College of Engineering
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The College of Engineering at Montana State University will serve the State of Montana and the nation by fostering lifelong learning, integrating learning and discovery, developing and sharing technical expertise, and empowering students to be tomorrow's leaders.
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Item Effect of surface roughness on the microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) of copper 101(Frontiers Media SA, 2024-12) Archarjee, Amit; Keskin, Yagmur; Peyton, Brent M.; Fields, Matthew W.; Amendola, RobertaThe effect of varying surface roughness on microbiologically influenced corrosion by a model sulfate reducing bacterium Oleidesulfovibrio alaskensis G20 culture on copper 101 coupons was investigated using microscopic, spectroscopic and surface characterization techniques. After 7-day of anoxic exposure abundant biodeposits consisting of sessile cells and copper sulfide minerals were found and pitting attack was observed upon their removal. Results showed that the distribution and thickness of the biodeposits as well as the pitting severity were affected by the varying surface roughness. A direct relationship between surface roughness and microbial activity was not observed. However, a statistically significant reduction in the corrosion rate was recorded when the surface roughness was decreased from ∼2.71 μm to ∼0.006 μm.Item Exploration of opportunities to address the impacts of roads and traffic on wildlife in and around Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, West Virginia(Western Transportation Institute, 2024-12) Huijser, Marcel P.; Bell, Matthew A.This report explores the opportunities for wildlife mitigation in and around two national park units in West Virginia; Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. The wildlife mitigation measures that will be explored are aimed at: 1. Reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions with large mammals (i.e. coyote and larger), and thereby also improving human safety; 2. Reducing direct road mortality for Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN); and 3. Reducing the barrier effect of roads and traffic and increasing habitat connectivity across major highways for large mammals (i.e. coyote and larger) and for SGCN species. In addition, this report specifically explores - based on a literature review - the potential to combine wildlife crossing structures with non-motorized human co-use (i.e. multi-functional crossing structures). This effort focuses on select trails for non-motorized use (hiking, bicycling, and equestrian trails).Item Bone infection evolution(Elsevier BV, 2024-10) Kruse Jensen, Louise; Top Hatmann, Katrine; Witzmann, Florian; Asbach, Patrick; Stewart, Philip S.The present minireview aims to provide a context for imagination of the timespan for bone infection evolution from the origin of cellular bone tissue to modern orthopedic surgery. From a phylogenetic osteomyelitis-bracketing perspective, and due to the time of osteocyte origin, bacteria might have been able to infect the skeleton for approximately 400 million years. Thereby, bone infections happened simultaneously with central expansions of the immune system and development of terrestrial bone structure. This co-evolution might aid in explaining the many immune evasion strategies seen in the field of bone infections. Bone infection patients with long disease-free periods followed by sudden recurrence and anamnesis of long-term and low-grade infections indicate that bacteria can perform silent parasitism within bone tissue (parasitism; one organism lives on another organism, the host, causing it harm and is structurally adapted to it). The silence seems to be disturbed by immunosuppression and the present minireview shows that a compromised immune system has been associated with bone infection development across all species in the phylogenetic tree. Orthopedic surgery, including arthroplasty and osteosynthesis, favor introduction of bacteria and prosthesis/implant related infections are thus anthropogenic infections (anthropogenic; resulting from the influence of human beings on nature). In that light it is important to remember that the skeleton and immune system have not evolved for millions of years to protect titanium alloys and other metals, commonly used for orthopedic devices from bacterial invasion. Therefore, these relatively new orthopedic infection types must be seen as distinct with unique implant/prosthesis related pathophysiology and immunology.Item Assessing the reliability of a digital inclinometer app for measuring hip, knee, and ankle proprioception(Public Library of Science, 2024-09) Chirumbole, Sophia; Teater, Rachel H.; Bals, Megan M.; Richie, Daniel R.; Monfort, Scott M.; Chaudhari, Ajit M. W.Proprioception can be defined as the ability of an individual to detect motion and position of the various joints in their bodies. Current tools for measuring proprioception lack consensus on their accuracy and validity; they also each have their own limitations, and, furthermore, present barriers to use for clinicians. We propose a new and reliable method for evaluating hip, knee, and ankle proprioception by utilizing a digital inclinometer app to measure joint position sense. The digital inclinometer app recorded the active joint position sense