Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Chemical Engineering

The ill effects of climate change are unfolding in real time, as species and ecosystems face irreversible destruction. Climate action is needed now more than ever, as ambitious targets set by the Paris Agreement seem far-reaching in the wake of global average temperatures above 1.5C over their pre-industrial levels recorded over a continuous 12 month period for the first time. Countries, organizations, and companies alike have pledged to limit their net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to the environment to zero, via nationally determined contributions and corporate net-zero commitments. Such commitments remain unattainable in the absence of guidance like convergent carbon accounting methods, systems models, and roadmapping frameworks. This dissertation seeks to bridge this gap for the chemicals and materials industry (CMI). The chemical industry generates the “hardest to abate” emissions among the industrial sector due to the fixed carbon content of its products. However, as chemical energy carriers such as hydrogen and methanol gain prominence as solutions to the intermittency issues of renewable energy, the net-zero transition of chemicals becomes tied to the net-zero goals of more expansive and ubiquitous industries such as the power sector. The decarbonization of chemicals to this end, requires estimation of material and carbon flows, and baseline emissions of its current global operations. The frameworks in literature lack appropriate structure and comprehensiveness for such analysis, and relevant process and price data are inaccessible and cost prohibitive. We therefore develop an inventory of first principle based, mass balance compliant, publicly available process and cost data for CMI processes, sourced from the public domain. We devise a regression framework capable of handling conflict ridden data, and an algorithm to map resource, intermediate, product, and emission flows of any chemical system with known product capacities. The resulting Global (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Bhavik Bakshi (Advisor); Joel Paulson (Committee Member); Lisa Hall (Committee Member) Subjects: Chemical Engineering; Climate Change; Energy; Engineering; Environmental Engineering; Technology

MDES, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Design

Mid-century designers leveraged post-WWII manufacturing techniques to blend form and function. This thesis demonstrates the similar capability of a designer with an engineering skillset. Following the examples set by past mid-century modern designers, as well as incorporating personal ethics and perspective, a chair design project in injection molding is performed and discussed. The research concludes that engineering methodologies alone in product design are often too limited in defining constraints. Furthermore, some professionals should operate in the same space in which all products live—between engineering and design. Conducting the chair design project inside of this “space between” resulted in an authentic product (one whose aesthetic direction is driven by constraints), faster iteration, and other key advantages.

Committee: Thomas Richard Huston Ph.D. (Committee Member); Peter Chamberlain M.F.A. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Design

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2023, Industrial and Systems Engineering

As automation and technology has grown, machines are no longer tools and new human-machine architectures have emerged that move beyond the definition of a traditional team and are better defined through joint activity. Current design philosophies, such as Human-Centered Design (HCD), continue to look at systems as collections of components, which is insufficient to understand the interdependencies and complexities that are necessary to support these new work architectures. Joint activity design (JAD) has been introduced to fill this gap and explicitly design for joint activity. However, adoption of JAD and similar techniques has been slow, and it is unclear what factors are contributing to this lack of proliferation. In this study, we aimed to determine the challenges for implementation of JAD artifacts and what may have facilitated their use. By analyzing 5 case studies of design projects that span multiple organizations, we found that JAD artifacts were rarely used as intended due to a high cost and a high uncertainty on how to implement them. Whereas these artifacts were often used within smaller subunits, they were rarely used across the larger design function. Across the larger design function, the support was not sufficient to maintain common ground, which exacerbated many of the challenges that resulted in sacrificing the final design's ability to support joint activity. In the future it would be valuable to get a larger selection of cases from other organizations and more evidence needs to be collected on the value of JAD methods over HCD methods.

