Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Due to the large variance in the stochastic nature of evolution and DNA, it can be difficult to be sure that inferences that use genetical data are perfectly correct. However, as we incorporate more data into our analysis then the...
A significant component of forensic science is analyzing bones to assess the age at death of an individual. Forensic anthropologists often include the pubic symphysis in such studies. Subjective methods, such as the Suchey-Brooks method, ...
Chemical evolution of stellar plasma is one of the most critical components of computational models in stellar astrophysics. Nuclear abundance distributions resulting from chains of nuclear reactions serve as a key comparison tool...
Many phenomena in ecology, evolution, and organismal biology relate to how a system changes through time. Unfortunately, most of the statistical methods that are common in these fields represent samples as static scalars or vectors....
Regression over circular response data requires special methods due to the periodic nature of this data type. In previous works, researchers tried to use the concept of projecting real-line distributions on unit circles or using...
Reduced Order Models (ROM) provide a low-dimensional alternative form of a system of differential equations. Such a form permits faster computation of solutions. In this paper, Poisson's Equation in two dimensions, the Heat Equation in...
The mandible can provide valuable information on both the life history and genetic makeup of Archaic human populations. If two genetically separated Homo sapiens populations practice differing dietary behaviors, one may expect to see...
Improving the accuracy and efficiency of methods has always been the pursuit of scientific computing. In this dissertation, we developed several methods to improve the computational efficiency and accuracy of Kohn-Sham density functional...
Overcoming Geometric Limitations in the Finite Element Method by Means of Polynomial Extension: Application to Second Order Elliptic Boundary Value and Interface Problems
In this dissertation, we present a new approach for approximating the solution of second order partial differential equations and interface problems. This approach is based on the classical finite element method, where instead of using...
Colloidal suspensions transform between fluid and disordered solid states when parameters such as the colloid volume fraction and the strength and nature of the colloidal interactions are varied. Seemingly subtle changes in the...
In the last 15 years, Video games have become a dominate form of entertainment. The popularity of video games means children are spending more of their free time play video games. Usually, the time spent on homework or studying is...
The tools and techniques used in shape analysis have constantly evolved, but their objective remains fixed: to quantify the differences in shape between two objects in a consistent and meaningful manner. The hand-measurements of calipers...
The BaLn(sub)2(/sub)O(sub)4(/sub) family has been synthesized successfully as single crystals by the flux-growth method. The phases crystallize in the CaV(sub)2(/sub)O(sub)4(/sub) structure prototype in space group Pnma (# 62). The...
Simulation is valuable since it can provide a link between theory and experiment. Whereas, com- puter modeling is based on theory and is limited to simple models, we can explore many physical properties in a parallel way to experiment....
Recently nonlocal continuum models have gained interest as alternatives to traditional PDE models due to their capability of handling solutions with discontinuities and their ease of modeling anomalous diffusion. The typical approach...
Excessive nitrogen loading to surface water bodies has resulted in serious environmental, economical, ecological, and human health problems, such as groundwater contamination and eutrophication in surface water. One important source of...
Individual carbon nanotubes (CNTs) possess excellent piezoresistive performance, which is manifested by the significant electrical resistance change when subject to mechanical deformation. In comparison to individual CNTs, the CNT thin...
Estimating groundwater nitrate fate and transport is an important task in water resources and environmental management because excess nitrate loads may have negative impacts on human and environmental health. This work discusses the...
Animals have demonstrated the capacity to traverse many complex unstructured terrains at high speeds by utilizing effective locomotion regimes. Motion in difficult and uncertain environments have only seen partial success on traditional...
Software packages that model geochemical speciation and complexation are useful for predicting how different materials such as heavy metals and organic matter interact with the environment. The East Fork Poplar Creek (EFPC) in Oak Ridge, ...
In the first part of this thesis, the bivariate or cross branching distribution of a film-grade ethylene 1-hexene copolymer with enhanced MD and TD Elmendorf tear (> 400 g/mil) and high dart impact, synthesized ExxonMobil Chemical...
