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Description
The hexagonal honeycomb is a bio-inspired cellular structure with a high stiffness-to-weight ratio. It has contributed to its use in several engineering applications compared to solid bodies with identical volume and material properties. This characteristic behavior is mainly attributed to the effective nature of stress distribution through the honeycomb beams that manifests as bending, axial, and shear deformation mechanisms. Inspired by the presence of this feature in natural honeycomb, this work focuses on the influence of the corner radius on the mechanical properties of a honeycomb structure subjected to in-plane compression loading. First, the local response at the corner node interface is investigated with the help of finite element simulation of a periodic unit cell within the linear elastic domain and validated against the best available analytical models. Next, a parametric design of experiments (DOE) study with the unit cell is defined with design points of varying circularity and cell length ratios towards identifying the optimal combination of all geometric parameters that maximize stiffness per unit mass while minimizing the stresses induced at the corner nodes. The observed trends are then compared with compression tests of 3D printed Nylon 12 honeycomb specimens of varying corner radii and wall thicknesses. The study concluded that the presence of a corner radius has a mitigating effect on peak stresses but that these effects are dependent on thickness while also increasing specific stiffness in all cases. It also points towards an optimum combination of parameters that achieve both objectives simultaneously while shedding some light on the functional benefit of this radius in wasp and bee nests that employ a hexagonal cell.
ContributorsRajeev, Athul (Author) / Bhate, Dhruv (Thesis advisor) / Oswald, Jay (Committee member) / Marvi, Hamidreza (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Regolith excavation systems are the enabling technology that must be developed in order to implement many of the plans for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) that have been developed in recent years to aid in creating a lasting human presence on the surface of the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies. The majority of proposed ISRU excavation systems are integrated onto a wheeled mobility system, however none yet have proposed the use of a screw-propelled vehicle, which has the potential to augment and enhance the capabilities of the excavation system. As a result, CASPER, a novel screw-propelled excavation rover is developed and analyzed to determine its effectiveness as a ISRU excavation system. The excavation rate, power, velocity, cost of transport, and a new parameter, excavation transport rate, are analyzed for various configurations of the vehicle through mobility and excavation tests performed in silica sand. The optimal configuration yielded a 28.4 kg/hr excavation rate and11.2 m/min traverse rate with an overall system mass of 3.4 kg and power draw of26.3 W. CASPER’s mobility and excavation performance results are compared to four notable proposed ISRU excavation systems of various types. The results indicate that this architecture shows promise as an ISRU excavator because it provides significant excavation capability with low mass and power requirements.
ContributorsGreen, Marko (Author) / Marvi, Hamid (Thesis advisor) / Emady, Heather (Committee member) / Lee, Hyunglae (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Fiber reinforced composites are rapidly replacing conventional metallic or polymeric materials as materials of choice in a myriad of applications across a wide range of industries. The relatively low weight, high strength, high stiffness, and a variety of thermal and mechanical environmental and loading capabilities are in part what make composite materials so appealing to material experts and design engineers. Additionally, fiber reinforced composites are highly tailorable and customized composite materials and structures can be readily designed for specific applications including those requiring particular directional material properties, fatigue resistance, damage tolerance, high temperature capabilities, or resistance to environmental degradation due to humidity and oxidation. The desirable properties of fiber reinforced composites arise from the strategic combination of multiple constituents to form a new composite material. However, the significant material anisotropy that occurs as a result of combining multiple constituents, each with different directional thermal and mechanical properties, complicates material analysis and remains a major impediment to fully understanding composite deformation and damage behavior. As a result, composite materials, especially specialized composites such as ceramic matrix composites and various multifunctional composites, are not utilized to their fullest potential. In the research presented in this dissertation, the deformation and damage behavior of several fiber reinforced composite systems were investigated. The damage accumulation and propagation behavior of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites under complex in-phase biaxial fatigue loading conditions was investigated and the early stage damage and microscale damage were correlated to the eventual fatigue failure behavior and macroscale damage mechanisms. The temperature-dependent deformation and damage response of woven ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) reinforced with carbon and silicon carbide fibers was also studied. A fracture mechanics-informed continuum damage model was developed to capture the brittle damage behavior of the ceramic matrix. A multiscale thermomechanical simulation framework, consisting of cooldown simulations to capture a realistic material initial state and subsequent mechanical loading simulations to capture the temperature-dependent nonlinear stress-strain behavior, was also developed. The methodologies and results presented in this research represent substantial progress toward increasing understanding of the deformation and damage behavior of some key fiber reinforced composite materials.
