Engineering Commons^™

Photocell Optimization Through Thermoelectric Generation, Dante Johnson, Brian Nguyen, General Roberts, Taylor Powell

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Photovoltaic units, also known as solar cells have an ideal operating temperature of about 25 C or 77 F, for each degree Celsius above the optimal operating temperature, we can expect the efficiency of the unit to drop 0.5%. On any given summer day, it is not uncommon for solar cell temperatures to reach upwards of 70 C which is about 158 F, this results in a drop of 25% efficiency. If we think of efficiency as the quantity energy produced divided by energy supplied, we can quantitatively see how loss of efficiency corresponds to a loss in energy produced. …

Head-Tracking Wireless Streaming Device, Christopher Foster, Kyle Arpe, Zachary Somers

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In various businesses and services, there is a need for tight integration between visual media, human response to that media, and coordination of that response. For example, emergency responders may need information from a separate perspective using robotically controlled cameras in order to improve coordination efforts. The aim of this project is to design a low cost, high performance video streaming device. The essential feature of our design is to wirelessly send a video stream from a webcam to a micro-display and remotely control the orientation of the webcam using head movements. There are many future applications for this project …

Low-Cost Desalination Unit: Direct Contact Membrane Distillation, Meghan Herbert-Walters, Aubrey Martin, Lauren Scolese, Tina Trinh

Capstone Design Expo Posters

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 783 million people do not have access to a reliable clean water source. With this many people in the world without access to clean water, a solution to this problem is highly essential. The objective of this project is to create a low-cost compact desalination unit that can be used to turn contaminated water into pure drinking. For our design, a direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) approach was used. The DCMD system allows only for the evaporated feed water to pass through the membrane and therefore causes an increase …

The Perfect Coffee Cup, Suzanne Bowers, Jessica Ingram, David Murphy, Gillian Stavlas

Capstone Design Expo Posters

To design a coffee cup that will maintain the coffee at the optimal drinking temperature for several hours using Phase Change Material, PCM. The importance of this project is designing a coffee cup that will retain its temperature for a prolonged period of time giving the consumer plenty of time to finish their coffee at the desired consumption temperature. We designed a double walled cup that would contain the PCM. Heat transfer calculations were done for different materials such as acrylic, glass, and stainless steel with various thicknesses for each material. These calculations were used to decide on the ideal …

Me-Em 2014-15 Annual Report, Department Of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, Michigan Technological University

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Annual Reports

Table of Contents

• Human-centered Engineering
• Endowed Department Chair
• Enrollment & Degrees
• Graduates
• Department News
• Faculty & Staff
• Alumni
• Donors
• Contracts & Grants
• Patents & Publications
• Faculty & Staff Directory

Learning To Drive A Simulator: Impact Of Prolonged Practice, Eyal Greenhouse, Samah Soki

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Most driving simulation experiments begin with a practice scenario, to allow participants to learn how to interact with the driving simulator. During practice, driving performance improves such that consistent steering and speed control is exhibited. It is unclear however, whether driver performance will degrade with prolonged practice, and whether the fidelity of the simulator contributes to this degradation. Therefore, a driving simulation experiment was conducted to examine the performance of drivers over one hour of driving, using two different simulators: DriveSafety RS-100 and RS- 600 models. The RS-100 is made up of a Logitech steering wheel and pedals attached to …

Power Electronics Design For A Transfemoral Prosthesis, Taylor Barto

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Prosthetic legs do not always properly emulate a human leg. However, recent advances have allowed prostheses to include motors and brakes in order to closely mimic the performance of human legs. Unfortunately, motorized prostheses are often inefficient, which results in a dependence on batteries. This project aims to use energy regeneration methods to increase the operating time of motorized prostheses. Regeneration occurs when the leg requires braking; instead of using an energy-wasting braking mechanism, energy flows through an electronic circuit into a bank of supercapacitors. The energy can also flow in the reverse direction so that the motors can be …

Engineering Research Review 2015, Office Of Engineering Research

Engineering Research Review

Contents:
[Page] 2 CFD modeling confirms improved blood flow with new stent design
[Page] 4 Statisticians evaluate probability models for crime scene evidence
[Page] 6 Oscillating heat pipes help cool high-power electronics
[Page] 8 Grid connection method improves double-tee girder performance
[Page] 10 Civil engineers help formulate recipe for Wisconsin prestressed bridge girders
[Page] 12 Steel byproducts trap phosphorous in agricultural drainage water
[Page] 14 Microgrids help data centers use renewable energy, maintain reliability
[Page] 16 Two engineering researchers receive awards
[Page] 17 Grantswinship awards recognize research funding

Optimizing Data Center Operations With Virtualization, Jason Kruse, Osman Sesay, Stephanie Goggin-Burns

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Design a computer network using two or more host servers that supports a virtual hosting environment.

