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ENG designed: better — and bolder — living
When William Oliver, an associate professor of electrical and computer
engineering (ECE), heard that a friend was having trouble with crows
ransacking his garden, he solicited help from undergraduates in his department.
Oliver added “crows” to a list of other problems compiled
by ENG faculty and alumni. Every year, ECE seniors form teams and select
their design project from this list. Two groups wanted to have at the
crows, and now they’re competing with slightly different versions
of a mechanical scarecrow. One is using infrared sensors that detect
the motion of the crows and activate an ultrasonic whistle to shoo the
birds away. The other is working on a scarecrow that tracks the crows
with a video camera and shoots jets of water at them.
Other ECE teams
are designing such things as an online trip planner like Mapquest for
navigating Boston on the MBTA, a digital display board for
flashing messages from your car window while it is parked (it’s
illegal to do this from a moving vehicle), and a device that tracks the
real-time position of sailboats in a race. Each of the projects requires
the students to call upon their technical knowledge from BU courses,
says Michael Ruane, an ECE associate professor, but also to adapt to
the evolving technologies on the market. “In their courses, the
students are encouraged to work independently and to work from first
principles,” he says, “and that’s usually not the way
to pursue rapid development on the schedules the real world needs. They
need to learn where to apply their creativity most effectively. If you’re
reinventing many wheels within wheels, you’ll miss your deadline,
you’ll miss your market, and you’ll miss your paycheck.”
Open sesame
Theodore Morse hasn’t had any crow
problems lately, but about a year ago he was having trouble opening a
jar. When the lid wouldn’t
budge, Morse, an ECE professor, suggested that his colleagues in the
department of aerospace and mechanical engineering (AME) put some seniors
on the case. As in ECE, AME seniors form teams at the beginning of the
fall semester and select their project from a list provided by the faculty.
The students who took on the jar assignment quickly realized that there
were many jar openers already on the market, but there were few affordable,
nonmotorized versions to choose from.
“
These types of projects give students experience in coming to grips with
defining what the problem really is,” says Morton Isaacson, an
AME associate professor and associate chairman of undergraduate studies. “With
the jar opener, the team first decided whether it would have a motor
or not. Then they raised the issue of who their customer would be. Ultimately
they settled on a market niche of people with physical impairments like
arthritis.”
For Jill Anderson (ENG’03) and her teammates,
the most challenging part of the jar-opening project has been shifting
from an independent
working style into a collaborative one. “We’re very attached
to our own concepts, and so the teamwork — getting us all together on
the same page and the same schedule with the same vision — has definitely
been the most challenging part,” she says. “We had four different
jar openers when we started, but if you look at our sketches in our design
journals, you’ll see pieces of each of our ideas in the final design.”
It’s a bird, it’s a plane . . .
Seniors
working on aerospace engineering projects rarely have clients come to
them with crow or jar problems. Instead, they review the trade
literature or consult sources in industry to keep abreast of hot topics
that would make for a timely mission. Then they get together in teams
to design a vehicle to carry out that mission, first drafting designs
on paper and ultimately building a model.
Each person on the team is
responsible for a different subsystem in the vehicle, such as aerodynamics,
structures, control systems, propulsion, and overall
design. According to Donald Wroblewski, an AME associate professor, that group
dynamic forces each person to see beyond his or her immediate tasks. “If
somebody says, ‘I want to change this in my subsystem,’ it affects
everyone else,” he says. “They can’t just go off and work
on their own. They have to function as a team.”
In the past, most seniors
have designed aircraft, but Wroblewski says that there’s now more interest
in spacecraft. “It’s only in the
past three years that we’ve done satellites, mainly in response to students
working with BU’s Center for Space Physics, which has contracts to do
NASA satellite designs.”
This year’s projects include a suborbital
rocket-powered plane to carry tourists up to the edge of space and then glide
to a landing; a supersonic
unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle; a foam-equipped amphibious fire-fighting
aircaft; and a business jet capable of taking off and landing vertically from
a helipad.
Industrious
The department of manufacturing engineering
(MFG) is the only one that sends all its teams out to do assignments
with local companies. Theo
de Winter, an MFG associate professor and a 2002 Metcalf Award winner,
sends his students out to companies such as General Electric, Beckton
Dickinson, and Cisco, where they come and go as employees. “I
don’t know what the project is going to be when I send them there,” de
Winter says. “It’s never the same two semesters in a row.
I don’t feed them any pre-thought-out project.”
The student
teams usually work one full day a week at their companies, says de
Winter, where they go about solving a problem that the company
needs solved. “One of these groups generally represents the equivalent
of three or more man-months,” he says. “It’s quite
a resource to the companies.”
The hip bone’s connected to the . . .
Biomedical
engineering was the first ENG department to initiate a senior capstone
project 18 years ago. Students work independently or in pairs
in a BME faculty member’s lab or at a local hospital or biotechnology
company.
Justin Voigt (ENG’03) and Allison Weiner (ENG’03)
have been working with Dennis Cullinane, an orthopedic surgeon at Boston
Medical
Center and a MED instructor, on a project that may lead to a treatment
for the 20 million Americans with osteoarthritis. There is no cure for
the disease, in which articular cartilage degrades within the knees,
knuckles, and other joints, but recent research may lead to a new way
of regenerating lost cartilage. Instead of putting a broken bone in a
cast, researchers have found that the controlled movement of a fracture
can cause bone cells to also grow cartilage. Voigt and Weiner have built
an experimental device that observes this process in the healing femur
of a rat to more precisely measure what kinds of motions coax cartilage
from bone. “You’ve gone through these four years of schooling,
but it’s gratifying to prove to yourself that you can really cut
it,” Voigt says. “It’s a big confidence-booster to
know that you can do research that doesn’t have boundaries on it.”
ENG
senior capstone presentations build real-world confidence
25
April 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations