Posts categorized 4. Keywords Archive

Art and Engineering are two separate disciplines that don’t collaborate and intersect as much as they should. There are many mediums that mix both disciplines to allow for a fuller artistic approach to engineering, but these mediums aren’t abundant on the River Campus.
The Kinetic Sculpture capstone project aims to be the bridge between these departments through kinetic art. The following interactive art piece fuses the concepts of art and mechanics to provide students with a one-of-a-kind experience on campus.

With increasing concerns about the environmental impact of ground transportation, the industry needs alternative solutions that are safe, efficient, and environmentally friendly. One solution to the pollution problem is human-powered vehicles which emit zero greenhouse gas on the road. This project aims to implement a new material technology (fiberglass) into the design of a human-powered vehicle to make it more lightweight, functional, and safe. The test results concluded that fiberglass can indeed be used to manufacture the monocoque of a human-powered vehicle without compromises. The findings of this project will advance the engineering knowledge of fiberglass in this field and enable other engineering teams to use this technology in future designs.

Human-powered submarines are underwater vessels that are driven solely by the power of a human pilot. The Foundation for Underwater Research and Education (FURE) has put on the International Submarine Races (ISR) for several years. In the past, teams from around the world have traveled to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division to compete and race with their human-powered submarine designs. With an in-person event not possible this year, a virtual event (vISR) will be taking place instead. The Human Powered Submarine team set out to tackle specific design problems related to the hull, drivetrain, and propulsion system of a human-powered submarine in the spirit of the virtual event guidelines.

L3Harris Technologies is an American defense company that builds a variety of mechanical, optical, and electrical systems. The Rochester division designs and builds systems for space applications. Optical space telescopes are widely used in both Earth and astrophysical observations and play a major role in scientific and national security. For optical telescopes to function properly and take clear images, their optics must be precisely aligned to focus light. However, during the launch of the telescope, the relative positions of these optics can change. The goal of the project is to build a mechanism to finely adjust the position of these optics to enhance resolution and accuracy of the telescope images. This improved image quality has significant implications for both terrestrial and space observations with applications to scientific research and national security.

Our team, along with Drill Powered Carts A have built a fully functioning, energy-efficient, and sustainable vehicle, which will be powered by a single electric power drill. By doing this, each team hopes to not only show people that electric-powered transportation is possible, reliable, and easy but, whose cart is the best. The two teams will face off in an endurance race to see which cart can make the most laps around a race track at the University of Rochester River Campus. This will show which team has the most optimized mechanical design.

Several optomechanical applications have a need for a 360° kinematic mounting system capable of withstanding thermal loading due to heat generation from electronic devices. It is advantageous for optical systems to have a repeatable and controlled, known distance between devices such as optics, sensors, light sources, mirrors or assorted non-optical sensors. The team was able to design a thermally stable spaceframe solution, capable of reducing movement of any assembled components to minimal displacements on the order of microns.

Our project was to implement a system of light reflectors that autonomously track the sun’s position and focus the light on a solar panel to maximize the incident light intensity and hence more power capture. The system was to be significantly cheap compared to buying multiple solar panels and capture more than double the solar power than using an ordinary solar panel.

Our senior design project is implementing an AI chess board. It uses Python and the popular chess engine Stockfish on a Raspberry Pi to show the user with LEDs where the computer would like to make its move. Our project was a success and could be used as a beginning step to make a more complex and intuitive chess board that plays chess against a user.

The Caldwell-Fay equation (2002) attempts to model what Lake Ontario’s current water level would be if dam construction had never taken place along the St. Lawrence Seaway (i.e. the natural hydraulic state of the lake).

Newly unearthed Lake Ontario data going back to the 1860s has been discovered, and we had the rare opportunity to be the first to digitize and publicly analyze it.

Since this data set predates any dam construction it actually captures the lake’s natural state. Therefore it can be used to verify Caldwell-Fey’s equation which is being used to govern the lake’s inflow and outflow rate on a daily basis.

A surgical drain is placed within an internal wound site to prevent fluid from accumulating in the body throughout the patient’s recovery. A suture is currently used to secure the drain to the patient but has multiple shortcomings including infection risk and failure over time. We have worked alongside Dr. Sara Neimanis to create a new securement device that minimizes infection while durably securing the drain over extended periods of time.

The cautery phantom senior design team will engineer and improve a system that will arrest artificial blood flow in response to electrocautery in a tissue phantom manufactured by Simulated Inanimate Models, LLC (SIM). To solve this problem, we have investigated methods of vessel constriction by lining the tissue phantom blood vessel wall with a thermoresponsive material, coagulating the artificial blood by introducing proteins and chemicals into the mixture, and by making the blood vessel with a shape memory polymer.

A chair specifically designed to safely and comfortably sit infants and young children that are immobilized by a cast that spans from the mid abdomen to the ankle, all while allowing proper social and cognitive development. The chair incorporates extra space for the casted torso and legs, as well as multiple aspects of adjustability to fit the wide range of children sizes and to fit under tables of varying heights.

