Engineering Commons^™

Fiberglass Mat-Roll Carryover, Bryce Youngson, Aaliyah Ramos, Johann Cayaban, Tony Ledesma

Mechanical Engineering

The asphalt shingle is a type of roof shingle that uses asphalt for waterproofing. Its low cost and easy installation make it one of the most common roof covers in North America. General Aniline and Film (GAF) is one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of roofing materials and produces asphalt shingles at their Shafter, California manufacturing facility. To manufacture asphalt shingles, a base material of fiberglass passes through a series of processes that sequentially add asphalt, ceramic-coated mineral granules, and thermoplastic adhesive. The fiberglass base-material arrives at the manufacturing facility in large rolls that workers must periodically splice together in …

Critical Radius Of Insulation, Maria N. Ambrose, Samuel J. Sayre, Travis W. Martin, Matt T. Sterling

Mechanical Engineering

The critical radius of insulation is a counterintuitive concept within the study of heat transfer. The theory states that adding insulation to a cylindrical or spherical object will increase the rate of heat loss rather than decrease it, if the radius (thickness) of the insulation is at its “critical” value. The Critical Radius of Insulation Senior Project is designed to demonstrate this phenomenon to Heat Transfer students via a portable apparatus. The concept will be demonstrated with a cylindrical object which is heated by way of a separate voltage source. Thermocouples will display the temperature of the cylinder while insulation …

Model Block Press Design, Ben Todd Van Hamersveld, Chester Wong, Alexander Wing-Jon Giannousis

Mechanical Engineering

This project’s goal is to redesign the Center for Vocational Building Technology (CVBT) BP9 earth block press, which makes 1/3 scale compressed earth blocks to build demonstration model homes in Thailand. The full-scale block press, the BP6, provides a sustainable and affordable technique for constructing habitable homes in Thailand. The BP9 serves as a tool to inform the public of the advantages of human-powered earth block presses through demonstration. The BP9 press design has multiple problems: it is too expensive to manufacture, there is too much friction when used, it has several weak points due to users unintentionally applying excessive …

Deployable Cover For Cubesat Fuv Imager, Edwin J. Rainville, Patrick J. Rainville, Jeff Wagner

Mechanical Engineering

The goal is to develop a deployable cover for a far ultraviolet imager cube satellite that will be used to map the earth’s auroras in the ionosphere. The deployable cover is used to protect the Far Ultra-Violet (FUV) sensor and lenses, house two mirrors which are used to filter unwanted light and expose optics when deployed. The deployable cover consists of a door, an actuator, a lockout mechanism, and an “open position” indicator. This project also includes designing a fixture for testing the optical alignment of the deployable cover after launch and during orbital conditions. The subassembly is required to …

Feasibility Of Collaborative Alliance Association For Non-Competitive Small Business Contractors, Brody Allen Gill

Construction Management

Small business construction contracting firms around the country struggle with growing their business successfully. This is a result of unknown results from new business practices and few resources to initiate programs that can improve productivity and efficiency. A simple solution could give small business construction contractors the opportunity to share ideas, compare company analytics and promote professional networking in a non-competitive, collaborative alliance. The goal of this project is to determine if a collaborative alliance association using data benchmarking would be an effective solution for non-competitive small business contractors to grow their businesses. Thereafter being proven effective, is such an …

Means And Methods Of Residential Construction And Design In Remote Areas Of Southeast Alaska, Joseph Anthony Masters

Construction Management

Building in the remote locations of Southeast Alaska is currently an unexplored area of construction that has been avoided due to the complications that accompany such projects. Many property owners in the Southeast Alaska region face challenges due to a lack of common practices that would simplify the construction process, particularly those deprived of road access and utility services. These potential residents must rely on sustainable techniques and alternative modes of material transportation, creating an abundance of planning concerns. Additionally, while code restrictions are limited due to the uniqueness of these properties, certain codes regarding the Alaska Department of Natural …

Process Improvement And Lift Design For The Installation Of A Metrology Machine Assembly, Dalt J. Lasell, James Mitchell O'Meara, Matthew Steensma

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The objective is to work with Onto Innovations, a leading provider of semiconductor metrology and manufacturing solutions, to develop a system that safely installs a 250lb optics plate into the Atlas III: one of their metrology machines. Based in Milpitas, CA, Onto Innovations utilizes a variety of operations to create different products and assembles each product on site. The 250lb optics plates are WIP that are transferred between fixtures and the Atlas III using a combination of lifts and human workers. The WIP have long lead times, high tolerances, and large costs associated with their manufacturing process.