The importance of creating a successful datacenter is to allow a company to maintain data accessibility while keeping the data secure. One way of doing this is to have servers at multiple locations to insure that data isn’t lost in case of a failure at one server location. The impact of a datacenter that supports a virtual hosting environment is to maximize hardware recourses, grants the ability to quickly stand up server services and increases availability during hardware failure due to software like VMotion. …

Text Analytic System: Document Similarity, Ryan Murphy, James Cecil, Joseph Contarino

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Knowledge discovery is a critical function of infrastructure protection in the U.S. By analyzing key text documents, we can gain insight into the interwoven and interdependent infrastructure system of the U.S., and better understand the security aspects of the system as a whole. Massive amounts of relevant data resides in text documents, which must be gathered and parsed to be analyzed on a large scale. Our algorithm collects web-based text embedded in HTML pages and analyzes it in various ways to decipher similarities. It will be a needed component of the larger system being developed by the Idaho National Laboratory, …

Rams Onboard: Improving Employment Process, De-Shunda White, Yamil Boo Irizarry, Samuel Brazil

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In order for the Virginia Commonwealth University Engineering Human Resources department to provide seamless new hire integration, they need to upgrade their current post-hire information gathering techniques. Currently the HR department continues to provide paper forms and packets to new hires to fill out and return for review. This method requires over $30,000 in cost for materials and labor. The main goal of our project is to establish a way for newly hired employees to complete their new hire forms electronically through the VCU server.

By successfully executing our project we are moving VCU’s onboarding process to a completely paperless …

Automated Disc Kiosks, Kal Stankov, Allen Woods, Yaw Amoatin

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Our improved automated disc kiosks are designed with two purposes in mind: to improve the inventory management and agility of current automated media rental services and to simplify and consolidate the storage and distribution of installation media in an IT environment. The kiosks combine the ability to store and dispense optical discs (CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray Discs, etc.) with the ability to burn newer content pushed out via a network connection from a company’s servers. Designed and built with commonly available components to minimize costs, the prototype consists of a Digilent Zybo FPGA board powered by a Xilinx processor. A tablet …

Molten Metal Loop Driven By Electromagnetic Pump, Dominic Espiritu, Dor Granek, Jerald Moore, Scott Torres

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The first challenge of this proposed study was the gauges for the loop, which were not functioning properly and giving off inaccurate data due to a loop flow issue. Therefore a new loop design, including gauges, was created to gather accurate data for the electromagnetic pump. The electromagnetic pump used in this experiment differs from the standard electromagnetic motors by using rare earth magnets set into opposing steel plates that rotate simultaneously. Accurate data from the velocity and pressure gauges is necessary so the correlation between the EM pump’s speed and the flow velocity could be calculated. This technology could …

Fsae Rear Diffuser Team, Zarwan Waqar, Sohail Hossini, Saman Usodan

Capstone Design Expo Posters

To generate additional force that is applied to the rear of the FSAE race car The importance of the rear diffuser is to add a rear force to the vehicle. The rear force is generated from the airflow coming from underneath the vehicle. The way the airflow creates a force is through generating a pressure differential in which the air exiting the rear of the race car is now causing a downward force from the diffuser. The use of a diffuser is known to be of use at high speeds and if designed correctly creating the aerodynamics needed to keep …

Effluent Treatment And Recovery Of Polyether Using Nanoporous Technology, Suhaib Alramamneh, Zachary Turner, Allison Warth

Capstone Design Expo Posters

This semester Evonik Industries, a specialty chemical producer located in Hopewell, Virginia, approached VCU’s Chemical Engineering department with a project that would reduce their costs and increase process sustainability. The project is to determine a way to separate their liquid organic product from their waste stream in order to recycle the lost product. Liquid-Liquid extraction is a procedure used across most of the chemical industry. Proven separation techniques already exist for the standard liquid-liquid separation; however, when one liquid is miscible in the other the difficulty of separation is greatly increased. In order to do a liquid-liquid separation of an …

Searchblox Project Indexer Agent, Tri Nguyen, Tom Vaele, Zachary Johnson

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In this digital world, access to information is essential. We need it and almost every day; Google, Bing, Yahoo, or one of these other major services that help us find what we’re looking for so we can use a resource or answer a simple question. SearchBlox, an enterprise elasticsearch toolkit which boasts a robust and easy to use indexing system for an array of MIME types lacks an essential capability: remoting. The scope of this problem requires the ability to efficiently index particularly voluminous, dense, or distributed file-systems to a centralized SearchBlox indexing server while keeping the services that clients …

Main Body Aerodynamics, Michael Al-Badini, Christopher Buettner, Wesley Russell, Steven Summerville, Marcus Wardlow

