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- All Subjects: Mechanical Engineering
- All Subjects: Materials Science
- Creators: Huang, Huei-Ping
Description
The conversion of H2S enables the recycling of a waste gas into a potential source of hydrogen at a lower thermodynamic energy cost as compared to water splitting. However, studies on the photocatalytic decomposition of H2S focus on traditional deployment of catalyst materials to facilitate this conversion, and operation only when a light source is available. In this study, the efficacy of Direct Ink Written (DIW) luminous structures for H2S conversion has been investigated, with the primary objective of sustaining H2S conversion when a light source has been terminated. Additionally, as a secondary objective, improving light distribution within monoliths for photocatalytic applications is desired. The intrinsic illumination of the 3D printed monoliths developed in this work could serve as an alternative to monolith systems that employ light transmitting fiber optic cables that have been previously proposed to improve light distribution in photocatalytic systems. The results that were obtained demonstrate that H2S favorable adsorbents, a wavelength compatible long afterglow phosphor, and a photocatalyst can form viscoelastic inks that are printable into DIW luminous monolithic contactors. Additionally, rheological, optical and porosity analyses conducted, provide design guidelines for future studies seeking to develop DIW luminous monoliths from compatible catalyst-phosphor pairs. The monoliths that were developed demonstrate not only improved conversion when exposed to light, but more significantly, extended H2S conversion from the afterglow of the monoliths when an external light source was removed. Lastly, considering growing interests in attaining a global circular economy, the techno-economic feasibility of a H2S-CO2 co-utilization plant leveraging hydrogen from H2S photocatalysis as a feed source for a downstream CO2 methanation plant has been assessed. The work provides preliminary information to guide future chemical kinetic design characteristics that are important to strive for if using H2S as a source of hydrogen in a CO2 methanation facility.
ContributorsAbdullahi, Adnan (Author) / Andino, Jean (Thesis advisor) / Phelan, Patrick (Thesis advisor) / Bhate, Dhruv (Committee member) / Wang, Robert (Committee member) / Huang, Huei-Ping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Least squares fitting in 3D is applied to produce higher level geometric parameters that describe the optimum location of a line-profile through many nodal points that are derived from Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulations of elastic spring-back of features both on stamped sheet metal components after they have been plasticly deformed in a press and released, and on simple assemblies made from them. Although the traditional Moore-Penrose inverse was used to solve the superabundant linear equations, the formulation of these equations was distinct and based on virtual work and statics applied to parallel-actuated robots in order to allow for both more complex profiles and a change in profile size. The output, a small displacement torsor (SDT) is used to describe the displacement of the profile from its nominal location. It may be regarded as a generalization of the slope and intercept parameters of a line which result from a Gauss-Markov regression fit of points in a plane. Additionally, minimum zone-magnitudes were computed that just capture the points along the profile. And finally, algorithms were created to compute simple parameters for cross-sectional shapes of components were also computed from sprung-back data points according to the protocol of simulations and benchmark experiments conducted by the metal forming community 30 years ago, although it was necessary to modify their protocol for some geometries that differed from the benchmark.
ContributorsSunkara, Sai Chandu (Author) / Davidson, Joseph (Thesis advisor) / Shah, Jami (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
A well-insulated dark conventional rooftop can be hotter than any other urban surface, including pavements. Since rooftops cover around 20 – 25% of most urban areas, their role in the urban heat island effect is significant. In general, buildings exchange heat with the surroundings in three ways: heat release from the cooling/heating system, air exchange associated with exfiltration and relief air, and heat transfer between the building envelope and surroundings. Several recent studies show that the building envelope generates more heat release into the environment than any other building component.Current advancements in material science have enabled the development of materials and coatings with very high solar reflectance and thermal emissivity, and that can alter their radiative properties based on surface temperature. This dissertation is an effort to quantify the impact of recent developments in such technologies on urban air. The current study addresses three specific unresolved topics: 1) the relative importance of rooftop solar reflectance and thermal emissivity, 2) the role of rooftop radiative properties in different climates, and 3) the impact of temperature-adaptive exterior materials/coatings on building energy savings and urban cooling. The findings from this study show that the use of rooftop materials with solar reflectance above 0.9 maintain the surface temperature below ambient air temperature most of the time, even when the materials have conventional thermal emissivity (0.9). This research has demonstrated that for hot cities, rooftops with high solar reflectance and thermal emittance maximize building energy savings and always cool the surrounding air. For moderate climate regions, high solar reflectance and low thermal emittance result in the greatest building energy cost savings. This combination of radiative properties cools the air during the daytime and warms it at night. Finally, this research found that temperature-adaptive materials could play a significant role in reducing utility costs for poorly insulated buildings, but that they heat the surrounding air in the winter, irrespective of the rooftop insulation.
