The team of mechanical and computer engineers and industrial design students forecast the tool could reduce unbraiding time by 25%. They worked with salon owners and customers to create their design and make it feasible for salon use, including removable parts that can be sanitized.

The team is working with their sponsor, Swella Braid Bar in Atlanta, to patent their design.

The other top team, HemoHeaters, also is working on patenting their technology.

Sponsored by Emory University doctors, they created a portable, efficient blood warmer to quickly bring blood to the proper temperature before it’s infused into a patient. They’re focused on providing a reliable solution in trauma and emergency situations, such as for emergency medical technicians in rural areas or aboard medical helicopters.

“Blood is stored at 4 to 10 degrees Celsius. If you want to administer it to someone who’s losing a lot of blood, then you need to warm it to 37 degrees. Currently, the portable blood warmers in the market are too slow. They can’t go to 37 degrees. They’re too bulky and too pricey,” said Marianne Al Haj, one of the four biomedical engineering students on the team. “We worked on a solution that fits in a pocket and is 60% lighter.”

The team’s design uses plastic tubing in a serpentine design nestled in a clamshell case with aluminum plates engraved in the same serpentine pattern. This creates more surface area for warming and results in quicker blood flow than existing devices — about two minutes faster for a full pint of blood. The design also is significantly cheaper.

“I don’t want to just create something that’s purely commercial. I want to create something that can also be an altruistic endeavor,” team member Kevin Swamy said. “We’re targeting rural emergency medical systems that don’t have access to blood warmers and systems that don’t have access to high-speed blood transfusion. We talked to a lot of these rural EMTs, and they told us the hospital in their area may have one device — or none.”

Another top team at the Expo also tackled issues in healthcare settings. The winning interdisciplinary team, RoboClose, developed a device to help doctors close arteries after surgery.

In the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, judges awarded the top prize to a proposal that would send a series of low-cost balloons to collect data about Venus’ atmosphere and surface. The team’s 30-day mission would include astronauts orbiting above the second planet from the sun.

The winning team in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering created Farm Box, an enclosure with a controlled environment and sensors for temperature, soil moisture, humidity, light intensity, and carbon dioxide. The idea is to help growers monitor conditions and adjust them as needed.

Improving Coca-Cola’s chilled warehouse network received top honors among projects from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. For the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, it was a protective case for powered wheelchairs that makes them easier to load into airplane cargo holds.

See all the winners from Capstone Expo below and visit expo.gatech.edu for more projects.