Engineering Commons^™

Pulse Modulation In Braided Pneumatic Actuators Mimics Contractile Behavior Of Biological Muscles, Mohamad Elzein

Student Research Symposium

Advancements in robotics and bioengineering aim to emulate biological muscle systems through robotic actuators, blending mechanical strength with biological adaptability. A lesser-explored aspect is mimicking the pulse-like control characteristic of biological muscles, which contract in response to action potentials from motoneurons, with muscle contractile force relying heavily on the timing between these potentials. This study explores the effect of pulse lengths and the gaps between pulses on braided pneumatic actuators (BPAs), which mimic the nonlinearity and dynamic response of biological muscles. It hypothesizes that artificial muscles utilizing pulse-based control will exhibit a similar force dependency on the intervals between pulses …

Comparative Life Cycle Assessment Of Recycling Processes For Perovskite Solar Cells, Juan P. Herrera, Jules Freeman, Achyuth Ravilla, Ilke Celik

Student Research Symposium

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have emerged as a promising option for solar energy generation. However, it is essential to consider the environmental impact of these innovative photovoltaic (PV) technologies as the industry moves towards commercialization. Researchers are currently exploring ways to recycle PSCs to recover valuable materials and reduce their environmental impact at the end of their life. To ensure the sustainability of PSCs, this study evaluates and compares the environmental impacts of five recently developed recycling approaches. The Tool for Reduction and Assessment of Chemicals (TRACI) method was utilized to measure environmental impacts in categories such as acidification (kg …

Deriving Analytical Design Constraints For Absolute & Relative Encoding Schemes In Functional Subnetworks, Cody W. Scharzenberger-Braet, Alexander Hunt

Student Research Symposium

As neural networks have become prolific solutions to modern problems, there has been a congruent rise in the popularity of the numerical machine learning techniques used to design them. While they are highly generalizable, numerical methods tend to produce networks that act as inscrutable “black boxes,” making it difficult to interpret their behavior. One solution to the problem of network transparency is to use analytical techniques, but these methods are underdeveloped compared to their numerical alternatives. In order to enhance the viability of analytical techniques, this work extends previous efforts to quantify the impact that non-spiking neural encoding schemes have …

Poster Session: Onu Engineering Freshman And Senior Design Projects, Keith Schimmel

Scholar Week 2016 - present

This poster session is held Friday, April 19, 4:45-6:15pm, with food served, in the Reed Hall of Science Tech Center.

The capstone engineering senior design projects at Olivet Nazarene University involve interdisciplinary engineering teams completing real-life projects sponsored by companies, mission organizations, and professional society competitions. The engineering first-year design projects at Olivet Nazarene University involve interdisciplinary engineering teams proposing product improvement designs, using Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. Posters for both the senior and freshman engineering design projects will be presented during this poster session.

Enhancing Fish Farming Sustainability In Guatemala: A Cost-Effective Oxygenation Solution, Olivia Wheeler, Creighton Seibeert, Carlos Gomez Gutierrez

Scholar Week 2016 - present

This project addresses a critical challenge faced by small-scale, family-owned fish farms in Guatemala, providing adequate oxygen to their fishponds due to the lack of reliable grid power and high energy costs. The primary goal is to design a sustainable and cost-effective solution that ensures continuous oxygenation within the range of 5-7 parts per million (ppm) of dissolved oxygen (DO). To achieve this, the solution must operate independently of grid power, withstand Guatemala's environmental conditions, and be replicable by local farmers for widespread accessibility. The holistic design objectives focus on boosting fish harvest yields, reducing operational costs, promoting sustainability, empowering …

Integrated Under-Deck Storage Unit Solutions For The Basic Utility Vehicle, Madeline Barone, Hunter Bogart, Cindy Carrion, Ethan Piacenti

Scholar Week 2016 - present

There is an urgent need to maximize storage usage on the Basic Utility Vehicle (BUV) that is used in Africa by the BUV ministry. Drivers have no place to store personal belongings and items that should stay with the BUV throughout the day. This project aims to find a solution that is in the market and figure out how to adapt it to the BUV. The final product must meet the design criteria given by the BUV ministry as is or with additional features added on to it. By providing an efficient storage solution, there will be a positive impact …

Process Control Experiment: Automated Titration System, Marc Shuflit, Nathan Martin, Noelle Miller, Benjamin Tavares

Scholar Week 2016 - present

A titration experiment has been designed using a chemical reaction tank and implementing all the basic components found in automatic control systems. This system has been constructed using basic fluid flow hardware, control sensors and actuators, along with ladder logic programing for the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) to automate an acid-base chemical titration. This system will be used in Olivet Nazarene University’s engineering labs to provide hands-on learning of state-of-the-art process technology.

