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Title: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF POTENTIAL PHOSPHORYLATION SITES IN BAXΔ2 UNIQUE OLIGOPEPTIDE
Creator: Tsai, Yu-tseng
Date: 2014, 2014-07
Description: The tumor suppressor gene, Bax, plays a critical role in tumor progression through regulating cell apoptosis. Mutations on the BAX gene often...
Show moreThe tumor suppressor gene, Bax, plays a critical role in tumor progression through regulating cell apoptosis. Mutations on the BAX gene often result in silencing its expression and the loss of pro-death ability. However, there is a unique Bax isoform, BaxΔ2, recently discovered in these Bax mutated cancer cells. BaxΔ2 isoform shows higher pro-apoptotic activity than Baxα. Unlike the parental Baxα, BaxΔ2 does not target mitochondria and forms aggregates in cytosol. There is a unique 10-amino-acid peptide in the N-terminus of BaxΔ2 protein possible function as a special signal. Two serines in this region are predicted as potential phosphorylation sites for regulation of the protein activity. To test this hypothesis, we mutated both serines (SS) into non-phosphorylatable alanines (AA) by site-directed mutagenesis approach. Both BaxΔ2 wild type (BaxΔ2-SS) and mutants (BaxΔ2-AA) were tagged with GFP, which allows us to monitor the protein expression and cellular localization in live cells. Here, we found that the distribution patterns of BaxΔ2-AA and BaxΔ2-SS were similar and appeared as aggregates in cytosol. BaxΔ2-AA mutant also possessed the similar pro-apoptotic activity with BaxΔ2-SS wild type. These results suggested that the two serines in BaxΔ2 unique oligopeptide might not play a critical role in BaxΔ2 localization and pro-death activity under the current ectopic expression conditions. Further study is needed to have better understanding of phosphorylation in contribution to unique behavior of BaxΔ2.
M.S. in Biology, July 2014
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Title: The utilization of sunflower stalks in paper manufacture
Creator: Zavertnik, J.
Date: 2009, 1914
Publisher: Armour Institute of Technology
Description: http://www.archive.org/details/utilizationofsun00zave
Thesis (B.S.)--Armour Institute of Technology

Title: POINT CLOUD FUSION BETWEEEN AERIAL AND VEHICLE LIDAR
Creator: Guangyao, Ma
Date: 2015, 2015-05
Description: Because of the increasing requirement of precision in region of 3-D map, we began to use LiDAR to establish a more accurate map. There still...
Show moreBecause of the increasing requirement of precision in region of 3-D map, we began to use LiDAR to establish a more accurate map. There still exist some problems although we have already made a great progress in this area. One of them, which I tried to process during my thesis study, is that we have two points source - Aerial LiDAR Data( Points gotten by Airplane ) and Vehicle LiDAR Data( Points gotten by Vehicle ) - while both of them have a different density and cannot be merged well. This process - Fusion-is kindly similar to registration, the difference is that the points we would like to merge are generated from different devices and have only few points pairs in the same region. For example, the Aerial LiDAR data has a higher points density in the roofs and ground, but lower in the walls. In the meanwhile, the Vehicle LiDAR data has a lot of points in the walls and ground region. It is beneficial to minimize the difference between these two point sets since the process is necessary for modeling, registration and so on. Therefore, my thesis is to minimize the difference between these two data sources, a procedure of Fusion. The main idea is to read the LiDAR data into data structure of Point Cloud, sample their density to the similar level, and select several corresponding special region pairs( we named these regions -chunks, e.g. Median strip and boundaries of road ) with sufficient interesting points to do fusion. Interesting points indicate the points with one and more special features among all points. And, the algorithm we used to implement the fusion is ICP( Iterative Closet Point Algorithm). Not similar to Registration of Point Cloud, research in the Fusion area is rare. Therefore, the existing algorithms are not well suitable in this project. I deduce some new algorithms during my research since the original ICP Algorithm cannot work well. Both Update Equation and Objective Function are modified. In this thesis, PCL( Point Cloud Library ) is mainly used to implement the basic function, such as nding the nearest points and sampling point cloud, and Eigen library to write the core functions( e.g. Modified Iterative Closest Point Alg ). I also use libLAS library to implement the IO operations and MeshLab to visualize the point cloud after modification.
