Ingenuity Reigns at 2014 UA Engineering Design Day
If you were due for a heavy dose of ingenuity, the University of Arizona was the place to be yesterday as more than 350 Engineering students displayed and demoed the results of their year-long senior projects.
Solar power ruled, rockets fascinated, cameras detected, medical devices remedied, and sustainability was front and center at the 2014 Engineering Design Day, held May 6 in the UA Student Union Memorial Center and on the UA Mall. Top design teams took more than $14,000 in prizes.
There was the modification of a street sweeper to make it into an efficient onion bulb harvester. For their clean, low-cost design that simply worked well, the multidisciplinary team won the Sargent Aerospace and Defense Voltaire Design Award.
A coveted $1,000 Texas Instruments Analog Design Award went to the team of electrical engineering and systems engineering students who created a meter to detect the power consumption of different devices in homes and businesses.
Students at Tanque Verde High School in Tucson, Arizona, have new educational opportunities and home-grown vegetables and fish, thanks to an agriculture and biosystems engineering team on the greenhouse aquaponics project. They won the Rosemont Copper Best Sustainable Engineering Award.
Two teams created award-winning solar-powered camera systems for a desert environment -- one for detecting border crossers, another for monitoring soil erosion.
A $770 automated time-lapse camera system to remotely monitor soil erosion was ready to start collecting data this monsoon season on the Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed near Tombstone, Arizona. The system will sense rain, take photos at 30-second intervals and deliver them on demand to scientists at the Southwest Watershed Research Center.
“Before, someone had to be there on site to monitor the erosion,” said team member Deanna Johnson, a mechanical engineering major, adding that she felt fortunate to work on a “customer-oriented, industry-related project with a client who did a great job of working with us.”
The team’s work was rewarded with a $750 Best Design Documentation Award from Technical Documentation Consultants of Arizona.
Judges deemed the proof of concept design for a saguaro border surveillance system the most manufacturable of the projects on display, and the team took home a $750 prize, sponsored by AGM Container Controls. The solar-powered network of cameras hidden inside saguaro cactuses was created to stream images to border patrol agents and help them identify illegal border crossers. Seismic sensors in use now detect movement, but they cannot identify what is causing the movement, explained team member Sean Baker, a mechanical engineering student.
“They can’t tell the difference between a cow and a person.” he said. “Agents do not always know what type of situation they are walking into or they use valuable time investigating nonincidents, so this will actually monitor what is out there.”
>> Design Day Guide Book: Full list of projects on display at Engineering Design Day.
In the medical arena, award winners included a wireless flow sensor for cerebral spinal fluid, a self-administered tonometer to measure interocular pressure related to glaucoma, a wearable clinical frailty meter to help identify and treat instability and other problems associated with aging, and a cell phone amplifier for people with hearing difficulties.
Second place for best overall design went to a multidisciplinary team -- including mechanical, optical science and materials science engineering students -- that created an automobile dashboard quality control system. And an aerospace engineering team won the first-place Sensintel Systems Best Overall Design Award for its high-powered rocket altitude-targeting system. The impressive 10-foot black rocket, constructed partially from additive manufacturing, or 3-D printed, components, towered above more than 1,000 people who turned out to see the Design Day creations.
The most exciting part of the project for many of the aerospace engineering team members: the test launch, of course!
“It was a heart-stopping experience,” exclaimed Austin Mills, who also said he was relieved to see the parachute deploy and the rocket return after its 2,000-foot climb. “Sometimes they don’t.”
The UA Engineering Design Day, sponsored by industry and faculty and supported by judges from local and national engineering firms, is the culmination of the Interdisciplinary Engineering Design Program. Many of the projects go on to become real commercial products.