Society Of Automotive Engineers Baja Vehicle Competition, Kevin Scott Leonard, Michael Roath, Matthew Bair, Ethan Burt, Jacob Burt, Jordan Evans, Jotham Drayton

Scholar Week 2016 - present

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Baja Senior Design Team is tasked with building a single person off-road vehicle to both perform in a competitive setting and appeal to the consumer market. Baja SAE gives students the first-hand challenge of pursuing their passion while managing real-life demands and priorities. Each team's goal is to design and build a prototype of an all-weather, rugged, single-seat, off-road recreational vehicle intended for sale to the nonprofessional weekend off-road enthusiast. The three main design objectives we believe are needed to reach our goals are for the vehicle to be durable, manufacturable, and serviceable. The …

Scaling And Optimizing Agitated Tanks For The Homogenization Of Complex Biological Suspensions, Josh Dittmer, Cara Serpe, Sterling Staranchuk

Scholar Week 2016 - present

This study presents an investigation of the agitated tank mixing dynamics across various scales, including lab, two pilot, and full scales, focusing on human blood plasma Kistler-Nitschmann-Cohn (KNC) I+II+III suspensions. The methods employed are empirical tank mixing correlations within the KaeMix software package and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling using ANSYS Fluent. Tank and agitator geometries were generated in ANSYS Workbench and meshed in ANSYS Fluent with varied cell sizes to capture detailed dynamics near the agitators and in the bulk fluid. Kaemix analysis provided rapid computation of bulk mixing times at different scales. Beyond simulations, the project aims to …

E-Bike Improvements, Reuben M. Eye, Cole Huddleston, Jeffery Scott, Cade Lewis, Ethan Ridenour

ATU Research Symposium

No abstract provided.

Filar Micrometer For Amateur Astronomers, Will Anderson, Conner Moore, Paige Panush

Scholar Week 2016 - present

A filar micrometer that measures double stars orbiting each other is being developed. Most filar micrometers are solely for professional use, making them expensive. Therefore, we are designing a filar micrometer that will be cost effective for amateur astronomers. A 3D printer and polylactic acid (PLA) material are the tools being used to implement the design.

Efficient, Affordable, And Accessible (Eaa) House Design, Jack Holohan, Matthew Carpenter, Faith Dalton, Payton Tindal

Scholar Week 2016 - present

Recent trends in the housing market, along with household income disparities, underscore the need for efficient, affordable, and accessible (EAA) housing for middle to lower-middle-income families. The EAA House Design project presents an alternative solution through a detailed set of construction documents encompassing architectural, electrical, mechanical, structural, plumbing, and interior design. Revit software was used to plan, design, and manage the project. The completed project will be submitted for the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) Engineering Education Award.

Promoting Electric Propulsion (Pep) For Small Craft, Robert Manatt, Brad Fletcher, Hector Campos, Johnathon Poindexter, Quinn Reynolds

ATU Research Symposium

The Promoting Electric Propulsion (PEP) For Small Craft event is a competition held every year by the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE) and the United States Coast Guard (USCG), and this coming year’s event is being held in Virginia Beach. It is aimed at inspiring students from universities all over the country and allowing them to design innovative fully electrically propelled boats, present their designs and builds, and race them against each other to show off their finished projects. Using fully electric propulsion systems for marine use can be challenging, but if done right they can provide a clean, …

Pipe Conveyor System For Cylindrical Steel Pipe, Josiah Paynter, Hannah Harris, Sam Bowden, Nicolas Fuentes

Scholar Week 2016 - present

The Peddinghaus Pipe Conveyor Senior Engineering Design Team was given the task of equipping an existing conveyor system with the ability to convey cylindrical steel pipe down the system while keeping the pipe in line with the datum and passline planes and restricting axial rotation. A metal prototype was constructed out of 0.25” mild steel that can store safely underneath the existing conveyor when not in use and extend when needed to constrain the pipes. Three pneumatic cylinders to actuate the main arm of the prototype were equipped with a polyurethane-coated roller to hold the pipe against both the conveyor …

Multi-Rotor Hexicopter, Corbin G. Beard, Payton Riddle, John Washburn, Nate Burckhartzmeyer, Alejandro Gamez

ATU Research Symposium

The Multi-Rotor Hexicopter is an original design for an eighteen motor, hydrogen fuel cell powered drone. After initial success with the hydrogen fuel cell powered drone created by previous students, our goal was take their success and create a much larger drone that could be controlled both from the ground and in the air. Our design was based on a drone created by the company Lift Aircraft. The drone is separated into four components that were designed in Autodesk Inventor. The bottom, known as the sled, is used for the storage of the two hydrogen fuel tanks. The second section, …

Controlled Radiation Capsule For Precision And Rapid Cancer Treatment, Hoseon Lee, Zsolt Kollar, Bailey R. White, Junia Nguyen, David Roque, Sowjanya Palagani

