## ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.

Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.

Subject
Date Range
2011 2019

## Recent Submissions

This dissertation examines six different models in the field of econophysics using interacting particle systems as the basis of exploration. In each model examined, the underlying structure is a graph G = (V , E ), where each x ∈ V represents an individual who is characterized by the number of coins in her possession at time t. At each time step t, an edge (x, y) ∈ E is chosen at random, resulting in an exchange of coins between individuals x and y according to the rules of the model. Random variables ξt, and ξt(x) keep track of the …

Contributors
Reed, Stephanie J, Lanchier, Nicolas, Smith, Hal, et al.
Created Date
2019

A continuously and stably stratified fluid contained in a square cavity subjected to harmonic body forcing is studied numerically by solving the Navier-Stokes equations under the Boussinesq approximation. Complex dynamics are observed near the onset of instability of the basic state, which is a flow configuration that is always an exact analytical solution of the governing equations. The instability of the basic state to perturbations is first studied with linear stability analysis (Floquet analysis), revealing a multitude of intersecting synchronous and subharmonic resonance tongues in parameter space. A modal reduction method for determining the locus of basic state instability is …

Contributors
Yalim, Jason, Welfert, Bruno D., Lopez, Juan M., et al.
Created Date
2019

Autonomic closure is a new general methodology for subgrid closures in large eddy simulations that circumvents the need to specify fixed closure models and instead allows a fully- adaptive self-optimizing closure. The closure is autonomic in the sense that the simulation itself determines the optimal relation at each point and time between any subgrid term and the variables in the simulation, through the solution of a local system identification problem. It is based on highly generalized representations of subgrid terms having degrees of freedom that are determined dynamically at each point and time in the simulation. This can be regarded …

Contributors
Kshitij, Abhinav, Dahm, Werner J.A., Herrmann, Marcus, et al.
Created Date
2019

Mathematical models are important tools for addressing problems that exceed experimental capabilities. In this work, I present ordinary and partial differential equation (ODE, PDE) models for two problems: Vicodin abuse and impact cratering. The prescription opioid Vicodin is the nation's most widely prescribed pain reliever. The majority of Vicodin abusers are first introduced via prescription, distinguishing it from other drugs in which the most common path to abuse begins with experimentation. I develop and analyze two mathematical models of Vicodin use and abuse, considering only those patients with an initial Vicodin prescription. Through adjoint sensitivity analysis, I show that focusing …

Contributors
Caldwell, Wendy K, Wirkus, Stephen, Asphaug, Erik, et al.
Created Date
2019

This dissertation explores the impact of environmental dependent risk on disease dynamics within a Lagrangian modeling perspective; where the identity (defined by place of residency) of individuals is preserved throughout the epidemic process. In Chapter Three, the impact of individuals who refuse to be vaccinated is explored. MMR vaccination and birth rate data from the State of California are used to determine the impact of the anti-vaccine movement on the dynamics of growth of the anti-vaccine sub-population. Dissertation results suggest that under realistic California social dynamics scenarios, it is not possible to revert the influence of anti-vaccine contagion. In Chapter …

Contributors
Moreno Martinez, Victor Manuel, Castillo-Chavez, Carlos, Kang, Yun, et al.
Created Date
2018

In this dissertation the potential impact of some social, cultural and economic factors on Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) dynamics and control are studied. In Chapter two, the inability to detect and isolate a large fraction of EVD-infected individuals before symptoms onset is addressed. A mathematical model, calibrated with data from the 2014 West African outbreak, is used to show the dynamics of EVD control under various quarantine and isolation effectiveness regimes. It is shown that in order to make a difference it must reach a high proportion of the infected population. The effect of EVD-dead bodies has been incorporated in …

Contributors
Espinoza, Baltazar, Castillo-Chávez, Carlos, Kang, Yun, et al.
Created Date
2018

The Kuramoto model is an archetypal model for studying synchronization in groups of nonidentical oscillators where oscillators are imbued with their own frequency and coupled with other oscillators though a network of interactions. As the coupling strength increases, there is a bifurcation to complete synchronization where all oscillators move with the same frequency and show a collective rhythm. Kuramoto-like dynamics are considered a relevant model for instabilities of the AC-power grid which operates in synchrony under standard conditions but exhibits, in a state of failure, segmentation of the grid into desynchronized clusters. In this dissertation the minimum coupling strength required …