Committee: David Woods (Committee Member); Michael Rayo (Advisor) Subjects: Design; Engineering; Industrial Engineering; Systems Design

Master of Science, Miami University, 2023, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering

Balancing creativity with a structured approach in engineering design poses a critical challenge, necessitating optimization of each stage to aid in efficiently creating superior products. Functional analysis, a systematic approach defining the design problem, enables comprehensive exploration of the design space. However, critics argue that it requires too many resources, restricts creativity, and imposes high demands on design teams. The goal of this research is to enhance the effectiveness of functional analysis by integrating theories from cognitive research and human-centered design. The proposed method, Natural Cognitive Flow Functional Analysis (NCFFA), aims to promote designers' creative freedom, maintain the quality of the function model, and be accessible to engineering students and professionals alike. A between-subject study involving novice engineers evaluated the effectiveness of NCFFA. Although determining the full effectiveness of NCFFA in terms of enhanced creativity and reduced effort proved challenging, the study found marginal improvement in designers' Flow State, suggesting the potential merit of the NCFFA method for enhancing the designer experience during functional analysis. The study highlights the benefits of incorporating cognitive research and human-centered design principles into functional analysis and paves the way for further research to refine the structured design process.

Committee: Jinjuan She (Advisor); Christopher Wolfe (Committee Member); Sk Khairul Hasan (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Engineering; Mechanical Engineering

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2022, Industrial and Systems Engineering

Decades of cognitive systems engineering research has revealed that implementing human-machine teams into complex environments can consequently result in challenges that negatively impact human-machine teams. Such challenges and conflicts amongst team members can readily be observed in human-machine teams where agents are assigned heterogeneous tasks because the agents' individual goals may have a tendency to conflict and compete with one another in their shared environment. This conflict may also be magnified if the agents of our heterogeneously tasked human-machine team do not share a common goal and are not equipped with the resources to manage their differences. In our study, we set out to determine how the performance of our heterogeneously tasked agents in our simulated human-machine team was impacted in our full-motion video and intelligence analysis. By using joint-performance activity graphs, various statistical analyses, constant comparative analysis, and human-machine teaming heuristic analysis, we were able to determine that the performance of our human-machine team was not significantly different from the performance of our participants who worked alone. This led us to the conclusion that the machine agent insufficiently aided their human agent's decision making during the full motion video analysis and the design of the machine failed to adhere to known Human-Machine Teaming heuristics. Lastly, this holistic analysis revealed that the machine agent acted as if it did not have any knowledge of the ultimate goal of their human agent, and due to its limited capabilities, the machine was unable to contribute information in relation to the overarching goal. Even though the architecture of the human-machine team in this study failed to adhere to various human-machine teaming heuristics, failing to adhere to and implement the team so that both the agents' individual tasks meaningfully contributed the shared goal was determined to be the most criti (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michael Rayo (Advisor); Samantha Krening (Committee Member); Michael Rayo (Committee Member) Subjects: Design; Engineering; Industrial Engineering; Systems Science

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2022, Biology

Tens of millions of American adults and nearly one billion people globally have a disability, with mobility limitations being the most commonly reported type. Most traditional mobility aids are rigid and lose functionality on surfaces that are non-uniform or cluttered with obstacles. Since only about 1% of the total land area in the U.S. is paved or otherwise urbanized, and even less globally, this leaves close to 99% of the terrestrial world inaccessible and unsafe for most people with mobility limitations to navigate. Despite the considerable risk of injury when using ineffective mobility aids, research surrounding their mechanical functionality is little to none. This work contributes targeted biomechanical research on realistic metrics of functionality between features of traditional aids and features inspired by the evolutionary success of biological models. We found that our all-terrain cane end inspired by the biomechanics of animal feet increases stability when compared to a traditional cane, and our study integrating elongate, polypedal locomotor strategies offers insight into more energy efficient and comfortable ways to propel and suspend an all-terrain chair. I also performed market research and customer discovery through my startup, Natraverse, LLC, to ensure our efforts aligned with solving user-relevant challenges. Ultimately, by leveraging techniques from both bio-inspired design and inclusive design, this work serves as a demonstration of the potential of what I call “bio-inspired inclusive design” to innovate in the direction of a more equitable future.

