Posts categorized 4. Keywords Archive

The main goal of this project is to build, assemble, and successfully test an accelerated testing machine for the India Mark II. In the India Mark II pump, the water gaskets wore off frequently during the pumping of water and needed frequent replacement which proved costly. To counter the problem, the project below proposes an accelerated testing machine composed of a slider-crank mechanism. The mechanism incorporated a flywheel driven by a motor that ensures continuous harmonic motion that replicates pumping mechanisms in the field. The mechanism was designed, simulated and a finite element analysis carried out in CAD software. These are covered in the report along with testing results and recommendations provided for improvement of future designs.​

Modern mechanical engineers utilize computers but do not fully understand how the computer performs its computations. Understanding the fundamentals will give them a better understanding to the limitation of traditional computing. To address this gap between functionality and understanding, we built a 4ft by 6ft physical 3-bit adder to blow up the tiny processes that go on inside of a computer. Using a system of logic gates, where marbles act as inputs and outputs, our machine is able to add numbers 7 and below to each other and produce an output in binary.

Robotic control is becoming increasingly integral across many disciplines and industries. Understanding the fundamentals of robotic control evolves people’s way of life into a more convenient and efficient epoch. Here in University of Rochester, robotics courses enable students to have basic hand-on learning experience over robotic control systems. This robotic steering system team is aiming at designing an inexpensive but reliable, and easy to replicate solution which fits the needs to teach the robotics courses at University of Rochester.

Have you ever had a gourd and wanted it over there, but in a way that would inspire the masses? The Mechanical Engineering Department sure has, and has tasked our team with creating their submission to our ASME-hosted annual pumpkin launch.

The Pittsford Community Library Team was tasked to design and manufacture an interactive ball maze machine. Upon completion, the model will be moved and displayed within the children’s lofted play area of the Pittsford Community Library. The main goal of this project was to deliver a fully functioning ball maze display, decorated with laser cut wooden designs of landmarks across Rochester. Combining elements of STEM and history, the team hoped to create a fun and educational display that children, as well as all library visitors, can enjoy.

The Mary Cariola Classroom Aids project focused on developing LED light panels to refocus the attention of visually impaired students. Our solution includes 4 individual panels, as well as a stand that can rotate to three different angles to help accommodate various students.

Art and Engineering are two separate disciplines that don’t collaborate and intersect as much as they should. There are many mediums that mix both disciplines to allow for a fuller artistic approach to engineering, but these mediums aren’t abundant on the River Campus.
The Kinetic Sculpture capstone project aims to be the bridge between these departments through kinetic art. The following interactive art piece fuses the concepts of art and mechanics to provide students with a one-of-a-kind experience on campus.

With increasing concerns about the environmental impact of ground transportation, the industry needs alternative solutions that are safe, efficient, and environmentally friendly. One solution to the pollution problem is human-powered vehicles which emit zero greenhouse gas on the road. This project aims to implement a new material technology (fiberglass) into the design of a human-powered vehicle to make it more lightweight, functional, and safe. The test results concluded that fiberglass can indeed be used to manufacture the monocoque of a human-powered vehicle without compromises. The findings of this project will advance the engineering knowledge of fiberglass in this field and enable other engineering teams to use this technology in future designs.

Human-powered submarines are underwater vessels that are driven solely by the power of a human pilot. The Foundation for Underwater Research and Education (FURE) has put on the International Submarine Races (ISR) for several years. In the past, teams from around the world have traveled to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division to compete and race with their human-powered submarine designs. With an in-person event not possible this year, a virtual event (vISR) will be taking place instead. The Human Powered Submarine team set out to tackle specific design problems related to the hull, drivetrain, and propulsion system of a human-powered submarine in the spirit of the virtual event guidelines.

L3Harris Technologies is an American defense company that builds a variety of mechanical, optical, and electrical systems. The Rochester division designs and builds systems for space applications. Optical space telescopes are widely used in both Earth and astrophysical observations and play a major role in scientific and national security. For optical telescopes to function properly and take clear images, their optics must be precisely aligned to focus light. However, during the launch of the telescope, the relative positions of these optics can change. The goal of the project is to build a mechanism to finely adjust the position of these optics to enhance resolution and accuracy of the telescope images. This improved image quality has significant implications for both terrestrial and space observations with applications to scientific research and national security.

Our team, along with Drill Powered Carts A have built a fully functioning, energy-efficient, and sustainable vehicle, which will be powered by a single electric power drill. By doing this, each team hopes to not only show people that electric-powered transportation is possible, reliable, and easy but, whose cart is the best. The two teams will face off in an endurance race to see which cart can make the most laps around a race track at the University of Rochester River Campus. This will show which team has the most optimized mechanical design.

Several optomechanical applications have a need for a 360° kinematic mounting system capable of withstanding thermal loading due to heat generation from electronic devices. It is advantageous for optical systems to have a repeatable and controlled, known distance between devices such as optics, sensors, light sources, mirrors or assorted non-optical sensors. The team was able to design a thermally stable spaceframe solution, capable of reducing movement of any assembled components to minimal displacements on the order of microns.

Our project was to implement a system of light reflectors that autonomously track the sun’s position and focus the light on a solar panel to maximize the incident light intensity and hence more power capture. The system was to be significantly cheap compared to buying multiple solar panels and capture more than double the solar power than using an ordinary solar panel.

Our senior design project is implementing an AI chess board. It uses Python and the popular chess engine Stockfish on a Raspberry Pi to show the user with LEDs where the computer would like to make its move. Our project was a success and could be used as a beginning step to make a more complex and intuitive chess board that plays chess against a user.