Contributors
Gilg, Brady, Armbruster, Dieter, Mittelmann, Hans, et al.
Created Date
2018

Need-based transfers (NBTs) are a form of risk-pooling in which binary welfare exchanges occur to preserve the viable participation of individuals in an economy, e.g. reciprocal gifting of cattle among East African herders or food sharing among vampire bats. With the broad goal of better understanding the mathematics of such binary welfare and risk pooling, agent-based simulations are conducted to explore socially optimal transfer policies and sharing network structures, kinetic exchange models that utilize tools from the kinetic theory of gas dynamics are utilized to characterize the wealth distribution of an NBT economy, and a variant of repeated prisoner’s dilemma …

Contributors
Kayser, Kirk, Armbruster, Dieter, Lampert, Adam, et al.
Created Date
2018

Inverse problems model real world phenomena from data, where the data are often noisy and models contain errors. This leads to instabilities, multiple solution vectors and thus ill-posedness. To solve ill-posed inverse problems, regularization is typically used as a penalty function to induce stability and allow for the incorporation of a priori information about the desired solution. In this thesis, high order regularization techniques are developed for image and function reconstruction from noisy or misleading data. Specifically the incorporation of the Polynomial Annihilation operator allows for the accurate exploitation of the sparse representation of each function in the edge domain. …

Contributors
Scarnati, Theresa Ann, Gelb, Anne, Platte, Rodrigo, et al.
Created Date
2018

The tools developed for the use of investigating dynamical systems have provided critical understanding to a wide range of physical phenomena. Here these tools are used to gain further insight into scalar transport, and how it is affected by mixing. The aim of this research is to investigate the efficiency of several different partitioning methods which demarcate flow fields into dynamically distinct regions, and the correlation of finite-time statistics from the advection-diffusion equation to these regions. For autonomous systems, invariant manifold theory can be used to separate the system into dynamically distinct regions. Despite there being no equivalent method for …

Contributors
Walker, Phillip, Tang, Wenbo, Kostelich, Eric, et al.
Created Date
2018

This dissertation investigates the classification of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) in the presence of non-SLE alternatives, while developing novel curve classification methodologies with wide ranging applications. Functional data representations of plasma thermogram measurements and the corresponding derivative curves provide predictors yet to be investigated for SLE identification. Functional nonparametric classifiers form a methodological basis, which is used herein to develop a) the family of ESFuNC segment-wise curve classification algorithms and b) per-pixel ensembles based on logistic regression and fused-LASSO. The proposed methods achieve test set accuracy rates as high as 94.3%, while returning information about regions of the temperature domain …

Contributors
Buscaglia, Robert, Kamarianakis, Yiannis, Armbruster, Dieter, et al.
Created Date
2018

Earth-system models describe the interacting components of the climate system and technological systems that affect society, such as communication infrastructures. Data assimilation addresses the challenge of state specification by incorporating system observations into the model estimates. In this research, a particular data assimilation technique called the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (LETKF) is applied to the ionosphere, which is a domain of practical interest due to its effects on infrastructures that depend on satellite communication and remote sensing. This dissertation consists of three main studies that propose strategies to improve space- weather specification during ionospheric extreme events, but are generally …

Contributors
Durazo, Juan Alberto, Kostelich, Eric J., Mahalov, Alex, et al.
Created Date
2018

The role of climate change, as measured in terms of changes in the climatology of geophysical variables (such as temperature and rainfall), on the global distribution and burden of vector-borne diseases (VBDs) remains a subject of considerable debate. This dissertation attempts to contribute to this debate via the use of mathematical (compartmental) modeling and statistical data analysis. In particular, the objective is to find suitable values and/or ranges of the climate variables considered (typically temperature and rainfall) for maximum vector abundance and consequently, maximum transmission intensity of the disease(s) they cause. Motivated by the fact that understanding the dynamics of …

Contributors
Okuneye, Kamaldeen Olatunde, Gumel, Abba B, Kuang, Yang, et al.
Created Date
2018

