Multi-objective optimization and life-cycle-cost analysis of a smart home

Linfeng Zhang's and Xingguo Xiong's poster on multi-objective optimization and life-cycle-cost analysis of a smart homes

An 8-bit Low Power Energy Recovery Full Adder Design

With the development of wireless communication and portable electronic products, circuit power consumption has become the critical bottleneck of the VLSI design. Among the low power VLSI designs, adiabatic circuit shows a promising future and has been studied by many researchers. As a newly emerged low power technique, adiabatic circuits can be implemented with different architectures such as PAL, 2N-2N2P, ECRL, and CAL, etc. They all lead to significant power saving. In this paper, we implemented true single-phase energy-recovering logic (TSEL) in PSPICE to build a 8-bit low power full adder. In order to verify the power saving of the adiabatic design, a traditional 8-bit static CMOS full adder is also designed in PSPICE for reference. PSPICE power simulation is used to simulate the power consumption of both full adder designs for the same given input pattern sequence. PSPICE power simulation result shows that TSEL full adder lead to effective power saving compared to conventional CMOS full adder. The adiabatic design also shows good potential to be used in high speed circuit design

Integrating Alternative Energy Technology Into Engineering Education

© 2009 by ASEEAlternative Energy Technology attracts more and more attention as evidenced by the tremendous amount of investment from the federal government, automotive industry, and fuel cell /photovoltaic cell manufacturers. To advance the search for solutions to the world’s most pressing energy problems and to prepare our future Connecticut workforce for the emerging alternative energy technology field, University of Bridgeport (UB) has provided a graduate level course, Alternative Energy Technology. This course is related to chemistry, electronics, and mechanics and the graduate students are with different engineering background. The challenges in the teaching are addressed and the possible solutions are given in this paper. Moreover, the teaching experience in this course is helpful for the licensure application for a new M.S. program, Sustainable Energy Engineering (SEE) in the school of Engineering at UB

Developing a New Graduate Program in Sustainable Energy Engineering

© ASEE 2010The world energy demand keeps increasing in recent years due to the rapidly rising living standards and expanding populations. However, the non-renewable energy resource, fossil fuels, is running out and the crude oil supply from Middle East is unstable. To meet the energy demand and improve the energy security, developing sustainable energy, such as solar, wind, tide, geothermal, biomass energy, is a solution to this most urgent energy problems. Therefore, the rapidly increasing nationwide demand for well-qualified professionals in the sustainable energy can be predicted. In order to educate and prepare the technical and scientific workforce for the emerging sustainable energy technology, the School of Engineering at University of Bridgeport (UB) is preparing the M.S. Sustainable Energy Engineering program. In this paper, the structure of the curriculum and the course design in this program will be presented in more details

A Design of Sustainable Energy Laboratory

© 2011 by ASEESustainable energy, including solar power, wind power, and geothermal power, is very attractive since the utilization of sustainable resources can significantly decrease the emission and protect our environment. Also, the use of such energy can enhance the national energy security and reduce the dependence on the imported fossil fuel. Till now, several energy-related courses, such as Fuel Cells, Sustainable Energy, and Hybrid Vehicles, have been offered at the University of Bridgeport. In order to have hands-on experience, a laboratory is necessary for our engineering students with their interest in the sustainable energy as well as smart grid. A course, Sustainable Energy Laboratory, was proposed by the school’s curriculum committed and it is offered in the Spring semester, 2011. In this course, a series of experiments are designed on the operating and testing of solar panels, wind turbine, fuel cell. Moreover, experiments on power electronics and data acquisition are developed to optimize the utilization of different energy sources. Finally, simulation on smart grid power system and hybrid power system will help the students understand the challenges in the use of sustainable energy resources

Teaching Computational Fluid Dynamics (Cfd) To Design Engineers

© 2008 ASEEComputational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can provide detailed thermal flow information, such as temperature field, pressure field and velocity field, in equipment and process in various industries. Due to the recent rapid growth of powerful computer resources and the development of commercial CFD software packages, CFD has been proven a useful tool for mechanical design engineers. CFD has also gained broad acceptance in the engineering education. It has been adopted in both undergraduate and graduate level courses in many universities. The teaching of CFD in current engineering education can be classified into two types, one is to focus on the numerical methods with little emphasis on using the software and the other is to introduce a CFD software as a virtual reality laboratory in Fluid Mechanics class without emphasis on teaching software. In the first type, students need strong mathematical background to succeed in the class and also need further training to effectively use modern commercial software for real industrial application. While in the second type, students only learned an abstract form of CFD processes, thus they will not be able to use CFD commercial software without further training in this area. This paper is about the use of CFD in teaching graduate students at this university who were in a two year design track program. Many of these students did not have a good background in mathematics, fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and programming, however, most of them were good at computer aided design in ProE and were very interested in learning CFD as a design tool in industries. STAR-CCM+ was chosen as the CFD software to teach students the entire CFD process in a single integrated software environment. After building a geometry model in ProE, students learned to import the CAD model, set up mesh model, physical model and solver, and postprocess the results in STAR-CCM+. Based on projects, CFD numerical methods and fundamentals of heat transfer and fluid flow were introduced to help students understand the CFD process, interpret, and validate simulation results

Teaching MEMS Curriculum in Electrical Engineering Graduate Program

© ASEE 2010Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) refer to devices and systems in the size range of 1 micron (1 micron=10-6m) to 1000 microns. Due to their small size, MEMS technology has the advantages of low weight, low cost, low power consumption and high resolution. MEMS have found broad applications in automobile, inertial navigation, light display, optical and RF communications, biomedicine, etc. World’s MEMS market is growing rapidly each year. To meet the strong market demands on MEMS engineers and researchers, we developed MEMS curriculum in our master program in School of Engineering since Fall 2005. In this paper, we shared our experience in teaching the MEMS curriculum in master program of Electrical Engineering department. Three core courses have been developed for MEMS curriculum. The course description, goals, prerequisites, as well as the topics covered in these courses are discussed. Multimedia technology is used in the teaching to enhance the teaching results. Several MEMS course projects using ANSYS simulation are designed to help student accumulate experience in MEMS device design and simulation. Students are fascinated by the MEMS field and continue their master project/thesis research in MEMS. The MEMS curriculum attracted tremendous interest among students, and the students’ feedback on the course have been excellent. This is part of our efforts to prepare students for the future need of economy revival

Fault Simulation of Surface-micromachined MEMS Accelerometer

© ASEE 2009Surface-micromachined MEMS accelerometers have been used in many applications, such as automobile airbag deployment systems and aerospace inertial navigation. Due to the movable parts involved and their diversity in device structure and working principles, MEMS devices are vulnerable to much more defect sources compared to their VLSI counterparts. Typical defect sources for MEMS devices include point stiction, etch variation, broken-beam, etc. Such defects may greatly lower the fabrication yield and degrade the device reliability. It is important to understand the MEMS failure mechanisms and see how various defects will affect the device behavior. In this paper, point-stiction defect in a surface-micromachined MEMS comb accelerometer is investigated. ANSYS simulation is used to see how the influence of the point-stiction defect on device behavior depends on the locations of the defect. ANSYS model for the defect-free device is developed and simulated. After that, point-stiction defects are injected to simulate the faulty device behavior. Simulation results demonstrate that depending on the location of the defects, the influence on the device behavior may be trivial, parametric or fatal. The fault simulation of MEMS accelerometer is helpful in finding an effective testing strategy for MEMS devices. It may also offer some hints on how to further improve the yield and reliability of MEMS