Engineering Commons^™

Rams Onboard: Improving Employment Process, De-Shunda White, Yamil Boo Irizarry, Samuel Brazil

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In order for the Virginia Commonwealth University Engineering Human Resources department to provide seamless new hire integration, they need to upgrade their current post-hire information gathering techniques. Currently the HR department continues to provide paper forms and packets to new hires to fill out and return for review. This method requires over $30,000 in cost for materials and labor. The main goal of our project is to establish a way for newly hired employees to complete their new hire forms electronically through the VCU server.

By successfully executing our project we are moving VCU’s onboarding process to a completely paperless …

Grid Game: Developing A Java/Android Version For Increased Accessibility And Usability, Sean Amos, Patrick Sivils, Aidan Collins

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Objective: Idaho University has implemented a power grid simulator game as a teaching aid for students enrolled in their Resilient Control Systems course. The game was created in LabView and requires the user to download the LabView client, as well as install the Grid Game on their machine in order to play. Our goal is to recreate the Grid Game in a Java based web-browser format so that the game is more accessible and easy to use. By recreating the Grid Game in a format that can be played in browser, other universities, companies, and individuals will easily be able …

Smart Grid Network Simulation, Morgan Waser, Brandon Perkins, Benjamin Koppier

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Problem: In the coming years the United States is working to move towards a smarter electric grid. One that is more versatile and can adjust to different situations. To move forward with these from our current electric grid to the Smart Grid, simulations are needed to understand how the new grid is likely to behave in different situations.

Rationale: The importance of creating these simulations is to try and predict which topological set-ups are best for different kinds of scenarios as well as how the grid might behave under different circumstances. Once different situations are simulated, Smart Grid developers can …

Scientifically Defensible And Measurable Anti-Phishing Training, Josh Rymer, Chris Neville, Robert Hodges

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Problem: How can the effectiveness of a phishing attack be quantified and/or measured?

Applications: This project will provide a resource for Idaho National Labs to quantitavely evaluate the effectiveness of their security awareness program in regards to phishing attacks. In turn, it will aid them in hardening the human element of security at the research facility.

Approach: Our approach is to construct a fully functional phishing system where we can craft phishing emails, send emails, and place links that point to our web application. We hope to use this system to conduct an anonymous and non-malicious experiment. This data will …

Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities In The Smart Grid & Thermodynamical Properties Database Software, Abderrahmen Chouat, Shiyoon Joo, Jacob Holcombe

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Project Scope: Smart grid stability and issues/ challenges associated with coupling nuclear and renewable energy source will be researched. The changes we can expect in grid technology so the robustness and resilience could be further improved will be addressed. This projects will entail literature surveys and may involve running some simulation software and comparisons. Another aspect of the project will be focus on nuclear plant as part of the future smart grid stability challenge. Specifically, this part of the project will entail CFD modeling of zig-zag Printed Circuit compact heat exchanger and modeling it in MATLAB and seeing the difference …

Text Analytic System: Document Similarity, Ryan Murphy, James Cecil, Joseph Contarino

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Knowledge discovery is a critical function of infrastructure protection in the U.S. By analyzing key text documents, we can gain insight into the interwoven and interdependent infrastructure system of the U.S., and better understand the security aspects of the system as a whole. Massive amounts of relevant data resides in text documents, which must be gathered and parsed to be analyzed on a large scale. Our algorithm collects web-based text embedded in HTML pages and analyzes it in various ways to decipher similarities. It will be a needed component of the larger system being developed by the Idaho National Laboratory, …

Clover Care: Website And E-Marketing Development, Parker Bryant, Amber Elliott, Weston Kingery, Ervin Ramos

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Clover Care is a geographically diverse company with both caregivers and clients spread across multiple counties. Efficient resource management and communication is critical for such a broadly distributed company. Clover Care also expects to continue expanding its geographical service area, making a solution even more critical. Clover Care was interested in updating and expanding their existing website to address this need. The centralization provided by using a website allows caregivers, clients and their families, and managers a way to quickly and effectively communicate.

The primary Clover Care forms that were to be centralized included the caregiver timesheet, client case management …

Predator-Prey Game To Maintain Stable Fish Population For Ecotoxicological Studies, Jason Blondin, Catherine Halpern, Tyler Malkus

Capstone Design Expo Posters

With the state of the environment on the forefront of many minds today, it’s important for our society to be able to understand how we interact with our local ecosystems and the potential impacts we can cause. Creating computational simulations of these environments can help to predict the possible effects of different situations. The purpose of our project was to create a predator-prey simulation of different species of fish that could take into account different population management strategies and accurately reflect the waves that could be caused by the introduction of various chemicals into the fish’s environment.

