Students Plug Face Plate Designs
Plugging something into an outlet that is behind a large piece of furniture or in a dark area is a challenge. For the vision impaired and the blind, outlets can be a frustration regardless of their location. First-year and sophomore students in Introduction to Engineering Design (E4), advised by engineering faculty Clive Dym, Nancy Lape, Erik Spjut and Ruye Wang, were charged with the task of designing a face plate for an electrical outlet that would make the plugging-in process easier. The non-profit client Christian Record Services, which offers free services for the blind and visually impaired, wanted a face plate that was adaptable to a two-prong and/or three-prong (ground) plug. The blind and visually impaired feel with their fingers for the holes then hope that they successfully line up the plug and outlet.

The six teams of students each presented their variations of a face plate design, some with moveable parts that also doubled as childproof outlet protectors. One design that stood out, and prompted one adviser to ask if the team had researched a possible patent for the device, was a simple E-shaped design. The team of first-year students Lolly Simoni, Jinsun Yoo, Anna Lei and Adam Richter created a prototype that allows users to slide prongs along horizontal edges that direct the hand toward the outlet holes but not beyond them.

Client liaison Ronald Bowes, a representative for Christian Record Services, was impressed with all of the designs from the student teams. “I think the work of these teams will be of real significant value to the blind in the United States,” he said. He plans to have business students at another college work on marketing possibilities for the designs and hopes that one day a local manufacturer that employs the disabled can turn one or more of the designs into a product that will prove useful for many.

Learning to Serve
Some of the best learning experiences happen outside of the classroom as several of Debra Mashek’s students attested during their presentations. Mashek, assistant professor of psychology, teaches Building Community, in which all students are required to complete a 20-hour service-learning project. But as one student remarked, many students did much more “simply because we had such a great time.”

Autumn Petros-Good ’09 traveled to a small Mexican village just outside San Antonio de las Minas, near Ensenada, with three other students from the class. For four days, they worked in an orphanage for disabled children, distributed food and clothing and helped build a church. While Petros-Good remarked that the trip was challenging to organize, it was ultimately rewarding, and it inspired her to become involved in the organization Engineers Without Borders.

Claire O’Hanlon ’09 took part in the trip to the Gulf Coast region sponsored by Mudders Making a Difference and Katrina on the Ground (KOTG). Participants helped residents gut homes in preparation for refurbishment. “Gutting homes was an important part of what we did,” she said, “but KOTG really wanted us to observe, listen and learn about the stories of survivors, about what really happened there and what was not happening there as far as reconstruction. They wanted us to understand and reflect on what we’d seen and tell it to others, and try to work for the Gulf’s reconstruction.”

Computer science skills were put to good use at both the Academy of Culture and Technology (ACT) in Pomona and at the local retirement community Pilgrim Place, both service-learning projects tackled by class members. At ACT, Adrian Sampson ’09 described how he helped set up a computer lab, did hardware and software upgrades, and led a computer science club, which allowed him to work one-on-one with the students. Lolly Simoni ’09 helped Pilgrim Place residents set up a video library and corresponding database. She said she enjoyed interacting with the tightly-knit Pilgrim Place residents and seeing the results of her work. She encouraged others to help out in communities such as these, especially in the area of computing, “something so simple for us students but something they really need,” she said.

Future Fuel
Energizing a laptop or other portable device may soon take just seconds instead of the hours now required to charge it thanks to technology from Direct Methanol Fuel Cell Corporation (DMFCC), a subsidiary of Viaspace Inc. of Pasadena, Calif. They asked HMC Engineering Clinic students to help devise new features for existing fuel cell cartridges and were rewarded with designs that have led to two provisional patents incorporating the students’ ideas.

DMFCC produces methanol fuel cartridges that provide the energy source for laptop computers and other portable electronic devices that will be powered by direct methanol fuel cells. Fuel cells are expected to gain a substantial market share because they offer longer operating time as compared to current lithium ion batteries and may be instantaneously recharged by simply replacing the disposable fuel cartridge.

The Clinic team of Kenny Maples ’06, Michael Bigelow ’06, Laurel Fullerton ’07, Michael Saldana ’07, Yosuke Sato (Kogakuin University, Japan) and Wayne Tanaka ’06 first designed, built and developed a prototype for a safe, simply designed and
widely compatible fuel cell that supplies fuel in any orientation. They also developed a proof of concept for an authentication system designed to prevent the use of dangerous pirated cartridges that could potentially explode and cause injury. Fullerton explained that this involved putting special “tags” in the cartridges that work similar to radar. “Unless a fuel cell detects this tag, it won’t work,” she said.

DMFCC was also pleased with the team’s innovative tamper/child resistant feature for its fuel cell cartridges. The team tried three different designs before choosing what they considered the simplest design, one which incorporates a sliding door to cover access to the power source. “The others had too many moving parts and were too complex,” said Fullerton. They tested their chosen design on 10 Mudders and were pleased that after five minutes, 60 percent could not open the device, a testament to its tamper resistance.