Through the detailed analysis of building façade radiative properties, this dissertation offers climate-specific design guidance that can be used to simultaneously optimize energy costs while minimizing adverse warming of the surrounding environment.
ContributorsPrem Anand Jayaprabha, Jyothis Anand (Author) / Sailor, David (Thesis advisor) / Phelan, Patrick (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Huei-Ping (Committee member) / Wang, Liping (Committee member) / Yeom, Dongwoo Jason (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The energy consumed by buildings occupies a large part of energy consumption and carbon emissions. Meanwhile, enormous amounts of waste heat from buildings and the swiftly increasing demand for electric energy have become one of the essential contradictions that scientists pay attention to. As a result, how to make use of the waste heat to generate electric energy becomes an appreciable research topic. In the latest research, it is common to convert the thermal energy generated by the temperature difference into electrical energy using the Seebeck effect. In previous research, a prototype of a thermogalvanic cell with graphite as the electrodes and a combination of Iron (II) and Iron (III) perchlorate salts (Fe(ClO4)2, Fe(ClO4)3) as the electrolyte, and with a 3D-printed Schwarz-P structure, was designed and assembled for achieving the energy conversion. The research shows that the incorporation of a 3D-printed Schwarz-P structure improves the thermogalvanic cell’s performance and increases the temperature difference across the cell. Here we focus on the same type of thermogalvanic cell prototype and keep the same working temperature difference but use different electrolyte concentrations (0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, and 0.25 mol/L) to measure the electric output, including open-circuit voltage, short-circuit current, and maximum output power, and the internal resistance. The results indicate that the open-circuit voltage and maximum output power increase with the rise of electrolyte concentrations, and the short-circuit current decreases with the rise of electrolyte concentrations.
ContributorsHan, Xiaochuan (Author) / Phelan, Patric (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Huei-Ping (Committee member) / Bocanegra, Luis (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Intelligent engineering designs require an accurate understanding of material behavior, since any uncertainties or gaps in knowledge must be counterbalanced with heightened factors of safety, leading to overdesign. Therefore, building better structures and pushing the performance of new components requires an improved understanding of the thermomechanical response of advanced materials under service conditions. This dissertation provides fundamental investigations of several advanced materials: thermoset polymers, a common matrix material for fiber-reinforced composites and nanocomposites; aluminum alloy 7075-T6 (AA7075-T6), a high-performance aerospace material; and ceramic matrix composites (CMCs), an advanced composite for extreme-temperature applications. To understand matrix interactions with various interfaces and nanoinclusions at their fundamental scale, the properties of thermoset polymers are studied at the atomistic scale. An improved proximity-based molecular dynamics (MD) technique for modeling the crosslinking of thermoset polymers is carefully established, enabling realistic curing simulations through its ability to dynamically and probabilistically perform complex topology transformations. The proximity-based MD curing methodology is then used to explore damage initiation and the local anisotropic evolution of mechanical properties in thermoset polymers under uniaxial tension with an emphasis on changes in stiffness through a series of tensile loading, unloading, and reloading experiments. Aluminum alloys in aerospace applications often require a fatigue life of over 109 cycles, which is well over the number of cycles that can be practically tested using conventional fatigue testing equipment. In order to study these high-life regimes, a detailed ultrasonic cycle fatigue study is presented for AA7075-T6 under fully reversed tension-compression loading. The geometric sensitivity, frequency effects, size effects, surface roughness effects, and the corresponding failure mechanisms for ultrasonic fatigue across different fatigue regimes are investigated. Finally, because CMCs are utilized in extreme environments, oxidation plays an important role in their degradation. A multiphysics modeling methodology is thus developed to address the complex coupling between oxidation, mechanical stress, and oxygen diffusion in heterogeneous carbon fiber-reinforced CMC microstructures.