error after each of five trials for the hip and knee joint and ten trials for the ankle joint. To quantify the reliability of the digital inclinometer app, single-measurement and average-measurement intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) along with the associated 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were calculated for each joint’s position sense error across trials. Both the hip (ICC (2,k) = 0.849 (95% CI = [0.783–0.897])) and knee joint (ICC (2,k) = 0.837 (95% CI = [0.750–0.897])) were found to have moderate to good reliability when the middle three of five trials were analyzed. Unlike the hip and knee, moderate to good reliability for ankle proprioception (ICC (2,k) = 0.785 (95% CI = [0.539–0.893])) was only achieved with the middle eight of ten trials. The results of this study indicate that this digital inclinometer app is able to accurately record joint position sense at the hip, knee, and ankle when the appropriate number of trials are collected; thus, allowing this tool and methodology to be considered for use in both clinical and research environments to measure proprioception, and furthermore, quantify proprioceptive deficits.Item Geometric phase predicts locomotion performance in undulating living systems across scales(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024-06) Rieser, Jennifer M.; Chong, Baxi; Gong, Chaohui; Astley, Henry C.; Schiebel, Perrin; Diaz, Kelimar; Pierce, Christopher J.; Lu, Hang; Hatton, Ross L.; Choset, Howie; Goldman, Daniel I.Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar traveling waves of axial body bending for movement. Delineating how self-deformation parameters lead to locomotor performance (e.g. speed, energy, turning capabilities) remains challenging. We show that a geometric framework, replacing laborious calculation with a diagrammatic scheme, is well-suited to discovery and comparison of effective patterns of wave dynamics in diverse living systems. We focus on a regime of undulatory locomotion, that of highly damped environments, which is applicable not only to small organisms in viscous fluids, but also larger animals in frictional fluids (sand) and on frictional ground. We find that the traveling wave dynamics used by mm-scale nematode worms and cm-scale desert dwelling snakes and lizards can be described by time series of weights associated with two principal modes. The approximately circular closed path trajectories of mode weights in a self-deformation space enclose near-maximal surface integral (geometric phase) for organisms spanning two decades in body length. We hypothesize that such trajectories are targets of control (which we refer to as “serpenoid templates”). Further, the geometric approach reveals how seemingly complex behaviors such as turning in worms and sidewinding snakes can be described as modulations of templates. Thus, the use of differential geometry in the locomotion of living systems generates a common description of locomotion across taxa and provides hypotheses for neuromechanical control schemes at lower levels of organization.Item Unraveling sex-specific risks of knee osteoarthritis before menopause: Do sex differences start early in life?(Elsevier BV, 2024-05) Hernández, Paula; Bradford, John; Brahmachary, Priyanka; Ulman, Sophia; Robinson, Jennifer L.; June, Ronald K.; Cucchiarini, MagaliObjective. Sufficient evidence within the past two decades have shown that osteoarthritis (OA) has a sex-specific component. However, efforts to reveal the biological causes of this disparity have emerged more gradually. In this narrative review, we discuss anatomical differences within the knee, incidence of injuries in youth sports, and metabolic factors that present early in life (childhood and early adulthood) that can contribute to a higher risk of OA in females. Design. We compiled clinical data from multiple tissues within the knee joint—since OA is a whole joint disorder—aiming to reveal relevant factors behind the sex differences from different perspectives. Results. The data gathered in this review indicate that sex differences in articular cartilage, meniscus, and anterior cruciate ligament are detected as early as childhood and are not only explained by sex hormones. Aiming to unveil the biological causes of the uneven sex-specific risks for knee OA, we review the current knowledge of sex differences mostly in young, but also including old populations, from the perspective of (i) human anatomy in both healthy and pathological conditions, (ii) physical activity and response to injury, and (iii) metabolic signatures. Conclusions. We propose that to close the gap in health disparities, and specifically regarding OA, we should address sex-specific anatomic, biologic, and metabolic factors at early stages in life, as a way to prevent the higher severity and incidence of OA in women later in life.Item A Case Study Comparison of Undergraduate Education and Engineering Majors’ Understanding of Community Engineering(Informa UK Limited, 2024-06) Vo, Tina; Hammack, Rebekah; Gannon, Paul; Lux, Nicholas; Wiehe, Blake; Moonga, Miracle; LaMeres, BrockAs we prepare teachers to provide students with opportunities within STEM education, authentic experiences should guide the instruction. Unfortunately, due to the novel integration of engineering into national reform documents, there is a dearth of documentation on elementary