Engineering Commons^™

Supetai Well Filtration System, Nicholas Holtz, Shirley Naranjo, Eduardo Villegas

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The rural, Maasai community of Ewaso Ngiro lacks a dependable source of clean drinking water. Their well, Supetai Well, pumps out groundwater that has high amounts of fluoride making it unsafe to consume. The team worked with a local kenyan water and power company, Davis & Shirtliff, to design a reverse osmosis system that will remove all contaminants, including fluoride. The reverse osmosis system takes into consideration current water demand and future population growth. The system will include pre-treatment, reverse osmosis membranes, and post treatment. This system will be powered by solar panels. The team will provide a final report …

Highway 17 Wildlife Crossing, Taryn Chisholm, Seema Singh, Justin Uyeno

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Highway 17 is an essential corridor for people to commute between the Bay Area and the Santa Cruz regions, but this highway also creates a barrier between wildlife territories, fragmenting their habitats and stranding animal populations on either side. The lack of crossing infrastructure along Highway 17 forces wildlife to attempt to cross the highway into oncoming traffic, causing wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC) which endangers the lives of motorists and animals alike. In order to address this problem, the team designed a precast, concrete culvert crossing underneath Highway 17 to provide a safer passageway to increase habitat connectivity as well as …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 64 Number 1 Spring 2023 [Print Issue 62:2], Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

16 - A BRIDGE TO TOMORROW How one university can change the world when it widens the path to opportunity. SCU Staff

22 - THE INTERNET'S LAST TRUE BELIEVER For more than two decades, Law Professor Eric Goldman has been one of the most influential legal voices fighting for the ’net. Chris O’Brien

26 - OPPORTUNITY ON SET Meet five Broncos who scored the opportunity of a lifetime—production assistants on an indie film crew—via Professor Nico Opper. Nicole Calande

28 - SPIRITUAL SOUP With a little bit of this, a dash of that, and a sprinkling of something else, humans …

Finn Hall Community Spaces Redesign, Kaan Euchukanonchai, Kevin Liang, Niko Lopez

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Carbon emissions negatively impact the environment through climate change, air pollution, and rising sea levels, among many other factors. One large contributor to carbon emissions is industrialization, more specifically, the building sector. Based on Architecture 2030, a non-governmental organization whose primary mission is to build an environment free from carbon emissions, building operations and the construction industry contribute to 40% of carbon emissions (Architecture 2030). As more buildings are being constructed, the need for reducing carbon emissions increases. This senior design project looked at Finn Residence Hall, a dormitory on the premises of Santa Clara University. The current design of …

Comparison Of P4 Programmable Software Switches As Wifi Access Points, Kaustubh Pimparkar

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

WiFi wireless access points must adapt to complex network operations as connected devices and their bandwidth requirements continue to rise. The use of software switches supporting Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) in wireless access points has drawn significant attention due to their versatility, flexibility, and potential to overcome the limitations of conventional network designs. T4P4S and BmV2 are the two most widely used P4 programmable software switches, and comparing the performance of these switches allows network operators to select the most suitable switch for specific use cases, such as minimizing latency or maximizing throughput while reducing resource consumption of the …

Nautilus Rov Robot Manipulator, Dana Stefanides, Jenny Huynh, Andrew Stewart, Steven Reimer, Andrew Nguyen, Rebecca Walters, Matt Hayes

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Global warming and climate change are prevalent issues in today’s society. As a result, research in the ocean, our world’s biggest ecosystem, is imperative in efforts to protect the environment. Santa Clara University’s Robotic Systems Lab contributes to this field through work and developments on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). An existing ROV system called Nautilus consists of a robot arm, end effector, and storage system in order to collect various types of sediments at a depth of 300 feet. However, the previous system does not meet that requirement. In direct collaboration with researchers within the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, …

Robotic Arm Extrusion End Effector, Nicholas Viamin, David Blouin, Savannah Hunt, Nico Figueroa

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

This senior design project aims to enhance the capabilities of the Rotrics AIO Desktop Arm (Dexarm) by designing and implementing an extrusion device capable of smooth and consistent extrusion for 3D printing applications. The project focused on ensuring safety, affordability, and ease-of-use for users, while achieving precise control over the extrusion process. Various mechanical and electrical components were carefully selected to ensure compatibility with the Dexarm and to provide optimal performance. To maintain safety, extensive testing and risk assessments were conducted to minimize any potential hazards associated with the extrusion process. To achieve smooth and consistent extrusion, precise control mechanisms …

