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Description
The Grill Caddie is a purpose-built product designed to enhance the outdoor grilling experience in communal living spaces. Developed through the Founders Lab Honors Thesis pathway at Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University, this venture encompassed the creation, development, testing, refinement, and market launch of a unique consumer product. The design integrates a magnetic cutting board with an aluminum foil roller, seasoning trough, and cupholder—components engineered for ease of transport, assembly, and cleaning. Emphasizing user-driven development and functional design, the team conducted iterative prototyping, material testing, and consumer interviews to optimize features such as the juice groove and slicing mechanism. Leveraging grant funding and professional mentorship, the team navigated key business operations including supply chain logistics, website development, and social media marketing. The Grill Caddie achieved initial market traction through direct sales, validating product-market fit and demonstrating the team’s ability to translate technical skills into entrepreneurial impact.
ContributorsBoylan, Gentry (Author) / Walker, Eric (Co-author) / Willett, Luke (Co-author) / Byrne, Jared (Thesis director) / Pierce, John (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Engineering Programs (Contributor)
Created2025-05
Description
Deformation and deflection can be equally important failure modes to material breakage depending on the system, and any stress raisers will increase the likelihood of both. However, current texts and curriculum emphasize only the increased chance of breakage due to stress concentration at the raiser without quantifying or sometimes even considering the increased effects on deformation and deflection. This thesis aims to derive and formulate “strain energy concentration factors” which would be applied in similar fashion to existing stress concentration factors" to relate the strain energy near the raiser vs if it was a simple beam. In conjunction with Castigliano’s Second Theorem, the effects on deflection can easily be obtained. Strain energy concentration factors will be obtained for notched and stepped stress raisers on rectangular and cylindrical beams under combined loading through a combination of mathematical and finite element analysis.
ContributorsVan Camp, Brett (Author) / Kosaraju, Srinivas (Thesis director) / Rajagopalan, Jagannathan (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2025-05
Description
Modern and future computer architectures will feature hyper-efficient and low-latency processing elements dedicated to a specific purpose.In a process known as pre-silicon design, computer architects design a customized piece of hardware, called a domain-specific architecture (DSA), to support the high performance and efficiency of a target group of computer programs.
Each program contains sections of code called "tasks" whose characteristics may be exploited for hyper-efficient and low-latency execution on specialized processors called processing elements (PE).
Architects design PEs toward those tasks, enabling DSAs to deliver magnitudes of performance and energy-efficiency advantages over general-purpose, scalar processors.
After the pre-silicon design phase of a DSA is the post-silicon design phase, where application designers map other and novel computer programs for high performance on that DSA.
To realize the performance and energy benefits of that DSA, each computer program must realize the PEs of that DSA.
Unfortunately, refactoring applications to exploit the PEs of a DSA is difficult.
Application and architectural experts (whose expertise is in low supply) must manually structure each application toward their target DSA.
Furthermore, open-source and legacy code called code-from-the-wild (CFTW), often lack the structure required to compile applications toward DSAs, requiring manual refactoring and creating a barrier between DSAs and the broader software engineering community.
Finally, manual application structuring techniques do not scale to novel applications and architectures.
This thesis argues that automating the process of structuring computer programs for transformation and optimization toward DSAs is essential to the widespread adoption and utilization of DSAs. Existing methods to extract the structure from CFTW both capture unimportant code and miss critical code for acceleration because they rely on code frequency.Further, they rely on static information to find communication patterns between them.
To address the challenge of localizing the acceleration candidates and finding their communication among each other, this thesis presents Cyclebite.
Cyclebite extracts coarse-grained tasks (CGTs) from CFTW by detecting CGT candidates in the dynamic execution profile of the application.
Then, Cyclebite localizes the instances of each CGT candidate, which measures its utilization and observes its communication patterns with other task candidates.
Each CGT candidate whose utilization is adequate is designated as a task, and its communication with other tasks forms producer-consumer relationships.
Cyclebite exports a produce-consume task graph (or simply task graph) for the application - a directed acyclic graph where each node is a CGT and directed edges are communication between CGTs, pointing from producer to consumer.