M.S. in Computer Science, May 2015
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Title: INVESTIGATION OF NOROVIRUS CROSS CONTAMINATION DURING FOOD SERVICE PROCEDURES USED IN PREPARATION OF FRESH PRODUCE
Creator: Suriyanarayanan, Annamalai
Date: 2011-11, 2011-12
Description: Human norovirus (HuNoV) is considered an important cause of foodborne outbreaks, often attributed to the preparation of fresh produce by...
Show moreHuman norovirus (HuNoV) is considered an important cause of foodborne outbreaks, often attributed to the preparation of fresh produce by infected food handlers. In this investigation, methods for recovery of murine norovirus (MNV-1), a surrogate for HuNoV, from food preparatory surfaces were optimized, and MNV-1 crosscontamination between various surfaces common in a food service setting were studied. Fifty microliters of MNV-1 was inoculated onto demarcated 1 x 1 inch squares of polypropylene cutting board, stainless steel knife and spigots. After drying, MNV-1 was recovered from each surface using either a cotton swab, composite tissue or sterile sponge in combination with different eluents such as tissue culture growth medium, 3% beef extract, glycine buffer (50mM glycine, 1% beef extract), stripping solution (0.04% K2HPO4, 1.01% Na2HPO4, 0.1% Triton X-100), and Earle’s Balanced Salt Solution (EBSS). The eluent/recovery tool combinations that recovered the highest percentage of MNV-1 from cutting board were stripping solution/sponge (20%) and growth medium/swab (20%). The greatest recovery from the knife blade was achieved with the growth medium/composite tissue combination (43%), while recovery from spigots was greatest using the stripping solution/sponge (28%) and the growth medium/sponge combinations (27%). In the second phase of this investigation, human volunteers were asked to perform various tasks in order to quantify the amount of MNV-1 cross contamination between various surfaces, including bare hands, fresh-cut lettuce, and spigots. The percentage of MNV-1 transfer from hands to spigots varied from 0.06% to 3.59%, spigots to hands varied from 10% to 90.4% and lettuce to hands varied from 0.30% to 4.33%. x The results of this investigation can be used in developing a model describing the transfer pattern of HuNoV between surfaces common in retail food service, and used in developing educational materials for food service workers.
M.S. in Science, Food Safety, and Technology, December 2011
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Title: PULSED LIGHT INACTIVATION OF MURINE NOROVIRUS ON VARIOUS FOOD CONTACT SURFACES
Creator: Zhou, Zijin
Date: 2015, 2015-07
Description: Norovirus is one of the leading causes for foodborne illness. Transmission of virus from surface to food has been known to cause a number of...
Show moreNorovirus is one of the leading causes for foodborne illness. Transmission of virus from surface to food has been known to cause a number of outbreaks. Studies of norovirus have been conducted using Murine Norovirus to simulate the behaviors. Pulsed light (PL) is a promising surface decontamination technology, which has the potential to be applied in a food service setting. PL uses intense pulses of short duration and a broad spectrum to accomplish microbial inactivation. This study evaluates the effect of PL on MNV-1, artificially inoculated onto various food contact surfaces including 304 stainless steel, glazed tile, polypropylene, and ultra-high molecular weight (UHMW) polyethylene. The virus was allowed to inoculate on the coupons for 20mins and treated with PL in a Xenon Steripulse XL-3000TM pulsed light treatment system for up to 60 s, at a distance of 8.3 cm 10.8 cm or 13.3cm from the central axis of the lamp. An infrared (IR) camera was used to record surface temperatures, in 1-s increments. After PL treatments, remaining viruses were recovered from surfaces and quantified by plaque assay. At a distance of 10.8cm, MNV-1 was reduced by 2.22-, 2.27- 2.75- and 3.12-log, after 20s treatment on inoculated stainless steel, glazed tile, UHMW polyethylene and polypropylene, respectively. After 50s treatment, MNV-1 was reduced by 4.86- and 5.93- log on glazed tile and stainless steel surface respectively. The surface temperature on tile and stainless steel increased at the rate of 1.08±0.20 and 1.28±0.32°C /s respectively. A relatively short treatment using pulsed light is sufficient to inactivate MNV-1 on the surface of materials commonly used in food preparation. The results suggest that the technology has the potential to reduce surface viral contamination in a food preparation setting.
M.S. in Food Safety and Technology, July 2015
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Title: WIRELESS COMMUNICATION FOR AN ACTUATED GLOVE FOR HAND REHABILITATION
Creator: Yuan, Ning
Date: 2016, 2016-12
Description: Stroke survivors often experience long-term upper extremity impairment. This can greatly impair activities of daily living. The eXtension...