Dominican Republic Greenhouse Automation, Pedro Alvarenga, Henry Kayser

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The development process involved meticulous engineering and integration of the electrical components, ensuring seamless functionality and performance. The AGS was designed to be affordable, scalable, and easily replicable, with the intention of expanding its implementation beyond the DR to other underserved communities globally. By optimizing resource management, conserving energy, and minimizing the carbon footprint, the AGS promotes environmental sustainability in food production. Overall, this senior design capstone project successfully developed a cost-effective and user-friendly Automated Greenhouse System, addressing food insecurity challenges in the DR. The project demonstrated professional excellence, fulfilled the mission of SCU's School of Engineering, and strengthened the …

Neurogen: Eeg And Near-Infrared Light Stimulation Control System, Arnold Nieto, Jaylinn Solis, Matthew Tamanaha

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Light stimulation or transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM) therapy has been shown to be effective when treating patients suffering neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. While there is currently no cure, light stimulation can help alleviate symptoms for those patient’s suffering from these diseases. With this in mind, the senior design team from last year began a prototype hybrid electroencephalography (EEG) and tPBM device. They implemented a specific wavelength of 810 nanometer (nm) near-infrared (NIR) light emitting diodes (LEDs), with a 16 channel EEG headset from OpenBCI. The device was intended to serve as a potential research tool, with a …

Inter-Abled And Adaptable Arcade Controls And Cabinet, Emma Berry, Raquel Macias

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

A considerable void exists in the digital gaming space, with a distinct lack of feasible control solutions for disabled gamers. The project aims to bridge this gap via a proof-of-concept arcade machine with interchangeable control surfaces, each catering to a different physical disability. In particular, the control boards aim to address the lack of accessibility of individuals with arthritis, as well as those with the use of only a single arm. To such an end, we design and implement STM32-based controllers which connect and interact directly with the host computer. Despite technical hardships, our results show that comprehensive control solutions …

Self-Diffusion In Misoriented Aluminum (111) Substrates After Jump-To-Contact, Noah Kane Manuel

Mechanical Engineering Master's Theses

Self-diffusion between misoriented aluminum (111) substrates after jump-to-contact (JC) is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. Diffusive behaviors of three twist misorientation angles, 2.45°, 4.40° and 6.00°, are studied at temperatures ranging from 75% to 95% of the melting temperature of aluminum. The existence of the post-JC interface is found to enhance diffusive behavior of atoms near the interface. The 4.40° misorientation angle has the highest pre-exponential factor of diffusion and the lowest activation energy, when compared to the other angles. For all misorientations the activation energies in the direction perpendicular to the JC interface was found to be the lowest. …

Metascriptura: A General Data Provenance Framework, Maria Joseph Israel

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Digital technology makes it easy to generate and distribute large volumes of data. However, it has also complicated the process of verifying and validating sources of data and their derivatives risking obfuscation of truth amidst the deluge of data. To address this issue, I trace and develop an approach based on data provenance tracking. Specifically, I make it possible to deep trace the origins and lineages of data, by applying state-of-the-art data provenance technologies, which I extend beyond traditional data provenance applications. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that with the right data infrastructure it is feasible to grant greater agency …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 63 Number 2, Fall 2022 [Print Issue 62:2], Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

14 - AFTER THE CANNONBALL What does it mean to wrestle with your own human limitations and vulnerability as you follow the footsteps of a saint? Hung Pham, S.J.

18 - GROWING When I was little, there seemed to be this nondescript era of life, a foggy “someday,” when becoming an adult just happened. Nikhita Panjnani ’24.

20 - HOW IT STARTED, HOW IT'S GOING For decades, the internet has shaped the way we communicate, but two years of being extremely online hit fast forward on its real-world impact. Matt Morgan.

26 - NURTURING NATURE A story in two stories: …

Engineering News, Fall 2022, School Of Engineering

Engineering News

No abstract provided.

Stochastic Distributed Control For Arbitrarily Connected Microgrid Clusters, Maryam Khanbaghi, Aleksandar Zečević

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Due to the success of single microgrids, the coming years are likely to see a transformation of the current electric power system to a multiple microgrid network. Despite its obvious promise, however, this paradigm still faces many challenges, particularly when it comes to the control and coordination of energy exchanges between subsystems. In view of that, in this paper we propose an optimal stochastic control strategy in which microgrids are modeled as stochastic hybrid dynamic systems. The optimal control is based on the jump linear theory and is used as a means to maximize energy storage and the utilization of …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 63 Number 1, Summer 2022, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

16 - SHARED DREAMS Meet incoming University President Julie Sullivan, the first layperson and woman selected to lead SCU. Leslie Griffy

20 - BD KNOWS BEST Discovering who you really are, being grateful, and dinosaurs with BD Wong. Lauren Loftus.

