Browsing by Subject "design"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 14
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    Building positive learning experiences through pedagogical research guide design
    (2018) Lee, Yoo Young; Lowe, M. Sara
    Library research guides are traditionally designed in a pathfinder-style format by resource type. However, would a pedagogical-style guide, which moves students through the research process, better support the student learning experience? This study sought to answer the question: Which guide design best supports the student information literacy learning experience outside of a classroom setting? This article reports results of a usability study (n=22) of first-year to graduate students who interacted with either a pedagogical or pathfinder-style research guide through a simulated research assignment. Results indicate that although there is no statistically significant performance difference between guide type, students using the pedagogical guide reported a more positive experience than those using the pathfinder guide. As a result, this led them to spend more time on, interact more with, and consult more resources on the research guide. Librarians who wish to enhance the usability of research guides may get greater student engagement by designing their guides pedagogically.
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    Configuration Analysis and Design of a Wind Turbine With Hydrostatic Transmission System
    (ASME, 2016-11) Deldar, Majid; Izadian, Afshin; Anwar, Sohel; Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    This paper presents a methodology for designing and dimensioning of hydrostatic transmission system (HTS) configurations for wind turbines. HTS provides an alternative method to the gearbox in wind power applications. It decouples the turbine and the generator such that the generator can be driven at synchronous speed regardless of wind speed variation. A comparison of different HTS configurations shows that the functionality and performance of the proposed system depends on proper dimensioning of hydraulic components and the circuit configuration. Practical constraints of wind turbine and hydraulic technologies are considered in the design to configure an industrial scale system. The design objectives include obtaining the maximum system efficiency at the rated and high efficiency at partial load. Different hydrostatic systems were designed and simulated to show potentials for improving the overall efficiency of wind power using HTS. It was shown that the larger swept area and moderate speed generator improve efficiency of hydrostatic drivetrain. Optimization of the entire HTSWT can improve output power from a HTSWT to an extent that its annual energy production (AEP) becomes closely equal to AEP of a geared WT.
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    Design for Social Change: A Pedagogical Approach to Prepare Students for Human-centered Design Practice
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Napier, Pamela
    The discipline of design is changing. Today more than ever, there is a growing need for designers to utilize their skills, methods and processes to address complex social challenges. In order to be prepared for this evolving landscape, designers of today must value and carry out a human-centered approach—putting the needs and concerns of people first—and shape design activities that enable and empower people to express, make, evaluate and collaborate in order to creatively solve problems and develop meaningful solutions. Today, design students are being required to expand their skill sets to include design facilitation, and a deep understanding of practicing human-centered, participatory design. Due to this shift in mindset and approach for social innovation, the design education community must be continuously seeking ways to teach these emerging skill sets and provide learning experiences that prepare students to be successful in today’s professional design context. With this focus, research was conducted to shape a process and approach for allowing students to work in real contexts with real people, and build new skills for designing for social change. This poster will describe a pedagogical approach that utilizes a human-centered process to help students select, develop and deploy participatory design methods in order to identify and frame social challenges. In addition, this approach teaches students to collaborate with stakeholders while generating, prototyping and evaluating solutions to those challenges. For this research, visual communication design students engaged in this process for a social design project in their senior-level studio course, VC5: Design Methods for Innovation. The pedagogical approach, process, project outline, student outcomes, and challenges/implications for future research will be highlighted.
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    Design of Self-Supported 3D Printed Parts for Fused Deposition Modeling
    (ASME, 2016-08) Lischke, Fabian; Tovar, Andres; Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    One of the primary challenges faced in Additive Manufacturing (AM) is reducing the overall cost and printing time. A critical factor in cost and time reduction is post-processing of 3D printed (3DP) parts, of which removing support structures is one of the most time consuming steps. Support is needed to prevent the collapse of the part or certain areas under its own weight during the 3D printing process. Currently, the design of self-supported 3DP parts follows a set of empirical guide lines. A trial and error process is needed to produce high quality parts by Fused Depositing Modeling (FDM). The usage of chamfer angle with a max 45° angle form the horizontal for FDM is a common example. Inclined surfaces with a smaller angle are prone to defects, however no theoretical basis has been fully defined, therefore a numerical model is needed. The model can predict the problematic areas at a print, reducing the experimental prints and providing a higher number of usable parts. Physical-based models have not been established due to the generally unknown properties of the material during the AM process. With simulations it is possible to simulate the part at different temperatures with a variety of other parameters that have influence on the behavior of the model. In this research, analytic calculations and physical tests are carried out to determine the material properties of the thermoplastic polymer Acrylonitrile - Butadiene - Styrene (ABS) f or FDM at the time of extrusion. This means that the ABS is going to be extruded at 200°C to 245°C and is a viscous material during part construction. Using the results from the physical and analytical models, i.e., Timoshenko’s modified beam theory for micro-structures, a numerical material model is established to simulate the filament deformation once it is deposited onto the part. Experiments were also used to find the threshold for different geometric specifications, which could then be applied to the numerical model to improve the accuracy of the simulation. The result of the finite element analysis is compared to experiments to show the correlation between the prediction of deflection in simulation and the actual deflection measured in physical experiments. A case study was conducted using an application that optimizes topology of complex geometries. After modeling and simulating the optimized part, areas of defect and errors were determined in the simulation, then verified and and measured with actual 3D prints.