ContributorsSkinner, Travis Dale (Author) / Chattopadhyay, Aditi (Thesis advisor) / Hall, Asha (Committee member) / Liu, Yongming (Committee member) / Jiao, Yang (Committee member) / Yekani-Fard, Masoud (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Gas Dynamic Virtual Nozzles (GDVN) produce microscopic flow-focused liquid jets and are widely used for sample delivery in serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) and time-resolved solution scattering. Recently, 2-photon polymerization (2PP) made it possible to produce 3D-printed GDVNs with submicron printing resolution. Comparing with hand- fabricated nozzles, reproducibility, and less developing effort, and similarity of the performance of different 3D printed nozzles are among the advantages of using 3D printing techniques to develop GDVN’s. Submicron printing resolution also makes it possible to easily improve GDVN performance by optimizing the design of nozzles. In this study, 3D printed nozzles were developed to achieve low liquid and gas flow rates and high liquid jet velocities. A double-pulsed nanosecond laser imaging system was used to perform Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV) in order to determine jet velocities and assess jet stability/reproducibility. The testing results of pure water jets focused with He sheath gas showed that some designs can easily achieve stable liquid jets with velocities of more than 80 m/s, with pure water flowing at 3 microliters/min, and helium sheath gas flowing at less than 5 mg/min respectively. A numerical simulation pipeline was also used to characterize the performance of different 3D printed GDVNs. The results highlight the potential of making reproducible GDVNs with minimum fabrication effort, that can meet the requirements of present and future SFX and time-resolved solution scattering research.
ContributorsNazari, Reza (Author) / Adrian, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / Kirian, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Herrmann, Marcus (Committee member) / Phelan, Patrick (Committee member) / Weierstall, Uwe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
The Vortex-lattice method has been utilized throughout history to both design and analyze the aerodynamic performance characteristics of flight vehicles. There are numerous different programs utilizing this method, each of which has its own set of assumptions and performance limitations. This thesis highlights VORLAX, one such solver, and details its historic and modernized performance characteristics through a series of code improvements and optimizations. With VORLAX, rapid synthesis and verification of aircraft performance data related to wing pressure distributions, stability and control, and Federal Regulation compliance can be quickly and accurately obtained. As such, VORLAX represents a class of efficient yet largely forgotten computational techniques that allow users to explore numerous design solutions in a fraction of the time that would be needed to use more complex, full-fledged engineering tools. In the age of modern computers, one hypothesis is that VORLAX and similar “lean” computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers have preferential performance characteristics relative to expensive, volume grid CFD suites, such as ANSYS Fluent. By utilizing these types of programs, tasks such as pre- and post-processing become trivially simple with basic scripting languages such as Visual Basic for Applications or Python. Thus, lean engineering programs and methodologies deserve their place in modern engineering, despite their wrongfully decreasing prevalence.