22 - SWEPT AWAY Being homeless in Silicon Valley is particularly deadly. One professor explores why so many die in a land of such excess. Leslie Griffy .

28 - ON THE OUTSIDE A first-person account of being wrongly convicted, as told by Arturo Jimenez.

30 - BOOKED AND BUSY The secret behind the Hollywood success of so many Bronco …

Experimentation And Modeling Of Laser Radiation Scattering Through Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers, Steven P. Shepard

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

With the prevalence of carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRPs) in aerospace platforms, there is a need to better understand radiative heat transport through the material. A laboratory experiment was constructed and a computational zonal Monte Carlo (ZMC) model developed to quantify and understand the laser scattering properties of CFRPs. The ZMC model builds off of the zonal method (ZM)—developed by Hottel et al. and expanded by researchers such as Yuen et al.—by incorporating Monte Carlo techniques into the ZM. The ZMC method is superior in efficiency to the ZM and alternative ray tracing methods, which enables larger mediums of exchange …

Container Migration In Ad-Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks, Gagan Gupta, Kyle Fenole, Siddharth Venkatesh

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project aims to implement container migration on an ad hoc mesh network, which would allow for a mobile fog computing mesh network in areas with no connectivity. This kind of system would allow for a rapidly deployable and mobile compute cluster that could be used in rural scenarios or situations where existing connectivity infrastructures are out of commission i.e. disaster recovery. We use technologies like Docker, CRIU, and batman-adv to create a mesh compute network that is decentralized, flexible, and consistent. Docker with CRIU facilitates container live migration by checkpointing a container in one network node and restoring that …

Velachain: A Decentralized Exchange Built For Cross-Chain Communication, Connor Callahan, Bradley Lostak

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The blockchain industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world right now. Billions of dollars of venture capital money is being put to work to innovate in this new space. One of the problems that has plagued the blockchain space since its inception is the lack of interoperability between blockchains. A single blockchain is great at dictating its own state but they rarely contain functionality to communicate with other blockchains. Furthermore, users on these blockchains have limited ways to swap cryptocurrencies from one blockchain to another. For this project, we built a cryptocurrency decentralized exchange built on …

Brilliance Bias In Gpt-3, Ashley Troske, Edith Gonzalez, Nicole Lawson

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Language has a profound impact on how we perceive the world. With GPT- 3’s rise in popularity, present in 300 applications averaging 4.5 billion words per day, it is critical for us as programmers to identify and correct biases in its generations. A variety of biases have been identified in generative language models, spanning biases based on gender, race, and religion. Our project pioneers the study of the Brilliance Bias for generative models. This implicit, yet powerful bias imposes the idea of “brilliance” being a male trait and in turn, sets back women’s achievements starting as young as 5-7 years. …

Database Of Non-Government Organizations On The Global Scale, Jeremy Mekker

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Currently in the world, there are about 10 million non-profit/non-governmental organizations. In order to find these organizations, one must diligently scour the Internet for hours on end. Most research into helping refugees or those in need results in only finding larger organizations that cover many different tasks in the targeted area. This is an active problem. While larger organizations tend to help a wider audience of people, often the help that one would like to give does not get delivered as urgently as the donor would hope. In order to combat this, the primary objective would be to optimize the …

Neural Network Interpretability For Autonomous Driving Neural Networks, Raghav Kapoor, Casey Nguyen

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In the field of neural networks, there has been a long-standing problem that needs to be addressed: gaining insight into how neural networks make decisions. Neural Networks are still considered black boxes and are often difficult to understand. This lack of understanding becomes an ethical dilemma especially in the domain of self-driving cars. Given the limited number of works geared towards unravelling neural network logic for autonomous driving vehicles, our team seeks to create a novel neural network interpretability method to influence the neural network during its training process.

Deep Neural Networks have demonstrated impressive performance in complex tasks, such …

Improving Diversity In Journalistic Sources With Computer Vision, Austin Johnson, Carlos Mercado, Sabiq Khan

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

News is a constant part of our lives, and has a significant impact on how we see the world. Simply put, journalistic sources are not diverse enough, and typically are only those in the majority. Newsrooms have made passionate declarations about wanting more diversity in their news sources. Our project aims to help with that. Building on top of the DEI toolkit, we aim to help newsrooms increase the diversity of their sources by analyzing their sources using a google search to pick an image and facial recognition software to determine the gender and race of the image.