Committee: Henry Astley (Advisor); Peter Niewiarowski (Committee Member); Amanda Booher (Committee Member); Vikram Shyam (Committee Member); Gavin Svenson (Committee Member); John Huss (Committee Member) Subjects: Biology; Biomechanics; Entrepreneurship; Minority and Ethnic Groups

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2019, Civil Engineering

The design of critical buildings must consider extreme load effects from earthquakes, wind and tornado, blast and impact, among others. Many hazardous loads—such as wind pressures, blast impulses, and projectile impacts—originate at the facade system and are transferred via connections to the main structural system and, ultimately, to the foundation; resilient design for such extreme loads requires controlling damage along this load path. This research proposes a multi-hazard facade system (MHFS) design methodology capable of achieving multiple performance objectives for all credible hazards while focusing damage to easily replaceable connectors, thereby reducing operational downtime and repair costs following an extreme event. This methodology is supported by fundamental mechanics and dynamics, nonlinear static and transient analyses at the component, system, and building levels, and quasi-static experimental testing of multi-hazard ductile connectors (MDCs). A probabilistic framework for critical blast scenario parameters is also proposed to promote performance-based blast design for critical infrastructure. Facade-frame interaction during blast scenario analyses suggest adequate performance of typical building frames with MHFS, while seismic analyses suggest interaction that is not necessarily detrimental to performance but should likely be considered during lateral force resisting system (LFRS) design. Analysis of perimeter frame column loss scenarios (which may result from a deliberate explosive attack) indicate the MHFS is capable of substantially supplementing the frame's capacity to redistribute demands to prevent progressive collapse, and the design may be altered to achieve a target floor load. The proposed MHFS is believed to be a practical and effective approach for improving building performance considering extreme events for both new design and retrofit of existing buildings.

Committee: Michael Pollino Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Dario Gasparini Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christian Carloni Ph.D. (Committee Member); Wojbor Woyczynski Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Civil Engineering

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2019, Mechanical Engineering

Access to clean, reliable water is an ongoing issue that affects more than 780 million people worldwide [1]. Multiple variations of water pumps have been installed in developing countries to relieve this issue, but these standard pumps can be unreliable or incapable of reaching sufficient depths underground [2]. Design Outreach (DO) is a non-profit organization who designed an innovative water pump known as LifePump™, to resolve the reliability and depth limitations of standard hand pumps [2]. The LifePump is a progressive cavity pump that is actuated by a manual rotary motion and can reach twice the depth (100 meters) of a standard hand pump [2]. Over the past 5 years, LifePumps have been installed and tested at various times in multiple countries including: Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, South Sudan, and Haiti [2], [3]. In 2018, it was found that a pump installed in Malawi for 3 years had significant handle wear after experiencing higher use (serving an estimated 2000 people) than its normal service life (serving 250 people) [3]. The presence of high utilization and harsh environmental conditions caused extreme deformation and material loss of the LifePump handle stems. The handles currently used on the LifePump include an aluminum stem that is welded onto an aluminum arm. Then, a plastic grip that rotates about the stem is secured on by a threaded screw. Although all of the currently-installed water pumps are still functioning, the excessive wear observed on the handle of the pump in Malawi is unacceptable. The current handle was expected to last approximately 10 years without repair, and now the expected life-span is 5 years. The cost of this 5-year life is approximately $521, and this is higher than the desired cost goals of the device. Therefore, it was determined that a redesign of the handle would be beneficial with the dual goals of reducing the handle's susceptibility to wear and reducing part cost. This thesis analyzes the excessive we (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sandra Metzler (Advisor); Blaine Lilly (Committee Member); Greg Bixler (Committee Member) Subjects: Design; Engineering; Mechanical Engineering

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2018, Mechanical Engineering

APEX, Alternative Perspective for the User Experience, is a two-year collaboration between Ohio State University, ArtCenter College of Design, and Honda R&D Americas, Inc. The purpose of this project was to determine the millennial vision of the future of mobility. Honda tasked student teams at ArtCenter and OSU to design the user experience of an autonomous vehicle interior for millennial women in 2030. The final output of the project was a full-scale functional interior prototype. Honda will validate user experience concepts from this project with millennial women to ensure the APEX experience meets target customer needs and to guide future research. Out of the six project phases, OSU led the latter three which involved the design, implementation, and validation of the high-level interior prototype. The OSU team utilized principles of design thinking and lean startup, as well as project frameworks such as scrum and the V-model, throughout the project. This paper discusses the design, implementation, and testing of the APEX autonomous vehicle interior prototype. The paper will especially focus on management of the resources and technical partners involved in the project, and the integration of the vehicle subsystems into a functioning prototype.