“I was very impressed with the work of the Harvey Mudd College team,” stated Carl Kukkonen, CEO of both VIASPACE and DMFCC. “They provided several alternative designs, and made a prototype of their best design for a child-resistant cartridge. The students recognized that a major real-life challenge is product cost and simplicity. They came up with a simple and elegant design.”
While the work involved disposable fuel cell cartridges, Fullerton remarked that the team also did an in-depth economic and environmental study showing DMFCC that refillable cartridges can save the environment as well as provide the company with cost savings.

Work and Play
Video games have revolutionized play. Is the workplace far behind? Electricity transmission and distribution company AREVA T&D is testing the boundaries between work and play by considering methods from video game interfaces that could be used by their power system operators.

The AREVA liaisons Alain Jeannot and Jay Giri charged the Computer Science Clinic team with designing and creating a prototype of a new user interface for AREVA power grid management software using ideas from computer game interfaces. Giri said, “Our goal is to make the power system operator’s life easier by presenting current system status promptly and effectively, identifying potential imminent problems quickly, and, most importantly, providing possible options to make decisions to improve power system
grid reliability.”

Team members used techniques from real-time strategy games to improve navigation, draw attention to important events and adaptively display relevant information. Team adviser and computer science Associate Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk said, “The video game industry has been incredibly successful in developing user interfaces that are intuitive for players and easy for them to learn. This success has spawned academic research into video game interfaces and how their techniques can be used for other applications. AREVA T&D’s software is really perfect for this type of approach.”

Project manager Jason Arold ’06 said, “We looked at video games in particular because they are complex systems that users can pick up in a reasonable amount of time and they’ve become so complex there are a lot of similar amounts of data and similar interactions between strategy games, for example, and the power grid operations.”

Arold and team members Michael Beyer ’06, Jeremy Lennert ’06, Robin Schriebman ’07 and Matthew Walsh ’06 looked at transforming some of the interface elements, like unit selection, narrative and scoring, to see if those elements could be used to create a more engaging, clear system. Incorporating all of the required elements within the complex system was difficult Arold said, but the team managed to develop a prototype that demonstrates how their design could evolve.

Giri, who was impressed with the team’s verbal presentation skills and confidence, said that their prototype provided a new, revolutionary paradigm of visualization relative to AREVA’s current product. “The concepts used in the Clinic have provided additional insights into how we should visualize different classes of power system data (units, lines, transformers, etc). The identification of gaming engines and 3-D will also be considered…in order to prompt the user to make the proper decisions (based on actual current evolving system conditions) to keep the power system grid secure and the lights on.”

The AO features of the instrument correct for aberrations in the cornea and lens of the eye, in much the same way that adaptive optics in astronomical telescopes correct for aberrations introduced by turbulence in the earth’s atmosphere. The correction of these aberrations provides good lateral resolution and allows the visualization of individual cone photoreceptors in the fovea of the retina. The OCT features of the instrument provide for good depth resolution in the image, and make use of the very short
coherence length of the broadband, near-infrared light source.

Steven Von der Porten ’07 said he and his team members—Lily Tian ’06, Megan Arman ’06, Sarah Adelman ’06, Hansford Hendargo ’06, Greg Sandstrom ’07 and Steven Ning ’08—were challenged to reduce the existing six-by-six- foot device to a two-by-three-foot prototype, but, by the end of the semester a working instrument was produced.

Faculty adviser and physics Clinic Director Richard Haskell said that members of the LLNL Adaptive Optics group will install the final superluminescent diode (SLD) light source and an additional deformable mirror for defocus compensation, parts that were not available when the team performed the final alignment and testing of the instrument just before Projects Day.

“The instrument will probably pass through Jack Werner’s Vision Science and Advanced Retinal Imaging Lab in the UC Davis Medical Center, Sacramento, for comparative in vivo imaging of human retinas, where its performance must match or exceed that of the much larger instrument that it is replacing,” said Haskell.

The instrument’s final destination is the USC Doheny Eye Institute in Los Angeles, where it will be used to monitor the fate of artificial retinas implanted in animal models. The lateral resolution of a few microns provided by the adaptive optics will enable researchers to stimulate and visualize individual pixels in the artificial retina arrays.

Groovy
It sounds like a new dance, but the “groove and fill” is actually the device created by the Engineering Clinic team for Soff-Cut International, Inc., a company that offers solutions for random cracking in concrete slabs.

Anyone with a concrete driveway or patio knows about cracks. Many of these cracks develop between the time the concrete is placed and before control joints are cut. Soff-Cut found that the sooner control joints were created (within an hour or two after the final finish), the less random cracking occurred. Their early-entry method was also found to save time, reduce cleanup and create an improved aggregate interlock.