ContributorsSouders, Tyler Jeffery (Author) / Takahashi, Timothy T. (Thesis advisor) / Herrmann, Marcus (Thesis advisor) / Dahm, Werner J.A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Nanoholes on the basal plane of graphene can provide abundant mass transport channels and chemically active sites for enhancing the electrochemical performance, making this material highly promising in applications such as supercapacitors, batteries, desalination, molecule or ion detection, and biosensing. However, the current solution-based chemical etching processes to manufacture these nanoholes commonly suffer from low process efficiency, scalability, and controllability, because conventional bulk heating cannot promote the etching reactions. Herein, a novel manufacturing method is developed to address this issue using microwave irradiation to facilitate and control the chemical etching of graphene. In this process, microwave irradiation induces selective heating of graphene in the aqueous solution due to an energy dissipation mechanism coupled with the dielectric and conduction losses. This strategy brings a remarkable reduction of processing time from hour-scale to minute-scale compared to the conventional approaches. By further incorporating microwave pretreatment, it is possible to control the population and area percentage of the in-plane nanoholes on graphene. Theoretical calculations reveal that the nanoholes emerge and grow by a repeating reduction–oxidation process occurring at the edge-sites atoms around vacancy defects on the graphene basal plane. The reduced holey graphene oxide sheets obtained via the microwave-assisted chemical etching method exhibit great potentials in supercapacitors and electrocatalysis. Excellent capacitive performance and electrocatalytic activity are observed in electrochemical measurements. The improvements against the non-holey counterpart are attributed to the enhanced kinetics involving ion diffusion and heterogeneous charge transfer.
ContributorsWang, Dini (Author) / Nian, Qiong (Thesis advisor) / Alford, Terry (Committee member) / Wang, Qing Hua (Committee member) / Zhuang, Houlong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Gas Diffusion Layers (GDL) based on PUREBLACK® carbon and VULCAN® (XC72R) carbon along with catalyst coated membranes were used to fabricate the membrane electrode assemblies for use in proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). Polyethylene glycol was used as the pore-forming agent on the microporous layer to improve the lower and higher relative humidity performance of the fuel cells. Accelerated stress tests based on the dissolution effect of GDLs were conducted and the long-term performance of the GDLs was evaluated. A single-cell fuel cell was used to evaluate the effect of porosity of the micro-porous layer and the effect of different types of carbon powder on the performance of the fuel cell at different operating relative humidity conditions and compared with commercial GDLs.Both PUREBLACK® and VULCAN® (XC72R) based GDLs show crack-free surface morphology in the Scanning electron microscopy and hydrophobic characteristics in the contact angle measurements. The fuel cell performance is evaluated under relative humidity conditions of 60 and 100 % using H2/O2 and H2/Air at 70 ℃ and the durability is also evaluated for the sample with and without 30% PEG for both carbons. The pristine PUREBLACK® based GDL sample with 30% pore-forming agent (total pore volume of 1.72 cc.g-1) demonstrated the highest performance (peak power densities of 432 and 444 mW.cm-2 at 100 and 60 % RH respectively, using H2/Air). There was a significant increase in the macropores when GDLs are aged in H2O2 and the contact angle dropped to about 14 and 95° for PUREBLACK® and VULCAN® carbon, respectively. Overall PUREBLACK® based GDLs performed the best after ageing both in H2O2 and H2O (average performance degradation of 8% in H2O2 and 8.25% in H2O).
ContributorsChauhan, Nitin (Author) / Kannan, Arunachala Mada (Thesis advisor) / Phelan, Patrick (Committee member) / Nian, Qiong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Realistic engineering, physical and biological systems are very complex in nature, and their response and performance are governed by multitude of interacting processes. In computational modeling of these systems, the interactive response is most often ignored, and simplifications are made to model one or a few relevant phenomena as opposed to a complete set of interacting processes due to a complexity of integrative analysis. In this thesis, I will develop new high-order computational approaches that reduce the amount of simplifications and model the full response of a complex system by accounting for the interaction between different physical processes as required for an accurate description of the global system behavior. Specifically, I will develop multi-physics coupling techniques based on spectral-element methods for the simulations of such systems. I focus on three specific applications: fluid-structure interaction, conjugate heat transfer, and modeling of acoustic wave propagation in non-uniform media. Fluid-structure interaction illustrates a complex system between a fluid and a solid, where a movable and deformable structure is surrounded by fluid flow, and its deformation caused by fluid affects the fluid flow interactively. To simulate this system, two coupling schemes are developed: 1) iterative implicit coupling, and 2) explicit coupling based on Robin-Neumann boundary conditions. A comprehensive verification strategy of the developed methodology is presented, including a comparison with benchmark flow solutions, h-, p- and temporal refinement studies. Simulation of a turbulent flow in a channel interacting with a compliant wall is attempted as well. Another problem I consider is when a solid is stationary, but a heat transfer occurs on the fluid-solid interface. To model this problem, a conjugate heat transfer framework is introduced. Validation of the framework, as well as studies of an interior thermal environment in a building regulated by an HVAC system with an on/off control model with precooling and multi-zone precooling strategies are presented. The final part of this thesis is devoted to modeling an interaction of acoustic waves with the fluid flow. The development of a spectral-element methodology for solution of Lighthill’s equation, and its application to a problem of leak detection in water pipes is presented.
