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Killough, Stephen M

Publications and source records attributed to Killough, Stephen M.

5 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Measuring the Moisture Content of Wood Sheathing with Continuous Wave Radars

Radars were studied for measuring the moisture content of wood-based materials because of their non-destructive nature and their ability to measure the moisture content of several layers at once. These convenient characteristics enable a quick and non-invasive method to find areas of high moisture content in building envelopes so that problems can be fixed before the structure degrades. The need to operate the radar at millimeter ranges required the development of new techniques and methods for analyzing and calculating the moisture content of individual layers of building material. The techniques are providing accurate results for oriented strand board, and efforts are continuing for investigating other construction materials, meeting FCC requirements, and building a system that will be easy to deploy.

Killough, Stephen M↗
DOE OSTI2018

Energy-Harvesting Based Wireless Sensor Using LoRa Protocol

This software can be applied with an integrated wireless sensor node that can sense environmental variables, process the variables, and transmit using the LoRa protocol. The software accompanies an embedded circuit layout that has sensing, processing, and communication circuitry. The software effectively retrieves data from a sensor node, processes them and transmits over the air while conserving on board energy.

Kuruganti, Phani Teja V↗
DOE OSTI2015

Design and Implementation of a Hall Effect Sensor Array Applied to Recycling Hard Drive Magnets

Rare earths are an important resource for many electronic components and technologies. Examples abound including Neodymium magnets used in mobile devices and computer hard drives (HDDs), and a variety of renewable energy technologies (e.g., wind turbines). Approximately 21,000 metric tons of Neodymium is processed annually with less than 1% being recycled. An economic system to assist in the recycling of magnet material from post-consumer goods, such as Neodymium Iron Boron magnets commonly found in hard drives is presented. A central component of this recycling measurement system uses an array of 128 Hall Effect sensors arranged in two columns to detect the magnetic flux lines orthogonal to the HDD. Results of using the system to scan planar shaped objects such as hard drives to identify and spatially locate rare-earth magnets for removal and recycling from HDDs are presented. Applications of the sensor array in other identification and localization of magnetic components and assemblies will be presented.

Hall Effect sensors↗
DOE OSTI2014

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Hybrid DS/FFH Spread-Spectrum Radio Transceiver

In recent years there has been great interest in using hybrid spread-spectrum (HSS) techniques for commercial applications, particularly in the Smart Grid, in addition to their inherent uses in military communications. This is because HSS can accommodate high data rates with high link integrity, even in the presence of significant multipath effects and interfering signals. A highly useful form of this transmission technique for many types of command, control, and sensing applications is the specific code-related combination of standard direct-sequence modulation with "fast" frequency-hopping, denoted hybrid DS/FFH, wherein multiple frequency hops occur within a single data-bit time. In this paper, we present the efforts carried out at Oak Ridge National Laboratory toward exploring the design, implementation, and evaluation of a hybrid DS/FFH spread-spectrum radio transceiver using a single Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The FPGA allows the various subsystems to quickly communicate with each other and thereby maintain tight synchronization. We also investigate various hopping sequences against robustness to interference and jamming. Experimental results are presented that show the receiver sensitivity, radio data-rate/bit-error evaluations, and jamming and interference rejection capabilities of the implemented hybrid DS/FFH spread-spectrum system under widely varying design parameters.

data rate↗