Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Node Filtering And Face Routing For Sensor Network, Umang Amatya

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Greedy forward routing and face routing algorithms have been extensively used for sending messages in sensor networks. In this thesis, we consider the problem of filtering redundant nodes in a sensor network as a pre-processing step for face routing. We propose two algorithms for identifying redundant nodes. We test the performance of proposed filtering algorithms on generated networks. The prototype algorithm for testing the proposed algorithms has been implemented in the Java programming language. Experimental investigation shows that the proposed filtering algorithms are effective in removing redundant nodes without compromising the network connectivity.

Basic Research On The Characteristics Of A Constricted Pulsed Glow Discharge, Sean Daniel Andersen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In certain plasma discharge experiments, it has been observed that under specific conditions a plasma glow discharge column tends to seek the central location of the discharge electrodes away from the electrode edges and chamber walls. Further, the column appears to have the properties of a stabilized equilibrium plasma pinch in a glow (non-arc-like) state. This is unusual since, normally field enhancements occur on edges resulting in arc-like discharge breakdown. Also, the column of plasma that protrudes from the anode emits highly intense, non-uniform light that is uncharacteristically bright for a glow discharge.

The main purpose of this thesis is …

Effects Of Moisture Augmentation Of Municipal Solid Waste Through Addition Of Food Waste Or Wastewater Treatment Biosolids On Bio-Gas Formation For Power Generation, Jared Michael Gore

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An investigation into the effect of moisture augmentation by manipulation of food waste proportion or wastewater treatment plant biosolids proportion was undertaken to determine the effects on production of methane and other biogases from municipal solid waste (MSW). Laboratory microcosm experiments were performed to determine the effect of various proportions of influent waste streams on the production of biogas. Results indicated that moisture augmentation through the addition of food waste to MSW increases the overall bio-gas and hydrogen gas formed during fermentation. Moisture augmentation through addition of wastewater treatment bio-solids lead to inconclusive results. Addition of food waste to MSW …

Determining The Motion And Location Of The Frenchman Mountain Fault, Las Vegas, Nevada: A Paired Basin Analysis And Structural Analysis, Laura Margaret Eaton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Understanding the evolution of large-scale fault systems remains a challenge to geologists and is of critical importance in understanding the dynamics of larger plate tectonic interactions. I mapped the southwestern Frenchman Mountain Fault (FMF), conducted a basin analysis of units in the footwall of the fault, and measured kinematic indicators along the fault zone in order to constrain fault offset, magnitude, and timing in an attempt to further our understanding of these systems.

My findings include: 1) the presence of vertical and sub-vertical slickenlines on southwest dipping fault surfaces indicative of normal sense offset; 2) relatively little lateral variation in …

Paleoseismic Study Of The Stewart Valley And Northern Pahrump Segments Of The Stateline Fault System, Nevada, Jonathan Carter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Stateline fault system (SFS) is a ~200 km long zone of dextral faults running NW along the NV/CA border from Primm, Nevada to Amargosa Valley in the western Central Basin and Range province (CBR). Because of size and proximity, the SFS poses a hazard to the 2.5 million people, most of who live within 10 km, in Pahrump, Nevada and within 40 km, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The goals of this thesis are to (1) understand if the SFS is accommodating faulting slip change in the CBR; (2) test the along strike continuity of the SFS in Pahrump and …

Non-Blocking Concurrent Operations On Heap, Mahesh Acharya

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We present a non-blocking implementation for the concurrent Heap data structure in the asynchronous shared memory system. The system may be a traditional one with a single processor with multiple threads, or it may be the one with multiple processors each possibly with multiple threads. Our implementation supports readMin, deleteMin, and insert operations on the heap. The deleteMin and insert operations are non-blocking operations, whereas the readMin is wait-free. One easy approach of using a heap in multi-threading environment could be by locking the entire heap before performing any operation. This would make the implementation very slow to have any …

Numerical And Experimental Investigation Of The Stability Region For A Cylindrical Ion Trap, Bradley Steven Clarke

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The stability diagram provides a useful tool for determining the appropriate AC biased potential to confine ions in an ion trap. Since no analytic solution exists for the cylindrical ion trap's (CIT's) equations of motion, the CIT's stability region is not well known. The objective of this thesis is to determine the stability region for a CIT numerically and experimentally. The equations of motion for ions confined in a CIT are derived and found to be similar to the Mathieu equation, i.e. the equation that describes ion motion in a hyperbolic ion trap (HIT). Because of the similarities in the …