Show moreStroke survivors often experience long-term upper extremity impairment. This can greatly impair activities of daily living. The eXtension Glove (X-Glove) is a soft robotic device to aid hand therapy. It uses cables serving as external extensor tendons to assist digit extension and control digit flexion. Load cells are located on each motor to detect the force value of fingers. This paper provides a way to add a biofeedback function on the X-Glove and update the microprocessor to a PIC32MX795. So the X-Glove can establish a wireless communication transmit data with terminals, like PC. In order to display the biofeedback, a graphic user-interface is also developed so that therapists can optimize the therapy for each individual patient in real time.
M.S. in Biomedical Engineering, December 2016
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Title: STUDY OF SALMONELLA SURVIVAL ON THE SURFACE OF FRUITS
Creator: Sui, Ke
Date: 2017, 2017-05
Description: Salmonella enterica has been frequently linked to the major foodborne disease outbreaks. The molecular mechanisms underlying this pathogen...
Show moreSalmonella enterica has been frequently linked to the major foodborne disease outbreaks. The molecular mechanisms underlying this pathogen survival on the fresh fruit surface remain largely unexplored. In this study, the environmental factors that affect the survival of Salmonella strains on the surface of selected fruits were studied. Grape tomatoes (or cantaloupe peels) were inoculated in three separate trials with 1 mL Salmonella enterica serotypes Enteritidis or Typhimurium (approximately 1010-11 CFU/mL). Storage of grape tomatoes at 4 ℃ resulted in significant decrease in populations of S. Enteritidis; this trend was observed at both of the tested relative humidity with the D-value as 7.25±1.05 d and 7.28±2.34 d, respectively. At different temperatures, relative humidity only had marginal effects on the bacterial survival on the surface of grape tomato and cantaloupe. In addition, S. Typhimurium apparently survived better than S. Enteritidis on the surface of grape tomato. Furthermore, a transposonmutagenesis library with random transposon insertion mutants of S. Enteritidis and high-throughput sequencing analysis showed that the expression of genes rcsB and nlpD were hypothesized to be associated with the survival of S. Enteritidis on grape tomatoes. Inframe deletions of the two genes in S. Enteritidis were constructed by lambda red recombinase system and respective complementation mutants were also obtained for identification of the contribution of the two genes to the bacterial survival on the surface of grape tomato. Thus, this study provided microbiological and molecular microbiological basis to probe the roles of putative genes in Salmonella enterica survival on the surface of fresh fruits.
M.S. in Food Safety and Technology, May 2017
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Title: LENGTH DEPENDENT ACTIVATION IN MANDUCA SEXTA FLIGHT MUSCLE
Creator: Kumar, Mohit
Date: 2011-08-09, 2011-07
Description: The flight muscle of Manduca sexta has some interesting properties. It is synchronous, like mammalian skeletal and cardiac striated muscle,...
Show moreThe flight muscle of Manduca sexta has some interesting properties. It is synchronous, like mammalian skeletal and cardiac striated muscle, but it is structurally similar to the more widely studied asynchronous insect flight muscles of Drosophila and Lethocerus. One of the main goals of the thesis is to generate a useful skinned preparation for mechanical studies in vitro. A number of different skinning protocols were tried and evaluated for preservation of structural integrity by using light and X-ray diffraction. In all muscles studied to date, isometric force is a function of the [Ca2+] of the bathing solution and also a function of the sarcomere length whereby more force is generated at a longer sarcomere length than at a shorter for the same [Ca2+]. This phenomenon is termed “length dependent activation” (LDA). To date no real studies on the force-pCa relationship has been done on Manduca sexta flight muscle. This force-pCa analysis would give us some insight into the length dependent activation (LDA) in this novel insect flight muscle system. The present studies were undertaken to characterize and analyze the force-pCa relationships in Manduca sexta. Conditions were found that allowed skinning muscles while maintaining good structural order. We found that both DLMs dorsal and ventral show length-dependent activation at longer SL. Our study also shows that ventral muscles are more cooperative than the dorsal muscles which may be related to their different functions in vivo.
M.S. in Biological, Chemical, and Physical Sciences, July 2011
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Title: MEAN EXIT TIME FOR RADIALLY SYMMETRICAL DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS DRIVEN
Creator: Luan, Yuanchao
Date: 2013, 2013-12
Description: Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) driven by non-Gaussian L´evy noises have attracted much attention recently [1, 29]. In [12], the...