Onto Innovations identified …

Automation Of Data Analysis In Formula 1, Adam Joseph Mourad, Prescott Jeanne Delzell, Patrick Conner Mccabe

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

This paper explores economic solutions for Formula 1 racing companies who are interested in data visualization tools. The research was conducted on the current development of data gathering, data visualization, and data interpretation in Formula 1 racing. It was found that a large chunk of racing companies within the league needs an affordable, effective, and automated visualization tool for data interpretation. As data collection in Formula 1 arises, the need for faster and more powerful software increases. Racing companies profit off-brand exposure and the more a racing team wins, the more exposure they receive. The goal of the paper focuses …

Reasoning From Point Clouds, Joey Wilson

Computer Engineering

Over the past two years, 3D object detection has been a major area of focus across industry and academia. This is primarily due to the difficulty of learning data from point clouds. While camera images are fixed size and can therefore be easily trained on using convolution, point clouds are unstructured series of points in three dimensions. Therefore, there is no fixed number of features, or a structure to run convolution on. Instead, researchers have developed many ways of attempting to learn from this data, however there is no clear consensus on what is the best method, as each has …

Increasing The Accessibility Of Bim Training Within The Aec Industry, Xavier Caldera

Construction Management

At the turn of the 21^st century, the rise of new technology has helped modernize the AEC industry. Architects, engineers, general contractors, and foremen can build, collaborate, and communicate more efficiently using BIM to help facilitate the building process. The benefits of BIM have been proven through increased coordination, risk mitigation, and cost optimization. However, with the increasing use of BIM, there is a growing education gap between construction workers and BIM technology. Currently, there are three main avenues to learn BIM: in-house company training, attending college, or paying to learn independently online. The foundation for a BIM learning …

2-Axis Electric Off-Road Bucket Seat Bases, Brennan K. Slater, Alexander P. Croteau, Spencer M. Kubik

Mechanical Engineering

Off-road vehicle bucket seats are currently restricted to a single position relative to the floor of the vehicle. Drivers and riders desire the ability to adjust their seat position to increase comfort and allow for a greater size range of riders to fit safely within the cabin or roll cage. To develop a viable solution, the team has gone through an extensive design process and has constructed a functioning prototype. This Final Design Report encapsulates the entire design process and concludes with recommendations for changes we would make looking both back in review as well as moving forward with further …

Waste Gasification, Glyn D. Lewis, Nash Taylor, Nicholas L. Ordonez, David S. Mccallum

Mechanical Engineering

This document summarizes the work the IGT Team has conducted on the topic of waste to energy gasification over the Cal Poly Winter, Spring, and Fall quarters of 2019. The project is being carried out by four Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering students: Nash Taylor, Glyn Lewis, David McCallum, and Nicholas Ordonez and the sponsor of this project is Tod duBois. The team’s original goal was to successfully create a system that compiles residential solid waste on a small scale, gasifies it, and measures the typical syngas outputs, so that the team may assess the viability of gasification of household waste …

Mechanized Advent Calendar, Oma Skyrus, Sigrid Derickson, Tyler Koski, Daniel Clifton

Mechanical Engineering

Within this document, the “Naughty and Nice” team will describe the details associated with the completion of this project, which involves creating an animated advent calendar for the Cambria Christmas Market. The problem, the customers and stakeholders, and the general goals of the project are introduced. The team conducted background research; how this research helps in finding a solution or supporting the needs of the sponsor is illustrated. Initial research includes interviews with the sponsor and potential users, patent and existing product searches, and some technical research pertaining to the subject. The team found that there are not many existing …

Tumble Bot, Alena Beyer, Blake Gonzales, Jensen Severance, Liam Chaffey

Mechanical Engineering

Passive locomotion is the ability for an object to move from one place to another by the means of the environment. In nature species such as tumbleweed, fox tails, plankton, and man o’ war jellyfish rely on passive modes of transportation for survival and are able to cross vast distances with little to no expenditure of their own energy. This document seeks to explore the feasibility of building a machine relies on the energy of Mars’ environment to explore the Martian surface.

The “Tensegrity Tumbleweed Locomotion” (nicknamed Tumble Bot) senior project was sponsored by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The …

Katie's Jogger, Megan Guillermo, Erin Wint, Abdullah Sulaiman, Kathryn Mangiaracina

Mechanical Engineering

Edward Robinson is an avid runner who would like to take his daughter on runs. His daughter, Katie, is 100% wheelchair bound and currently does not fit in any commercial joggers on the market. The project team was expected to design, build, and test a custom working prototype of a jogger that the sponsor can use to take his daughter on runs. This entire project was performed over a span of three quarters.