In order to …

Church Hill Activities & Tutoring, Dhundi Acharya, Dhruvil Shah, Michael Mcalexander

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Problem Statement: Church Hill Activities and Tutoring ( CHAT ), a non-profit organization which invests in the lives of Richmond’s most at-risk children by establishing strong connections through one-on one tutoring, mentorship, and enrichment activities , is facing difficulty in managing consistent communication with parents and volunteers. Each of these audiences requires different channels and information, and currently, sending paper to the home through students has become the primary channel for communicating with parents. The reliability of this practice is limited but continues because parents’ contact information, such as phone number or email, changes frequently.

Rationale: Since CHAT is facing …

Tatami: An Open Source Enterprise Social Network, Kenny Hegeland, Jeremy Narron, Kameron Spruill

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Tatami is an open source enterprise social network created by Ippon, a consulting and software design company with offices in France and the USA. Any company can install Tatami, allowing its employees to communicate in a Twitter-like fashion. Self-hosting Tatami also lets a company retain ownership of its data, keeping it out of the hands of third parties.

Tatami’s front end was originally coded using the Backbone.js library, which can make it challenging to add and modify features. Ippon decided to have it rewritten using the AngularJS web application framework, which will fix the previously mentioned problems. This rewrite will …

Searchblox Project Indexer Agent, Tri Nguyen, Tom Vaele, Zachary Johnson

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In this digital world, access to information is essential. We need it and almost every day; Google, Bing, Yahoo, or one of these other major services that help us find what we’re looking for so we can use a resource or answer a simple question. SearchBlox, an enterprise elasticsearch toolkit which boasts a robust and easy to use indexing system for an array of MIME types lacks an essential capability: remoting. The scope of this problem requires the ability to efficiently index particularly voluminous, dense, or distributed file-systems to a centralized SearchBlox indexing server while keeping the services that clients …

Optimizing Data Center Operations With Virtualization, Jason Kruse, Osman Sesay, Stephanie Goggin-Burns

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Design a computer network using two or more host servers that supports a virtual hosting environment.

The importance of creating a successful datacenter is to allow a company to maintain data accessibility while keeping the data secure. One way of doing this is to have servers at multiple locations to insure that data isn’t lost in case of a failure at one server location. The impact of a datacenter that supports a virtual hosting environment is to maximize hardware recourses, grants the ability to quickly stand up server services and increases availability during hardware failure due to software like VMotion. …

The Optimization And Comparison Of A Cerium Salt-Based Phosphate Filtration System To Industry Standard Phosphate Removal Water Filtration Systems, Nicholas Seymour, Snehi Shrestha, Laura Viktoria Pretzman

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Phosphorous, being one of the fundamental building blocks of life, has been linked with the increase of cyanobacteria and algae growth. One of the main ways that phosphorous enters the marine ecosystem is through the form of runoff phosphates from fertilizers and industrial processes. In addition to disrupting the biology of ecosystems another drawback of excess of phosphates is the tendency for these chemical groups to form scale buildup on metal through the form of calcium phosphate.

The goal of our project is to investigate a novel way of removing phosphate groups from wastewater with the use of the rare …

Rapid Diagnostics With Nanoparticles, Lance Johnson, Sai Katikala, Maaz Nawaz

Capstone Design Expo Posters

More than 500,000 open-heart surgeries are performed in the United States every year. The anticoagulant Heparin is used to decrease the likelihood of thrombosis or hemorrhaging in each surgery by bonding to the enzyme inhibitor antithrombin III (AT-III). However, anesthesiologists currently lack the ability to measure antithrombin levels in a patient quickly, making appropriate Heparin dosages difficult to determine and possibly resulting in thrombosis or hemorrhaging if thrombin levels move outside the allowable range. This could be prevented with a simple bedside test. Current tests use gold, but we believe Iron (III) Oxide (commonly known as rust) can be used …

A Treatment For Menorrhagia And Irregular Menstruation: Free Flowing Cryo-Fluid Endometrial Ablation, Julia Biddle, Hubertina Rose Tolpa, Krystal Zentgraf

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Menorrhagia (abnormally heavy and prolonged menstrual period) is a condition suffered by many women; these women have menstrual flow greater than 80 mL per cycle compared to the average 30 mL for normal cycles. The area of the uterus responsible for menorrhagia is the regenerative basal layer of the endometrium (inner uterine layer). In order to relieve menorrhagia, the endometrium needs to be destroyed through the basal layer. This project looks to address issues which patients face with current standard menorrhagia treatments, such as invasiveness, intense pain, or incomplete treatment of the uterine wall, by developing a superior remedy.