The Soff-Cut Clinic team of Arran McNabb ’06, Ben Howard ’06, Keane Kaneakua ’06, Kyle Jacobs ’07, Caitlin Vierra ’07, Ian Goicochea-Preston ’07 and Scott Mahr ’07 was asked to design the next generation of random crack control. Guided by faculty adviser Lori Bassman, associate professor of engineering, they studied the concrete process—pouring, levelling with a screed, troweling, then cutting—before designing a device that would meet Soff-Cutt’s criteria. The team built a prototype for early-entry crack control and called it the “groove and fill.” It consists of a blade, large wheels that distribute the weight evenly and minimize damage, and a filler-dispensing gun with a static mixer on the tip.

“Our concept is to come on with the groove and fill right after the screeding process while concrete is very wet. But we were afraid the groove would fill in so we decided to fill it,” said McNabb. They proposed three different fillers, one of the more complicated project elements to finalize, said McNabb, and finally decided on a flexible polymer foam. “Foam was the best selection because control joints are made in a gridlike pattern, and foam can be cut.”

The quick-drying concrete proved a challenge as the team tried to find the perfect window for “grooving.” It turned out to be under an hour, before the concrete became too hard for the groover to cut.

Soff-Cut Vice President Chuck Markley welcomed the students’ solutions to the problem. “One of the problems of working on projects within your company is that you can sometimes get blinders and keep going down the same paths or approaches to problems and products,” he said. “What we wanted from the HMC Clinic were fresh eyes with no prior history. We were pleased with the multiple ideas the team generated. We will take the team’s ideas and continue development.”

Two for the flow
Cardinal Health, provider of products and services supporting the healthcare industry, kept two groups of students busy with projects related to medication delivery systems. Since many of the most critical medications are injected directly into veins, arteries or muscles using medication delivery systems, the control and monitoring of flow is essential. The flow through traditional delivery systems (like an IV) is driven by direct displacement mechanisms such as pistons or peristaltic actuators which do not employ flow sensing.

Cardinal Health is investigating delivery systems which combine active and passive components with a flow sensor for control of flow and detection of occlusions. The Engineering Clinic team designed an inexpensive, partially disposable flow sensor with a small footprint for a medical IV set. Current designs employ pressure sensors to detect occlusions and have no direct means to measure flow.

Advised by engineering Assistant Professor Qimin Yang, the Engineering team of Sarah Thomson ’06, Eddy Chavarria ’07, James O’Grady ’06, Jennifer Schockro ’06, Philip Tam ’06 and Christina Tang ’07 implemented and tested a thermal time-of-flight sensor employing an optical position sensor. Their sensor was designed to measure a wide range of flow velocities.

The Mathematics Clinic team of Sarah Mann ’06, Reid Howard ’06, Susanna Ricco ’06 and Hope Runyeon ’06 were asked to design a control algorithm that could incorporate data from a flow sensor such as that designed by the Engineering Clinic team.

To test the performance of the control algorithm, the Mathematics Clinic team created a mathematical model of fluid flow through the system. Even though their control algorithm had not been tested on the hardware, team members felt confident that the control strategy they proposed could be successfully adapted. Cardinal Health will evaluate the results from both Clinics efforts for possible use in future products.

News Collection Service NC4
Already Using Students’ Work
Breaking news related to disasters, terrorism and other hazards are now being collected, analyzed and distributed more efficiently due to the work of Computer Science Clinic team members and seniors Forrest Briggs, Andrew Campbell, Bill Hewitt and Ryan Ausanka-Crues (PZ). Guided by computer science Assistant Professor Christopher Stone, they further automated NC4’s online information filtering process, allowing analysts to maintain a sharper focus on news events and their potential impact on clients. The information being gathered and analyzed by the technology developed during the Clinic project is being used by NC4 customers including state, local and federal government agencies as well as major corporations in the aerospace and defense, pharmaceutical and financial services industries.

Project Lands Successfully
in FAA’s Hands
Enthusiastic student participation, talent and hard work has led to the completion of the Clinic project for the Federal Aviation Administration, said Carl Baumgaertner, faculty advisor on the project. Four years in the making and involving over 20 students, the project challenged Clinic teams to devise a highly efficient LED airport approach lighting system to replace presently-used incandescent lamps. The improved system uses photodiodes and temperature sensors in a closed-loop system to compensate light levels for snow, rain, dirt and LED aging. The teams designed an innovative LED configuration and computer-controlled strobe sequences to improve airport visibility and evaluated fuel cells as backup power. They also included a detailed economic analysis of the LED system.

Alumnus Calvin Miles ’87 served as liaison for the project and Instructor of Aeronautics Emerita Iris Critchell played an instrumental role in helping to test the device, providing flights as necessary to team members.

Baumgaertner said the FAA will likely turn the project over to one of their development groups for online production, which could happen in about six years. He said, “The students have proven the feasibility and practicability of the system. It’s exciting. All the teams were just absolutely fantastic on the project. It’s an experience they’ll remember for a lifetime.”