Degree Constrained Triangulation, Roshan Gyawali

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Triangulation of simple polygons or sets of points in two dimensions is a widely investigated problem in computational geometry. Some researchers have considered variations of triangulation problems that include minimum weight triangulation, de-launay triangulation and triangulation refinement. In this thesis we consider a constrained version of the triangulation problem that asks for triangulating a given domain (polygon or point sites) so that the resulting triangulation has an increased number of even degree vertices. This problem is called Degree Constrained Triangulation (DCT). We propose four algorithms to solve DCT problems. We also present experimental results based on the implementation of the …

Evaluating Actinide Sorption To Graphite With Regards To Triso Repository Performance, Corey Christopher Keith

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Graphite has the potential for inclusion in nuclear waste for disposal in waste repository settings. Implementation of High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors contributes to this potential through use of TRISO fuel, if direct disposal of the graphite matrix surrounding the fuel is employed. The inclusion of the large mass and volume in the TRISO fuel waste form differs significantly from used light water reactor fuel waste forms, requiring new performance models to describe the behavior in a repository setting. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the potential for the graphite to improve actinide, specifically uranium and neptunium, retardation from …

Petrogenesis Of The Linked River Mountains Volcanic Section And Wilson Ridge Pluton, Denise Kelly Honn

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The River Mountains (RM) volcanic suite and Wilson Ridge pluton (WRP), in the northern Colorado River extensional corridor of southern Nevada and northwestern Arizona, provide an ideal opportunity to investigate one of the most fundamental questions in igneous petrology: Do volcanic rocks erupt from subjacent plutons and do plutons vent to form volcanic fields? The RM volcanic suite (14.47± 0.26 to 12.66 ± 0.54 Ma; uncertainties are 2sigma) consists of a stack of andesite and rhyolite sills beneath a stratovolcano that primarily erupted dacite with lesser volumes of basalt and rhyolite. This volcanic suite is cored by a multiphase quartz …

Message Passing Algorithm For Different Problems Sum, Mean, Guide And Sorting In A Rooted Tree Network., Sabaresh Nageswara Rao Maddula

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this thesis, we give message passing algorithms in distributed environment for five different problems of a rooted tree having n nodes. In the first algorithm, every node has a value; the root calculates the sum of those values, and sends it to all the nodes in the network. In the second algorithm, the root computes the value of mean of values of all the nodes, and sends it to all nodes of the network. The third algorithm calculates the guide pairs. Guide pair of a node x is an ordered pair (pre_index(x), post_index(x)), where pre_index(x) and post_index(x) are the …

Impact Of Secondary Treatment Types And Sludge Handling Processes On Estrogen Concentration In Wastewater Sludge, Erica J. Marti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs), such as estrogen, are known to be present in the aquatic environment at concentrations that negatively affect fish and other wildlife. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are major contributors of EDCs into the environment. EDCs are released via effluent discharge and land application of biosolids. Estrogen removal in WWTPs has been studied in the aqueous phase; however, few researchers have determined estrogen concentration in sludge. This study focuses on estrogen concentration in wastewater sludge as a result of secondary treatment types and sludge handling processes. Grab samples were collected before and after multiple treatment steps at two WWTPs …

Modeling Of Cellular Automata And Agent-Based Complex Systems, Sara Pallekonda

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The term 'complex systems' may sound terrifying whenever you come across it as it depicts an overall collective structure which indeed can live up to its name; but when you comprehend the system at its fundamental level by stripping to its simpler multiple- interacting individual parts, the insights it provides may be used to describe and understand different problems ranging from atomic particles to the economics of societies and evolution. The simple laws can be used to simulate the behaviors of disparate complex systems.

