THE 2004-2005 PROJECTS

Each year ME seniors take a year-long design course taught by Senior Lecturer Dr. Andy Conn and assisted by Undergraduate Lab Coordinator, Mike Johnson, and the ME Department’s machinist, Eric Harden. Students working in groups of three to four select small-scale engineering design problems suggested and funded by corporations, government, or non-profit agencies. With funding allocated at a base value of typically $11,000 per project, the students must handle every aspect of the design process, from brainstorming possible solutions, to preparing a budget, to purchasing equipment and putting together a final device or product. In the first semester, they present oral reports describing how they settled on their final solution to the problem. At the end of the year, their final devices or products are presented and demonstrated in a special two-day series of presentations, with industry representatives and ASME judges present. The ASME judges selected Team MASTER as this year’s award-winning project.

PROJECT A-BALL  (Audible  Basketball  for  ALL)
Sponsored by:  Blind Industries and Services of Maryland

There is a critical stage for blind persons in their development of “navigational skills,” that is, being able to mentally map out a room or other space just by using the sounds reflected from surrounding surfaces.  This critical developmental stage can be called “hand-ear coordination.”  Sighted persons develop the analogous “hand-eye” coordination, which is needed to catch a ball and for many other daily activities.  An important way to help develop hand-ear coordination in the past has been to use a simple method such as placing a bell inside a ball.  But, if the ball rolls to a stop, then it is “invisible” to a blind person.  The full range of basic navigational skills could be greatly enhanced if a sport such as basketball could be played by the blind – hence Project A-BALL.  Project Designers Alissa Burkholder, Stephen Garber, and Ashanna Randall developed a means to have a continuous, battery-powered sound source imbedded inside an ordinary basketball, without degrading its handling characteristics in any way.  Combined with a sound source at the basket and a warning system at the boundaries of the court, they have invented a means for blind persons to catch, dribble and shoot and thus involve themselves in all aspect of this game.

PROJECT BPEN  (Braille Portable  Economical  Note-taker)
Sponsored by:  National Federation of the Blind   

This project was motivated by the need for an inexpensive way for the blind to create Braille, such as for taking notes in a classroom or a meeting, or just to learn the language of Braille.  Many portable machines do exist for these purposes, but they are either large, very expensive electronically controlled devices or a very slow (inexpensive) slate and stylus device where each individual dot must be tediously pushed in one at a time.  This sponsor also sees the potential of such a small Braille typewriter as a means for decreasing the extremely high level of Braille illiteracy in third world countries, where there is very little money available for educating the blind.  Team BPEN: Yann Brandt, David Garber, Selcuk Hepyaz, and Angelo Santiago has invented a small device that uses the same six keys and a space bar that is found on the much more expensive machines, but uses only purely mechanical, hand-powered mechanisms, and has kept the machine small, lightweight and fairly inexpensive.  If the individual parts were mass-produced here in the USA, and the assembly performed overseas, the price of this machine could become very affordable.

PROJECT DRIVER  (Devices for Realizing Independent Vehicular Environmental Restructuring)
Sponsored by: The Volunteers for Medical Engineering and the JHU Department of Biomedical Engineering.

This team was asked by their sponsor to develop a means for a disabled person to be able to independently start and operate a full-sized farm tractor.  This tractor was owned and used for various maintenance activities by Greenwell State Park, a park in southern Maryland that has wooded trails that need to kept be clear of debris, and open meadows that require mowing.  One of the volunteers at this park is a paraplegic, and wanted to be able to fully participate in the park’s activities.  The members of Team DRIVER:  Alexander Forman, Jonathan Haslanger, Emily Nalven, and Brian Wolcott created the means for this user to start the tractor by remote control while still seated in his wheelchair. Then he shifted himself into the chair that was used to move him – via hydraulic power -- from wheelchair level to a height adjacent to the tractor seat.  All controls were modified to allow hand operation, including an electronic throttle and a linkage mechanism to allow braking.  Extensive calculations were performed to assure that every component of the lifting apparatus had a sufficient factor of safety.

PROJECT ICE (Increased  Cooling  Efficiency)
Sponsored by:  Differential Dynamics,  LLC
The objective of this project was to develop a way to modify an ordinary home refrigerator so as to utilize a new and unique power transmission mechanism invented by the sponsor.  This totally mechanical device is called the IVMC, standing for:  Infinitely Variable Motion Control.  It provides the ability to smoothly transition from a startup power transfer mode -- at high torque and low RPM -- to a full speed mode of lower torque and high RPM, such as for the transmission in an automobile.  One specialized version of the IVMC -- the TVC (Three Variable Control) -- was used in Project ICE.  David de Garavilla, Edmond Husseini, Nick Petrone, and Gabe Phillips created the means to provide a feedback-actuated power-transfer regulator for the TVC; then evaluated the baseline performance of an unmodified refrigerator.  Finally, they then compared its power consumption and operation with an identical refrigerator that was equipped with a TVC-controlled compressor, which the team had to develop and implement.