The …

Effluent Treatment And Recovery Of Polyether Using Nanoporous Technology, Suhaib Alramamneh, Zachary Turner, Allison Warth

Capstone Design Expo Posters

This semester Evonik Industries, a specialty chemical producer located in Hopewell, Virginia, approached VCU’s Chemical Engineering department with a project that would reduce their costs and increase process sustainability. The project is to determine a way to separate their liquid organic product from their waste stream in order to recycle the lost product. Liquid-Liquid extraction is a procedure used across most of the chemical industry. Proven separation techniques already exist for the standard liquid-liquid separation; however, when one liquid is miscible in the other the difficulty of separation is greatly increased. In order to do a liquid-liquid separation of an …

Separation Technologies Of Base Oils: The Optimization Of An Anaerobic Thermal Desorption Unit, Kelsey Mangham, Nicholas Montesdeoca, Michael "Ngyuon" Lay

Capstone Design Expo Posters

There has been a recent increase in the amount of oil and natural gas exploration due to fuel reserves that were once inaccessible in North America becoming available through methods such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. However, these methods of exploration generate substantial amounts of oil contaminated waste which pose significant pollution risks of which current methods of treatment are slow and ineffective. This project aims to design a better operating process for use with Anaerobic Thermal Desorption Units (ATDU) that are currently manufactured by RLC Technologies which offer more environmentally safe and quick processing of such wastes.

Current …

A Device For The Objective Assessment Of Adhd Using Eye Movements, Ankita Dosaj, Jefferson Overlin, Cassie Turnage

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder characterized by lack of focus, self-control,and hyperactivity. ADHD is difficult to diagnose without extensive observation by an expert, and even then is often misdiagnosed. Current methods of pediatric diagnosis rely on subjective measures of activity and behavior relative to other children [3]. Proper diagnosis is critical in preventing unnecessary prescription of the powerful, habit-forming nature of the drugs used to manage ADHD, such as Adderall and Ritalin [1][5]. Research has shown that patients with ADHD show abnormalities in reading tests and antisaccade tests, as these tests gauge ability to …

Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Monitoring System, Brittany Martinez, Brittany Noah, David Decker

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The objective of this project is to create a non-invasive hypoglycemic alert system that will detect a drop in blood sugar in type 1 diabetics during sleep. This will be achieved by creating an algorithm that couples heart rate variability with skin conductance to increase the accuracy of hypoglycemia detection. The device will be housed in a torso strap that will include: electrodes located over the user’s rib cage, a skin conductance sensor placed in the user’s armpit, a microcontroller to collect and process the data, and vibrating motors that will awaken the patient if hypoglycemia is detected. Integrating the …

A Non-Contact System For Measuring Wrist And Carpal Kinematics, Shruthi Muralidharan, Kristina Hendel, Joseph Newton, Vivek Patel

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Ligamentous and bone injuries in the wrist affect tens of thousands of adults per year and leads to abnormal function. Surgical procedures as well as physical therapy intended to restorefunction have room for improvement. Measuring wrist kinematics of the small carpal bones is necessary to understand the effect of ligamentous injury during normal motion.Currently there are motion analysis systems that are used to track large scale movementfor total body kinematics such as gait analysis. The accuracy of these systems is catered toward capturing gross movement and cannot precisely measure on the order of millimeters necessary for carpal kinematics. There are …

Molten Metal Loop Driven By Electromagnetic Pump, Dominic Espiritu, Dor Granek, Jerald Moore, Scott Torres

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The first challenge of this proposed study was the gauges for the loop, which were not functioning properly and giving off inaccurate data due to a loop flow issue. Therefore a new loop design, including gauges, was created to gather accurate data for the electromagnetic pump. The electromagnetic pump used in this experiment differs from the standard electromagnetic motors by using rare earth magnets set into opposing steel plates that rotate simultaneously. Accurate data from the velocity and pressure gauges is necessary so the correlation between the EM pump’s speed and the flow velocity could be calculated. This technology could …

Improved Lower-Arm Prosthesis, Trent Ernst, Eric Henderson, Patrick Borges, Taylor Powell

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Over the past few decades, innovations in myoelectric sensing in upper limb prostheses have given systems the ability to read, detect, and emulate fine motor control in an increasingly realistic manner. However, the practical impact that these scientific accomplishments yield is significantly limited by the lack of adoption witnessed by patients who are given such prosthetics. Some people see the device as a burden rather than an improvement. To address this issue, we propose the development of an improved lower arm prosthesis. This prosthesis is intended to encourage patient adoption and retention by emphasizing simplicity and comfort over technical precision. …

Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusor, Cody Boyd, Brian Hortelano, Yonathan Kassaye, Dimitris Killinger, Adam Stanfield, Jordan Stark, Thomas Veilleux, Nick Reuter

