Protecting Organs, Water, and the Military Earn Top Honors at Capstone Expo

The spring 2026 showcase of senior design projects spanned engineering, design, computing, and liberal arts.

By: Joshua Stewart (jstewart@gatech.edu)

Photography: Candler Hobbs

Tuesday, 28 April 2026

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In one way or another, the three top teams at this spring’s Capstone Design Expo were trying to protect something.

Two of them tied for the best overall project: one with a portable defense against enemy drones to protect soldiers and the other with a system to protect livers enroute to transplant recipients. The best interdisciplinary team aimed to protect drinking water in Guatemala by removing toxic levels of arsenic.

They were just three of the 237 teams and more than 1,300 students spread throughout Georgia Tech’s McCamish Pavilion April 28 to show off semester-long projects that serve as a culmination of their undergraduate studies.

Projects spanned seven of the eight schools in the College of Engineering and students in computing, architecture, industrial design, music technology, and public policy. Judges selected the top project from each discipline and a series of honorable mentions alongside a top interdisciplinary group.

For the Air. Space. Denial. team, one of top overall teams, the challenge from the U.S. Air Force was to confront and take down drones spying on military bases or loaded with explosives and targeting U.S. forces. Their solution mounts a series of spiderweb-like nets on a drone that would drop them on an enemy craft, tangling the rotors and downing the machine.

“A missile is thousands of dollars. Bullets are expensive. This system weighs about 20 grams,” said team member Grayson Benton, a mechanical engineering student. “A kilogram of 3D-printing filament costs $20, so each one is about 20 cents plus the fishing line.”

The team of electrical and mechanical engineers calls their system FRED — frangible rotary entanglement device — because, as Benton put it, “every great device has a cool name.”

Typical drone defense systems ram one drone into another, destroying both craft. The FRED system means the Air Force drone doesn’t crash and can return to base for another mission.

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A spiderweb-like net drops onto a drone and causes it to crash.

The Air. Space. Denial. team created a defense system that uses drones to drop spiderweb-like nets on unmanned enemy craft, tangling the rotors and downing the machine.

237

Teams

schools from four colleges

$15,500

in prize money

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a 3D-printed filter disc on a table in front of vial of biochar material

Team Char Wars evaluated the effectiveness of biochar for removing arsenic from water in Guatemala. This 3D-printed disk is designed to be filled with the charcoal-like substance and inserted into a commonly used filtration system.

a red replica of a liver in a bowl, over water

The portable Liver ProTECHt device can keep a liver viable during transport between a donor and recipient by cooling but not freezing the organ and supplying it with preservation fluid infused with oxygen.

The other top overall team was Liver, Laugh, Love, a group of biomedical engineers tasked by the Emory Healthcare transplant team with finding a better way to preserve livers during transport between donors and recipients.

Every year, hundreds of patients die waiting for a liver transplant because the organ goes bad before it arrives. That’s because the most common approach is to put the liver on ice to slow its function, but that only keeps it viable for about six hours.

Some hospitals have access to systems that can preserve it for up to 24 hours, but they’re bulky, heavy, and cost tens of thousands of dollars per use.

“This project affects rural communities and low-income hospitals the most. The current systems, because of their exorbitant cost, can’t be adopted across the country,” said team member Shobana Santhanam. “That makes it harder to get organs to people, because many hospital centers aren't able to use the cutting edge of technology. We wanted to integrate the newest, most novel technologies into a smaller and more affordable system so that it could be adopted across the country.”

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A look at more projects and teams from the spring Expo.

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Santhanam said the team’s solution keeps livers at cold, but not freezing, temperatures and maintains a flow of hypothermic preservation fluid that’s also infused with oxygen. Their approach cuts costs by 60% and the device’s size and weight by 80%. Santhanam said Emory’s team plans to continue developing the system.

Further development also was the goal for the best interdisciplinary project. Team Char Wars picked up the work of a previous capstone project that determined using a charcoal-like substance called biochar would be a promising way to filter arsenic out of drinking water in Guatemala.

The team — biomedical, computer, and mechanical engineers — conducted a series of experiments evaluating the material’s effectiveness and designing it to fit a common water-filtration system used in the Central American country.

“In Guatemala, many families already have an existing filter product called the Ecofiltro, which can only filter up to 63% of arsenic,” mechanical engineering student Eli Scott said. “Our goal was to have a design that can easily integrate into the Ecofiltro, while also reducing the arsenic levels in the drinking water as much as possible.”

They found adding biochar to the system reduced their experimental stand-in for arsenic by 25% to 30%.

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three women stand in front of a car with its hood in the air

Although the BMW M54 engine is popular among car enthusiasts, its intake manifold hinders power optimization. Team Axis Performance Group designed a new flow-optimized intake system.

person laying down with outstretched arms in swimming motion

Go With the Flow created an indoor, dry-land swimming system designed to replicate the feel and biomechanics of freestyle swimming without water.

people looking at two students showing a model of a bridge

Timeless Consulting Solutions assessed the current structural condition (and iconic lattice) of the historic Watson Mill Bridge in Comer, Georgia, then used their findings to fabricate a new bridge for an Atlanta park.

Elsewhere, the top project in electrical and computer engineering was a system for caregivers that detects when someone falls in a room without using cameras or requiring a wearable device. Among aerospace engineering students, judges selected a two-propellant methane-oxygen rocket designed to reach an altitude of 45,000 feet.

Other posters, projects, and prototypes spilled out of McCamish Pavilion and across the adjacent parking lot, including:

A mattress that’s 40% to 60% lighter.
A freestyle swimming simulator that operates on dry land.
A satellite designed to clean up space debris by causing it to fall back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere.
A drum kit for drummers with physical impairments that’s easier for one person to set up and tear down.
An AI-powered golf coach.
A self-clearing ear tube to prevent blockage and repeat insertion procedures for kids with recurring ear infections.

Students also developed a funding model so the United Way of Greater Atlanta can help more people with housing aid and redesigned processes for the Empty Stocking Fund to deploy school supplies from its Teacher Resource Center to help more Atlanta-area teachers.

The Capstone Design program is supported by philanthropic donations that are part of Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech, a more than $2 billion comprehensive campaign designed to secure resources that will advance the Institute and its impact — on people’s lives, on the way we work together to create innovative solutions, and on our world — for decades to come.

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

a women looking at a screen and makeshift windshield

InvisiVisor is a car sun visor replacement designed to improve visibility and minimize distractions by automatically darkening specific areas of the visor based on the driver's eye position.