I show that Cyclebite finds both important code that state-of-the-art (SoA) structuring techniques miss and rejects unimportant code that SoA structuring techniques erroneously include in the task graph.
I propose a CGT analysis and export tool, called Cyclebite-Template, that extracts the parallel execution pattern of each CGT in the exported Cyclebite task graph, and exports the task graph into a domain-specific language, which facilitates its transformation and optimization towards a target DSA.
Cyclebite-Template works on a low-level representation of each CGT, making its analysis agnostic to the syntactic definition of each task, while SoA task templates use higher-level representations that are not robust to differing syntactic task definitions.
Further, Cyclebite-Template supports the transformation and optimization of non-polyhedral tasks by extracting each task's canonical expression (which implies its parallel execution pattern), while SoA task templates only support polyhedral tasks.
I show that Cyclebite-Template accurately extracts the parallel pattern from Cyclebite tasks, and Cyclebite task graphs exported with Cyclebite-Template achieve speedups inline or exceeding those of SoA task templates.
ContributorsWillis, Benjamin Roy (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Brunhaver, John (Thesis advisor) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Zhang, Jeff (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Obesity has consistently presented a significant challenge, with excess body fat contributing to the development of numerous severe conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and various musculoskeletal disorders. In this study, different methods are proposed to study substrate utilization (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats) in the human body and validate the biomarkers enabling to investigation of weight management and monitor metabolic health. The first technique to study was Indirect calorimetry, which assessed Resting Energy Expenditure (REE) and measured parameters like oxygen consumption (VO2) and carbon dioxide production (VCO2). A validation study was conducted to study the effectiveness of the medical device Breezing Med determining REE, VO2, and VCO2. The results were compared with correlation slopes and regression coefficients close to 1. Indirect Calorimetry can be used to determine carbohydrate and fat utilization but it requires additional correction for protein utilization. Protein utilization can be studied by analyzing urinary nitrogen. Therefore, a secondary technique was studied for identifying urea and ammonia concentration in human urine samples. Along this line two methods for detecting urea were explored, a colorimetric technique and it was validated against the Ion-Selective method. The results were then compared by correlation analysis of urine samples measured with both methods simultaneously curves. The equations for fat, carb, and protein oxidation, involving VO2, VCO2 consumption, and urinary nitrogen were implemented and validated, using the above-described methods in a human subject study with 16 subjects. The measurements included diverse diets (normal vs. high fat/protein) in normal energy balance and pre-/post interventions of exercise, fasting, and a high-fat meal. It can be concluded that the indirect calorimetry portable method in conjunction with urine urea methods are important to help the understanding of substrate utilization in human subjects, and therefore, excellent tools to contribute to the treatments and interventions of obesity and overweighted populations.
ContributorsPradhan, Ayushi (Author) / Forzani, Erica (Thesis advisor) / Lind, Mary Laura (Committee member) / Wang, Shaopeng (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The Grill Caddie is a purpose-built product designed to enhance the outdoor grilling experience in communal living spaces. Developed through the Founders Lab Honors Thesis pathway at Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University, this venture encompassed the creation, development, testing, refinement, and market launch of a unique consumer product. The design integrates a magnetic cutting board with an aluminum foil roller, seasoning trough, and cupholder—components engineered for ease of transport, assembly, and cleaning. Emphasizing user-driven development and functional design, the team conducted iterative prototyping, material testing, and consumer interviews to optimize features such as the juice groove and slicing mechanism. Leveraging grant funding and professional mentorship, the team navigated key business operations including supply chain logistics, website development, and social media marketing. The Grill Caddie achieved initial market traction through direct sales, validating product-market fit and demonstrating the team’s ability to translate technical skills into entrepreneurial impact.
ContributorsWalker, Eric (Author) / Boylan, Gentry (Co-author) / Willett, Luke (Co-author) / Byrne, Jared (Thesis director) / Pierce, John (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Engineering Programs (Contributor)
Created2025-05