Symposium of Student Scholars

This research aims to transform cancer treatment through the optimization of brachytherapy, with a focus on reducing treatment duration, setup complexities, and financial burdens, all while emphasizing patient safety. Patients living at a distance from radiation clinics, particularly those undergoing extended Low Dose Radiation brachytherapy, often struggle with the formidable financial challenges associated with securing nearby accommodations. In response to these issues, the research introduces a radiation capsule designed to condense the conventional six-month treatment period to approximately just one week, thereby significantly reducing the duration of required accommodations. This capsule is especially relevant considering the construction cost of $40 …

Kwad - Ksu All Weather Autonomous Drone, Nick Farinacci, Sebastian Gomez, Stewart Baker, Ed Sheridan

Symposium of Student Scholars

"KWAD" or "KSU all-Weather Autonomous Drone" project was sponsored by Ultool, LLC to the KSU Research and Service Foundation to create a lightweight drone capable of capturing HD video during all-weather operations. The conditions of all-weather operation include rainfall of one inch per hour and wind speeds of up to twenty miles per hour. In addition, a global minimum structural safety factor of two is required to ensure the system's integrity in extreme weather conditions. Potential mission profiles include autonomous aerial delivery, topological mapping in high moisture areas, security surveillance, search and rescue operations, emergency transportation of medical supplies, and …

Computational Modeling Using A Novel Continuum Approach Coupled With Pathway-Informed Neural Networks To Optimize Dynein-Mediated Centrosome Positioning In Polarized Cells, Arkaprovo Ghosal, Padmanabhan Seshaiyar Dr., Adriana Dawes Dr., General Genomics Inc.

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Reducing Uncertainty In Sea-Level Rise Prediction: A Spatial-Variability-Aware Approach, Subhankar Ghosh, Shuai An, Arun Sharma, Jayant Gupta, Shashi Shekhar, Aneesh Subramanian

I-GUIDE Forum

Given multi-model ensemble climate projections, the goal is to accurately and reliably predict future sea-level rise while lowering the uncertainty. This problem is important because sea-level rise affects millions of people in coastal communities and beyond due to climate change's impacts on polar ice sheets and the ocean. This problem is challenging due to spatial variability and unknowns such as possible tipping points (e.g., collapse of Greenland or West Antarctic ice-shelf), climate feedback loops (e.g., clouds, permafrost thawing), future policy decisions, and human actions. Most existing climate modeling approaches use the same set of weights globally, during either regression or …

Damage Identification In 3d Printed Metal Parts Using Deep Learning, Romaine Byfield, Alireza Modir, Ibrahim Tansel, Raniero Plaza

36th Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

An active Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) method called Surface Response to Excitation (SuRE), is used in this study to detect and quantify the damages created by a milling operation on additively manufactured metal plates. This method entails bonding two piezoelectric disks to the test specimens, one to excite it with surface waves from one end of the plate, and the other to sense the dynamic response to excitation at the other end. A sweep sine wave with a duration of 1 ms, ranging from 50-120 kHz is used as the excitation signal. Five stainless steel plates of identical size (195×54×2.5 …

Assistive Robotic Platform For Non‐Urgent Household Tasks: A New Design, Amanda Serger, Normandy Tanguilan, Hakki Erhan Sevil

36th Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

Humans overcome minor household inconveniences daily without fully recognizing how challenging these tasks could be for individuals such as elderly people or people with disabilities. Those people often times struggle to complete tasks, for instance opening a door or reaching for an item, leading them to rely on caregivers for help. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this caregiver support becomes an unsafe and unreliable solution that can result in a greater risk, thus the need for another solution arises: robotic technology. Recent developments in the robotics field have paved the way for this research, aiming to design a home assistance robot …

Comparing Probabilistic Planning Success On Three Types Of Robots: Wheeled, Legged, And Underwater, Daniel Griessler, Josias Moukpe, Braidan Duffy, Akil Hosang, Blake Janes, Omar Jebari, Kourtnee Fernalld, Erbene De Castro, Humberto Rivera, William Stern, Badria Alfurhood, Akram Alghanmi, Marius Silaghi

36th Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

We compare the relevance of POMDP graphical models to addressing a given common task, the autonomous navigation, in mobile robotics, for robots in three different environments: legged walking, wheeled, and underwater robots. Principled approaches to the implementation of Intelligent robots in realistic environments with uncertainty exploit probabilistic models. The use of graphical models increases tractability and verifiability of probabilistic reasoning. Our robots face similar localization problems of passing by three doors on a corridor in a building, respectively, for the underwater case, of passing by three barrels in a pool. All the three robots are equipped solely with noisy sonars …

Flexible Magnetic Skin Sensor Array For Torsion Perception, Lucja Stawikowska, Erik D. Engeberg

