Engineering Commons^™

Mems 4110: Remotely Deployed Banner, Amiel Josiah Mari B. Silbol, Maxwell A. Fargo, Brant M. Weir, Elias Barro

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This project works in tangent with the Design, Build, Fly club at Washington University in St. Louis as one of the specific challenges required for the 2026 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' national competition. A banner must be stowed, deployed, and released during flight and must not interfere with the existing flight mechanics of the remote control aircraft.

Mems 4110: Egg Project, Rebecca Leighann Boone, Courtney Davis, Bebel Trani

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Peeling hard-boiled eggs by hand is a time-consuming and tedious task that often results in dimples and cracks in the final product. Many chefs and home cooks have tried techniques, from boiling the eggs in baking soda to slipping off egg shells using a spoon, to perfect the peeling process. However, these attempts often fall short by either altering the taste of the egg or extending the amount of time and labor. In the restaurant business, having employees peel eggs for long periods of time is costly. The local St. Louis salad restaurant, Neon Greens, is selling a new protein-dense …

Mems 4110: Dbf Deployable Banner, Julia Peppe, Danny Bruns, Sarah Donner, Michael Safier

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Create a device that stores a banner in an RC aircraft that can be remotely deployed to be towed and released upon command.

Mems 4110: Dbf Banner, Pachie Ackerman-Bennett, Joshua Paul Laue, Nazifa Younus

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The DBFBanner is a project made for the WashU Design / Build / Fly club. After interviewing DBF club president Sarah Donner, we interpreted the club’s needs as: (1) a banner that could achieve vertical stability in flight; (2) the banner could deploy and release remotely; (3) the banner and associated components were as light as possible. We went through several design iterations, including mathematical and CAD models, mockups, prototypes, and testing apparatus. Many designs were considered, including designs based on linear motion and collapsible trusses. We arrived at a design that used a servo motor to rotate a 3D-printed …

Mems 4110: Air Cannon Launcher Demo, Jackson Strauss, Avery Cohen, Wilson Gao, Jack Galloway

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

For our senior design class (MEMS 4110) at Washington University in St. Louis, we were tasked with creating a demonstration for the St. Louis Science Center that demonstrated an engineering principle or concept. The Science Center functions as a science-oriented museum and saw more than 600,000 visitors in 2024. For our demonstration, we wanted to showcase the principles of kinematic motion. Kinematic motion is study of the motion of objects without considering applied forces. Additionally, when the acceleration of an object is either zero or held constant, the trajectory path that the object follows can be described by a few …

Mems 4110: Asme Waste Collection Challenge, Evelyn Madrigal, Letty Patino, Bing Ling, Michael Avaliani

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Make a remote-controlled vehicle that can traverse the course below (obeying traffic laws), collect garbage units from collection bins and deliver the garbage units to a receptacle.

Mems 4110: N1 Precise Water Distribution System, Lillian Salter, Ye Huang, Elaine Wang, Joy Luo

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The aim of the project is to construct a precise water distribution system for anthropology graduate student Christina Youngpeter, who is studying the impact of hydration levels on the growth of quinoa plants. As her experiment grows in scale, she increasingly needs a system that can measure and distribute water for her, saving hours otherwise spent meticulously measuring water for 36 plants and counting. The system must measure water accurately and distribute it to the plants cleanly and efficiently. It should also be scalable and autonomous, requiring minimal human intervention.

Mems 4110: Asme Waste Collection Challenge, Theo A. Mass, Grant Kaplan, Emanoeel Ghabrial, Joseph Gillett

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Efficient Jolley Trash Grabber (EJTG) is a teleoperated vehicle adherent to the modified rules of the 2025-26 ASME Student Design Competition, hosted in MEMS 4110: Mechanical Engineering Design Project. The vehicle design was informed first by understanding the problem of waste collection. Patents, existing devices, user needs, and relevant codes and standards were reviewed to survey potential design approaches. The concept for the vehicle was generated by setting functionality, and brainstorming solutions to accomplish each goal. A mock-up vehicle was created using available materials, and four complete concepts were drawn each with a different design. Rigorous methods were used …

Mems 4110: Conservation Of Angular Momentum Demo, Matthew Brouillet, Iyanu Akinyemi, Mingxuan Bi, Matthew Gimbel

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

A demo was built to serve as a hands-on experience for reinforcing concepts behind the conservation of angular momentum.