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Our senior design project entails designing, analyzing the front upper aerodynamic nose for the Formula SAE at VCU’s race team. Currently there are no provisions on the chassis to provide relief for parasitic loss of speed & efficiency due to drag. Since Formula SAE is focused on building a engineered, safe, and efficient vehicle our aerodynamic design will help with handling, downforce, and fuel economy all while reducing drag. Our Aerodynamic design will play a key role not only in how the Formula car is perceived aesthetically, but our calculations will be a large determining factor in the cars overall …

Lower Body Exoskeleton Powered By Epidermal Electronics Systems, Francis Azari, Forrest Baber, Saswat Mishra, Karan Patel, Juan Soto

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The purpose of our design revolves around the concept of enhancing the human body through the use of a lower body exoskeleton. The most applicable demographics for our design consists of paraplegics and non-paraplegics. The various uses we hope to include would allow the user to: walk again, lift heavier loads with the ability to move forward, back and be seated. Although lower body exoskeletons already exist on the market, they still have shortcomings that prevent widespread use among the general public. Our hope is to improve upon the design of existing exoskeletons with the integration of epidermal electronic systems …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 56 Number 2, Winter 2015, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

10 - May the Rhodes rise to meet you - On the road with Aven Satre-Meloy ’13.

16 - Season tough, photos by Denis Concordel.

18 - Space Aces by Sam Scott '96. 20 - The fragility of faith by Michael C. McCarthy, S.J. '87. A professor of religious studies and executive director of SCU’s Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education confesses that it’s not merely an academic question when he asks: “How can a thinking person still believe in God?”

26 - Rebound by Mitch Finley '73. Lessons from the court and the chapel in dealing with addiction, mental illness, …

Introduction To Mips Assembly Language Programming, Charles W. Kann

Open Educational Resources

This book was written to introduce students to assembly language programming in MIPS. As with all assembly language programming texts, it covers basic operators and instructions, subprogram calling, loading and storing memory, program control, and the conversion of the assembly language program into machine code.

However this book was not written simply as a book on assembly language programming. The larger purpose of this text is to show how concepts in Higher Level Languages (HLL), such as Java or C/C++, are represented in assembly. By showing how program constructs from these HLL map into assembly, the concepts will be easier …

Effects Of Accelerometer Based Feedback On Clinical Measures And Paretic Upper Extremity Amount Of Use In Subjects Chronic Post-Stroke, Amber Kuehn, Nathan Pohl, Mishgan Abdullah

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Purpose/Hypothesis: To determine the effects of accelerometer based feedback on clinical measures of paretic upper extremity (UE) recovery in people post-stroke and examine the relationship between these changes and paretic UE amount of use (AOU) measured by an accelerometer. Subjects: 7 people chronic post-stroke (5 males, 2 females; aged 62.03 ± 11.33 years) with an Upper Extremity Fugl-Meyer score range of 10-63 were included for this poster. Materials/Methods: Subjects wore wrist accelerometers for 3 weeks in the home. Clinical measures (Motor Activity Log, Stroke Impact Scale, Chedoke Arm and Hand Activity Inventory, and the ABILHAND) were assessed weekly. Data analysis …

Processing Conditions For Ultrastable Surfactant-Free Nanoparticle Stabilized Foams, Willian Ivancic, Richard Schmitt

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Foams, which are mixtures of gas and either a liquid or solid, are important to many applications, from consumer products to industrial processes. Stabilizing the liquid/gas interface against coalescence is key to the performance of foams. Typically, molecular surfactants (surface active agents) are used for interfacial stability, but adsorption/desorption of surfactant can diminish foam performance. We investigated the use of solid nanoparticles, rather than surfactants, as stabilizers. Fumed silica nanoparticles of varying surface chemistry, ranging from hydrophobic to hydrophilic, were suspended at 1% (w/w) and agitated in solutions of water and ethanol. Foam (gas in liquid), suspensions, and inverse foam …

Computer Vision And Route Planning For Humanoid Robots, Brandon Rutledge, Mike Iannica

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Today humans control robots. Eventually, robots will control other robots. This research is a step in that direction. The goal of this research is to enable the NAO humanoid robot to take a picture of a VEX mobile robot and a colored cube, and analyze the picture so that the NAO can control the VEX to fetch the cube. The picture is examined by the NAO one pixel at a time. Using predetermined color values, the cube, along with the front and back of the VEX, are located, and the center points of each are calculated. The angle that the …

Parallel Selection Algorithms On Gpus: Implementation And Performance Comparison, Darius Bakunas-Milanowski

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

The computing power of current Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) has increased rapidly over the years. They offer much more computational power than recent CPUs by providing a vast number of simple, data parallel, multithreaded cores. In this project, we focused on the study of different variations of parallel selection algorithms on the current generation of NVIDIA GPUs. That is, given a massively large array of elements, we were interested in how we could use a GPU to efficiently select those elements that meet certain criteria and then store them into a target array for further processing. The optimization techniques used …

