Engineering Commons^™

Wavefront Sensor, Richard Mulé

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Wavefront reconstruction techniques have enabled important scientific improvements to corrective imaging in astronomy, optometry, and elsewhere. Here, we describe the design of a wavefront reconstruction-based adaptive optics system designed at Santa Clara University (SCU) in the Department of Physics. Our compact system is based on a modified Shack-Hartmann sensor design and can detect wavefront disturbances on the order of tens of nanometers. The full SCU system includes a 635 nm laser, a collimating lens pair, two mirrors, a microlens array, and a commercial CCD camera. The CCD data is analyzed using a least-squares reconstruction algorithm. Here, we present preliminary wavefront …

Bringing Electricity To Alafiarou: The Solar Microgrid Project, Nicolas Metais, Jacob Leatherberry

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Despite the great technological advancements and discoveries that have been made throughout the last century, 1.2 billion people still live without access to electricity, 95% of which live in Sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia.1 In this paper, we discuss how we designed and implemented a self-sustaining, affordable and highly replicable solar microgrid in order to accelerate the electrification of rural communities in the most environmentally conscious way possible. Our project focused on developing a microgrid for a small community of 10 households in rural Benin that previously had no access to electricity. We travelled to this village in December of …

Microphone Array, Aram Garibyan, Riley Stout

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Sound Localization is very useful for many real world applications, ranging from the military, to the fall detection of the elderly, to field biology. However, the purpose of our design was mainly a proof of concept. In this paper, we show the methods and algorithm we used to find a direction of arrival of a basic 1khz continuous sine wave. Our results show how a direction of sound can be calculated to a difficult yet condensed algorithm that was originally designed to triangulate cellular devices using cell towers. We have concluded that our margins of error have come from the …

Navigation And Illumination For Skateboards, Nathan Depew

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Skateboarding is not a hobby for the faint of heart. It is a treacherous mode of transportation. One small stone could lead to a face plant. These dangers are magnified at night, when previously visible objects become practical invisible. There is also the issue of distracted skating. Just like distracted driving leads to accidents, distracted skating can result in similar problems. When a skateboarder is distracted, the safety issues inherent in skateboarding are magnified and reaction time slows.

The most perilous time this is when skateboarders are skating while distracted at night. Although the simple answer would be to put …

Reactive Power Compensation, Kimberly Meyers, Martin Prado

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Reactive power compensation serves to increase the power factor of large industrial loads and increase the efficiency of power transmission. In doing so, reactive power compensation decreases overall energy consumption and has lasting economic and environmental impacts. This paper discusses a simulation to model power consumption in a multitude of different loads, which gives industrial consumers a solution to increase the power factor of their systems to a more desirable level. The MATLAB simulation that we built successfully calculates and displays how much energy can be saved and it shows how that energy can be saved. If physical implementations of …

Energy Management Control Center, Francis Estacio, Ren Hirokawa, Devon Quaternik, Matthew Salmanpour

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Home energy management is a booming market and is a problem that a lot of people are working on all across the world. The “Energy Management Control Center,” henceforth referred to as EMC2, is a project built upon the Smart Thermostat Senior Design project that was completed last year. We took the smart thermostat system and integrated it with an AC unit through a central hub. We will take this concept and extend it to other electrical appliances, essentially creating a home hub that can intelligently control different home appliances.