Mems 4110: Parachute Snatch Force Tester, Adam Mallalieu, Ethan Riak, Jackson Shurman, Ryan Schmadtke

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This report discusses the design, development, and testing of a parachute snatch force tester for MEMS 411 Senior Design. The device is for the WURocketry Team, and aims to measure the peak force exerted on the rocket bulkhead during parachute ejection. This peak force is known as the snatch force, and is incredibly important when it comes to maintaining safety, improving performance, and material selection during the rocket’s production process. Current methods for testing and recording this snatch force are limited, so our team aimed to create a simple and cost effective solution. Our design utilizes a vertical support that …

Mems 4110: Asme Challenge, Jon Cossman, Jonathan Young, Nate Nowel

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The goal of this project was to design and assemble a remote controlled device for a competition that can maneuver through a course, collect trash units from 3D-printed trash bins, and bring them to a receptacle at the end of the course. Important factors to consider in the design involved ensuring it followed traffic laws through the course, making sure it could operate multiple times, and fit within price and space constraints. Prototypes were tested against the ability to deliver 75 percent of trash units within 5 minutes, 50 percent of trash units within 5 minutes without any traffic violations, …

Single-Molecule Orientation And Localization Microscopy, Sophie Brasselet, Matthew D. Lew

Electrical & Systems Engineering Publications and Presentations

Single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) offers enhanced spatial resolution in optical microscopy, providing detailed insights into the spatial organization of proteins in cells at the nanoscale. Over the past decade, SMLM has progressively incorporated the capability to retrieve the orientations of single molecules using their polarized dipolar emission pattern. Here we explore recent advancements in single-molecule orientation and localization microscopy (SMOLM), which yields super-resolved images of molecular three-dimensional (3D) orientations, wobble and 3D positions. This advancement opens possibilities to explore the nanoscale organization and conformation of biological molecules as well as to monitor and design local 3D optical fields in nanophotonics. …

Development Of Turbulence Models For Prediction Of Hypersonic Flows Using Compressibility Corrections And Uncertainty Quantification With Emphasis On The Wray-Agarwal Model, Aidan Robert Murphy

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Accurate prediction of high-speed compressible turbulent flows remains one of the most significant challenges in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), especially in the realm of hypersonic vehicle design. These flow regimes involve significant aerodynamic heating and shock-wave boundary layer interactions (SBLI) which remain a significant challenge for the current CFD prediction capabilities. While Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) provide high-fidelity solutions, their computational demands limit their usability, making the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations an efficient alternative for many industrial aerodynamic applications. Traditional RANS techniques, while computationally efficient, often provide limited accuracy in high-speed flows due to the presence …

Developing Aerosol Representation In Atmospheric Modeling, Inderjeet Singh

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Ambient aerosols affect climate and air quality in the Earth system. Global chemical transport models used to study these impacts require an accurate representation of aerosols in terms of shape, composition, and vertical distribution. For example, despite having a complex morphology, mineral dust is often treated as spherical particles in these models. This can lead to errors in optical properties calculations, trace gas retrievals, and heterogeneous chemistry. Similarly, inaccurate representation of the vertical distribution of smoke particles in these models can lead to uncertainties in air quality assessments. Aerosol composition also plays a critical role in determining radiative forcing and …

Photolysis Of Emerging Agricultural Applications Under Environmental Conditions, Kun-Pu Ho

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Novel agricultural applications are rapidly emerging to protect crops from weeds or pests in the US and worldwide. Isoxaflutole is a proherbicide considered agriculturally significant because it controls weeds that have developed resistance to other commonly used herbicides. In addition, RNA interference (RNAi) technology is regarded as a next-generation biopesticide because the technology has less toxicity to humans and more specificity to pests than traditional pesticides, which pose risks to the environment and the health of humans and livestock. However, we cannot disregard the possible risks of the emerging proherbicides and biopesticides to humans or non-target organisms. Therefore, the study …

Development, Numerical Simulation, And Optimization Of Quiet Supersonic Transport Aircraft And Extension Of The Wray-Agarwal Algebraic Transition Model To Include Compressibility And Crossflow Effects, Dean Ryan-Simmons