Effect Of Accelerometer Based Feedback On Paretic Upper Extremity Amount Of Use And Quality Of Movement: A Case Study, Mishgan Abdullah, Nathan Pohl, Amber Kuehn

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Purpose/Hypothesis: To determine the effects of accelerometer based feedback on clinical measures of paretic upper extremity (UE) recovery in people post-stroke and examine the relationship between these changes and paretic UE amount of use (AOU) measured by an accelerometer. Subjects: 7 people chronic post-stroke (5 males, 2 females; aged 62.03 ± 11.33 years) with an Upper Extremity Fugl-Meyer score range of 10-63 were included for this poster. Materials/Methods: Subjects wore wrist accelerometers for 3 weeks in the home. Clinical measures (Motor Activity Log, Stroke Impact Scale, Chedoke Arm and Hand Activity Inventory, and the ABILHAND) were assessed weekly. Data analysis …

Feasibility And Effects Of Accelerometer Based Feedback On Paretic Upper Extremity Amount Of Use In The Home Setting In Subjects Chronic Post-Stroke, Nathan Pohl, Amber Kuehn, Mishgan Abdullah

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Purpose : to (1) evaluate the feasibility of using accelerometers in the home to quantify how much subjects chronic post-stroke (PS) use their upper extremities (UE), (2) measure differences between amount of UE movement in subjects PS and a healthy control group (HC), (3) determine the effects of accelerometer based feedback on paretic UE use in subjects PS, and (4) determine if those effects are retained over time. Methods : Six subjects PS wore accelerometers for 3 weeks with two feedback sessions given during week two. Seven HC subjects wore accelerometers for one week. Accelerometer based outcome measures included relative …

Creating Miniaturized Tissue Constructs On A Micropillar/Microwell Chip Via 3d Bioprinting Technology, Yana Sickhar, Pranav Joshi, Akshata Datar

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Liver tumor tissues in the human body consist of different layers of hepatic cells including hepatoma cells and surrounding normal cells. To mimic in vivo tumor tissues, three-dimensional (3D) microarray bioprinting was demonstrated on a microwell chip via layer-by-layer printing of Hep3B human hepatoma cell line. The 3D microarray printing coupled with high-content imaging (HCI) of cell layers on the chip might open new opportunities for predictive drug screening for patients. Our goal is to demonstrate high-throughput cell printing in hydrogel layers and establish HCI of cell layers from the microwell chip for miniaturized tumor tissue engineering. To achieve this …

Experimental Analysis Of Catalytic Gasification Of Polyethylene, Eric M. Lange, Samuel O. Sanya, Aliandra Barbutti, Stephen A. Reeves, Joshua M. Cmar, Jade Moten

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Over the last century there has been a global interest in reducing/recycling waste material as well as creating energy from renewable and more eco-friendly sources. Catalytic gasification is one effective method that can promote low-temperature conversion of solid waste to energy, also referred to as “gasification”. The gas mixture produced by gasification of long-chain polymers using ruthenium (or platinum) catalysts consists of hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and water. Product mixtures of gasification experiments were analyzed by Gas Chromatography (GC) and post-processed using statistical analysis. Using fundamental reactor design equations along with stoichiometric calculations yielded the percent gasified as …

Effect Of Solidification Through Cross-Section Change On Dendritic Array In Single Crystal Castings, Christopher Stacey, Masood Ghods

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

Dendritic single crystal turbine blades are the most critical component in a gas turbine engine. These are made by directional solidification in ceramic molds having many cross-section changes. Abrupt cross-section changes during casting are the source of casting defects, such as, freckles and spurious grains. Purpose of this study was to examine the role of convection associated with cross-section changes in producing microstructural defects. Al-7%Si alloy was directionally solidified at 11, 29 and 73 μm s-1 in graphite crucibles having abrupt cross-section decrease and cross-section increase to simulate solidification of turbine blades. It is observed that, (i) shrinkage flow leads …

Community Perceptions On Substance Abuse By Underage, Wyatt Suntala, Navid Changizi

Undergraduate Research Posters 2015

In the spring of 2015, the Community Awareness and Prevention Association (C.A.P.A.), and westshore young leaders network (WYLN) developed and conducted a Community Perception Survey (CPS) of adult residents in the suburbs of Lakewood, Rocky River, Fairview Park, Bay Village, Westlake, and North Olmsted. The purpose of the survey was to assess attitudes and opinions about substance abuse and prevention efforts of WYLN. The survey was both anonymous and confidential. The CPS resulted in 955 usable data which were analyzed and visualized at CSU. The results showed a strong perception of alcohol abuse and accessibility to alcohol for teens by …