Engineering Commons^™

Design Of A Denitrification Bioreactor For St. Francis Retreat Center, Monique Hansen, Ashton Politz

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The St. Francis Retreat Center located in San Juan Bautista, California has over 7000 visitors a year. The Retreat Center aims to provide a peaceful rejuvenating experience for its visitors through the opportunity to enjoy the natural beauty and landscape it has to offer. Unfortunately, the Retreat Center has a lake on its property that, primarily during the summer months, is dry due to the lack of rain. In effort to solve this problem and make the property more visually appealing, the Retreat Center would like to use the water from a well to recharge the lake. The well, however, …

Groundwater Irrigation System For Sustainable Agriculture, Peter Koros, Richard Matthews, Ciara Murphy

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The aim of this project was to develop a prototype that may be a model to help relieve food insecurity in rural Liberia. This was accomplished by designing a groundwater extraction, recharge, and irrigation system to facilitate year-long crop-growth. The project was in partnership with BRAID Africa and a community in Zwedru, located in east Liberia, near the border of Côte D’Ivoire. During 2010 and 2011, a civil war broke out in Côte D’Ivoire and led to the citizens of the country taking refuge in Liberia (Leaf 2015). Many refugees have decided to stay in Liberia and are struggling to …

Design Of Sustainable Mixed Use Complex In Santa Clara, California, Spencer Larsen, Joao Etrusco, Marek Kossik

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Lying in the heart of the Silicon Valley, the City of Santa Clara is a hotbed of development and has long been viewed as the model for rapid development, as the area needs to keep up with the demands of the rapidly growing technology industry. For this senior design project, the team decided to address this issue of massive urban growth by proposing a development design that is both sustainable and establishes a community feel that enhances local growth and business. The team drew initial inspiration from San Jose based The CORE Companies’ Agrihood project, a community development already in …

Tiny Home Innovations: Alternative Uses And Designs With The San José Bridge Housing Community, Jackson Bordelon, John O’Hagan

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Homelessness is without question one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the Bay Area. Regardless of whether people think ending homelessness is feasible, the bottom line is that every human deserves the right to have a place they call home. Despite the simplicity of this right, achieving it in today’s society is difficult because of the economic, social and political complexities which make homelessness appear to be a problem with no solution. Unfortunately, belief in the hopelessness of efforts to end homelessness dissuades many from taking action.

This project is not guided by the belief that ending homelessness is …

Complete Streets In Venice, California, Fabian Chavez, Jordan Cho

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

In response to the growing pattern of fatal traffic accidents involving pedestrians and bicyclists in the City of Los Angeles, a new initiative has been started to reduce these accidents by improving current designs and adding signage and striping to add more visibility. The city-wide project also focused on these redesigns to help boost the surrounding economy by encouraging residents to bike and walk instead of drive. Though met with much criticism and protest from residents, the traffic data after one year of the pilot implementation proved accident rates and fatalities had decreased with the new safety measures installed. This …