preservice teachers’ engineering ideas as they align with student goals (e.g. enrolling in an engineering program). As teachers must provide authentic science experiences to help frame the work of scientists for students, creating authentic engineering experiences should frame the work of engineers. Thus, it is important to foundationally investigate how elementary preservice teachers’ ideas about engineering reflect those of novice engineers. This research uses multiple case study to investigate and compare teaching and engineering majors’ understanding of engineering within their communities. Additionally, while there were some similarities across groups, engineering majors were more likely to speak to the science behind the artifacts represented in the photo novellas they authored, and the preservice teachers found a larger variety and diversity of engineering elements. Findings indicate that these groups have fundamentally different perspectives on engineering and how it is manifested within the communities. This has implications for upper tiers of education as elementary teachers lay broad engineering foundations, while middle, high school, and community colleges must methodically highlight engineering disciplines to provide more authentic experiences, highlighting the connections between engineering, science, and math.Item Simple near-monostatic Mueller polarimeter(Optica Publishing Group, 2024-09) Field, Nathaniel J.; Shaw, Joseph A.Inferring material properties from active or passive polarimetric remote sensing requires knowledge of the polarized bidirectional reflectance distribution function (P-BRDF). To encourage and simplify the process of measuring the P-BRDF of materials in the monostatic or near-monostatic configurations seen in lidar and other active remote sensing systems, we describe the design, build, and operating procedure for a simple near-monostatic polarimeter. The described system operates at 1064 nm and with a transmitter-receiver separation of about 4◦, but the design principles, alignment procedure, and measurement procedure can be directly applied to systems at other wavelengths or separation angles. Also included are the control and data analysis software for the instrument we deployed, and a small selection of retrievals from the instrument.Item Permutation-constrained Common String Partitions with Applications(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2024-09) Lafond, Manuel; Zhu, BinhaiWe study a new combinatorial problem based on the famous Minimum Common String Partition (MCSP) problem, which we call Permutation-constrained Common String Partition (PCSP for short). In PCSP, we are given two sequences/genomes s and t with the same length and a permutation π on [`], the question is to decide whether it is possible to decompose s and t into ` blocks that can be matched according to some specified requirements, and that conform with the permutation π. Our main result is that PCSP is FPT in parameter ` + d, where d is the maximum number of occurrences that any symbol may have in s or t. We also study a variant where the input specifies whether each matched pair of block needs to be preserved as is, or reversed. With this result on PCSP, we show that a series of genome rearrangement problems are FPT k + d, where k is the rearrangement distance between two genomes of interest.Item Hybrid Radial-Axial Flow for Enhanced Thermal Performance in Packed Bed Energy Storage(Wiley, 2024-10) Al-Azawii, Mohammad M. S.; Anderson, RyanIn this work, a hybrid radial-axial (HRA) system is used to store thermal energy in a packed bed. The heat transfer fluid (HTF) is delivered via a perforated radial pipe placed at the center of the packed bed along the axial length. Hot fluid flows from the center toward the wall through the holes (like other radial systems), but then leaves via the traditional axial flow exit, creating the HRA flow configuration. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is used to analyze the thermal performance of the packed bed during the charging process utilizing the new HRA system. Alumina beads of 6 mm were filler materials and air was HTF with inlet temperature of 75°C for proof of concept. The present paper focuses on two aims: (1) utilizing CFD models to analyze flow and temperature profiles in the packed bed; (2) comparing the model results to experimental results published in a previous HRA flow study and to traditional axial flow. Two HRA configurations were considered based on previous experimental designs, one with uniform holes in the central pipe (R1) and one with gradients in the hole sizes to promote even flow from the central pipe into the bed (R2). The numerical results agree with the experimental results in both cases. The HRA system performance depends on the flow profile created by the hole designs, and it can perform better than the axial flow depending on the design of the radial pipe. Design R2, which promotes even flow from the central pipe into the bed, has higher charging efficiency than standard axial flow methods. For HRA design R2 at 0.0048 m3/s (7 SCFM, standard cubic feet per minute), numerical results for charging efficiency were 75.5% versus 73.8% for traditional axial flow. For HRA design R2 at 0.0061 m3/s (9 SCFM), numerical charging efficiency was 80.5% versus 78.1% for traditional axial flow. These results are consistent with experimental data.