ContributorsSchichtel, Jacob (Author) / Chattopadhyay, Aditi (Thesis advisor) / Dai, Lenore (Committee member) / Ghoshal, Anindya (Committee member) / Huang, Huei-Ping (Committee member) / Jiao, Yang (Committee member) / Oswald, Jay (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Ultra-fast 2D/3D material microstructure reconstruction and quantitative structure-property mapping are crucial components of integrated computational material engineering (ICME). It is particularly challenging for modeling random heterogeneous materials such as alloys, composites, polymers, porous media, and granular matters, which exhibit strong randomness and variations of their material properties due to the hierarchical uncertainties associated with their complex microstructure at different length scales. Such uncertainties also exist in disordered hyperuniform systems that are statistically isotropic and possess no Bragg peaks like liquids and glasses, yet they suppress large-scale density fluctuations in a similar manner as in perfect crystals. The unique hyperuniform long-range order in these systems endow them with nearly optimal transport, electronic and mechanical properties. The concept of hyperuniformity was originally introduced for many-particle systems and has subsequently been generalized to heterogeneous materials such as porous media, composites, polymers, and biological tissues for unconventional property discovery. An explicit mixture random field (MRF) model is proposed to characterize and reconstruct multi-phase stochastic material property and microstructure simultaneously, where no additional tuning step nor iteration is needed compared with other stochastic optimization approaches such as the simulated annealing. The proposed method is shown to have ultra-high computational efficiency and only requires minimal imaging and property input data. Considering microscale uncertainties, the material reliability will face the challenge of high dimensionality. To deal with the so-called “curse of dimensionality”, efficient material reliability analysis methods are developed. Then, the explicit hierarchical uncertainty quantification model and efficient material reliability solvers are applied to reliability-based topology optimization to pursue the lightweight under reliability constraint defined based on structural mechanical responses. Efficient and accurate methods for high-resolution microstructure and hyperuniform microstructure reconstruction, high-dimensional material reliability analysis, and reliability-based topology optimization are developed. The proposed framework can be readily incorporated into ICME for probabilistic analysis, discovery of novel disordered hyperuniform materials, material design and optimization.
ContributorsGao, Yi (Author) / Liu, Yongming (Thesis advisor) / Jiao, Yang (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Pan, Rong (Committee member) / Mignolet, Marc (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
In this dissertation, two types of passive air freshener products from Henkel, the wick-based air freshener and gel-based air freshener, are studied for their wicking mechanisms and evaporation performances.The fibrous pad of the wick-based air freshener is a porous medium that absorbs fragrance by capillary force and releases the fragrance into the ambient air. To investigate the wicking process, a two-dimensional multiphase flow numerical model using COMSOL Multiphysics is built. Saturation and liquid pressure inside the pad are solved. Comparison between the simulation results and experiments shows that evaporation occurs simultaneously with the wicking process. The evaporation performance on the surface of the wicking pad is analyzed based on the kinetic theory, from which the mass flow rate of molecules passing the interface of each pore of the porous medium is obtained. A 3D model coupling the evaporation model and dynamic wicking on the evaporation pad is built to simulate the entire performance of the air freshener to the environment for a long period of time. Diffusion and natural convection effects are included in the simulation. The simulation results match well with the experiments for both the air fresheners placed in a chamber and in the absent of a chamber, the latter of which is subject to indoor airflow.
The gel-based air freshener can be constructed as a porous medium in which the solid network of particles spans the volume of the fragrance liquid. To predict the evaporation performance of the gel, two approaches are tested for gel samples in hemispheric shape. The first approach is the sessile drop model commonly used for the drying process of a pure liquid droplet. It can be used to estimate the weight loss rate and time duration of the evaporation. Another approach is to simulate the concentration profile outside the gel and estimate the evaporation rate from the surface of the gel using the kinetic theory. The evaporation area is updated based on the change of pore size. A 3D simulation using the same analysis is further applied to the cylindrical gel sample. The simulation results match the experimental data well.
