Design and construction

As puzzle-driven, character based games, Portal and Portal 2, developed by the Valve Corporation, are not only pioneering in their use of narrative, but they also revolutionize the function of aporia. This thesis explores the role of aporia and use of the narrative in the two video games. It will be argued that the games possess a rigid narrative structure, but while the narrative serves as a peripheral construction, there are other structures that contribute to the experience of gameplay. The research aims to determine how the games adapt narrative and use it in combination with other elements to move beyond simple play and storytelling. As video games become more widely studied in academia, it is important that they merit and maintain standing ; Portal and Portal 2 not only provide a rich gameplay experience, but also offer a particular interaction not found in other texts.

Though several clinical monitoring ways exist and have been applied to detect cardiac atril fibrillation (A-Fib) and other arrhythmia, these medical interventions and the ensuing clinical treatments are after the fact and costly. Current portable healthcare monitoring systems come in the form of Ambulatory Event Monitors. They are small, battery-operated electrocardiograph devices used to record the heart's rhythm and activity. However, they are not energy-aware ; they are not personalized ; they require long battery life, and ultimately fall short on delivering real-time continuous detection of arrhythmia and specifically progressive development of cardiac A-Fib. The focus of this dissertation is the design of a class of adaptive and efficient energy-aware real-time detection models for monitoring, early real-time detection and reporting of progressive development of cardiac A-Fib.... The design promises to have a greater positive public health impact from predicting A-Fib and providing a viable approach to meeting the energy needs of current and future real-time monitoring, detecting and reporting required in wearable computing healthcare applications that are constrained by scarce energy resources.

The incorporation of an ejector refrigeration cycle with a high temperature PEM fuel cell (HT-PEMFC) presents a novel approach to combined heat and power (CHP) applications. An ejector refrigeration system (ERS) can enhance the flexibility of a CHP system by providing an additional means of utilizing the fuel cell waste heat besides domestic hot water (DHW) heating. This study looks into the performance gains that can be attained by incorporating ejector refrigeration with HT-PEMFC micro-CHP (mCHP) systems (1 to 5kWe). The effectiveness of the ERS in utilizing fuel cell waste heat is studied as is the relulting enhancement to overall system efficiency. A test rig specially constructed to evaluate an ERS under simulated HT-PEMFC conditions is used to test the concept and verify modeling predictions. In addition, two separate analytical models were constructed to simulate the ERS test rig and a HT-PEMFC/ERS mCHP system. The ERS test rig was simulated using a Matlab based model, while two residential sized HT-PEMFC/ERS mCHP systems were simulated using a Simulink model. Using U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) air conditioning and DHW load profiles, as well as data collected from a large residential monitoring study in Florida, the Simulink model provides the results in system efficiency gain associated with supporting residential space cooling and water heating loads. It was found that incorporation of an ERS increased the efficiency of a HT-PEMFC mCHP system by 8 t0 10 percentage points over just using the fuel cell waste heat for DHW. In addition, results from the Matlab ERS test rig model were shown to match well with experimental results.

The development and experimental testing of the DUKW-Ling amphibious vehicle was performed during the first phase of an autonomous amphibious vehicle system development project. The DUKW-Ling is a 1/7th scale model of a cargo transport concept vehicle. The vehicle was tested in the three regions it is required to operate: land, sea and the surf zone region. Vehicle characteristics such as turning radii, yaw rate and velocities were found for different motor inputs on land and water. Also, because a vehicle navigating the surf zone is a new area of research that lacks experimental data the vehicle was tested in the breaking waves of the surf zone and its motion characteristics were found, as well as the drivetrain forces required to perform this transition. Maneuvering tests provided data that was used to estimate a model for future autonomous control efforts for both land and water navigation.

Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) 2010 methodology for freeway operations contain procedures for calculating traffic performance measures both for undersaturated and oversaturated flow conditions. However, one of the limitations regarding oversaturated freeway weaving segments is that the HCM procedures have not been extensively calibrated based on field observations on U.S. freeways. This study validates the HCM2010 methodology for oversaturated freeway weaving segment by comparing space mean speed and density obtained from HCM procedure to those generated by a microsimulation model. A VISSIM model is extensively calibrated and validated based on NGSIM field data for the US 101 Highway. Abundance of the NGSIM data is utilized to calibrate and validate the VISSIM model. Results show that HCM methodology has significant limitations and while in some cases it can reproduce density correctly, the study finds that speeds estimated by the HCM methodology significantly differ from those observed in the field.

The impingement of supersonic jets on surfaces is of interest because of its important application to jet blast deflectors (JBD), and short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft (STOVL) during hover. Typically, on an aircraft carrier deck, the impingement of the jet blast on the deflector generates impingement tones, and structural vibrations, not only on the JBD but also on the ship deck. Therefore, apart from direct transmission of jet noise to the gallery level, there is a component of noise transmitted due to the impingement of the jet on the JBD. The objectives of this work are to study the pressure spectra (i) on a flat plate, and separately on a cone due to axisymmetric impingement of a supersonic underexpanded cold jet issuing from a convergent-divergent nozzle and (ii) on a plane jet impinging on a finite plate and an adjoining ground plane due to the impingement of a planar jet on the plate. The characteristics of the surface pressure fluctuations are numerically investiga ted using WIND-US 2.0. The time-dependent, compressible Euler equations for perfect gas are employed for the present computations. The impingement distance between the jet nozzle and the deflector plate, and the plate inclination with respect to the incident jet are varied. The impingement zone stagnation bubble and a high-speed radial jet with several embedded structures (shocklets) were identified on the perpendicular plate. Flows involving cones reveal the presence of detached cone shocks, enclosing a recirculation zone. The location and magnitude of the peak pressure on the cone surface are a strong function of the cone apex angle. For the two-dimensional jet impingement on angled plate the peak value of pressure occurs at normal jet impingement. The pressure at the intersection point of the plate and the ground plane is sometimes higher than the peak pressure on the plate. Beyond this point there is a sharp decrease in pressure. As the flow accelerates, an oblique shock is