36th Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

Prosthetic hands help upper limb amputees and people who were born without hands. Currently, these prostheses are rather rudimentary and do not provide adequate sensing capabilities compared to a human hand. People use their natural hands to perceive complex tactile phenomena such as shear and torsion using thousands of mechanoreceptors in their fingertips. The capability to detect torsional loads at the fingertips is a notable gap in prosthetic hand sensation. Flexible tactile sensors are a promising new technology that would be ideal for prosthetic hands since they allow for stretching and movement like human skin without damage to the sensor. …

Covenant Persuasion Lead To Constitutionalism – Neither Was Invented, Joseph Livni

Helm's School of Government Conference - American Revival: Citizenship & Virtue

Constitutionalism is a conviction shared by people that a government must act in compliance with a dominant charter. So is covenantal persuasion. The covenant reflects statutes and traditions etched in a living covenantal practice. The practice cannot exist without the persuasion and the persuasion cannot exist without the practice. Elazar was one of the most prolific scholars of the covenantal model. There is one point were the paper diverges from Elazar. The paper discusses a mathematical model and other studies of the covenant practice demonstrating that such a practice involves a multitude of simultaneous vital conditions. That led to the …

Optimization Of Metallic Interconnectors For Clean Energy Power Systems, Mason Cox

Symposium of Student Scholars

The need to eliminate carbon emissions coupled with intensified energy demands have led to an intensified research and development activities in clean energy technology. Taking advantage of fuels such as green hydrogen, solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) power systems can serve as a potential energy conversion system. SOFCs combine O2 from air and H2 gas to generate electricity, consequently producing water (H2O) as the only byproduct of the electrochemical reaction. SOFCs typically have an operational temperature in the range of 500-900C and generate electricity without the requirement of recharging, so long as the fuel is supplied. A single SOFC cell …

Demonstration Of Hydrogen Combustion Properties, Stephen M. Baker

ATU Research Symposium

The Hydrogen Flame Demonstration project encompasses the design, fabrication, and usage of a pressure vessel system with the goal of demonstrating the hazardous flammable properties that are associated with gaseous hydrogen. This project was completed as a part of a 16-week internship at the NASA White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico during the Spring of 2022. As the interest of technologies using hydrogen as a fuel, or otherwise, increases, informing and setting ‘best practices’ for use of pressure systems containing hydrogen becomes increasingly necessary. Gaseous hydrogen is highly flammable with the presence of air or oxygen. Since …

Rc Flying Car, Andrew Hood, Ethan Jacobs, Nicholas Jones, Joshua Phifer

ATU Research Symposium

For this project, the goal is to build a 3D printed RC flying car with actuating wings and to show the modularity and adaptability of using 3D printing to create a multifunctional RC flying car. The goal with the actuating wings is to showcase how adaptable and modular 3D printing is and to also have a drivable car. Also, with a multifunctional 3D printed flying car, an end user could customize the flying car to their desired needs or wants. The reason for choosing to build a flying car instead of just a plane or a car is that it …

An Introductory Investigation Of Dust Devils On Mars: Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling, Alexios Nicolas Philippou, Kakkattukuzhy M. Issac

NASA-Missouri Space Grant Consortium

This report investigates the flow characteristics of tornado like vortices which can be used to describe an array of axisymmetric rotating vertical columns of fluid such as dust devils, steam devils and tornadoes. These vortices have been recreated within vortex chambers in research facilities, but in focus of this report the investigation is conducted through numerical simulations using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software package provided by ANSYS. By varying the main governing nondimensional parameter of swirl ratio through the computational domain’s boundary conditions, different flow characteristics appear which confirm theories presented in previous papers. This enables the research conducted …

Servo Mounting Device And Collective Control System Design For The Forward Flight Aero Test Stand, Aaron Jones

NASA-Missouri Space Grant Consortium

The majority of the ten-week internship was spent designing a servo mounting device, and a collective control system for the Forward Flight Aero Test (FFAT) stand. The servo mounting device uses four threaded standoffs along with a top plate, held together with screws, that raises the servos above the protruding threaded rods and screws. The collective control system is a rectangular block that attaches the swashplate to the servo arms connected to the servo motor. This control rod is used to translate the rotation from the servo arm into collective control for the blade angle. The control rod has two …

Modeling And Simulation Of An Electrostatic Lunar Particle Sieve, Aaron Berkhoff

NASA-Missouri Space Grant Consortium

The following research was conducted to develop a kinetic particle model, which simulates an electromagnetic sieve used for in-situ material utilization on the lunar surface. A code package was developed to simulate an electromagnetic sieve that uses electrodes to transport fine particles within a cylindrical device. Specifically, this research generates an initial working model for the sieve and tests different electrode configurations. The simulation models different electric fields generated by electrodes, kinetic particle dynamics, and lunar particle distribution. During the case study, which investigates different electrode configurations, it was determined that electrodes oriented such that electrodes located above and below …