Committee: Shawn Midlam-Mohler (Advisor); Annie Abell (Committee Member) Subjects: Design; Engineering; Mechanical Engineering

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1987, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, Industrial, Interior Visual Communication Design

Studying as a designer and working with engineers revealed differences between the disciplines that affect communication. The increasingly complex problems facing society require specialists to manage. Increased specialization can lead to confusion when communicating across disciplines. Designers and engineers both provide vital services to industry and it is important that they be able to work with each other as effectively as possible. With a focus on the two academic disciplines of design and engineering, I have attempted to explore whether collaboration between the two can be positively impacted. Participants from each field of study were asked to complete a series of evaluations to determine their problem solving tendencies, learning styles, and patterns in thinking. They were then asked to present their problem solving process for approaching a set of complex contemporary issues. Engineers tend to fall into logical and rational thinking patterns and are more likely to be seen as linear thinkers. Designers differ in their approach to problem solving when there is an opportunity for abstract and innovative thinking. A practical application of this information would require the contributions of both designers and engineers throughout the design and development process. Interaction between disciplines should take place in the form of information exchange, discussions, and informal dialogues. These goals can be achieved through common workspaces, support from management, and strong leadership.

Committee: Paul Nini (Advisor); Elizabeth Sanders Ph.D. (Committee Member); Philip Smith Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Design; Engineering

MDES, University of Cincinnati, 2014, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Design

In recent years, the medical device industry has revised its development practices by incorporating the ISO/IEC 62366 (Usability Engineering Process) standard. The standard, purposed to guide industry toward achieving reasonable usability in all medical devices and reduce use errors, heavily emphasizes risk management and has created a large need for usability research and an in-depth understanding of human factors. A common misconception exists that the complexity of identifying, mitigating, and testing for such risk is beyond the usability and human factors components of tradition industrial design. As a result, medical device design teams typically rely on human factors engineers, and in many cases where both disciplines are present, have consequently grayed the understanding of team roles concerning usability engineering. By surveying and performing case studies on design processes used in medical device design, this thesis examines the role of the industrial designer and suggests the best practices for industrial design within the ISO/IEC 62366 standard.

Committee: Steven Doehler M.A. (Committee Chair); Edwin Bills M.Ed. (Committee Member); Soo-Shin Choi M.F.A. (Committee Member); Tony Kawanari M.A. I.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Design

Master of Science (MS), Wright State University, 2013, Human Factors and Industrial/Organizational Psychology MS

Objective: Our purpose was to discuss alternative principles of design (emergent features and perceptual objects) for analogical visual displays, to evaluate the utility of four different displays for a system state identification task, and to compare outcomes to predictions derived from the design principles. Background: An interpretation of previous empirical findings for three displays (bar graph, polar graphic, alpha-numeric) is provided from an emergent features perspective. A fourth display (configural coordinate) was designed to leverage powerful perception-action skills using principles of cognitive systems engineering / ecological interface design (i.e., direct perception). Methods: An experiment was conducted to evaluate these four displays. Primary dependent variables were accuracy and latency. Results: Numerous significant effects were obtained and a clear rank ordering of performance emerged (from best to worst): configural coordinate, bar graph, alpha-numeric, polar graphic. Conclusions: The findings are difficult to reconcile with principles of design based on perceptual objects but perfectly consistent with principles based on emergent features. Limitations of the most effective configural coordinate display are discussed and a redesign is provided to address them. Applications: The principles of ecological interface design that are described here (i.e., the quality of very specific mappings between domain, display, and observer constraints) are applicable to the design of all forms of displays for all work domains.