RTS is a regional transportation authority established by New York State and the goal of the project is to find the potential reasons for preventable accidents caused by bus operators. First, descriptive and exploratory analysis is performed on all the data provided and driver-related variables and environmental-related variables. Then, frequent pattern mining is applied and conditional probabilities are calculated for the accident history of operators with high risk of accidents to extract accident patterns.

The Rossell Hope Robbins Library is underutilized by many students on campus due to the lack of awareness of the library and its resources. To promote awareness for the library, this project contains designs for a “life-size” portable chess set with medieval themes.

Students at the Mary Cariola Center with visual impairments are attracted to light in rooms, often pulling their attention away from the teachers/lesson to look upwards at the ceiling lights. Lighted surfaces that provide contrast can help students focus on that surface and on any activity being performed on the lighted surface. The team was tasked with creating a mat suitable for children that illuminates in order to draw the student’s attention downward.

There is a need to ensure that drivers are alerted of approaching emergency vehicles so that they can remove themselves from the path of the emergency vehicle. It is especially a challenge for deaf, hard of hearing, and distracted drivers to identify emergency signals, which puts them at an increased risk for collision. In this project, we developed a device for use in the car that detects emergency vehicles and notifies the driver of their presence. We used a trained convolutional neural network to detect sirens in noisy environments. On our validation set, we achieved a 95% detection accuracy with a 50% criterion. A demonstration of our real-time detector and design schematic are shown below.

Development of polymers to simulate kidney tissues for surgical training of medical students at UR Medical Center.

Cataracts, a hardness and opacifying of the lens, is the leading cause of curable blindness worldwide, with the majority of cases occurring in developing countries where trained ophthalmologists are scarce. Our project is to develop a device to be used for a simplified cataract surgery that will insert a cylindrical intraocular lens into the cataract. By simplifying the procedure, more healthcare providers can be trained to perform the procedure, increasing the accessibility of cataract treatment in developing countries.

We were given a patient reported symptoms dataset PRO-CTCAE and applied a variety of clustering methods. The clusters were then statistically tested for associations with a selection of outcomes such as hospitalization. We found significant associations with clusters and outcomes and compared it to linear regression results.

The aim of this project was to design a device capable of removing impacted food boluses in pediatric patients both more efficiently and more quickly compared to current industry standards.

MOTLEY (Main Organizing Terminal for Low Energy Usage) focuses on the creation of a Smart Home using a Raspberry Pi as the central device. Similar to the google home, we are able to control our in-house made and thoughtfully designed custom peripherals through the use of this Pi, granting our user the ability to remotely control various devices in their homes from their current location.

Tibial shaft fractures are a common injury and may require surgical intervention. During our team’s observation of trauma surgeries at Strong Memorial Hospital, we found the procedure was inefficient. Tools used to align bone may move, and people holding alignment are prone to fatigue. Each time a tool moves, alignment is checked or redone using X-ray. Our device clamps to the surgical bed and locks the position of instruments reducing staff needed to hold alignment and increasing efficiency.

Various post-operative complications may lead cardiac surgeons to opt for delayed sternal closure following open heart surgeries. Patients’ sterna are left open and they are cared for in the intensive care unit for 1-7 days. In the ICU, bedridden patients are turned to prevent pressure ulcers and for linen changes. During these turns, the sternal halves rotate and twist, potentially leading to injury or death. Our device stabilizes the sternal halves during transport and turning, greatly increasing patient safety.

Our project focuses on solving the need to decrease the amount of muscle obstruction during minimally invasive lumbar surgeries in order to increase the surgeon’s visualization of the surgical field. We developed a medical device that decreases the muscle obstruction by expanding an inflatable at the base of a cylindrical port. The product was tested in a PVA mixture that resembles similar material characteristics as muscle which proved the plausibility and efficacy of the concept.

Hutchison Hall is home to the Biology department. However, there’s a lack of understanding regarding all research undertaken by the department. Hanging physical models can bring exposure to the department and create a vibrant and joyous community inside the Hutchison Hall. ​ The Eurypterid Team’s models are designed to represent the Jaekelopterus, a genus of the Eurypterid species. These models will be about 9 feet in length. The motorized tail and claws will be triggered through infrared motion sensors. ​

We are designing a device that will provide a cost-effective method for characterizing whether a particle in water is a plastic or nonplastic, as well as categorizing the subtype of plastic. The device will need to be effective on a scale of approximately one to five microns, which is the size of the microplastic particles.

Minimize nickel contamination of cleaning tanks in Orafol Precision Technology’s electroforming process.

Limit entry of abrasive sediment into India Mark II handpump for Ugandan Water Project.

The AI Sorting System takes a photo of a recyclable object, weighs it, and scans it with a metal detector. It inputs this data into a program that classifies the item as plastic, metal, or glass. The system includes 3 bins, one for each material. LEDs will light up on one of the bins and its lid will flip open, indicating that the recyclable should be placed in that bin.

A renewed focus on environmental concerns means that fuel efficiency and emissions of engines are of significant importance. A current design for a mixing nozzle exists, but the fuel residence could be higher and the pressure drop could be lower. A longer fuel residence time ensures smooth distribution of fuel and a more efficient burn. A lower pressure drop means that less energy is lost by the motion of the fluid through the mixer.