Show moreStochastic differential equations (SDEs) driven by non-Gaussian L´evy noises have attracted much attention recently [1, 29]. In [12], the authors studied a scalar SDE driven by a non-Gaussian L´evy motion, and numerically investigate mean exit time and escape probability for arbitrary noise intensity in one dimensional case. In the present thesis, we utilize a different strategy to explore a numerical method for the problem in two dimensional cases. To be specific, we assume the solution u(x) is radially symmetric with respect to the origin, and then represent the equation using radial coordinate, reducing the problem into one dimensional case. Then main difficulty is that, in the integral term, appears a Gauss Hypergeometric function and the unknown function u(r), which makes the error estimates complicated. We exploit some properties of Gauss Hypergeometric function, and finally make out a way for estimating the error [19]. Up to now we are only able to deal with this problem with 0 < α ≤ 1, since our numerical scheme does not converge when 1 < α < 2. Then we compare our numerical solutions with the analytical ones which are given in [3], and they coincide very well. KeyWords: Stochastic dynamical systems; non-Gaussian L´evy motion; L´evy jump measure; First exit time
M.S. in Applied Mathematics, December 2013
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Title: Variable speed motor control
Creator: Fry, August, Baker, Charles
Date: 2009, 1906
Publisher: Armour Institute of Technology
Description: http://www.archive.org/details/variablespeedmot00frya
Thesis (B.S.)--Armour Institute of Technology

Title: CONSTRUCTION OF ZEBRAFISH OLFACTORY RECEPTORS INTO A MAMMALIAN EXPRESSION VECTOR FOR FUTURE LIGAND-BINDING STUDIES
Creator: Tian, Chen
Date: 2011-07, 2011-07
Description: The olfactory system is an important chemosensory system. Our identification of odorants is occurred through binding of odorant molecules with...
Show moreThe olfactory system is an important chemosensory system. Our identification of odorants is occurred through binding of odorant molecules with olfactory receptors in the olfactory epithelium. In zebrafish, there are four classes of olfactory receptors: trace amine-associated receptor (TAAR), odorant receptor (OR), vomeronasal type 1-like receptor (V1R-like) and vomeronasal type 2-like receptor (V2R-like). In this study, I amplified four olfactory receptors taar1a, or1016, ora5 and olfcc1, which are respectively belong to the four olfactory receptor classes, from cDNA of the zebrafish olfactory epithelium and cloned genes into a mammalian expression vector pCI. The gene sequences of these receptors were not identical as the sequences obtained from GenBank database. The possible reasons for the inconsistency of gene sequence are discussed. I further tranfected these four cloned olfactory receptors in a mammalian cell line Hana3A. Expression of all four olfactory receptors in Hana3A cells was confirmed by immunocytochemistry. In summary, these four olfactory receptors taar1a, or1016, ora5 and olfcc1 were successfully cloned into the pCI vector and can be expressed on cell membrane surface of Hana3A cells.
M.S. in Biology, July 2011
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Title: CHARACTERIZATION OF VERY LARGE YET VERY MILD BMD TYPE EDITS OF DYSTROPHIN
Creator: Lin, Yi-hsiu
Date: 2014, 2014-12
Description: Duchenne muscular dystrophy, DMD, is a severe X-linked recessive disease that kills boys in their second or third decade of life. A related...
Show moreDuchenne muscular dystrophy, DMD, is a severe X-linked recessive disease that kills boys in their second or third decade of life. A related condition Becker Muscular Dystrophy, BMD, is very heterogeneous with clinical severity ranging from nearly as bad as DMD, to nearly benign. Both of these are caused by defects in the dystrophin gene, which encodes a 427 kDa cytoskeletal protein, dystrophin, which can provide a mechanical link between the cytoskeleton and the muscle membrane and stables muscle tissue. In general, DMD results from defects that eliminate all dystrophin expression, whereas BMD patients carry mutated products: modified and malfunctioned dystrophin proteins. Since DMD is invariably fatal, monogenic, has a high incidence (1:3500 male births) and afflicts a charismatic patient profile, it has been an attractive target for gene therapy. However, the huge size of the dystrophin gene (2.4 Mbp) and more importantly its processed mRNA (14.2 kb) poses a problem for viral gene therapy which is limited to payloads of about 8 kb. This has prompted efforts to reduce the size of the dystrophin protein while still maintaining functionality. A major inspiration for such efforts was the identification of a very unusual, very large deletion serendipitously found in an extremely mild BMD case. The patient identified with this defect was ambulatory at 65 year of ages. This edit removes more than half the central rod region, from exon 17 to 48, Δe17-48, and, fortunately, the size of this BMD type edit protein is available for viral vector loading. In this project, edited dystrophin with central rod region deletion (D2:22 Δe17-48) and other two related edits, D2:22 Δe17-47 (exon 48 is added in D2:22 Δe17-48) and D2:22 Δe17-49 (exon 49 is deleted from D2:22 Δe17-48), were studied. According to these results, D2:22 Δe17-47 demonstrated the best biophysical and biochemical properties, but D2:22 Δe17-48 displayed higher to protease sensitivity, and D2:22 Δe17-49 had the worst thermal stability. This work will help us to understand the factors that result in benign large scale edits, and facilitate the development of effective viral gene therapy vectors.