The most advanced social insects, the eusocial insects, form often large societies in which there is reproductive division of labor, queens and workers, have overlapping generations, and cooperative brood care where daughter workers remain in the nest with their queen mother and care for their siblings. The eusocial insects are composed of representative species of bees and wasps, and all species of ants and termites. Much is known about their organizational structure, but remains to be discovered. The success of social insects is dependent upon cooperative behavior and adaptive strategies shaped by natural selection that respond to internal or external …

Contributors
Rodriguez Messan, Marisabel, Kang, Yun, Castillo-Chavez, Carlos, et al.
Created Date
2018

Rabies is an infectious viral disease. It is usually fatal if a victim reaches the rabid stage, which starts after the appearance of disease symptoms. The disease virus attacks the central nervous system, and then it migrates from peripheral nerves to the spinal cord and brain. At the time when the rabies virus reaches the brain, the incubation period is over and the symptoms of clinical disease appear on the victim. From the brain, the virus travels via nerves to the salivary glands and saliva. A mathematical model is developed for the spread of rabies in a spatially distributed fox …

Contributors
Alanazi, Khalaf Matar, Thieme, Horst R., Jackiewicz, Zdzislaw, et al.
Created Date
2018

I investigate two models interacting agent systems: the first is motivated by the flocking and swarming behaviors in biological systems, while the second models opinion formation in social networks. In each setting, I define natural notions of convergence (to a flock" and to a consensus'', respectively), and study the convergence properties of each in the limit as $t \rightarrow \infty$. Specifically, I provide sufficient conditions for the convergence of both of the models, and conduct numerical experiments to study the resulting solutions. Dissertation/Thesis

Contributors
Theisen, Ryan, Motsch, Sebastien, Lanchier, Nicholas, et al.
Created Date
2018

Robotic swarms can potentially perform complicated tasks such as exploration and mapping at large space and time scales in a parallel and robust fashion. This thesis presents strategies for mapping environmental features of interest – specifically obstacles, collision-free paths, generating a metric map and estimating scalar density fields– in an unknown domain using data obtained by a swarm of resource-constrained robots. First, an approach was developed for mapping a single obstacle using a swarm of point-mass robots with both directed and random motion. The swarm population dynamics are modeled by a set of advection-diffusion-reaction partial differential equations (PDEs) in which …

Contributors
Ramachandran, Ragesh Kumar, Berman, Spring M, Mignolet, Marc, et al.
Created Date
2018

Two urban flows are analyzed, one concerned with pollutant transport in a Phoenix, Arizona neighborhood and the other with windshear detection at the Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA). Lagrangian measures, identified with finite-time Lyapunov exponents, are first used to characterize transport patterns of inertial pollutant particles. Motivated by actual events the focus is on flows in realistic urban geometry. Both deterministic and stochastic transport patterns are identified, as inertial Lagrangian coherent structures. For the deterministic case, the organizing structures are well defined and are extracted at different hours of a day to reveal the variability of coherent patterns. For the …

Contributors
Knutson, Brent, Tang, Wenbo, Calhoun, Ronald, et al.
Created Date
2018

This thesis consists of three projects employing complexity economics methods to explore firm dynamics. The first is the Firm Ecosystem Model, which addresses the institutional conditions of capital access and entrenched competitive advantage. Larger firms will be more competitive than smaller firms due to efficiencies of scale, but the persistence of larger firms is also supported institutionally through mechanisms such as tax policy, capital access mechanisms and industry-favorable legislation. At the same time, evidence suggests that small firms innovate more than larger firms, and an aggressive firm-as-value perspective incentivizes early investment in new firms in an attempt to capture that …

Contributors
Applegate, J M, Janssen, Marcus A, Hoetker, Glenn, et al.
Created Date
2018

The geotechnical community typically relies on recommendations made from numerical simulations. Commercial software exhibits (local) numerical instabilities in layered soils across soil interfaces. This research work investigates unsaturated moisture flow in layered soils and identifies a possible source of numerical instabilities across soil interfaces and potential improvement in numerical schemes for solving the Richards' equation. The numerical issue at soil interfaces is addressed by a (nonlinear) interface problem. A full analysis of the simplest soil hydraulic model, the Gardner model, identifies the conditions of ill-posedness of the interface problem. Numerical experiments on various (more advanced and practical) soil hydraulic models …

Contributors
Liu, Ruowen, Welfert, Bruno D, Houston, Sandra L, et al.
Created Date
2017