Ryan Alicea

Area of research

Biomedical Engineering · Rehabilitation

Research interest

Research topics from publications: Effects of Filament Size on Critical Current Density in Overpressure Processed Bi-2212 Round Wire; Sound Identification for Fire-Fighting Mobile Robots; Modeling and traversal of pliable materials for tracked robot navigation; Characterization and Traversal of Pliable Vegetation for Robot Navigation. Representative work: Bi 2 Sr 2 CaCu 2 O x (Bi-2212) conductor is the only high-temperature superconductor manufactured as a round wire and is a very promising conductor for very high field applications. One of the key design parameters of Bi-2212 wire is its filament size, which has been previously reported to affect the critical current density (Jc) and ac losses. Work with 1 bar heat treatment showed that the optimal filament diameter was about 15 μm, but it was not well understood at that time, that gas bubbles were the main current limiting mechanism. Here, we investigated a recent Bi-2212 wire with a 121 × 18 filament architecture with varying wire diameter (1.0-1.5 mm) using 50 bar overpressure processing. A structure engulfed in flames can pose an extreme danger for fire-fighting personnel as well as any people trapped inside. A companion robot to assist the fire-fighters could potentially help speed up the search for humans while reducing risk for the fire-fighters. However, robots operating in these environments need to be able to operate in very low visibility conditions because of the heavy smoke, debris and unstructured terrain. This paper develops an audio classification algorithm to identify sounds relevant to fire-fighting such as people in distress (baby cries, screams, coughs), structural failure (wood snapping, glass breaking), fire, fire trucks, and crowds. The outputs of the clas