Mysyllabi: An Online Syllabus Repository, Aristos Xanthus

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

College students need more information when selecting coursework. During the time of course registration, students are limited to the course name, time, description, and professor. To make the best course selection, students need access to the syllabus which provides a comprehensive overview of the course as well as course-specific details such as the structure, workload, and teaching style. However, syllabi are hard to obtain before the first day of class, and they are seldom found online. Therefore, I propose MySyllabi, an online syllabus repository as a quick, accessible, and reliable location to find syllabi for a university’s classes/professors that will …

Donation Pick-Up And Tracking App For Columbian Food Bank, Alex Fang, Arren Leung, Adrian Ramirez Lopez, Rodrigo Mejia

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Banco de Alimentos Cali is responsible for picking up food donations from local businesses, organizing by perishable dates, and distributing them to the communities in need. When donations are picked up from the donor, the bank is responsible for sending their donors a certificate with the donation's information, including the dollar equivalent of their donation. This certificate is sent out only if the donor requests it for tax deduction purposes. While this plan may seem simple in theory, the food bank often struggles to get the necessary information from their drivers in regards to the donation, which ultimately delays the …

Expanding Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence For Strategic Learning, Dorian Clay

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Today, artificial intelligence is used to solve problems as varied as driving cars to diagnosing diseases. However, it still has major pitfalls. The most common form of AI today, machine learning, can produce near-certain predictions for some tasks, yet completely fail at a related but different task. Additionally, such algorithms cannot do reasoning for complex problems, are not well explainable, require massive training datasets, and are sensitive to new data.

One solution to these problems is combining today’s cutting-edge neural networks with an older idea in AI: symbolic AI. Such so-called “neuro-symbolic AI” systems can be understood at a high …

Netcon: Dynamic Resource Allocation To Containers Running On Network Switching Appliances, Siena Hanna, Justin Lee, Tania Pham

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

A WiFi Access Point (AP) is an important technology that switches data packets to transmit and receive wireless signals to create WiFi. These Access Points (AP) can have powerful processors, but they are idle most of the time [1]. Instead, these idle processing resources could be redirected to run containers for low-latency applications. However, it is essential to ensure that the AP does not suffer performance issues as a result of running containers. The main function of APs is to switch packets, and this function must be preserved while containers are running. In this thesis, we propose a method, NetCon, …

Smartnic Compatible Blockchain, Gavin Jampani, Eish Kapoor, Vivek Ponnala

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The intent of our Senior Design Thesis was to develop a software infrastructure for Blockchain applications that is compatible with SmartNIC (smart network interface card) hardware to contribute to the future of edge computing and Blockchain. The demand on network infrastructure is exploding, with there estimated to be 41.2 billion active network connections in 2025, 30.8 of those being IOT [13]. Of these active network IOT connections, a growing plurality will contain SmartNICs, which add valuable compute into the crucial intersection between the network and individual server. With it forecasted that three-fourths of all enterprise data will be processed at …

Enhancing The Quality Of Service And Energy Efficiency Of Wifi-Based Iot Networks, Jaykumar Sheth

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

The 802.11 standard, known as WiFi, is currently being used for a wide variety of applications including Internet of Things (IoT). However, the contention between the traffic of IoT stations (STAs) as well as the contention between these flows and regular user-generated traffic reduces the energy efficiency and timeliness of IoT communication. To remedy this problem, in this thesis, we take the following approaches for mitigating the challenges faced by WiFi-based IoT networks: First, we highlight the importance of observability with respect to WiFi networks and how it helps the researchers to better examine the dynamics of issues and its …

B2b2: Lidar 2d Mapping Rover, Laurence Kim, Isaiah Youngblood, Quintion Turner

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Autonomous machines are becoming more popular and useful with even self-driving cars being a thing of the present. Most of these machines navigate using cameras and LiDAR which does not detect glass, therefore the machines give misleading results when objects and obstacles are transparent to the wavelengths of the light used. This is problematic in modern building floor plans with glass walls. A solution is to build a ROS system that fuses ultrasonic sensors with LiDAR sensors in order for a robot to navigate in a building that has glass walls. Using both sensors, the final product is a robot …