In the last decades, population growth has been outpacing transportation infrastructure growth, and today's transportation professionals are challenged to meet the mobility needs of an increasing population. The effectiveness of the transportation system is an essential constituent of people's daily lives as they commute between different points of interest. Studies show that at many highway junctions, congestion continues to worsen, and drivers are experiencing greater delays and higher risk exposures. Engineers have very little resources to handle this increase in population. One solution to resolve and alleviate congestion due to increasing traffic volumes and travel demands relies in implementing alternative designs. This approach will help traffic engineers determine which design will be the most appropriate for a particular location. This study compares and evaluates the Diverging Diamond Interchange (DDI), which is an unconventional design, to Partial Cloverleaf (ParClo) types A4 and B4 interchange designs by evaluating different Measure of Effectiveness (MOEs). Using microsimulation platform AIMSUN, each interchange type was evaluated for low, medium and high traffic flows. The analysis revealed that the DDI with four through lanes performed better than the ParClo A4 for unbalanced conditions, the DDI with six though lanes had similar results as the ParClo B4 for very high volumes. In terms of queue, the DDI design had a much better performance. The results from the analysis help in providing guidelines to the decision makers for selecting the best alternative in terms of performance.

This work presents the development of the Statistical Location-Assisted Broadcast (SLAB) protocol, a multi-hop wireless broadcast protocol designed for vehicular ad-hoc networking (VANET). Vehicular networking is an important emerging application of wireless communications. Data dissemination applications using VANET promote the ability for vehicles to share information with each other and the wide-area network with the goal of improving navigation, fuel consumption, public safety, and entertainment. A critical component of these data dissemination schemes is the multi-hop wireless broadcast protocol. Multi-hop broadcast protocols for these schemes must reliably deliver broadcast packets to vehicles in a geographically bounded region while consuming as little wireless bandwidth as possible. This work contains substantial research results related to development of multi-hop broadcast protocols for VANET, culminating in the design of SLAB. Many preliminary research and development efforts have been required to arrive at SLAB. First, a high-level wireless broadcast simulation tool called WiBDAT is developed. Next, a manual optimization procedure is proposed to create efficient threshold functions for statistical broadcast protocols. This procedure is then employed to design the Distribution-Adaptive Distance with Channel Quality (DADCQ) broadcast protocol, a preliminary cousin of SLAB. DADCQ is highly adaptive to node density, node spatial distribution pattern, and wireless channel quality in realistic VANET scenarios. However, the manual design process used to create DADCQ has a few deficiencies. In response to these problems, an automated design procedure is created that uses a black-box global optimization algorithm to search for efficient threshold functions that are evaluated using WiBDAT. SLAB is finally designed using this procedure.

Marine current turbines are submerged structures and subjected to loading conditions from both the currents and wave effects. The associated phenomena posed significant challenge to the analyses of the loading response of the rotor blades and practical limitations in terms of device location and operational envelopes. The effect of waves on marine current turbines can contribute to the change of flow field and pressure field around the rotor and hence changes the fluid forces on the rotor. However, the effect of the waves on the rotor depends on the magnitude and direction of flow velocity that is induced by the waves. An analysis is presented for predicting the torque, thrust, and bending moments resulting from the wave-current interactions at the root of rotor blades in a horizontal axis marine current turbine using the blade element-momentum (BEM) theory combined with linear wave theory. Parametric studies are carried out to better understand the influence of important parameters , which include wave height, wave frequency, and tip-speed ratio on the performance of the rotor. The periodic loading on the blade due to the steady spatial variation of current speeds over the rotor swept area is determined by a limited number of parameters, including Reynolds number, lift and drag coefficients, thrust and torque coefficients, and power coefficient. The results established that the BEM theory combined with linear wave theory can be used to analyze the wavecurrent interactions in full-scale marine current turbine. The power and thrust coefficients can be analyzed effectively using the numerical BEM theory in conjunction with corrections to the tip loss coefficient and 3D effects.

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is composed of low-cost electronic devices with sensing, data storage and transmitting capabilities, powered by batteries. There are extensive studies in the field of WSN investigating different algorithms and protocols for data collection. A data collector can be static or mobile. Using a mobile data collector can extend network lifetime and can be used to collect sensor data in hardly accessible locations, partitioned networks, and delay-tolerant networks. The implementation of the mobile data collector in our study consists of combining two different platforms: the Crossbow sensor hardware and the NXT Legos. We developed an application for data collection and sensor querying support. Another important contribution is designing a semi-autonomous robot control. This hardware prototype implementation shows the benefits of using a mobile data collector in WSN. It also serves as a reference in developing future applications for mobile WSNs.