PROJECT LAURA (Low  Altitude  Unmanned  Reconnaissance Vehicle)
Sponsored by:  the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratories
The need fulfilled by Team LAURA: Ben Jackson, Nick Keim, and Mike Chin was to develop a means to study, at near full scale, but at ground level, the ways to best control, propel and navigate a lighter-than-air vehicle. This blimp was used in this student design project as a tool for determining how to deal with these aspects, and thus to provide their findings as inputs for a larger program underway at APL.  The full APL program involves using a rocket to inject such a blimp at very high altitudes where it could be used, for instance, as a temporary substitute for a failed communication satellite, or as a military reconnaissance vehicle. This team designed and built a light-weight gondola, which was fastened to a purchased blimp.  In this gondola were all of the components needed to determine where the blimp was located at all times (via GPS), and to send control signals as needed to the motors that drove the four propellers, so as to be able to steer the blimp around a pre-determined course.  Means to keep the blimp “on an even keel” were also included.

PROJECT MASTER (Mechanical  Actuated  Sensor  Tower  Effectively  Revisited)
Sponsored by:  Lockheed Martin Corporation
As a follow on to last year’s Project MAST, the sponsor asked this team to revisit the challenge of rapidly raising radar and thermal sensors to a height of 12 feet above the deck of a small Navy reconnaissance boat.  However, the boundary conditions for this year’s project were very different due to redesigns of the boat.  Now, all of the device's mechanisms were required to fit within a space that had a foot print of 1 foot by 1 foot, with a depth of 4 feet.  The award-winning Team MASTER:  Adam Hagge, Stephen Grambling, Benjamin Topper, and Edwin Wood invented two ingenuous mechanisms for their system.  The first was the means to elevate the mast sections – a set of round, thin-walled fiberglass shells – by using just a single, centrally located powered screw.  Each shell was driven up by that single screw, pushing the shells above it upward.  This was accomplished by the second invention, a purely mechanical lock-unlock mechanism, which allowed the shells to be lifted serially during the upward travel mode, and then automatically be released, one-at-a-time, during the downward travel mode.  An hydraulic motor powered the system.

PROJECT SCORCH (System  for  COoling  Radar  CHipsets)
Sponsored by: Northrop Grumman Corporation
The challenge presented to Team SCORCH:  Prashant Atri, Michael Chiang, and John Cutright was to develop a way to cool a large (4 foot by 4 foot) array of sensor elements in a radar antenna.  This antenna was to be used on a vehicle such as a Humvee, and hence was ideally to be as light weight and simple as possible.  This antenna consisted of numerous individual radar chips, each of which was a site for heat generation.  The cooling method selected for study involved the use of a single blower, with a heat sink (i.e., cooling fin) attached to each radar element.  Thus the investigation focused on discovering how to guide the air flow to all of the elements in such a way as to uniformly cool each of them.  The emphasis of the project was first on a single module, that is, a sub array of 16 radar elements, which were simulated by 2 by 2 inch electrical heating blankets.  Several types of cooling fins were selected for examination in a full scale test of this module.  A mockup of the total nine module system was then constructed and studied.

PROJECT SLIDE (Safe  Landing  Inflatable  Door  Evacuation)
Sponsored by: JHU Center for Injury Research and Policy
It is an unfortunate fact that injuries often occur when the passengers in a commercial aircraft are asked to exit via the emergency slides affixed to the doors and wings of these planes.  Team SLIDE:  Michael Francis, Pete Torosian, and Dan Ursu was asked to find a way to minimize the incidence of such injuries. They learned that each USA airline deploys their slides a surprising average of once every two weeks, and in 39% of these deployments some one is injured in some way.  The team discovered that these injuries occur in several locations along the slide, at the top, the mid section and the bottom, resulting in a variety of injuries type. To combat each of these they focused on redesigning the slide to be somewhat stiffer at the top, to minimize injuries caused by persons disobeying directions and stepping off onto the slide's pliable surface instead of jumping out onto it.  A softer lower end was created to combat the foot and ankle injuries at the bottom that often occurred when the passenger strikes the hard surface of the runway.  Full scale tests were performed by this team, first on a slide obtained from a test center for such devices, and then on their own invention.

PROJECT SPI (Shock  Prevention  Instrument)
Sponsored by:  Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division
In order to fully qualify – or reject – a potential new subsystem, such as a radar or computer, which is under consideration for installation aboard a Navy ship, an expensive “barge test” is conducted.  The candidate equipment is placed on a small barge in a Navy-built pond and a nearby underwater explosion is set off.  However, to minimize the costs of running numerous of these expensive barge tests, the Navy would like their vendors to pre-screen their own equipment within a shock-simulating machine, with the design drawings for this machine supplied by the Navy to the vendors.  The design, construction and validation of this shock simulator was the task set for Team SPI, which consisted of members Owen Loh, Eric Nothnagel, Sandy Sheng, and Eric Toback.  They settled on a drop tower configuration. The test object was mounted on a plate that fell and then impacted upon a so-called “Programmer.” This Programmer was used to create the required shock profile that was specified by the Navy as the simulation of what the test object would experience onboard ship from a nearby underwater explosion.  To determine the design of the Programmer, hundreds of tests had to be run until the desired shock spectrum was finally achieved.

Check out the 2003-2004 PROJECTS!

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