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The VCU Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) Fusor design project is a multi-year and multi-disciplinary venture. It was started as a means to build a neutron generator for the Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering department at VCU. The IEC fusor is a device based on the designs of Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the cathode ray tube. Our design utilizes a high voltage cathode located in a vacuum chamber that is filled with deuterium gas. This high voltage accelerates the deuterium particles towards the center of the chamber, resulting in deuterium-deuterium (D-D) fusion. This reaction creates a bright purple glow that can …

Home Automation Via Smart Technology, Christian Griggs, Audrey Morrisette, James Pepper

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Problem Statement The idea of an ‘Internet of Everything’ has been floating around for a while, but beyond mere buzzword this concept carries with it immense, and unfortunately as of yet untapped potential. The idea of complete interconnectivity most typically conjures images of home automation; smart appliances capable of self-regulation, self-setting thermostats, etc., but with this connectivity comes with it not only the capacity to remotely monitor an existing system but to control it as well (be it with a smart phone, online application, what have you). There exists ‘smart technologies’ which incorporate user’s smart phones in the operation and …

Small Scale Wide Band Radio Frequency Spectrum Analyzer, Ali Aldajaei, Ryan Littleton, Matthew Thomas

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The project being proposed has to deal the processing and identification of radio frequencies. As more and more frequencies are being used on the radio spectrum, noise and interference have become a problem. Currently spectrum analyzers can be used to identify this noise and interference but they require manpower and specialized equipment. Our project will focus on automating the process of analyzing multiple frequencies and identifying signals from interference. This will be done by first taking an input from a radio antenna to acquire radio signals at various frequencies and storing the values. These values will then be analyzed to …

Human-Machine Interfacing Via Epidermal Electronic Systems, Michael Flynn, Matthew Nelson, Stefan Sharpley, Drew Simmons

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Surface electromyography (EMG) is rapidly becoming a viable control source for interfacing with machines. By measuring the electric potential generated by the contractions of skeletal muscles, systems can be controlled with a mere flick of the wrist, allowing intuitive and versatile control to the wielder. As sensors and classification algorithms become more sophisticated, EMG control has increasing potential to revolutionize the way we interact with and utilize technology. Prosthetics in particular have benefited the most from these recent advances, with one research team successfully returning ambulation to a leg amputee last year. However, this technology is not yet suitable for …

Wind Energy Harvesters For Urban Small Scale Power Generation, James Mcnamee, Zachary Gartrell, Andrew Krupacs

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The energy demands of society are increasing, and the ability to produce this energy from renewable sources such as wind must also increase to meet these demands. Large wind turbines are a great way to harvest renewable wind power, but they are often too large to use in an urban environment.

This project focuses on designing wind energy harvesters, based on existing iterations that produce output power per area comparable to that of an efficient wind turbine, approximately 3 watts per harvester that is 1 meter long. In order to reach this target power level, two innovative designs are under …

Automated Magnetic Field Scanning System, George Bakirtzis, Tim Owen, Tara Powell

Capstone Design Expo Posters

One of Jefferson Laboratory’s research areas is in Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) science and technology. SRF cavities are tested in the Vertical Testing Area (VTA) at Jefferson Laboratory, within a series of large cylindrical dewars. The measured quality factor (Q factor) of the SRF cavity is directly influenced by any existing magnetic field. Because the VTA previously housed a cyclotron, all the rebars within the building have residual magnetic fields emanating from them. This magnetic field effect of the building renders the measurements of Q factor on the devices inaccurate and the testing data unreliable. A magnetic field scanning system …

Automotive Object Detection Training System, Lucas Cerully, Salima Fenaoui, Derek Mccubbin

Capstone Design Expo Posters

With a constant rise in the automobile industry, there is a demand for more advanced integratable technology along with it. With the consumer’s safety always in mind, automobile companies are adding more to their systems to help detect and prevent collisions. Among these technologies is the object detection system. In summary, this component warns or reacts to oncoming objects that could put the driver in danger. As with any piece of technology, there are problems and bugs that the object detection system can come across that would cause it to act irregularly. In turn, this requires the availability of technicians …

Main Body Aerodynamics, Michael Al-Badini, Christopher Buettner, Wesley Russell, Steven Summerville, Marcus Wardlow

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Our senior design project entails designing, analyzing the front upper aerodynamic nose for the Formula SAE at VCU’s race team. Currently there are no provisions on the chassis to provide relief for parasitic loss of speed & efficiency due to drag. Since Formula SAE is focused on building a engineered, safe, and efficient vehicle our aerodynamic design will help with handling, downforce, and fuel economy all while reducing drag. Our Aerodynamic design will play a key role not only in how the Formula car is perceived aesthetically, but our calculations will be a large determining factor in the cars overall …