M.S. in Biology, December 2014
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Title: PRENATAL ULTRASOUND CONSULTATION AND MATERNAL FEELINGS IN THE SECOND TRIMESTER OF PREGNANCY
Creator: Stockman, Alexandria
Date: 2015, 2015-07
Description: NO ABSTRACT
M.S. in Psychology, July 2015

Title: Street pavement for Rushville, Illinois
Date: 2009, 1914
Publisher: Armour Institute of Technology
Description: http://www.archive.org/details/streetpavementfo00pome
Thesis (B.S.)--Armour Institute of Technology; Includes folded leaves in back pocket

Title: Vacuum jacketing vs. steam jacketing
Creator: Gentry, T. E., Wernick, F. E.
Date: 2009, 1910
Publisher: Armour Institute of Technology
Description: http://www.archive.org/details/vacuumjacketingv00gent
Thesis (B.S.)--Armour Institute of Technology

Title: INTERACTION IN THE SIXTH SENSE
Creator: Ghods, Ramin
Date: 2014, 2014-05
Description: Every experience of architecture is rooted in multi-sensory and embodied interactions with surroundings. All sensory modalities as well as...
Show moreEvery experience of architecture is rooted in multi-sensory and embodied interactions with surroundings. All sensory modalities as well as linguistic paradigms are integrated in the sensorimotor cortex of brain where mirror neurons are originated therein. Neurological understanding, on the other hand, suggests that meaning is always contextually grounded. Metaphor, in its very essence, is an expression to convey meaning to spectator. It stimulates ventra premotor cortex of brain, wherein mirror neurons activate the embodied simulation of actions, emotions, and corporeal sensations. So conceptual metaphors in everyday language are highly based on bodily interaction and encountering with surroundings. Additionally, they are also rooted in context and primordial images. Metaphor creates an interactive atmosphere in which symbolic and literal meanings are conveyed to beholders. Atmosphere is the essence of a space, in other words, understanding this atmosphere is the most crucial for understanding architecture. Spatial experiencing in its complete entirely could be taken through the emissions of atmosphere. In general, interaction in the 6th sense is focusing on a methodology of design to facilitate immediate perception of spatial settings of architecture. Far from abstraction and intellectualism, an atmosphere conveyed meaning through sensual perceptions. In this case, several modalities of architectural design, including materializes and de-materialized qualities such as light, texture, geometry, reflection, smell, sound, air, have been identified as contributing to atmosphere.
M.S. in in Architecture, May 2014
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Title: INFORMATION PROPAGATION DYNAMIC THROUGH VEHICLE TO VEHICLE COMMUNICATION NETWORK ON A ROAD SEGMENT
Creator: Wang, Lu
Date: 2015, 2015-12
Description: Vehicle-to-vehicle communication system enables vehicles to share various traffic information such as road surface condition, real-time...