ContributorsXu, Yiqin (Author) / Peet, Yulia (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Huei-Ping (Committee member) / Herrmann, Marcus (Committee member) / Adrian, Ronald (Committee member) / Baer, Steven (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The desorption process is widely used in numerous fields such as drying, thermal energy storage, dehumidification, etc. but due to the long duration and low efficiency of the process, ultrasound has been widely used to enhance the desorption. There are a lot of studies carried out in this area but due to the experimentation time and cost computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations provide an effective and cheaper way to studying the desorption process. This research aims to develop a CFD model using ANSYS Fluent for the desorption of water from zeolite-13X in the presence and absence of ultrasound as experimentally done by Daghooghi-Mobarakeh et al. The simulation results show very good agreement (error less than 1%) with the experimental results for the desorption process without ultrasound. It was found later that it is not possible to simulate the ultrasound-assisted desorption due to the computational burden imposed by the very small time step required. Hence, to study the effect of pressure induced by ultrasound the pressure term in the simulation is added/subtracted by the pressure induced by the ultrasound to determine its effects. There is no change in the desorption curve because the induced pressure is 975 Pa which is less than 1% of the fluid pressure which is equal to 101325 Pa. Also, the effects of thermal conductivity, surface diffusion and its activation energy are explored. The increase in thermal conductivity and surface diffusion enhances desorption while an increase in activation energy decreases desorption rate.
ContributorsBalakrishnamurthi, Sarvesh (Author) / Phelan, Patrick Dr (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Huei-Ping Dr (Committee member) / Calhoun, Ronald Dr (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Desorption processes are an important part of all processes which involve utilization of solid adsorbents such as adsorption cooling, sorption thermal energy storage, and drying and dehumidification processes and are inherently energy-intensive. Here, how those energy requirements can be reduced through the application of ultrasound for three widely used adsorbents namely zeolite 13X, activated alumina and silica gel is investigated. To determine and justify the effectiveness of incorporating ultrasound from an energy-savings point of view, an approach of constant overall input power of 20 and 25 W was adopted. To measure the extent of the effectiveness of using ultrasound, the ultrasonic-power-to-total power ratios of 0.2, 0.25, 0.4 and 0.5 were investigated and the results compared with those of no-ultrasound (heat only) at the same total power. Duplicate experiments were performed at three nominal frequencies of 28, 40 and 80 kHz to observe the influence of frequency on regeneration dynamics. Regarding moisture removal, application of ultrasound results in higher desorption rate compared to a non-ultrasound process. A nonlinear inverse proportionality was observed between the effectiveness of ultrasound and the frequency at which it is applied. Based on the variation of desorption dynamics with ultrasonic power and frequency, three mechanisms of reduced adsorbate adsorption potential, increased adsorbate surface energy and enhanced mass diffusion are proposed. Two analytical models that describe the desorption process were developed based on the experimental data from which novel efficiency metrics were proposed, which can be employed to justify incorporating ultrasound in regeneration and drying processes.
ContributorsDaghooghi Mobarakeh, Hooman (Author) / Phelan, Patrick (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Liping (Committee member) / Wang, Robert (Committee member) / Calhoun, Ronald (Committee member) / Deng, Shuguang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021