Republished with permission from Momentum, a School of Engineering electronic publication.

 

On Thursday, May 30th, UConn’s GK-12 program hosted the second annual Engineering Design Challenge Competition, involving student teams from Connecticut’s Technical High School System, at the Storrs campus. The theme of this year’s competition was “Reverse Engineering Egg Crash Car.”

  

In the good-natured competition, the student teams were required to apply core engineering principles in a deceptively simple, fun and engaging way while pitting their engineering knowhow against that of other Tech School students. The participating teams were the top performers in contests held at their home Tech Schools.

In the Egg Crash Car competition, the teams were charged with building a racecar – using only the materials provided – capable of safely transporting an uncooked egg through a variety of challenges without the precious cargo breaking.

Among the materials available were Ziplock® bags, wheels, balloons, straws, pom-poms, mouse traps, fishing line, tape, poly-fill stuffing, cotton balls and rubber bands. These raw materials produced a variety of vehicles, from sleek rectangular entries to zany-looking “Mad Max” style vehicles adorned with cotton-ball armor. For each vehicle, it was stipulated that the egg “passenger” had to be removable.

The GK-12 Fellows designed three rigorous tests for the vehicles: a rear impact test, in which a suspended wooden mallet was released from three different angles into the rear of the vehicle; a rollover test, in which vehicles were released at different angles from the top of a four-foot plane; and a head-on collision test, in which CO2 canisters were attached to the rear of each vehicle as a propulsion system that carried the vehicles into a cinderblock wall. For each test, the aim was to keep the vehicle and its egg cargo intact. Other criteria included the vehicle production costs, speed and structural integrity.

In the end, the Tech School students enjoyed a fun day of friendly competition and came away with a better appreciation of core engineering concepts such as performance-based testing, tradeoffs between material cost and quality and the iterative and challenging nature of the design process.

The competition brought together teams from the Academy of Engineering and Green Technology, Howell Cheney Technical High School, Harvard H. Ellis Technical High School, E.C. Goodwin Technical High School, Ella T. Grasso Southeastern Technical High School, Norwich Technical High School, A.I. Prince Technical High School, Vinal Technical High School, and Windham Technical High School.

The teams – along with fellow students who did not compete – were mentored throughout the 2012-13 academic year by UConn Engineering doctoral candidates who are committed to helping introduce engineering concepts in Tech School classrooms. The 2012-13 GK-12 Fellows included Juan Pablo Correa Baena (Environmental Engineering); Lu Han,  Andrea Kadilak, Joseph Parisi and Rebecca Rubinstein (all in Chemical Engineering); Justin Roller and Michael Zilm (Materials Science & Engineering); and Lou Bachenheimer and Nick Curtis (Mechanical Engineering).

The GK-12 (Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education) program is an innovative educational program sponsored by the National Science Foundation.  It aims to provide teaching resources (in the form of graduate students in the engineering sciences) to classrooms in the state of Connecticut Technical High School System. Dr. Doug Cooper is the Principal Investigator of UConn’s GK-12 program.

By Jayna Miller

The Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) Department is pleased to announce the launch of a revised Capstone Senior Design program this fall 2013. In this new format, each faculty member will be advising one or two capstone design projects over the entire academic year.

Prof. Leslie Shor, building on the recent successes of Prof. Dan Burkey in formulating this new format, will be leading the effort for the department. Professor Shor is a Northeast Utilities Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering Education, and currently leads the Engineered Microhabitats research group.

Professor Shor will be chairing a “Capstone Design Governance Committee,” which will propose guidelines for Capstone Design projects, create templates for project descriptions and general project criteria, and work with faculty to ensure proposed projects meet the criteria.  Working with Burkey and Prof. George Bollas, the committee will also create milestone and evaluation rubrics for the faculty and students to follow, and produce an “example design projects catalog,” which can be used to recruit industry sponsors. The overarching goal is to help the department provide the best design experience for students and our industry partners.

In Capstone Design, our seniors are mentored by chemical engineering faculty and industry sponsors as they apply engineering fundamentals and tools to solve practical engineering problems. Students use this experience to develop teamwork and communication skills as they tackle their open-ended, real-world challenges. They learn about the principles and practices of design, setting priorities, project management, ethical and economic decision making, intellectual property, oral and written communication, all as they evaluate their design from a technical, economic, safety, and environmental perspective.

The department is actively seeking industry partners to propose and support a student project. For more information, please visit: http://www.cbe.engr.uconn.edu/undergraduate-program/capstone-design and learn how to join our team.

Michael Keane, a 3rd year PhD student in the Chemical Engineering Program, has received a highly prestigious Connecticut Space Grant Consortium fellowship award to continue his research in the field of high temperature solid state electrochemical device and systems development. Potential applications include life support (oxygen generation) and resource utilization (power generation and fuel production) for International Space Station and missions to Mars. The CT Space Grant Consortium, an organization that promotes aerospace-related research at universities across Connecticut in collaboration with NASA, selected the project after competitive peer review and selection process. The research proposal includes the development, design, testing, and evaluation of high temperature solid state electrochemical systems (600-800°C) that can operate efficiently in both fuel cell and electrolysis mode utilizing thermal energy available on board from solar cells. The novel architecture will include light weight electrochemical cells comprised of bi-electrolyte supported structure and highly active electrodes. Major focus of the research will be increasing the energy density and performance stability of these devices for improvements in payload capacity, mission endurance, and energy savings for NASA’s manned space missions.

Michael works with Professor Prabhakar Singh at the Center for Clean Energy Engineering (C2E2) and conducts research in the area of electrochemical materials development with focus on electrodics, fluorite and perovskite based electrode materials and interfacial degradation. Michael received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering (summa cum laude) from the University of Maine in 2009. He served as an intern at ConocoPhillips Technology Center (Bartlesville) in 2011. He is a member of ACerS, AIST, ASM International, and TMS. He has presented his research work at ICACC 2011 and 2012 and MST 2011.

Hom Sharma, a Chemical Engineering PhD candidate in Mhadeshwar’s research group, recently visited Kathmandu, Nepal to present a seminar at the Birenda Multiple Campus, Tribhuvan University on “Environmental pollution from vehicles and emissions control technologies”. The seminar was held on January 19, 2012 with the objective of providing information about environmental pollution due to fossil fuel based vehicles and various aftertreatment technologies used in the Europe/America as well as creating awareness in the students, professors, and government officials about the growing problem of engine emissions in developing countries. The talk was well attended by graduate and undergraduate students along with faculty from the Chemistry Department at Tribhuvan University and government officials.
Hom holds a BSc degree in Chemistry from the Tribhuvan University and a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire. His research interests are kinetic modeling of emissions oxidation from diesel engine exhaust and design of sulfur resistant catalysts materials. He is currently a Department of Education GAANN Scholar advised by Dr. Ashish Mhadeshwar.