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In the first part of this thesis, the goal of the research is to implement and extend multi fidelity methods for conceptual design and optimization of a commercial supersonic transport (SST). Most modern commercial aircraft operate at a cruise condition between Mach 0.7 and 0.9, as this is the optimal trade-off of flight efficiency, operational cost, and adherence of noise regulations for overland travel. Advancements in aviation propulsion fuel efficiency and design materials suggests a primary restraint on commercial supersonic transport is noise regulations. At speeds above Mach 1, the shock waves generated by the airframe are strong enough to …

A Control Theoretic Approach To The Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit Problem With Applications In Hyperparameter Optimization, Jonathan Gornet

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Decision-making under uncertainty is a fundamental problem encountered frequently in many real-world applications. This challenge has been rigorously formulated as the Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (SMAB) problem, which consists of a learner interacting with an environment. For each interaction, the learner selects an action and then receives a reward from the environment based on the chosen action. The learner's objective is to maximize the accumulated reward over a set number of rounds. This thesis addresses the SMAB problem by leveraging the field of Control Theory and dynamical systems. We specifically focus on a SMAB environment where the rewards are the output …

Moment Ensemble Approaches For Estimation And Robust Quantum Control, Andre Luiz Paes De Lima

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Large-scale population dynamics governed by ensemble systems present significant challenges due to their inherently high dimensionality. Recent advances have demonstrated the effectiveness of moment-based methods (particularly those employing polynomial bases such as Legendre and Chebyshev polynomials) when integrated with optimization techniques for control design in ensemble systems. However, these methods have not been extensively explored for enhancing robustness against systematic noise, nor have they been widely applied to complex quantum systems involving multi-parameter configurations and entanglement phenomena. In this work, we extend the application of moment methods in ensemble systems through two projects. Initially by developing a Kalman filter analogue, …

Multi-Layer Support For Component-Based Cyber-Physical Systems Applications, Oren Bell

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Component-based design is a paradigm meant to aid in development of software applications by modularizing different functionalities of a system. This building-block approach is used extensively in cyber–physical and robotic systems. Common and established solutions to specific problems, such as perception nodes, state estimators, and motion planners, can be developed, verified, and reused as off-the-shelf modules. These modules may be integrated atop today’s heterogeneous hardware platforms, where an application can be distributed across GPUs, FPGAs, and CPU cores. When heterogeneous computational devices share the workload of a collection of components, the very act of integration may inject timing uncertainty. For …

Safe Real-Time Obstacle Detection And Navigation Using Cbf–Clf And Cbf–Pid Control, Nicolas M. Hernandez

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Traditional robotic navigation pipelines typically follow a three stage architecture: obstacle detection, path planning, and low-level control for trajectory tracking. While effective in static environments, these methods often introduce latency and lack formal guarantees of safety in dynamic or unplanned for scenarios. Our work addresses these limitations by developing a real-time controller grounded in Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs), unified through a Quadratic Program (QP). We first investigate a hybrid CBF-PID-QP controller on a 1/10 scale car, where the CBF serves as a real-time safety filter, modifying the PID output to prevent constraint violations. While this …

Improving Particle-Phase Nitrate Measurement In Pm2.5 Filter Sampling: Evaluation Of A Denuder–Nylon Filter Modification In The Spartan Network, Wenyu Liu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Accurate measurement of PM_2.5 composition is of global importance. Evaporation-induced mass loss introduces potential bias in filter-based PM_2.5 measurements, with ammonium nitrate volatilization from Teflon filters being a major contributor to negative mass artifacts. Previous studies have demonstrated that using an acid gas denuder in combination with nylon filters can help recover the nitrate mass. This study evaluates design modifications to the AirPhoton sampling station setup within the globally distributed Surface Particulate Matter Network (SPARTAN) incorporating an additional acid gas denuder upstream and a nylon filter downstream of the existing Teflon filter.

Two co-located AirPhoton Sampling stations were …

Accelerating Gnn Inference On Multi-Core Systems, Binglin Ji

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are becoming increasingly popular, with their applications expanding across diverse domains. As the scale of graph data continues to grow, including larger numbers of nodes, edges, and higher embedding dimensions, standardized libraries such as DGL and PyG have been developed to facilitate GNN computation. However, with the rapid increase in the number of processor cores and the evolution of multi-core architectures, these libraries often show poor scalability and fail to execute GNN inference efficiently on the latest multi-core systems, particularly those with upwards of a hundred cores. To address this limitation, we present FGI, a Fast …

Supporting Programmers Answering The Hard-To-Answer Questions Through The Use Of Large Language Models, Haixin Zhou

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Programmers often face hard-to-answer questions when working on large-scale projects. Not only during team collaborations, but also during interruptions such as meetings, having to suddenly work on another project, or even just taking a break are major reasons these questions arise, as programmers have to regain the context, knowledge, and mental state to resume the work. Traditional text editors such as GitHub do provide a built-in history system, but they lack historical context behind the editing to answer such questions.

