Nathan Collier receives Outstanding Master's Thesis Award

Mr. Nathan Collier is a recipient of the 2004 Outstanding Master's Thesis Award from USF.  Mr. Collier thesis advisor was Dr. Autar Kaw. 

Factors considered in this award include the scope and difficulty of the research, degree of innovation and independent thought, development of new ideas, techniques and methodology, and the significance of the research to the respective field.  The theses selected represent the highest standards of its specific discipline and of this University with regard to:

1. Cogently argued and logically organized methodology employed.

2. Clarity of the written expression.

3. A high standard for bibliographic format and physical presentation, including typographical accuracy, consistency of format, and attention to detail.

4. Significance of the topic and results

For his thesis, he looked at the benefits of staged cooling for the assembly of fulcrums of bascule bridges.  Since 1998, USF has been investigating the assembly procedures for the fulcrum of bascule bridges such as those on Hillsborough Avenue.  During assembly, they have found cracks and other problems while assembling the fulcrums of a few bridges.  This happens when the fulcrum assembly is cooled down in liquid nitrogen to contract its size so that it can be fit into the span of the bridge.

One of the recommendations of our study was to cool the assembly in stages rather than directly into liquid nitrogen.  Examples of staged cooling include various combinations of refrigerated chamber, dry-ice/alcohol mixture, and liquid nitrogen.  Mr. Collier analyzed this problem for his MS thesis.  He used finite difference approach and wrote his own code to solve the problem.  The latter is almost a lost art in engineering research as most people use computational packages to solve engineering problems.  However, since we wanted total control of the inputs to the problem, he was required to develop his own program. 

Writing one’s own program requires patience and a unique set of debugging skills that are developed only by a keen understanding of the physics and mathematical modeling of the problem.  Writing a program that you can understand five years from now was not a lost thought when Mr. Collier wrote his program.  Writing a program where anyone else can run the program for different inputs was not a low priority either for him.

The most significant conclusion of his thesis was that he categorically found that staged cooling of only certain types are beneficial.  He also was able to quantify the benefit based on the geometry of the fulcrum.  Such design tools are important for practicing engineers as the fulcrum of each bridge has a unique geometry.

The findings of this work will be submitted to Journal of Thermal Stresses in June 2004.  In two years, he already is a co-author of two journal articles based on his work on a NSF-funded educational research project.

Dr. Besterfield and Dr. Rahman were the other committee member of his thesis work.