Committee: Kevin Bennett Ph.D. (Advisor); John Flach Ph.D. (Committee Member); Herb Colle Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Psychology

Master of Science (MS), Wright State University, 2008, Human Factors and Industrial/Organizational Psychology MS

Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle assets are in high demand in the theater of operations for supporting the Global War on Terror and this demand is expected to increase. This work involved exploratory case study research into the envisioned world design problem of networked Predator multi-UAV control, as a candidate for meeting higher Predator sortie requirements without the need for a one for one increase in pilots. The concept involves the development of a potential new position for controlling multiple UAVs, called the Multi-Aircraft Manager (MAM). The goal was to analyze work requirements and develop representational models of the structure of this new work domain and develop an initial MAM display design representation (with a temporal emphasis) as a first hypothesis for an iterative program of evaluation and refinement. An additional goal was to discover and document, through this case study, what analysis methods explored helped to inform the design of the display representations. The MAM Tasking and Timeline Display was ecologically designed and mapped from the MAM cognitive work analysis (CWA) as a hypothesis of the work support the MAM will need to perform multi-aircraft management within a Global Unmanned Air System (UAS) work environment. This display includes timeline, status, and workload management vantages intended to complement the traditional geospatial map-based displays used by UAV pilots. This conceptual low fidelity display was used to both further the discussion of MAM among domain practitioners in a concrete way, enrich the work analysis, as well as to gather more display design requirements. The display concept served as an artifact to assist potential future users of MAM displays in envisioning the possibilities for supporting MAM. This is only the first step in an iterative program of evaluation and display refinement research needed for evolving the MAM vision concept and developing advanced human computer interface (HCI) displays in suppo (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Flach PhD (Committee Chair); Valerie Shalin PhD (Committee Member); Mark Draper PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Design

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Physics

Here I present my work identifying and addressing student difficulties with several materials science and physics topics. In the first part of this thesis, I present my work identifying student difficulties and misconceptions about the directional relationships between net force, velocity, and acceleration in one dimension. This is accomplished primarily through the discussion of the development, validation, and results of implementation of the FVA test, a research-oriented multiple-choice assessment instrument. In the second part of this thesis, I present my work identifying and addressing student difficulties in materials science through the design, implementation, and assessment of group work concept oriented tutorials. These tutorials were designed to mimic the tutorials developed by the University of Washington and the University of Maine and known to be effective in physics education. In addition, these tutorials include several teaching techniques found to be effective in physics education such as multiple representations, cognitive conflict, i.e. elicit-confront-resolve, and student dialog questions. While these tutorials still have a lot of room for improvement, the results suggest that these tutorials and recitation methods are effective in teaching students the difficult and important conceptual materials which they were designed to address. Furthermore, since the general design process used was not specific to that of materials science, there are wider implications that this process may be successful for a wide range of STEM courses. In this second part, I also discuss the development of a second multiple-choice assessment instrument which is designed to be more of an instructional tool, although it has been used for research as well to assess student conceptual understanding of the introductory materials science and engineering course.

Committee: Andrew Heckler PhD (Advisor); Bao Lei PhD (Committee Member); Patton Bruce PhD (Committee Member); Nandini Trivedi PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Educational Tests and Measurements; Materials Science; Physics

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2010, Industrial and Systems Engineering

Research has found many instances of surprises when technological systems are introduced into fields of practice (Woods & Dekker, 2000). These surprises appear in the form of new paths to failures and other side effects of change which are unanticipated by system designers. This thesis suggests that technologists as designers are limited by the ontologies they apply to make sense of the activities in a field of practice, causing the design claims embodied in their designed artifacts to be underspecified and ungrounded, producing the aforementioned surprises. Furthermore, technologists often respond to these surprises by inadvertently steering design down the path of creeping featurism and complexity. This point is illustrated using a design case involving intelligent vehicle automation. The thesis integrates results from the field of cognitive systems engineering to present an ontology which better supports design's human-centered intentions. Finally, a tool is proposed using cognitive systems engineering as ontology to support the design process.

