Project goal: To design test procedures to investigate the relationship between the power captured by Regenesis and the Regenesis system’s effect on an HVAC unit. Regenesis is the concept of generating electrical power from the discharged airflow of a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, or HVAC, system. The first procedure determines the baseline efficiency of an HVAC with and without the sponsor-provided high-efficiency fan and Regenesis fan blade. The second test restricts different amounts of airflow to find similarities in this simulation and how Regenesis restricts the airflow and affects HVAC pressure. Finally, a test is run to determine the relationship between the placement of the system above the HVAC and the power captured by Regenesis. The tests determine the placement of Regenesis where power is optimized, and if the HVAC is running to factory specifications.

Project goal: To design a low-cost drone attachment capable of using lidar to create a sub-five centimeter resolution model of a selected area. This system easily mounts to an unmanned aircraft and,by programming a simple flight path, is capable of flying over a designated area to create a high-resolution 3-D model of the scanned area. The system uses three low-cost lidars scanning simultaneously while the unmanned aircraft is on autopilot slowly flying across a field. A custom-designed interface board allows microcontrollers to log the data from each lidar. An ultra-high-resolution GPS using real-time kinematics was selected to get a global positioning accuracy of less than one centimeter. Custom software running on a supercomputer was used to process the millions of data points collected and return a 3-D model of the scanned object with a final resolution accuracy of five centimeters or less.

Project goal: To apply compressive sensing theory to the field of optics to create a nominal four times improvement in X and Y image resolution from the detector. High-resolution images are highly sought after in many commercial and military optical systems because they can store large amounts of information, but detector costs increase significantly with pixel count.The Super Resolution Imager SRIdesign incorporates a coded mask, which complicates the point spread function of the optical system. The mask pattern can then be exploited to acquire improved image resolution. To meet the Shannon-Nyquist sampling criterion, the design incorporates a piezoelectric translation stage on the mask to allow multiple image samples to be captured with different mask positions. Representing the samples as a Toeplitz matrix presents them as an undetermined linear system, allowing them to be solved by computer compressive sensing algorithms such as the two-step iterative shrinkage/thresholding, or TwIST, algorithm.

Project goal: To expedite the cleaning of residential refuse cans by designing an automatic wash-dry cycle that is compact, self-contained, efficient and sustainable.

Removing residue from these containers provides many benefits to the community and reduces media for flies and other disease-spreading vectors.

The rotary union designed distributes hot pressurized water about the can’s interior and uses the water’s velocity to drive a rotating mechanism. The process that cleans the can exterior was designed to contain all water within the system while maximizing the contact between the water and the can walls. Water pressures and flow rates were modeled using WaterCAD. A prototype system was fabricated and tested. Optimal water flow rates, nozzle sizes, and pipe lengths were selected through several iterations of testing.

The requirements of the project are to create a lightweight concrete canoe that can withstand the tension and compression forces generated by two or four rowers in a five-race competition against 18 other civil engineering schools.

Specific constraints for the construction of the canoe are that, of the entire concrete mix, a minimum of 25 percent by volume must be aggregate, and of that aggregate a minimum of 25 percent by volume must comply with ASTM-C330. The canoe must also pass a swamp test, which means it must surface on its own after being filled with water and submerged.

To overcome drag forces on the canoe the team designed a streamlined shape with a sharp stern and wide bow that allow it to slice easily through the water. To minimize erratic turning when paddling, the canoe has a narrow shape with a tumblehome hull and a flat keel line.

Solar power is becoming increasingly economically feasible. The goal of this project is to design a concentrated solar plant to power all the houses in Chandler, Arizona.

The plant consists of a central power tower filled with molten salt heated by solar energy, which allows the plant to produce large amounts of energy through various turbines and generators.

The plant creates zero emissions and, unlike similar solar plants, reuses all its water during steady-state operations. The economical feasibility of this type of plant has been determined.

Ivermectin is an antibiotic derived from avermectins, naturally occurring compounds found in soil microbes. It is effective against parasites and has been used against river blindness, lice, scabies and many other diseases. Merck & Company owns the patent for ivermectin and produces 3-milligram pills for human use.

To produce ivermectin, the team proposes a facility with four stages: catalyst production, ivermectin synthesis, purification, and packaging. The catalyst-production stage includes a batch reactor that produces Wilkinson's catalyst, which creates ivermectin by hydrogenating a specific double bond in avermectin’s molecular structure. This hydrogenation occurs in a batch reactor at the ivermectin-synthesis stage.

Wilkinson’s catalyst contains rhodium, which is reduced to 9 ppm by separators in the purification stage. The packaging stage dries and packages the powder ready for sale and distribution.

Manufacturing processes that use carbon fiber composites all face the same challenge: removing the mandrel core from the cured part. One solution is castable, water-soluble aggregates typically composed of plasters and binders.

This method works well for composites with complex geometries that make removing the mandrel core difficult and labor-intensive. The sponsor’s AquaPour is a castable, water-soluble product used to make composites in the aerospace, defense and sporting goods industries. The objectives of this project are to increase the product’s green strength for faster mandrel extraction from molds, improve compression strength, optimize water transport and delivery, and improve washout time.

The resulting design involves methods such as crosslinking polymers and using desiccants to absorb water and prevent hemihydrate formation, optimization of water content and recipe, and incorporation of sodium silicate with ester-driven reaction for hardening.

Significant research and funding has gone into developing so-called “toilet-to-tap” systems that can treat wastewater to make it 100 percent safe and potable in a single closed loop

The goal of this project is to design a treatment facility and process to treat 30 million gallons per day of wastewater and turn it into drinking water. Wastewater of the same composition as that found in Tucson, Arizona, was evaluated and a full-scale process and operation were designed to remove solids and harmful chemicals in the water, and further purify it to EPA drinking water standards.

The team incorporated features such as gravity-induced flow and recycling bacteria into a bioreactor, and the entire process was designed with economic feasibility, and thus the consumer’s water bill, in mind.

The wastewater-purification system on the International Space Station recovers about 75 percent of the contaminated water on board. Increasing this recovery rate decreases the need for resupply missions.

The design team’s goal is to design a water-purification system that can increase the life expectancy of the overall system. The designed trace contaminant control system uses an activated-charcoal bed followed by an alumina bed to remove large contaminants such as siloxanes. After the beds, the stream passes through a photocatalytic oxidizer that uses ultraviolet light and titanium dioxide to create radicals and remove volatile organic compounds.

Finally, the Microlith sorbent bed removes contaminants such as ammonia and carbon dioxide. A heat-exchanger network has been developed using space as the condenser. The designed system is scheduled to be implemented in the late 2020s.