which would serve to complement existing power production on Kuwait’s grid. In this work, six different turbines with different sizes are considered from 2.5 MW to 4.2 MW (from well-known manufacturers, such as, Nordex and Vestas), but ultimately 4.2 MW turbines are recommended. Data for this study has been supplied by: A) Civil Aviation -- temperature and wind speed, B) Ministry of Electricity and Water (MEW) -- electricity data, and C) Public Authority for Civil Information -- population data.
ContributorsAlotaibi, Abdullah Saqer (Author) / Calhoun, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / Kitchen, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Roedel, Ronald (Committee member) / Mayyas, Abdul Ra'ouf (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
157167-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
In this dissertation, I investigate the electronic properties of two important silicon(Si)-based heterojunctions 1) hydrogenated amorphous silicon/crystalline silicon (a-Si:H/c-Si) which has already been commercialized in Heterojunction with Intrinsic Thin-layer (HIT) cells and 2) gallium phosphide/silicon (GaP/Si) which has been suggested to be a good candidate for replacing a-Si:H/c-Si in HIT

In this dissertation, I investigate the electronic properties of two important silicon(Si)-based heterojunctions 1) hydrogenated amorphous silicon/crystalline silicon (a-Si:H/c-Si) which has already been commercialized in Heterojunction with Intrinsic Thin-layer (HIT) cells and 2) gallium phosphide/silicon (GaP/Si) which has been suggested to be a good candidate for replacing a-Si:H/c-Si in HIT cells in order to boost the HIT cell’s efficiency.

In the first part, the defect states of amorphous silicon (a-Si) and a-Si:H material are studied using density functional theory (DFT). I first employ simulated annealing using molecular dynamics (MD) to create stable configurations of a-Si:H, and then analyze the atomic and electronic structure to investigate which structural defects interact with H, and how the electronic structure changes with H addition. I find that H atoms decrease the density of mid-gap states and increase the band gap of a-Si by binding to Si atoms with strained bonds. My results also indicate that Si atoms with strained bonds creates high-localized orbitals in the mobility gap of a-Si, and the binding of H atoms to them can dramatically decrease their degree of localization.



In the second part, I explore the effect of the H binding configuration on the electronic properties of a-Si:H/c-Si heterostructure using density functional theory studies of models of the interface between a-Si:H and c-Si. The electronic properties from DFT show that depending on the energy difference between configurations, the electronic properties are sensitive to the H binding configurations.

In the last part, I examine the electronic structure of GaP/Si(001) heterojunctions and the effect of hydrogen H passivation at the interface in comparison to interface mixing, through DFT calculations. My calculations show that due to the heterovalent mismatch nature of the GaP/Si interface, there is a high density of localized states at the abrupt GaP/Si interface due to the excess charge associated with heterovalent bonding, as reported elsewhere. I find that the addition of H leads to additional bonding at the interface which mitigates the charge imbalance, and greatly reduces the density of localized states, leading to a nearly ideal heterojunction.
ContributorsVatan Meidanshahi, Reza (Author) / Goodnick, Stephen Marshall (Thesis advisor) / Vasileska, Dragica (Committee member) / Bowden, Stuart (Committee member) / Honsberg, Christiana (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
164237-Thumbnail Image.png
ContributorsSera, Anna (Author) / Weiss, Stephanie (Thesis director) / Dreyfoos, Dale (Committee member) / Lajoie, Molly (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music, Dance and Theatre (Contributor)
Created2022-05
165588-Thumbnail Image.png
Description

This project was an exploratory take on outreach in the life sciences - looking into the existing literature and practices and formulating a proof of concept for future outreach with synthesizes my findings. The research culminated in the creation of an insect guide for the novice observer, which reads as

This project was an exploratory take on outreach in the life sciences - looking into the existing literature and practices and formulating a proof of concept for future outreach with synthesizes my findings. The research culminated in the creation of an insect guide for the novice observer, which reads as a modern take on the dichotomous key and allows amateur insect observers to develop some skills of identification with relatively little entomological knowledge.

ContributorsHaddad, Mary (Author) / Polidoro, Beth (Thesis director) / Yule, Kelsey (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Earth and Space Exploration (Contributor)
Created2022-05