Committee: David Woods (Advisor); Philip Smith (Committee Member) Subjects: Systems Design

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2004, Communication

This dissertation project focused on design practitioners' communicative experiences as they occurred during usability testing in an attempt to isolate and lay out the contradiction that occurs between practitioners' belief in user-centered design (UCD) and their practice of that methodology. Communication was important to study because it is a central aspect of UCD, but the notion that design practitioners perceive communication to be instructive and/or useful as indicated by their design practice has not been well documented and represents an axiom of sorts in the design field. The goals of this research were to trace the contradiction to determine how design practitioners perceive communication between themselves and the users—the UCD rationale—and by extension, to better understand communication's impact upon their subsequent design decisions. The following research questions flowed from this idea: (a) How does the contradiction between design practitioners' values and practices play itself out in their experiences communicating with users to implement UCD in the form of usability testing? (b) What do design practitioners say about the reasons that factor into their decisions to exclude users' suggestions from the final product design? Sense-Making Methodology, a methodology in the tradition of Grounded Theory, was used to isolate contradictory communication behaviors related to design practitioners' belief in UCD and their practice of UCD methodology as represented by usability testing and users' suggestions. Twenty-two in-depth interviews were conducted and Sense-Making's Communication-As-Procedure analytic was used to analyze the data, examining occurrences of contradicting communication behaviors. The results of this exploratory study indicated that communicative tactics seeking connection with and direction from users to validate the product under design, led most often to a design effort that included usability testing and users' suggestions. On the other (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brenda Dervin (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Computer Science, Miami University, 2006, Computer Science and Systems Analysis

Ontologies are an emerging means of knowledge representation that can improve information organization and management in an application. They have demonstrated their value in numerous application areas such as intelligent information integration or information brokering since they offer the technical support for sharing and exchanging information between human and/or software agents. Despite their successes, their time-consuming and expensive development process deters the prevalent use of ontologies. Thus, research is focusing on ways to improve the process of ontology construction which involves recognizing, representing, and recording concept definitions and their relationships. This thesis research investigates existing methods for ontology learning and develops ontology adaptation software architecture for transforming an ontology from one domain to a related or similar domain. Using this software, the SEURAT's Argument Ontology for the domain of software engineering is adapted to create an initial ontology that supports engineering design for the specific problem domain of spacecraft design.

Committee: Valerie Cross (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Business Administration, The Ohio State University, 1970, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2024, Civil Engineering

Conventional lateral force resisting systems such as steel concentrically-braced frame (CBF) and steel moment resisting frames (MRFs) are designed for life safety performance during the design basis earthquake (DBE). The main properties of a CBF system are that it is economical and has considerable strength and stiffness. The system, however, has limited system ductility capacity prior to brace buckling. To remedy the systems shortcoming, A seismic resistant self-centering rocking core with buckling restrained columns (SC-RC-BRC) system, based on a self-centering CBF system, was developed by (Blebo & Roke, 2018) to withstand seismic lateral forces while limiting residual drift and structural damage. The system consists of steel members in a CBF configuration with buckling restrained columns (BRCs) at the first story level. The system can self-center due in part to post-tensioning (PT) bars located vertically along the external columns of the system. The system has suffers from under-predicting the design demand. This dissertation studies the effectiveness of the design demand procedure and two design demand approaches to improve design demand calculations. (1) load factor manipulation (Cline, 2021) and (2) Modified Modal Superposition (MMS) (Martin & Deierlein, 2021). This dissertation investigates multiple frames design demand, under multiple design procures. Overall results show an improvement in member desing demand predictions , some members were overdesigned.

Committee: Dr. David Roke (Advisor); Dr. Anil Patnaik (Committee Member); Dr. Yilmaz Sozer (Committee Member); Dr. Jun Ye (Committee Member); Dr. Ping Yi (Committee Member) Subjects: Civil Engineering