Mad Jack Alpine Touring Model Design, Austin Gasbarra, Gillian Stargensky, Madeleine Mccool, Brannon Smudz

Mechanical Engineering

Skiing is a sport enjoyed by millions of people every year, yet ski boots are very uncomfortable and cost- prohibitive, resulting in a low conversion rate of first-time skiers to lifetime skiers. Additionally, Alpine Touring (AT) is seeing a surge in popularity as ski resorts become more expensive, but few companies are developing affordable products in this realm. Mad Jack Snow Sports has developed a product that they believe addresses some of the main issues associated with skiing, but they want to develop their product line further. The problem statement and scope state that the purpose of this project is …

The Impact Of Education On Career Growth In The Construction Industry, Luis F. Rodrigues

Construction Management

A construction management degree and an apprenticeship are the two educational routes for a career in the construction industry. There are divisions within the workforce that reflect these educational pathways. Ideally, an alternative education would allow individuals without access to a university education to develop their career from an entry level position. However, if education has a long-term career impact, then limiting factors on education are consequently limiting on career growth. In examining if there is a ceiling on career growth relative to educational backgrounds, both education and experience were identified as key variables. In the case study presented, the …

Pv Mppt Water Pump Controller, Jacob R. Lamkin

Electrical Engineering

The intention of this project is to create a low cost way to extract the maximum useful power from a PV module to power a water pump. This approach will yield maximum financial and technical accessibility for end users. The project was successful in powering a water pump from a PV module as desired, and the microcontroller driven control circuitry was capable of finding and maintaining operation at the maximum power point of the PV module. Due to the low performance of the buck converter used in this project, this approach was not as efficient as desired and would require …

Free Space Optical Communication, Anuj Gohil

Electrical Engineering

Communication is key to day to day activities for all companies and people. Wireless communication has made us expect more from our tools. Radio Frequency has been the preferred medium for a couple decades, but there is a need for faster secure communication. Free Space Optical Communication is an alternate wireless communication system which uses optics to create a link. It utilizes low-power and converts an analog signal into digital pulses which are transmitted across space to a receiver. Its only caveat is its vulnerability under atmospheric obstacles. The goal of this project is to create a free space optical …

Blood Glucose Predictor, Jessica Patterson

Electrical Engineering

For my senior project, I perform data analysis using statistical methods to determine body metrics that correlate with blood glucose levels. Working with Dr. Tina Smilkstein, I take repeat measurements from 6 different volunteers to establish trends in bodily metric data. The data taken includes weight, body fat, pulse rate, VO2, blood glucose, blood pressure, hours slept, and quality of sleep. Using these values, I use the program MiniTab to view results.

A few examples of correlations with blood glucose found in this project are:

• Systolic blood pressure for females had a regression line of 124.0 -0.3366*Blood Pressure. This indicates …

Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling With Autonomous Learning Effects, Jordan M. Ticktin

Master's Theses

It's commonly assumed that experience leads to efficiency, yet this is largely unaccounted for in resource-constrained project scheduling. This thesis considers the idea that learning effects could allow selected activities to be completed within reduced time, if they're scheduled after activities where workers learn relevant skills. This paper computationally explores the effect of this autonomous, intra-project learning on optimal makespan and problem difficulty. A learning extension is proposed to the standard RCPSP scheduling problem. Multiple parameters are considered, including project size, learning frequency, and learning intensity. A test instance generator is developed to adapt the popular PSPLIB library of scheduling …

Evaluating Urban Downtown One-Way To Two-Way Street Conversion Using Microscopic Traffic Simulation, Bernice Liu

Master's Theses

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Downtown San Jose is attracting new residents, visitors, and businesses. Clearly, the mobility of these residents, visitors, and businesses cannot be accommodated by streets that focus on the single-occupancy automobile mode. To increase the potential for individuals to use non-single-occupancy modes of travel, the downtown area must have a cohesive plan to integrate multimodal use and public life. Complete streets are an integral component of the multi-modal transport system and more livable communities. Complete streets refer to roads designed to accommodate multiple modes, users, and activities including walking, cycling, transit, automobile, and nearby …

Shell House Demo, Cameron Tilmont

Construction Management

The Shell House demo was recommended by the Associate Dean of CAED as a potential senior project for students. Built decades ago it had deteriorated over time. The purpose of this project was to clean up Poly Canyon Architecture Graveyard, making it a nice, safe place to visit. This project interested the author because it was something different and was geared more towards heavy civil.

