This dissertation contains findings from two research projects. The first research area focused on assessing engineering students problem solving skills. Problem solving related to two material and energy balance topics--vapor liquid equilibrium and reacting systems with recycle - were examined first followed by a more holistic analysis across two…

Ambient ionization mass spectrometry enables rapid in-situ analysis of a plethora of analytes that are relevant to the forensic and defense communities. As the arsenal of ambient ionization techniques, aimed at solving specific targeted problems, continues to expand, the adoption of these techniques into non-academic settings has been relatively…

American lobster, "Homarus americanus," H Milne Edwards 1837, are an ecologically, economically, and culturally valuable marine resource for the coastal communities in the Gulf of Maine (GoM). The American lobster fishery is the most valuable commercial fishery in the United States, supporting thousands of jobs and generating hundreds of…

Equally as important as growing the body of human knowledge through scientific discoveries and analysis is relaying this information to the general public in a digestible manner to establish a scientifically literate society. This dissertation approaches the multifaceted issue by combining an in-depth study of brown dwarf binary atmospheres with…

The research presented in this dissertation looks at how students in general chemistry reason about atomic emission spectroscopy. Situated within the context of a transformed general chemistry curriculum called "Chemistry, Life, the Universe, and Everything" (CLUE), the goal of this study was to (1) characterize the various ways in which…

Energetic materials (EMs) are substances with a high amount of stored energy and the ability to release that energy at a rapid rate. Nanothermites and green organic energetics are two classes of EMs which have gained significant interest as they each have desirable properties over traditional explosives. These systems also possess downfalls, which…

Red snapper, "Lutjanus campechanus," were sampled with hook and line at natural (n = 33) and artificial (n = 27) reef sites in the northern Gulf of Mexico from 2009-2011. Stomachs (n = 708) were extracted and their contents preserved for gut content analysis, and muscle tissue samples (n = 200) were dissected and frozen for stable…

The goal of this dissertation is to enable better predictive models by engaging raw experimental data through the Instrumental Model. The Instrumental Model captures the protocols and procedures of experimental data analysis. The approach is formalized by encoding the Instrumental Model in an XML record. Decoupling the raw experimental data from…

Camouflage fabrics are produced on a large scale for use in the US military and other applications. One of the highest volume camouflage fabrics is known as the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP) which is produced for the US Department of Defense. At present, no standard measurement-based color quality control method exists for camouflage…

The sluggish kinetics of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) contributes significantly to the loss of cathode overpotential in fuel cells, thus requiring high loadings of platinum (Pt), which is an expensive metal with limited supply. However, Pt and Pt-based alloys are still the best available electrocatalysts for ORR thus far. The research presented…

The concept of Lewis base activation of selenium Lewis acids has been effectively reduced to practice in the Lewis base catalyzed selenofunctionalization of unactivated olefins. In this reaction, the weakly acidic species, "N"-phenylselenyl succinimide, is cooperatively activated by the addition of a "soft" Lewis base donor (phosphine sulfides,…

It has been more than two decades since the copper-oxide high temperature superconductors were discovered. However, building a satisfactory theoretical framework to study these compounds still remains one of the major challenges in condensed matter physics. In addition to the mechanism of superconductivity, understanding the properties of the…

Multibeam interference lithography is investigated as a manufacturing technique for three-dimensional photonic crystal templates. In this research, optimization of the optical setup and the photoresist initiation system leads to a significant improvement of the optical quality of the crystal, as characterized by normal incidence optical…

Abstract I. The goal of this study was to synthesize and characterize a set of coordination complexes containing 6pi-cationic ligands. These compounds could be extremely useful as catalysts for the polymerization of olefins that are widely used in the synthetic polymer industry. The original strategy was to synthesize the 6pi-cationic ligands…

This thesis outlines how meV-resolution inelastic x-ray scattering and causality-enforcing mathematics can be used to measure the dynamical density-density linear response function for liquid water with Angstrom spatial resolution and 50fs temporal resolution. The results are compared to high-resolution spectroscopic and scattering experiments and…