Show moreVehicle-to-vehicle communication system enables vehicles to share various traffic information such as road surface condition, real-time traffic congestion, crashing alert or weather situation. Thus, it has a great potential to improve traffic safety, mobility and environmental sustainability. To grant this great promise, information availability plays a critical roles. Accordingly, many previous studies have investigated statistic characteristics (such as mean and variance) of information propagation (such as speed/time delay via instantaneous transmission, connectivity, etc.) integrating traffic flow features. However, few of them are able to capture the information spread dynamics based on V2V. Motivated by this view, this research seeks to develop a discrete mathematical approach to capture information coverage dynamics built upon traffic flow dynamics, which is described by discrete traffic flow dynamics, i.e., cell transmission model. The approach is entailed by developed mathematical model to capture inner-cell information propagation delay and inter-cell transmission based on the proposed information-traffic cell transmission model. The development of the proposed methodology considers a single or two piece(s) of information is (are) sequentially landed on a one-way or two-way road segment underVehicle-to-vehicle communication system enables vehicles to share various traffic information such as road surface condition, real-time traffic congestion, crashing alert or weather situation. Thus, it has a great potential to improve traffic safety, mobility and environmental sustainability. To grant this great promise, information availability plays a critical roles. Accordingly, many previous studies have investigated statistic characteristics (such as mean and variance) of information propagation (such as speed/time delay via instantaneous transmission, connectivity, etc.) integrating traffic flow features. However, few of them are able to capture the information spread dynamics based on V2V. Motivated by this view, this research seeks to develop a discrete mathematical approach to capture information coverage dynamics built upon traffic flow dynamics, which is described by discrete traffic flow dynamics, i.e., cell transmission model. The approach is entailed by developed mathematical model to capture inner-cell information propagation delay and inter-cell transmission based on the proposed information-traffic cell transmission model. The development of the proposed methodology considers a single or two piece(s) of information is (are) sequentially landed on a one-way or two-way road segment under sparse or congested traffic flow considered. Next-Generation simulation field data and Paramics simulated data are used to verify the accuracy of the experiments. Our experimental results show that the proposed model can accurately track information spread dynamics with mean absolute error less than 5% over all experiments. Key words: Vehicle-to-vehicle communication system; cell transmission model; time delay; information propagation coverage.
M.S. in Civil Engineering, December 2015
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Title: Washington Park Center for Improvisational Music: Kellen White_Final Booklet_Spring 2010
Creator: White, Kellen
Date: 2010-07-30

Title: HIGH PERFORMANCE LOGIC DESIGN FOR ADAPTIVE FIR FETAL ECG ESTIMATION
Creator: Wang, Sizhou
Date: 2014, 2014-05
Description: This thesis presents realizations of IEEE-754 single precision floating point non-invasive fetal ECG estimation based on QR Decomposition...
Show moreThis thesis presents realizations of IEEE-754 single precision floating point non-invasive fetal ECG estimation based on QR Decomposition Recursive Least Square algorithm (QRD-RLS). Experiments of the system, which is implemented on Xilinx Zynq SoC platform, are carried out with electrocardiogram (ECG) data and the results with analysis are presented. The embedded system design aims for saving resources, streaming pipeline performance and software-aid computation and integration. The challenge of exploiting the system full potential with pseudo-parallel computation on multiple fetal ECG data packets is also examined.
M.S. in Computer and Electrical Engineering, May 2014
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Title: FABRICATION OF POLYMER OF CLAY NANOCOMPOSITES AND DEVELOPMENT OF CLAY DIGESTION METHODS
Creator: Jin, Zhen
Date: 2014, 2014-07
Description: This thesis reports on our preliminary development of methods used to assess the risks that polymer/clay nanocomposite (PCN) food packaging...
Show moreThis thesis reports on our preliminary development of methods used to assess the risks that polymer/clay nanocomposite (PCN) food packaging pose to consumers. PCN with 1% - 7% (w/w) montmorillonite (MMT) clay and 3 mass equivalents of maleic anhydride-grafted polyethylene (MAPE) as a compatibilizer dispersed in low-density polyethylene (LDPE) was successfully extruded into thin, free-standing films using a pilot-scaled microcompounder with 65 mm film device. These films had good optical clarity and a reasonably consistent thickness of 35 ± 3 μm. An oxygen permeability analyzer was used to measure oxygen transmission rate and permeability of these fabricated films to demonstrate that they perform similarly to PCN barrier materials intended for commercial applications; these results showed that the films with the highest amount of added clay had better barrier properties than the neat LDPE films. In preparation of experiments to assess whether clay particles can be released from these materials during intended conditions of use, we also explored effective digestion and trace-metal analysis (Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectroscopy) methods of both pure clay and MMT/MAPE/LDPE films. This work resulted in an effective digestion protocol to fully digest neat clays and PCN films, as well as an analysis method that provides for a 5-orders-of-magnitude linear detection range and single-digit parts-per-billion detection limits for aluminum and magnesium. Silicon was a more challenging element and efforts to eliminate environmental contamination of samples with this element were unsuccessful. While the work presented in this thesis is largely preliminary and numerous questions remain unanswered, the PCN fabrication and ix characterization methods developed here will be invaluable in our future efforts to understand the risks that nanocomposite food packaging materials pose to human health.
M.S. in Food Process Engineering, July 2014
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