In this thesis, a brief study is done emulating few such complex systems through programming techniques …

Cpu Scheduling For Power/Energy Management On Heterogeneous Multicore Processors, Rajesh Patel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Power and energy have become increasingly important concerns in the design and implementation of today's multicore/manycore chips. Many methods have been proposed to reduce a microprocessor's power usage and associated heat dissipation, including scaling a core's operating frequency. However, these techniques do not consider the dynamic performance characteristics of an executing process at runtime, the execution characteristics of the entire task to which this process belongs, the process's priority, the process's cache miss/cache reference ratio, the number of context switches and CPU migrations generated by the process, nor the system load. Also, many of the techniques that employ dynamic frequency …

Post Processing Of Optically Recognized Text Via Second Order Hidden Markov Model, Srijana Poudel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this thesis, we describe a postprocessing system on Optical Character Recognition(OCR) generated text. Second Order Hidden Markov Model (HMM) approach is used to detect and correct the OCR related errors. The reason for choosing the 2nd order HMM is to keep track of the bigrams so that the model can represent the system more accurately. Based on experiments with training data of 159,733 characters and testing of 5,688 characters, the model was able to correct 43.38 % of the errors with a precision of 75.34 %. However, the precision value indicates that the model

introduced some new errors, decreasing …

Image Processing With Cuda, Jia Jun Tse

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis puts to the test the power of parallel computing on the GPU against the massive computations needed in image processing of large images. The GPU has long been used to accelerate 3D applications. With the advent of high level programmable interfaces, programming to the GPU is simplied and is being used to accelerate a wider class of applications. More specically, this thesis focuses on CUDA as its parallel programming platform.

This thesis explores on the possible performance gains that can be achieved by using CUDA on image processing. Two well known algorithms for image blurring and edge detection …

Analysis Of Bank Failure And Size Of Assets, Guancun Zhong

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The financial health of the banking industry is an important prerequisite for economic stability and growth. Bank failures in the United States have run in cycles largely associated with the collapse of economic bubbles. The number of bank failures has increased dramatically over the last thirty years (Halling and Hayden, 2007). In this thesis, we try to address the following two questions: 1) What is the relationship, if any, between a bank's asset size and its likelihood of failures? 2) How can we use statistical tools to predict the numbers of bank failures in the future? Various modeling techniques are …

Special Edition: National Clean Energy Summit, Nevada Institute For Renewable Energy Commercialization (Nirec)

Nevada Newsflash

Young Professionals in Energy–Nevada recently gathered for an up-to-the-day report on renewable energy at UNLV’s LEED-certified Science and Engineering Building given by Associate Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research Tom Piechota—just hours after President Obama appeared on campus in support of higher education.

Piechota, who also heads UNLV’s Urban Sustainability Initiative (and is this author’s boss in that capacity), covered all the overlapping curriculum and research going on. Of about 400 total research projects university-wide, 142 involve clean energy, water or environmental science – some at the nexus of all three. Department of Energy remains the biggest source of funding, along …

Take Pride In America Phase Iii: Quarterly Progress Report, Period Covering April 25, 2012-July 24, 2012, Margaret N. Rees

Anti-littering Programs

• The GIS database continued to be populated with data.
• Hector’s Helpers added an additional youth group.
• The new website launched and social media efforts began.
• The pilot testing of the litter monitoring program continued.

The University of Nevada Las Vegas Public Lands Institute (PLI) designed the Take Pride in America (TPIA) Phase III work plan based on the strategic plan developed by the Southern Nevada Agency Partnership (SNAP) anti-litter and desert dumping team during Phase II of the program.

Angular And Dynamical Properties In Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering: Case Study Of Chlorine-Containing Molecules, Renaud Guillemin, Wayne C. Stolte, Loic Journel, Stephane Carniato, Maria Novella Piancastelli, Dennis W. Lindle, Marc Simon

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Research

Polarization-dependent resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) has been shown to be a probe of molecular-field effects on the electronic structure of isolated molecules. In this experimental analysis we explain the linear dichroism observed in Cl 2p polarized RIXS following Cl 1s excitation of a series of chlorofluoromethanes (CF3Cl, CF2Cl2, CFCl3, and CCl4) as due to molecular-field effects, including singlet-triplet exchange. We present an approach to extract directly the 2p inner-shell electronic state populations from the experimental measurements. Using the angular properties of the measured KV emission we also are able to determine the value of the polarization anisotropy parameter βp …

Walking Box Ranch Planning And Design Quarterly Progress Report: Period Ending July 10, 2012, Margaret N. Rees

Walking Box Ranch

• BLM informed UNLV that after investigating a concession contract as the appropriate BLM document for the future operating partner, they have concluded that an operating agreement is the preferred document and they are proceeding to complete such an agreement as soon as possible.
• Following a visit to the ranch with BLM, UNLV has completed temporary repairs to ranch house windows, which should mitigate deterioration of the ranch house from water
• UNLV participated in a one-half day meeting with BLM to review Condit’s Extended Content Package #1. As a result of the lack of progress by Condit, UNLV was requested to …

Hrc Enews — 2012 Summer, Megan M. Iudice

Publications (HRC)

This issue contains staff accomplishments and announcements, event listings, and a "new faces" listing for new staff, affiliates, and researchers.

