Showcase Highlights Innovative Student Engineering & Computing Projects

May 10, 2017

The Engineering and Computer Science Student Showcase and Awards 2017

The Engineering and Computer Science Student Showcase and Awards took place on Monday, May 8 and provided the opportunity for students in all disciplines to showcase their senior design, research & collegiate competition projects to ECS donors, alumni, industry supporters, and university leaders.

Speaking about the event, Dr. Joe Piacenza, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering said, “The Showcase is a great opportunity for everyone in both the academic and industrial community to come together and share our mutual interests in engineering and computer sciences. Speaking on behalf of the ECS faculty, we are all very proud of our students’ hard work and achievements.”

The showcase and competition assembles outstanding capstone, senior design and collegiate competition projects from across each of ECS’s departments of Civil Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. This year 69 projects were entered in the showcase.

The projects below were judged by professionals and selected for awards:

Titan II Rocket (Best in College)
The Titan II Rocket team applied skills acquired through school to design, manufacture, and launch a model hybrid rocket. Hybrid rocket technology is an emerging type of propulsion technology which the team gained further understanding of through hands-on experience. There is much potential in this technology due to its high performance and safety benefits.

Titan Rover (Best in College)
The Titan Rover team has worked to build a rover that must be able to traverse rough terrain, effectively manipulate and transport a myriad of objects and collect environmental data while being controlled from a nearby base station. To accomplish these requirements the rover must feature a highly capable mobility system, a complex arm and end effector, carrier bins, soil collecting and storage devices, multiple sensors, video feedback, and the ability to autonomously navigate terrain.

A Regenerative Nozzle Cooling Design for a Hybrid Rocket Engine (2nd Place)
This project presents a proof-of-concept regenerative cooling system for a hybrid engine which uses hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) as its solid fuel and gaseous oxygen (O2) as its oxidizer, whereby a portion of gaseous oxygen is injected directly into the combustion chamber and another portion is routed up through grooves on the exterior of a copper-chromium nozzle and, afterwards, injected into the combustion chamber.

Edwards Automated Sewing (3rd Place)
The scope of this project was to contribute to Edwards Lifesciences endeavors in fully automating a sewing process of an implantable cloth onto a trans-catheter heart valve (THV). Of the many phases to come, this year’s senior design team in the design project was to showcase mainly the precision and accuracy of the robotic system.

Titan Racing Baja (Honorable Mention)
The goal for this year was to design and manufacture a mini Baja car from scratch that can perform to the best of its ability in an endurance and dynamics test with a limited budget.