The Caldwell-Fay equation (2002) attempts to model what Lake Ontario’s current water level would be if dam construction had never taken place along the St. Lawrence Seaway (i.e. the natural hydraulic state of the lake).

Newly unearthed Lake Ontario data going back to the 1860s has been discovered, and we had the rare opportunity to be the first to digitize and publicly analyze it.

Since this data set predates any dam construction it actually captures the lake’s natural state. Therefore it can be used to verify Caldwell-Fey’s equation which is being used to govern the lake’s inflow and outflow rate on a daily basis.

A surgical drain is placed within an internal wound site to prevent fluid from accumulating in the body throughout the patient’s recovery. A suture is currently used to secure the drain to the patient but has multiple shortcomings including infection risk and failure over time. We have worked alongside Dr. Sara Neimanis to create a new securement device that minimizes infection while durably securing the drain over extended periods of time.

The cautery phantom senior design team will engineer and improve a system that will arrest artificial blood flow in response to electrocautery in a tissue phantom manufactured by Simulated Inanimate Models, LLC (SIM). To solve this problem, we have investigated methods of vessel constriction by lining the tissue phantom blood vessel wall with a thermoresponsive material, coagulating the artificial blood by introducing proteins and chemicals into the mixture, and by making the blood vessel with a shape memory polymer.

A chair specifically designed to safely and comfortably sit infants and young children that are immobilized by a cast that spans from the mid abdomen to the ankle, all while allowing proper social and cognitive development. The chair incorporates extra space for the casted torso and legs, as well as multiple aspects of adjustability to fit the wide range of children sizes and to fit under tables of varying heights.

RTS is a regional transportation authority established by New York State and the goal of the project is to find the potential reasons for preventable accidents caused by bus operators. First, descriptive and exploratory analysis is performed on all the data provided and driver-related variables and environmental-related variables. Then, frequent pattern mining is applied and conditional probabilities are calculated for the accident history of operators with high risk of accidents to extract accident patterns.

The Rossell Hope Robbins Library is underutilized by many students on campus due to the lack of awareness of the library and its resources. To promote awareness for the library, this project contains designs for a “life-size” portable chess set with medieval themes.

Students at the Mary Cariola Center with visual impairments are attracted to light in rooms, often pulling their attention away from the teachers/lesson to look upwards at the ceiling lights. Lighted surfaces that provide contrast can help students focus on that surface and on any activity being performed on the lighted surface. The team was tasked with creating a mat suitable for children that illuminates in order to draw the student’s attention downward.

There is a need to ensure that drivers are alerted of approaching emergency vehicles so that they can remove themselves from the path of the emergency vehicle. It is especially a challenge for deaf, hard of hearing, and distracted drivers to identify emergency signals, which puts them at an increased risk for collision. In this project, we developed a device for use in the car that detects emergency vehicles and notifies the driver of their presence. We used a trained convolutional neural network to detect sirens in noisy environments. On our validation set, we achieved a 95% detection accuracy with a 50% criterion. A demonstration of our real-time detector and design schematic are shown below.

Development of polymers to simulate kidney tissues for surgical training of medical students at UR Medical Center.

Cataracts, a hardness and opacifying of the lens, is the leading cause of curable blindness worldwide, with the majority of cases occurring in developing countries where trained ophthalmologists are scarce. Our project is to develop a device to be used for a simplified cataract surgery that will insert a cylindrical intraocular lens into the cataract. By simplifying the procedure, more healthcare providers can be trained to perform the procedure, increasing the accessibility of cataract treatment in developing countries.

We were given a patient reported symptoms dataset PRO-CTCAE and applied a variety of clustering methods. The clusters were then statistically tested for associations with a selection of outcomes such as hospitalization. We found significant associations with clusters and outcomes and compared it to linear regression results.

The aim of this project was to design a device capable of removing impacted food boluses in pediatric patients both more efficiently and more quickly compared to current industry standards.

MOTLEY (Main Organizing Terminal for Low Energy Usage) focuses on the creation of a Smart Home using a Raspberry Pi as the central device. Similar to the google home, we are able to control our in-house made and thoughtfully designed custom peripherals through the use of this Pi, granting our user the ability to remotely control various devices in their homes from their current location.

Tibial shaft fractures are a common injury and may require surgical intervention. During our team’s observation of trauma surgeries at Strong Memorial Hospital, we found the procedure was inefficient. Tools used to align bone may move, and people holding alignment are prone to fatigue. Each time a tool moves, alignment is checked or redone using X-ray. Our device clamps to the surgical bed and locks the position of instruments reducing staff needed to hold alignment and increasing efficiency.

Various post-operative complications may lead cardiac surgeons to opt for delayed sternal closure following open heart surgeries. Patients’ sterna are left open and they are cared for in the intensive care unit for 1-7 days. In the ICU, bedridden patients are turned to prevent pressure ulcers and for linen changes. During these turns, the sternal halves rotate and twist, potentially leading to injury or death. Our device stabilizes the sternal halves during transport and turning, greatly increasing patient safety.

Our project focuses on solving the need to decrease the amount of muscle obstruction during minimally invasive lumbar surgeries in order to increase the surgeon’s visualization of the surgical field. We developed a medical device that decreases the muscle obstruction by expanding an inflatable at the base of a cylindrical port. The product was tested in a PVA mixture that resembles similar material characteristics as muscle which proved the plausibility and efficacy of the concept.