To get started, a permit had to be submitted to the CAL POLY building department. This process took longer than expected. The permit wasn’t released until an environmental impact test was conducted, resulting in asbestos …

On-Site Design Of A Water Filtration System In Rural Ghana, Donald Eugene Long

Construction Management

Agbokpa is a rural community in southern Ghana with no access to clean or running water. Villages without access to water face significant hurdles in obtaining an education and developing their communities’ infrastructure and economy. In August of 2019 Cal Poly students Eugene Long, Fletcher Podosek, and Mason Nolan traveled with professors Paul Redden and Dr. Nathan Heston to Agbokpa to fix this problem. The team spent three weeks living in the village and constructing a water tower, pumping system, and filtration system that communally serves the village. The team worked with local craftsmen and sourced nearly all equipment and …

An Analysis Of Single Family Residences And Townhomes In Los Angeles As An Investment, Maggie Lai

Construction Management

Purchasing a home has long been one of the most important financial decisions and big purchases one makes in their life. However, recently rising market prices and a large influx of people moving to large cities, such as Los Angeles, has driven housing prices far beyond many people’s budgets. In fact, affordability is going down at such a rapid rate that currently only 30% of LA County residents actually own a home. Additionally, Los Angeles is currently ranked as the fourth most difficult market for first-time homebuyers to delve in to. Many LA County residents have decided against ever purchasing …

Visual Speech Recognition Using A 3d Convolutional Neural Network, Matthew Rochford

Master's Theses

Main stream automatic speech recognition (ASR) makes use of audio data to identify spoken words, however visual speech recognition (VSR) has recently been of increased interest to researchers. VSR is used when audio data is corrupted or missing entirely and also to further enhance the accuracy of audio-based ASR systems. In this research, we present both a framework for building 3D feature cubes of lip data from videos and a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for performing classification on a dataset of 100 spoken words, recorded in an uncontrolled envi- ronment. Our 3D-CNN architecture achieves a testing accuracy of …

Flight Test Data System For Strain Measurement, Zachary David Wilson

Master's Theses

This thesis describes the design and evaluation of two devices to be included in the next generation of the family of devices called the Boundary Layer Data System (BLDS). The first device, called the Quasi-Static Strain Data Acquisition System, is a continuation of the BLDS-M series of devices to be known as the Flight Test Data System (FTDS) that uses a modular approach to acquire non-flow, quasi-static mechanical strain measurements. Various breakout boards and development boards were used to synthesize the device, which were housed by a custom PCB board. The system is controlled by the Simblee^TM System on …

Navigational Feasibility Of Flyby / Impact Missions To Interstellar Objects, Declan Moore Mages

Master's Theses

In October 2017, the first interstellar object, designated 1I/2017 U1 and more commonly referred to as Oumuamua, was detected passing through our solar system by the Pan-STARRS telescope, followed recently by the detection of 2I/Borisov in August 2019. These detections came much sooner than thought possible, and have redefined our understanding of the population of interstellar objects. With the construction of the next generation of powerful observatories, future detections are estimated to occur as frequently as two per year, and while there is significant scientific understanding to be gained from observing these objects remotely, a spacecraft sent to intercept one …

A Case Study: The First Coastal Nuclear Decommissioning Project In California, Willie Aaron Quiros

Construction Management

San Onofre Nuclear Generating System (SONGS) is one of two nuclear power plants in California. Since the shut down in 2012, there is only one actively remaining, Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which is set to shut down in 2024. This paper will examine the decommissioning of SONGS thus far; the first coastal nuclear decommissioning project in California’s stringent permitting process. This project was awarded as a joint venture to AECOM and Energy Solutions, both having experiencing in the field of nuclear decommissioning. This paper will outline what nuclear decommissioning challenges have been in the past; general steps of decommissioning …

Interdisciplinary Studio Pavilion [Isp] 2019, Rhett Turner

Construction Management

The Wine History Project of San Luis Obispo (the “WHP”) has been collecting and presenting viniculture artifacts from the last two centuries. With the need to display and maintain important artifacts comes the need for a structure that can fulfill such criteria. The purpose of this project was to design a pavilion that could entertain individuals while also displaying artifacts for the WHP. Additionally, the project’s design followed the recently trending method of integrated project delivery, which included the Architecture and Architectural Engineering departments. From the beginning, the design was influenced by its value propositions while still working within the …