ContributorsYuan, Jing (Author) / Chen, Kangping (Thesis advisor) / Herrmann, Marcus (Committee member) / Huang, Huei-Ping (Committee member) / Wang, Liping (Committee member) / Jiao, Yang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Stiffness and flexibility are essential in many fields, including robotics, aerospace, bioengineering, etc. In recent years, origami-based mechanical metamaterials were designed for better mechanical properties including tunable stiffness and tunable collapsibility. However, in existing studies, the tunable stiffness is only with limited range and limited controllability. To overcome these challenges, two objectives were proposed and achieved in this dissertation: first, to design mechanical metamaterials with metamaterials with selective stiffness and collapsibility; second, to design mechanical metamaterials with in-situ tunable stiffness among positive, zero, and negative.In the first part, triangulated cylinder origami was employed to build deployable mechanical metamaterials through folding and unfolding along the crease lines. These deployable structures are flexible in the deploy direction so that it can be easily collapsed along the same way as it was deployed. An origami-inspired mechanical metamaterial was designed for on-demand deployability and selective collapsibility: autonomous deployability from the collapsed state and selective collapsibility along two different paths, with low stiffness for one path and substantially high stiffness for another path. The created mechanical metamaterial yields unprecedented load bearing capability in the deploy direction while possessing great deployability and collapsibility. The principle in this prospectus can be utilized to design and create versatile origami-inspired mechanical metamaterials that can find many applications.
In the second part, curved origami patterns were designed to accomplish in situ stiffness manipulation covering positive, zero, and negative stiffness by activating predefined creases on one curved origami pattern. This elegant design enables in situ stiffness switching in lightweight and space-saving applications, as demonstrated through three robotic-related components. Under a uniform load, the curved origami can provide universal gripping, controlled force transmissibility, and multistage stiffness response. This work illustrates an unexplored and unprecedented capability of curved origami, which opens new applications in robotics for this particular family of origami patterns.
ContributorsZhai, Zirui (Author) / Nian, Qiong (Thesis advisor) / Zhuang, Houlong (Committee member) / Huang, Huei-Ping (Committee member) / Zhang, Wenlong (Committee member) / Liu, Yongming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Human-robot interactions can often be formulated as general-sum differential games where the equilibrial policies are governed by Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs (HJI) equations. Solving HJI PDEs faces the curse of dimensionality (CoD). While physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) alleviate CoD in solving PDEs with smooth solutions, they fall short in learning discontinuous solutions due to their sampling nature. This causes PINNs to have poor safety performance when they are applied to approximate values that are discontinuous due to state constraints. This dissertation aims to improve the safety performance of PINN-based value and policy models. The first contribution of the dissertation is to develop learning methods to approximate discontinuous values. Specifically, three solutions are developed: (1) hybrid learning uses both supervisory and PDE losses, (2) value-hardening solves HJIs with increasing Lipschitz constant on the constraint violation penalty, and (3) the epigraphical technique lifts the value to a higher-dimensional state space where it becomes continuous. Evaluations through 5D and 9D vehicle and 13D drone simulations reveal that the hybrid method outperforms others in terms of generalization and safety performance. The second contribution is a learning-theoretical analysis of PINN for value and policy approximation. Specifically, by extending the neural tangent kernel (NTK) framework, this dissertation explores why the choice of activation function significantly affects the PINN generalization performance, and why the inclusion of supervisory costate data improves the safety performance. The last contribution is a series of extensions of the hybrid PINN method to address real-time parameter estimation problems in incomplete-information games. Specifically, a Pontryagin-mode PINN is developed to avoid costly computation for supervisory data. The key idea is the introduction of a costate loss, which is cheap to compute yet effectively enables the learning of important value changes and policies in space-time. Building upon this, a Pontryagin-mode neural operator is developed to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) safety performance across a set of differential games with parametric state constraints. This dissertation demonstrates the utility of the resultant neural operator in estimating player constraint parameters during incomplete-information games.
ContributorsZhang, Lei (Author) / Ren, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Si, Jennie (Committee member) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Zhang, Wenlong (Committee member) / Xu, Zhe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) are one of the latest automotive technologies for improving vehicle safety. An efficient method to ensure vehicle safety is to limit vehicle states always within a predefined stability region. Hence, this thesis aims at designing a model predictive control (MPC) with non-overshooting constraints that always confine vehicle states in a predefined lateral stability region. To consider the feasibility and stability of MPC, terminal cost and constraints are investigated to guarantee the stability and recursive feasibility of the proposed non-overshooting MPC. The proposed non-overshooting MPC is first verified by using numerical examples of linear and nonlinear systems. Finally, the non-overshooting MPC is applied to guarantee vehicle lateral stability based on a nonlinear vehicle model for a cornering maneuver. The simulation results are presented and discussed through co-simulation of CarSim® and MATLAB/Simulink.
ContributorsSudhakhar, Monish Dev (Author) / Chen, Yan (Thesis advisor) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Xu, Zhe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023