Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

Although the first balloon flights in 1783 created a sensation throughout Europe, human flight had long captured the imaginations of scientific and literary authors alike. Prior histories of flight begin with balloons, but earlier centuries boasted a strange and colorful aviary that shaped thinking about flight long before the first balloon ever left the ground. Taking a cultural materialist approach informed by a broad familiarity with the development of early flight machines and a deep familiarity with the literary conventions of the period, I analyze historical materials ranging from aeronautical treatises to stage pantomimes, from newspaper advertisements to philosophical poems, from mechanical diagrams to satirical cartoons. This earlier culture possessed high hopes and anxieties about human flight. I argue that early flight was lively and varied before the invention of a successful flying machine, and that these early flights were important because they established an aerial tradition astonishingly resistant to change. Rather than revolutionizing the culture, ballooning was quickly incorporated into it. Although ballooning came to be regarded as a failure by many onlookers, the aerial tradition had long become accustomed to failure and continued unabated. Human flight has always promised tremendous and yet debatable utility, a paradox that continues into the present age.

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2018, Electrical Engineering (Engineering and Technology)

Building a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channel to face real-world fading and noise efficiently needs good diversity and coding techniques. Alamouti coding provided a great launch pad to open up this area and made the MIMO technology affordable in day-to-day mobile and wireless communications. In this thesis, testing the MIMO system on different fading channels provided a great insight into how direct and scattering components affect the Bit Error Rate performance of the MIMO system. A 4x4 MIMO system is tested using a full code rate codeword on different fading channels by varying Rician factor (K). The thesis concluded that the 4x4 MIMO with referred codeword is performing better than 2x2 Alamouti STBC when Rician Factor k>8dB in indoor channels. In this thesis, by testing the referred 4x4 MIMO with other relative codewords, the importance of complex symbols handling and code rate is shown. The results help demonstrate the coding gain and spectral efficiency of test 4x4 MIMO. As people are interested in cloud computing and store more information online, hiking speed from Mobile devices to Base station also becomes essential.

Master of Science, Miami University, 2015, Computational Science and Engineering

Incoherent scatter radar (ISR) is a versatile tool to study the ionosphere by measuring the autocorrelation function (ACF). Accurate ACF in the E-region is difficult to obtain because the relative short range limits the length of a pulse. The short correlation time of the ionosphere renders the correlation using the pulse-to-pulse technique useless. In the thesis, we study a method that combines intra-pulse and inter-pulse techniques and apply it to the data taken at Arecibo Observatory. We show simultaneously measured ACF's at short and long lags and summarize the merits of ACF. Applications of ACF and its advantages are discussed. The technique used here will make the derivation of ionosphere parameters more accurate.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Mechanical Engineering

The acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a devastating lung disease. Patients with ARDS must be placed on a mechanical ventilator to survive. However, these ventilators also exacerbate the existing lung injury and as a result the mortality for ARDS is high (~25-40%). During ARDS, small pulmonary airways become occluded with fluid and mechanical ventilation of the fluid-filled lung involves the reopening of fluid-filled airways and the propagation of microbubbles over a layer of epithelial cells lining airway walls. Previous computational and experimental studies indicate that the large spatial gradients in pressure generated near the bubble tip may cause large-scale cellular deformation, rupture of the plasma membrane and cell necrosis. However, previous computational models do not account for the complex fluid-structure interactions that occur during in-vitro or in-vivo experiments. In addition, previous studies assumed rigid-wall conditions while pulmonary airways are in reality highly compliant and changes in airway wall mechanics may significantly influence the dynamics of airway reopening and cell deformation. Furthermore, the lung consists of a large network of bifurcating airways and different bifurcation patterns may influence both the hydrodynamics of airway reopening and cellular injury/deformation especially when the effect of gravity is considered. The objective of this particular thesis is to employ sophisticated computational fluid-structure interaction models to investigate how changes in the patient's biomechanical status such as airway wall compliance, fluid properties and bifurcation patterns influence the mechanics and hydrodynamics of microbubble induced cellular deformation and injury. We have developed several sophisticated computational models that can better represent the in-vivo or in-vitro conditions of compliant airway walls, fully coupled fluid-structure interactions and 3D structure of pulmonary airways with epithelial cells l (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering

Pretreatment is a crucial step in the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fermentable sugars. Microbial pretreatment with white rot fungi can delignify lignocellulosic biomass under atmospheric conditions and, thus, has the potential to be applied to on-farm wet storage for cost-effective cellulosic ethanol production. The present research investigated the feasibility of solid-state microbial pretreatment of corn stover and other types of lignocellulosic biomass feedstocks with the white rot fungus Ceriporiopsis subvermispora. The glucose and ethanol yields, based on the theoretical yield of untreated corn stover, reached 66.61% and 57.80%, respectively, after a 35-d pretreatment, which were more than three times of that obtained with the untreated corn stover. Washing of fungal-pretreated corn stover did not cause significant improvement in ethanol yield, suggesting no water insoluble inhibitory compounds were formed during fungal pretreatment. A high correlation was obtained between the remaining lignin content in the treated corn stover and its cellulose digestibility, indicating that lignin removal facilitated enzymatic hydrolysis. The delignification process of corn stover was investigated throughout a 42-d pretreatment by monitoring changes in composition and enzyme production. Lignin degradation increased with pretreatment time, reaching 39.20% at the end of pretreatment while cellulose degradation was less than 4.52% throughout the process, indicating a high selectivity of the fungus for lignin in the corn stover. However, hemicellulose degradation, mainly xylose loss, was substantial with up to 27.52% hemicellulose simultaneously degraded with lignin. Manganese peroxidase (MnP) and laccase were two detected oxidative enzymes while xylanase was the major hydrolytic enzyme. Observation by scanning electron microscopy showed that fungal pretreatment changed the microstructure of corn stover significantly. At the later stage of pretreatment, corn stov (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science, Miami University, 2012, Computational Science and Engineering

Because of deficiencies in sampling resolution and storage space, the plasma line frequency component of the incoherent scatter radar (ISR) spectrum has been neglected in experimentally verifying ionospheric parameters. Several incoherent scatter theories were independently developed with confirmation from low resolution data in the 1960s that used the plasma line resonant frequency and plasma line peak intensity to derive ionospheric parameters. Now that higher resolution measurement techniques exist, this thesis investigates three methods for obtaining plasma line resonant frequency, peak intensity, and spectral width. Following this study, several salient features endemic to the ISR experiment performed on January 15-17th, and January 22nd of 2010 are presented and analyzed.

Master of Science, Miami University, 2012, Computational Science and Engineering

This thesis reports the investigation of the dynamics and associated phenomena occurring in the ionospheric E- and F-region heights above Arecibo. The observational data was derived with an incoherent scatter radar (ISR) from Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico. The thesis focuses primarily on two aspects. One is to study the atmospheric tidal and planetary waves. This is the first time that dual-beam ISR has been used for E- and F-region tidal and planetary wave studies. The vertical structures of the observed tidal and planetary waves are analyzed rigorously. This study is the first to report the existence and possible excitation mechanism of a terdiurnal tide in the F-region at low latitude. The second aspect is to give a more complete explanation of the midnight collapse phenomenon. The F-region electric field, ambipolar diffusion, and tidal components in the meridional wind all play a role in causing the midnight collapse at Arecibo.