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    Design, Modeling, and Fabrication of a Ventilator Prototype - A Successful Student Project Story
    (ASME, 2021-11) Yeong, Haoyee; Iloeje, Francis; Kindomba, Eli; Folorunso, Sunday; Li, Yafeng; Zhang, Jing; Mechanical and Energy Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    Abstract In this work, we use a group project approach for a group of undergraduate students to design and develop a mechanical ventilator, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A student group project composed of a team of undergraduate students has successfully designed and fabricated a mechanical bag valve mask (BVM) ventilator prototype. It is lightweight with a single controller is driven, capable of volume adjustment, inexpensive, open-source, and designed for ease of fabrication, installation, and operation by the average user. The ventilator prototype also consists of 3D printed components and stored bought hardware. A finite element model was developed to analyze the deformation of the bag valve mask. Finally, the ventilator system is fully tested functioning properly.
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    Exploring Casual COVID-19 Data Visualizations on Twitter: Topics and Challenges
    (MDPI, 2020-09) Trajkova, Milka; Alhakamy, A’aeshah; Cafaro, Francesco; Vedak, Sanika; Mallappa, Rashmi; Kankara, Sreekanth R.; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
    Social networking sites such as Twitter have been a popular choice for people to express their opinions, report real-life events, and provide a perspective on what is happening around the world. In the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have used Twitter to spontaneously share data visualizations from news outlets and government agencies and to post casual data visualizations that they individually crafted. We conducted a Twitter crawl of 5409 visualizations (from the period between 14 April 2020 and 9 May 2020) to capture what people are posting. Our study explores what people are posting, what they retweet the most, and the challenges that may arise when interpreting COVID-19 data visualization on Twitter. Our findings show that multiple factors, such as the source of the data, who created the chart (individual vs. organization), the type of visualization, and the variables on the chart influence the retweet count of the original post. We identify and discuss five challenges that arise when interpreting these casual data visualizations, and discuss recommendations that should be considered by Twitter users while designing COVID-19 data visualizations to facilitate data interpretation and to avoid the spread of misconceptions and confusion.
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    Exploring Social Justice, Design,and HCI
    (ACM, 2016-05) Fox, Sarah; Asad, Mariam; Lo, Katherine; Dimond, Jill; Dombrowski, Lynn; Bardzell, Shaowen; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
    The aim of this one-day workshop is to share existing research, discuss common practices, and to develop new strategies and tools for designing for social justice in HCI. This workshop will bring together a set of HCI scholars, designers, and community members to discuss social justice perspectives on interaction design and technology. We will explore theoretical and methodological approaches in and around HCI that can help us generatively consider issues of power, privilege, and access in their complexity. We will discuss the challenges associated with taking a justice approach in HCI, looking toward existing practices we find both productive and problematic. This workshop will bridge current gaps in research and practice by developing concrete strategies for both designing and evaluating social change oriented work in HCI, where agendas are made clear and researchers are held accountable for the outcomes of their work by members of their field site and the research community.
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    From sequence to structure, to function, and back again: Integrating knowledge-based approaches with physical intuitions for protein folding, binding, and design
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2011-04-08) Zhou, Yaoqi
    Most biological activities are directed and/or regulated by proteins made of a gene-specified sequence of 20 amino-acid residue types. As a result, function or malfunction of specific proteins is responsible for almost all diseases. Proteins perform their function through their unique, self-assembled (folded) three-dimensional structures and through their specific binding to small molecules, to DNA/RNA (e.g. transcription factors that regulate gene expressions), or to other proteins (e.g. molecular recognition in signal transduction). Thus, how to predict the structure of a protein from its amino-acid sequence, discover the function from its structure and, then, design the sequence from its function or structure are the most essential problems in structural biology. In this poster, we will illustrate how the coupling of physical intuitions with learning from structural databases can go a long way toward untangling the complex relation between sequence, structure and function of proteins.
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    Machine Learning and Metamodel-Based Design Optimization of Nonlinear Multimaterial Structures
    (ASME, 2016-08) Liu, Kai; Detwiler, Duane; Tovar, Andres; Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    This study presents an efficient multimaterial design optimization algorithm that is suitable for nonlinear structures. The proposed algorithm consists of three steps: conceptual design generation, design characterization by machine learning, and metamodel-based multi-objective optimization. The conceptual design can be generated from extracting finite element analysis information or by using structure optimization. The conceptual design is then characterized by using machine learning techniques to dramatically reduce the dimension of the design space. Finally, metamodels are derived using Efficient Global Optimization (EGO) followed by multi-objective design optimization to find the optimal material distribution. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using examples from multiple physics and compared with traditional multimaterial topology optimization method.
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    A novel in vitro stretch device for simulating in vivo conditions
    (2018-05) Akella, Arun; El-Mounayri, Hazim
    Biological cells are constantly subjected to mechanical forces such as tension, compression and shear. The importance of these forces in mediating cell signals, maintenance of lineages, promoting embryonic cell differentiation and tissue engineering is only now coming into focus. It has been shown that stretch stimulus can influence growth, differentiation, as well as tissue strength and integrity. Most stretch systems built to understand more of these phenomena suffer from shortcomings, as accurately replicating the in vivo environment is quite challenging. Many of the devices currently available are very expensive as well as limited to a single application. The objective of this thesis is to design, manufacture, test, and validate a novel uniaxial cyclic cell stretch device that overcomes most of the major limitations of existing systems, and to experimentally demostrate that uniaxial cyclic stretch causes a shift towards in vivo characteristics of smooth muscle cells. The stretch mechanism is driven by a single servo motor which makes its operation simple and straight forward. Coolworks Lite, a proprietary software of the servo motor supplier, is used to control the motor and LabVIEW is used to obtain feedback from the sensors. Validation for the stretch machine was done by evaluating the performance of the device against engineering requirements. Methods were suggested to improve shortcomings that were encountered. Also, the machine's unique design allows its extension to a biaxial stretch unit while keeping the same driver platform, a concept for which has been discussed and illustrated.