Nevada Interagency Volunteer Program: Helping Hands Across Public Lands: Phase Ii: Period Covering April 1, 2012 To June 30, 2012, Margaret N. Rees

Get Outdoors Nevada

• The number of records in the volunteer database increased by 14.4% over the last quarter. The database now contains 8,087 records.
• Results show an average of 956 visits per month, and an average of 3,015 pages viewed per month.
• Get Outdoors Nevada supplied 11 volunteer events in a variety of ways. These events utilized 388 volunteers who contributed approximately 1,351 hours of service.
• The team continues planning an alternative bus tour.
• The team is negotiating a media plan, to be rolled out in July.
• The IVP team has stated planning for the annual volunteer recognition banquet.
• One volunteer training was …

Estimating Annual Precipitation For The Colorado River Basin Using Oceanic-Atmospheric Oscillations, Ajay Kalra, Sajjad Ahmad

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

Estimating long-lead time precipitation under the stress of increased climatic variability is a challenging task in the field of hydrology. A modified Support Vector Machine (SVM) based framework is proposed to estimate annual precipitation using oceanic-atmospheric oscillations. Oceanic-atmospheric oscillations, consisting of Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) for a period of 1900–2008, are used to generate annual precipitation estimates with a 1 year lead time. The SVM model is applied to 17 climate divisions encompassing the Colorado River Basin in the western United States. The overall results revealed that …

Let Us Buy You Coffee!, Nevada Institute For Renewable Energy Commercialization (Nirec)

Nevada Newsflash

NIREC is a nonprofit organization that helps Nevada's entrepreneurs to build their businesses. We'd like to better understand the biggest challenges that currently face entrepreneurs, so that we can work on fixing them more effectively.

Pv Costs Overestimated - High-Impact Innovation, Nevada Institute For Renewable Energy Commercialization (Nirec)

Nevada Newsflash

Current accounting methods often over-estimate the lifetime costs of generating electricity from solar panels, according to “Reconsidering the Economics of Photovoltaic Power.” This new working paper, written by 10 authors with insight into the economics of solar power, appeared on the website Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

Nevada Grown, Cutting Edge Clean Energy Innovation Please, Nevada Institute For Renewable Energy Commercialization (Nirec)

Nevada Newsflash

The Nevada chapter of Young Professionals in Energy (YPE Nevada) seeks to facilitate the advancement of mid-career energy professionals in the state of Nevada through social, educational, vocational and community service events. YPE Nevada aims to build a cohesive network of energy professionals from students to retired executives, and to create an environment where members can learn from each other’s experiences, share industry knowledge and discuss career matters. By expanding networking between the state’s energy professionals, it aims to enhance entrepreneurial activity.

Unlv Students To Build Zero Net Energy Home; Boom & Bust Report, Nevada Institute For Renewable Energy Commercialization (Nirec)

Nevada Newsflash

Design and build an approximately 800 square foot home that consumes zero net energy.

Those are the instructions for Team Las Vegas, after the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) became one of only 20 schools worldwide to quality for the 2013 Solar Decathlon, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

UNLV’s entry, Autonomy House, is marketed as an “age-in-place” home for an empty nester whose children have grown up. The 730-squarefoot home will use daylighting from windows, insulation and solar panels to produce more energy than it consumes. Additionally, it will filter rainwater for household …

Join Nevada's Newly Formed Networking Group For All Energy Professionals, Nevada Institute For Renewable Energy Commercialization (Nirec)

Nevada Newsflash

“YPE Nevada is designed to engage Nevada’s mid-career energy professionals through a variety of career-related, community service, professional education and social events to be scheduled across the entire state. ” said YPE Nevada Board Member Walt Borland, the President and CEO of NIREC that is sponsoring the launch of the new chapter. “And, we expect that this enhanced interaction will help to drive more energy-related entrepreneurial activity in Nevada.”

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2012, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Senior Design Experience

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the Senior Design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. Working in teams, the senior design project encourages students to use everything learned in the engineering and computer design programs to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

Beyond the classroom...

Because of the requirement to work in teams, students also build good communication skills, presentation skills and even business writing skills. They also have to source …