To address this issue, we developed an experimental extension, Code History, on Visual Studio Code (VS Code) in the hope …

Jme 4110: Remotely Actuated Rail Switch, Calysta Yalew, Chibale Anwisye, Ron Almira, Andy Sengsavang

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

This project focuses on developing a device that will switch the direction of rail by moving the manual rail switch itself. This design consists of two winches strategically placed on either side of the rail switch. It is then attached to a beam clamped to the manual switch and via a button on a phone, can pull the handle left and right. With this device patrons are able to keep safe and railway operations would be more efficient.

Jme4110: Hydro-Excavator Robot, Diane L. Evans, Nathan Fenton, Grant Cole, Nicholas Sipe

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

In an environmental situation wherein, diesel has leaked into soil surrounding high voltage lines in an underground confined space where workers cannot access physically and for safety reasons. To alleviate the situation, the project goal is to create a remotely controlled robot, with umbilical attachments. Due to the nature of the environment containing sensitive and electrically charged equipment, mechanical means of removing the soil are not feasible. For this reason, the robot is to remove contaminated soil by using a powerful water sprayer and vacuum combination. Other options for features of this robot are that it uses tracks for movement, …

Jme 4110: Automatic Umbrella Opener, Sam Nieder, Adam Freeman

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

Manually opening and closing a patio umbrella can be time consuming and laborious. While there are remote controlled umbrellas for sale, they are expensive and may not be a reasonable option for most people. Our task was to create a device that can be retrofitted onto any patio umbrella, that allows it to be opened and closed remotely.

Jme 4110: Design And Evaluation Of A Remote-Operated Tool For High-Ceiling Light Bulb Maintenance, Faiq Kureshi, Austin Carr, Phuc Truong, Klevis Malaj

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

Changing light bulbs in high ceilings is a common but hazardous task. Existing tools are awkward, unstable, and often lead to dropped bulbs, damaged fixtures, or the need for ladders, increasing both risk and effort. There is a clear need for a safe, accurate, and efficient solution that allows bulb replacement from the ground without compromising speed or precision

On The H-Property For Step-Graphons: Residual Case, Wanting Gao

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

We investigate the H-property for step-graphons. Specifically, we sample graphs Gn on n nodes from a step-graphon and evaluate the probability that Gn has a Hamiltonian decomposition in the asymptotic regime as n → ∞. It has been shown in Belabbas and Chen (2023); Belabbas et al. (2021) that for almost all step-graphons, this probability converges to either zero or one. We focus in this paper on the residual case where the zero-one law does not apply. We show that the limit of the probability still exists and provide an explicit expression of it. We present a complete proof of …

Computational Complexity Of Soundness Verification For Neural Networks, Scott Sirri

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Neural networks are an increasingly ubiquitous tool in systems of varying complexity across a range of domains. While these tools can be used to learn and predict complex functions, their opaque nature limits the scope of their acceptable applications. In particular, a lack of performance guarantees means that they are unsuitable for safety-critical applications such as self-driving cars and scheduling systems. Neural networks trained to solve NP-complete problems, in particular, are unlikely to be able to solve the problem exactly. However, a weaker soundness guarantee may be sufficient for some systems, e.g., that positive instances of the problem may be …

Development Of A Light-Based Platform To Assess Cervical Mucus Barrier Function And Physical Mucus Properties, Elizabeth J. Buzbee

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Preterm birth is the leading cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality worldwide, yet current clinical tools for predicting its risk lack specificity and reliability. Cervical mucus plays a crucial role in maintaining pregnancy by forming a barrier that protects the uterus against infection. This study investigates the use of laser speckle rheology as a noninvasive technique to assess cervical mucus biomechanics. Synthetic cervical mucus was fabricated at varying hydration levels and tested using a conventional rheometer that confirmed that the mechanical properties of the synthetic mucus samples were representative of physiological cervical mucus. These results were compared to the complex …