Slide Show: UA Engineering Design Day 2014
UA Engineering Design Day 2014 List of Prize Winners
Sensintel Systems Best Overall Design, First Prize • $1,000
Design of a high-powered rocket altitude targeting system
Design team: Matt Dusard, Tianna Stefano, Daniel Guyll, Varun Patel, Austin Mills
Project sponsor: UA student chapter of AIAA
Sensintel Systems Best Overall Design, Second Prize • $750
Vision system for automotive cluster (dashboard)
Design team: Zhe Cao, Lee Johnson, Jeremy Katz, Abraham Lemus, Thomas Lundstrom
Project sponsor: Continental Automotive
Rincon Research Best Presentation • $1,000
MACO: modular aircraft for conceptual operations
Design team: Joshua Alexander, Anthony Colbert, Dana Cordova, Jeff Gluck, Ian Haubert, John Inman
Project sponsor: Hermann Fasel
Texas Instruments Analog Design • $1,000
Smart grid intelligent power meter
Design team: Tani Abraham, Ryan Carnaghi, Will DeCook, Sankar Unnithan, Matt Yalung, Wenhan Yang
Project sponsor: Texas Instruments
Ventana Innovation in Engineering • $1,000
Wireless flow sensor using GMR magnetic sensors for cerebral spinal fluid
Design team: Michael Martinez, Jose Valdez, Brett Lenz, Mervyn Abraham, Ernesto Barraza-Valdez, Deon Eakins
Project sponsor: Texas Instruments
AGM Container Controls Most Manufacturable Design • $750
Saguaro border surveillance system
Design team: Jeff Wilhite, Jason Wrona, Robbie McCarthy, Leah Herlihy, Jeff Colet, Sean Baker
Project sponsor: Raytheon Missile Systems
Edmund Optics Perseverance and Recovery • $750
NASA remote imaging system acquisition (RISA) project
Design team: Jeff Asman, Alex Felli, Justin Mortara, Noah Neff, Lucie Parks, Adrianna Vera
Project sponsor: NASA Johnson Space Center
W.L. Gore and Associates Creative Solution • $750
Universal hybrid conversion kit
Design team: Robert Futch, Angel Cecena, Clint Robison, Matt Vaughn, Kris Savage, Dominic Badillo
Project sponsor: UA Electric Vehicle Club
PADT Best Use of Prototyping • $750
Self-administered at-home tonometer
Design team: Shelly Garland, Michael Bollig, Alex Aames, Timothy Hill, Daniel Okiyama, Amy Nipp
Project sponsor: Texas Instruments
Raytheon Best Engineering Analysis • $750
Silver Fox Next Generation
Design team: Samantha Lowden, Paul Neff, Juan Rivera, Savannah Rodgers
Project sponsor: Sensintel Inc.
Sargent Aerospace & Defense Voltaire Design • $750
Onion bulb harvester
Design team: Nicholas Junk, Joshua Holmes, Andrew Keller
Project sponsor: Sunbelt Transplants Inc.
Technical Documentation Consultants of Arizona Best Design Documentation • $750
Automated time-lapse camera system
Design team: Hassan Alyousef, Taylor Christenson, Thomas Fumo, Deanna Johnson, Katherine Psyk, PengWang Song
Project sponsor: Southwest Watershed Research Center
Avilés Best Project That Exemplifies the Innate Art and Beauty of Engineering • $500
Soaring design team
Design team: Phillip Tindall, Maira Garcia, Matthew Ashton, Nick Griffis, Joel Mueting
Project sponsors: Ricardo G. Sanfelice and Hermann Fasel
Honeywell Team Leadership 1 • $250
NASA remote imaging system acquisition (RISA) project
Design team: Jeff Asman (winner), Alex Felli, Justin Mortara, Noah Neff, Lucie Parks, Adrianna Vera
Project sponsor: NASA Johnson Space Center
Honeywell Team Leadership 2 • $250
Clinical frailty meter
Design team: Erika McMahan (winner), Lance Frazer, Shih-Wei Lin, Michael Adam Schurr, Robert Welch
Project sponsor: Arizona Center on Aging
Latitude Engineering Best Physical Implementation of Analytically Driven Design • ($500)
Clinical frailty meter
Design team: Lance Frazer, Shih-Wei Lin, Erika McMahan, Michael Adam Schurr, Robert Welch
Project sponsor: Arizona Center on Aging
Prototron Circuits Best Printed Circuit Design • ($500)
Applying ZigBee wireless technology to a production line
Design team: Jesse A. Dobson, John Bergquist, Bader Alushaim, Chao Wu, Hanqing Wen, Jafar Almousa
Project sponsor: Continental Automotive Systems
Rosemont Copper Best Sustainable Engineering • ($500)
Tanque Verde High School greenhouse aquaponics project
Design team: Aaron Tirado, Isaac Hung, Alison Burton
Project sponsor: Tanque Verde School District
Universal Avionics Best Integration and Test Philosophy • ($500)
Cabin pressure control system pressure rate sensor
Design team: Albert Martinez, Claudia Aster, Gordon Hardy, John Mothershed, Kelly Reid, Kimberly Schlecht
Project sponsor: Honeywell Aerospace
University of Arizona Center on Aging: Bioengineering Solutions to Aging Issues • ($500)
Design of a cell phone amplification device for older adults with hearing loss
Design team: Seung-Hyun Francis Baek, Kokou Serge Dogbevi, Peter W. Hall, Roberto Reyes, Benjie Tong
Project sponsor: Arizona Center on Aging
Kristy Pearson Fish Out of Water, First Prize • $250
Clinical frailty meter
Design team: Michael Adam Schurr (winner), Lance Frazer, Shih-Wei Lin, Erika McMahan, Robert Welch
Project sponsor: Arizona Center on Aging
Kristy Pearson Fish Out of Water, Second Prize • $150
Design of a high-powered rocket altitude targeting system
Design team: Varun Patel (winner), Matt Dusard, Tianna Stefano, Daniel Guyll, Austin Mills
Project sponsor: UA student chapter of AIAA
Honeywell Excellence in Aerospace Electronic System Design • $400
Electromechanical shaft disconnect for generators
Design team: Janiece Cooper, Mason Fritz, Matthew Groff, Tovi Johnson, Eric Watters, Matthew Yturralde
Project sponsor: Honeywell Aerospace