Held Tuesday night at the McCamish Pavillion, Georgia Tech’s Spring 2017 Capstone Design Expo, the largest expo to date, showcased the inventions of 242 teams from 11 schools and three colleges.
1,222 graduating seniors from multiple disciplines, including seven engineering schools, architecture, industrial design, and public policy worked in either mono- or interdisciplinary teams on industry or campus created projects to develop various prototypes for real-world applications. The teams presented their innovations to industry reps, faculty, staff and students and competed for best project from their major and to win an overall prize of $3,000.
The best overall project, as determined by judges’ scores, went to “Pump It Up” for Kracken, a water sampling system to be deployed under the Antarctic ice. “Pump It Up”, made up of mechanical engineering students Christian Hofstetter, Sam Youngdale, Manisha Khanal, and Joshua Lutz worked with sponsors Dr. Mick West and Dr. Britney Schmidt to design a water sampling system for a mid-sized autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named IceFin. Currently, there are no AUV-fitted water sampling systems capable of withstanding the extreme cold and pressure of the water under Antarctica.
“The Kracken Water Sampling System was an idea given to us by a Georgia Tech research team who has an underwater autonomous vehicle called IceFin. IceFin is deployed under Antarctic ice but has no physical interaction with the environment. One way to do that is to collect water samples but there are no commercial products out there for them to use so they needed to leverage new minds to really think of a completely ground-up, new idea for a sampling system,” said team member Joshua Lutz.
The teams biggest challenge? “I think right off the bat the biggest, daunting challenge was looking at the extremely constrained design problem,” explains Lutz, “There was deep pressures, extremely cold and it had to fit inside this tiny, tiny vehicle but still have the huge capability that extremely large systems implement.
Spring 2017 Capstone Design Expo Winners:
Best Overall
Pump It Up: Kracken (Mechanical Engineering)
Christian Hofstetter
Sam Youngdale
Manisha Khanal
Joshua Lutz
Discipline Awards:
Aerospace Engeering
Pelican: Boeing AerosPACE Design-Build-Fly Project
Matt Gilmartin
Kayleigh Lane
Salah Tarazi
Architecture
River Leap: Soaring River Gardens
Cameron Bradberry
Anthony Galvan
Biomedical Engineering
PediaTRACH: Endotracheal Tube Detector
Nasya Paul
Joanna Gochuico
Dhanushka Vitharana
Kara Hardin
Civil & Environmental Engineering
SEVEN Engineering: Town Center OCC
Kemeria Abdella
Sharani White
Chin Yung Wong
Ming Yang
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Medcap: Medcap
Michael Balourdas
Miheer Bavare
Matt Allen
Nicold Barcori
Tyler Nguyen
Raj Patel
Industrial and Systems Engineering - Tie
CDC Contact Tracing: Design of New Contact Tracing Protocol
Leah Patterson
Chungjae Lee
Suphaphat Petlerkwong
Kevi Desprez
Yuntong Zhu
Jason Bermudez
Alexander Kehres
Team 1-Equifax: Equifax Resource Allocation
Yeji Lee
Jihwan Oh
Anju Suresh
Shivum Agrawal
Srida Saraogi
Maria Auslander
Divya Achtani
Industrial Design & Mechanical Design
Flyover: Design a Remote Autonomous Teaming Workstation
Victor Padron
Shrinka Roy
Sam Harvey
Hareen Godthi
Elizabeth Jarecki
Alexandra Flohr
Interdisciplinary
The X-Fives: X-Ray Machine Positioning Robotic Arm
Minh Tran (ME)
Haoli Du (BME)
Quynh Tran (ME)
Aman Bedi (ME)
Dhara Patel (BME)
Materials Science and Engineering
Desiigners: Thermomechanical Failure of Hard Court Uniforms
Keshav Swarup
Michael Davidson
Ryan Dwyer
Shawn Gregory
Christopher Lo
Mechanical Engineering
The Drag Reducers: Formula SAE Drag Reduction System
Jarrett Schalch
Jacob Speed
Justin Shaulis
Trevor Hyatt
Lee Selbach
Nuclear and Radiological Engineering
Lead Fast Reactor Core Analysis: Demonstration Lead Fast Reactor – Change of Core Dimensions on Cycle Length and Reactivity
Kham Ho
Vincent Paglioni
Darrell Lewis, Jr.
Daniel Vizoso
Public Policy
Sidewalk Scholars: Safe Routes to School Program Analysis
Reagan ZJohnson
Maggie Kelley
A big thank you goes out to the many Capstone Design Expo sponsors who gave generously, both monetarily and in time, to senior project design teams. While students received hands-on experience creating solutions to industry challenges, sponsors were provided with answers to real-world problems.
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