Submarine debris flows are hazards when they threaten the facilities that are built on sea floor to facilitate submarine transportation. The dynamics of submarine debris flow is simple once the debris material gets in the flow motion and...
A theoretical-computational model is developed to study irradiation-induced composition patterns and segregation in binary solid solutions under irradiation, which is motivated by the fact that such composition changes alter a wide range...
Propylene ethylene and 1-octene copolymers synthesized with the same type of metallocene catalyst were analyzed using 13C solution NMR to determine the microstructure (tacticity, regio-regularity, and concentration of comonomer) and the...
Modeling the cell membrane is important for understanding many biological processes. Important physical properties of the cell membrane include its ability to move small molecules into and out of the cell through the lipid bilayer and a...
Bioacoustics has long been a vital source of knowledge in the life sciences. Bioacoustics provides us with an invaluable set of tools and insights to help us better understand how life interacts with one another and its environment....
Groundwater is a vital natural resource, and our ability to protect and manage this resource efficiently and effectively relies heavily on our ability to perform reliable and accurate computer modeling and simulation of subsurface...
Receptor trafficking such as endocytosis may decrease the number of surface receptors and hence down-regulate receptor-mediated functions. Previous studies showed that dynamic endocytosis of N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor/channels (NMDARs...
This dissertation focuses on the non local continuum peridynamics model for the mechanics of materials, related constitutive models, its connections to molecular dynamics and classical elasticity, and its multiscale and multimodel...
Physics-based models are often described by partial differential equations (PDEs) involving more than one independent variable, for example, space and time. Solving these PDEs is critical to understanding the behavior of the physical...
The central purpose of this thesis is to explore the behavior of the numerical solution of the Cold- Ion model with shock forming conditions in one and two dimensions. In the one dimensional case, a comparison between the numerical...
To this day, the origins and prognosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pose significant challenges. This thesis presents a methodology to understand AD by systematically applying state-of-the-art techniques from graph neural networks (GNNs)...
The United States has fallen below many countries in international assessments of middle school aged students in the fields math and science. Computer games have only grown in popularity. In the last few decades, the time spent playing...
Estimating parameters for reactive contaminant transport models can be a very computationally intensive. Typically this involves solving a forward problem many times, with many degrees of freedom that must be computed each time. We show...
By removing as much as 90% or more of a deep neural network's (DNN's) parameters, a wide variety of pruning approaches not only allow for DNN compression but also increase generalization (model performance on test/unseen data). This...
The origins of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) remain an unsolved problem of contemporary astrophysics. Decades of research indicate that these supernovae arise from thermonuclear runaway in the degenerate material of white dwarf stars;...
The development of robust thermal barrier coating (TBC) systems is crucial in many high-temperature applications. The performance of a TBC system is significantly limited by microstructural evolution mechanisms, such as sintering at...
With the recent advances in using nonlocal approaches to approximate traditional partial differential equations(PDEs), a number of new research avenues have been opened that warrant further study. One such path, that has yet to be...
Computer vision principles enable the analysis of fire, wind, and plume behavior from visual and infrared (IR) video as opposed to sparse measurements obtained with expensive instrumentation. Data that quantifies the transport of heat...
An accumulation of experimental evidence over the past two decades has tightened the relationship between thermodynamics and the emergence of structure in driven natural systems. A plausible explanation for how structure emerges has...
Human life and diseases are inseparable. For millions of years, humans and their ancestors suffered from diseases, caused by infectious pathogens (e.g., bacteria, viruses, parasites) and caused by our own bodies as they age and...
One important area in materials science and engineering is the relationship between spatial and temporal scales and its influence on constitutive properties. Fractal functions can be useful in studying materials where self-similarity...
This dissertation studies a graphical processing unit (GPU) construction of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) using large training data sets. The goal is to create a program for the mapping of phenomenological Minimal Supersymmetric...
Geometric morphometrics has traditionally relied on named anatomical landmarks for the statistical analysis of shape, but that is changing. With the now-widespread availability of 3D surface and volumetric scanning technology, performing...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
