This honors thesis report aims to propose a sustainable long-term solution for providing off-grid solar energy to rural communities that lack the necessary grid energy infrastructure. With this in mind, we aim to establish the framework and documentation for people to be able to build and maintain their own off-grid solar power systems. Due to recent pushes for clean energy both nationwide and statewide, the team will discuss the current renewable energy market and the incentives to justify the future growth potential of residential solar energy systems, which includes off-grid or remote solar. This discussion will include comparing pre-built solar systems currently offered for purchase against the proposed design outlined in this report. Notably, the outlined design has been made with an emphasis on system sustainability, low initial cost, reliability, ease of manufacturing/maintenance, and material selection. Lastly, the team will discuss the project’s approach to documentation with a user manual draft to ensure the system's long-term sustainability and troubleshooting. Although the efforts of this project have increased over time, this project remains active within the ASU EWB chapter, meaning that not all aspects described throughout this report are fully complete. The Native American community of Shonto, Arizona, will be used as an example to understand a rural community's needs for designing a solar panel system that provides sufficient energy for a single household. The project was completed in collaboration with Arizona State University’s Engineering Projects In Community Service (EPICS) program and Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter. Both these organizations aim to connect ASU students to the professional mentors and resources they need to design and implement low-cost, small-scale, easily replicated, and sustainable engineering projects.

In this report, a PDMS network formed from catalysis of a linear, bifunctional polymer by Ashby-Karstedt’s catalyst is analyzed. An exploration of the crosslink density, shear plateau modulus, and glass transition temperature is performed to display some of the material’s mechanical, chemical, and thermal properties. The softness of this network in addition to the biocompatibility and thermal stability of PDMS make this elastomer useful for a broad spectrum of applications.

Our mission is to provide a valuable experience for the everyday consumer that both tests personal attributes, like logic or memory, and is also legitimately fun. We want our product to be a hands-on, exciting puzzle box experience that anybody can use. Our goal is to become a leading brand of puzzle boxes and be able to provide fun, educational experiences to everyone. We also would like to serve schools by providing learning experiences all over the world at an affordable price.

As the need for whole heart transplantation to treat heart failure grows faster than the supply, alternative methods are in increasing demand. Transplantation of cardiomyocytes to replace injured myocardium after MI has shown promise. Myocardium is notoriously ineffective at proliferating after switching from hyperplastic to hypertrophic growth. FOXM1 has been established as having a strong role in cell cycle regulation in cancerous tumors and cardiomyocytes, and these experiments show the relationship between FOXM1 and iPSC-derived cardiomyocyte proliferation and attempt to improve a treatment option for heart failure through manipulation of this gene. Our experiment concludes that FOXM1 knockdown increases iPSC-CM cell proliferation, and can be further explored to better increase cardiomyocyte proliferation.

Given their manufacturing versatility, plastics have fundamentally changed commercial consumerism. Unfortunately, two of the largest drawbacks to current plastics on the market is their dependency on fossil fuels and their lack of circular recyclability. In this paper, the focus will be on the latter issue. Circular recyclability can be described as the idea of minimizing waste through its reformation back into a commodity. Currently, the primary method of recycling plastics, mechanical recycling, can only be achieved through melting and reshaping plastic for reuse. A significant drawback to this method is the reduction in chain molecular weight and subsequent loss of mechanical integrity through multiple reheating cycles. Chemical recycling provides an alternative where the polymer is broken down through chemically reactive sites, allowing the material to be recycled a theoretically infinite number of times and maintain its mechanical properties. Polyethylene, one of the largest classes of industrially produced plastic, does not have any commercially relevant chemically recyclable derivatives. The structure of polyethylene is primarily composed of long, nonpolar hydrocarbon chains that provide the material’s signature tough property. To make a material that can be depolymerizable for chemical recycling, polar ester functional groups must be added throughout the chain, allowing for chain scission by hydrolysis. Unfortunately, while the incorporation of ester functionality into polyethylene has been studied previously, material strength decreases as a result of this modification, sacrificing the integrity of the final product. Herein, I propose the incorporation of nucleobase pairings into the ester-containing polyethylene, which will add supramolecular hydrogen bonding reinforcements to improve the mechanical performance while maintaining chemical recyclability. This addition to the polyethylene backbone will be achieved by the synthesis of a ureido cytosine (UCy) diol, which contains 4 complementary hydrogen bonding sites for enhanced intermolecular forces between polyethylene chains.

After the Vietnam War the Communist party faced the issue of unifying the minds of the Vietnamese people beyond just the outward signs. The party experienced both successes and failures in these efforts but overall found a valid way to normalize relations in the country. This thesis finds that unity did not come so much from forced indoctrination as from establishing prosperity and finding common points of unity. In Vietnam’s case, its shift to a more flexible and tolerant political and economic atmosphere paved the way for more positive views of the government, and by employing a nationalist appeal to historic figures and symbols, the government further shaped the minds of the rising generation. The use of Ho Chi Minh as the symbol of both modern Vietnam and the Communist party is a particularly telling example. Upon visiting Vietnam today, it is difficult to find outward expressions of disunity between the north and south. Accordingly, some of the strategies employed in Vietnam may be useful in other countries struggling with unity.