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  • Project Haiti

    PI Marc Compere

    The goals of Project Haiti are to provide Haitians with clean drinking water, to expose our college students to another culture, and to give them a hands-on experience using their engineering skills to directly help people.



    Many Haitians living in the tent cities after the earthquake deal with chronic intestinal sickness from contaminated water. Our solar water purifier is designed to provide clean drinking water for 500 adults per day.The Summer 2014 purifier will be installed at the Dayspring Missions orphanage in Croix des Bouquets area, a suburb east of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. It will provide up to 6000 gallons of water a day with the water being used by the orphans, distributed to three local church communities, as well as being sold to the community to generate income and filter replacement costs.

    This project is an ideal intersection of humanitarian aid and engineering. Our students designed and built Embry-Riddle's solar powered water purifier for delivery to a Haitian tent camp. They learned how to use solar panels, batteries, pumps, and filters to construct a purifier that runs entirely from the sun. Now that it is completed, our students have become better engineers and they have learned a global perspective and the satisfaction of helping people in a developing country.

    More on Project Haiti

    Past Efforts

    Summer 2010

    In Summer 2010 Embry-Riddle students delivered a 1 gallon-per-minute (gpm) water purifier powered entirely from the sun. The 2010 trip report presentation is available here. It was a valuable success for over 150 college student volunteers who traveled to Haiti that summer to help the disaster relief effort. The Nehemiah Vision Ministries camp upgraded to a 10gpm unit for greater capacity.

    Summer 2011

    In Summer 2011, our team of students designed and installed a 4gpm unit powered entirely from the sun. We installed it at the Anne Clemande Children's Foundation in Chambellan, Haiti. They operate a children's home and school with approximately 600 children and staff. They had no access to clean drinking water. The 2011 trip report is downloadable here.

    Summer 2012

    In Summer 2012, our team of Embry-Riddle students delivered a community water system providing 14gpm of clean, safe water to an Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp named Onaville The purifier is in daily operation delivering roughly 15,000 gallons per day. Onaville was the largest tent city in Haiti during post-earthquake Haiti. This is our most successful trip from a partnership standpoint, a purifier standpoint, and also an academic standpoint. Students received credit during a summer course titled ME595 Practicum in Water Purification. The 2012 trip report is here.

    Summer 2013

    The Summer 2013 unit was installed in Michaud, Haiti, at the Ryan Epps Home for Children. Michaud is a suburb of Port-Au-Prince. This is a 14gpm unit powered entirely by the sun which means nearly zero recurring cost to operate the unit. This is ideal for starting a sustainable micro-business. This system combined with the micro-business provides clean, safe drinking water and also create jobs, generate recurring income, and improve community health. The 2013 trip report is available for download here.

    Academic Integration

    • Our 2012 EPA P3 Entry was a Portable Solar Water Purification Backpack for Disaster Releief. It won the $90k EPA Phase II award, the US Army's NetZero Water Award, and the Student's Choice Award at the 2012 National Sustainable Design Expo
    • Dr. Compere teaches two water courses:
      • ME595J, Practicum in Water Purification is a lab based, hands-on course that provides students with practical experience in testing for water-borne pathogens, water purification methods, and solar power systems
      • HON350, Emerging Trends in Global Water Supply and Demand is a humanities survey course raising awareness of water as the new high-value commodity. This course highlights the major issues in the water-energy nexus, water-food nexus, and water-climate nexus.
    • An American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) SouthEast Regional conference paper on the 2012 unit and trip is available here.

    Contact

    Donate

    Gifts at any level make a direct impact: Donate to Project Haiti.

    Categories: Undergraduate

  • Active Emissions Reduction for a Hybrid Car

    PI Patrick Currier

    CO-I Maxwell Pellerin

    The objective of this project is to reduce the emissions on the EcoCAR 3 hybrid Camaro 

    Currently, in year 2 of the competition, the team is working to create a basic functioning vehicle. Year 3 of EcoCAR 3 is intended for improvement of the vehicle that was constructed during year 2. The competition heavily focuses on reducing emissions and helping to reduce the environmental impact of vehicles. With that in mind our plan is to explore the possibility of pre-heating the engine block using the coolant from the electric motors within our vehicle architecture. Since the vehicle will be able to run approximately 36 miles using only battery power, the gas motor will have time to cool below the optimal running temperature. The goal is to improve the efficiency of the engine by never letting it drop below optimum running temperature while running on the battery. Other options would include pre-heating the fuel or exhaust. The project aims to produce a measureable emissions reduction on the Camaro and research that may be publishable in an academic conference. 

    Categories: Undergraduate

  • Development of Parking Space App

    PI Ilteris Demirkiran

    CO-I Diego Rincon

    The main purpose of this project is to reduce the wait and search time for an individual who is looking to park his or her vehicle at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach campus. This project is to help in reducing fuel consumption as well as making campus roads safer. An additional benefit is the ability to continuously monitor all parking lots on campus increasing overall campus safety.



    ​Many schools in the United States deal daily with complications associated with parking on campus. Commuters, students and faculty members, travel back and forth causing major traffic within the campus and in some cases, a logistic nightmare. For a university to accommodate all of the vehicles takes countless hours of planning and management. Schools have solved some of these problems by assigning specific parking lots to specific groups of individuals such as on-campus students, commuter students, and faculty. This research proposes a secondary solution to a growing problem. The main goal of this research effort is to reduce the wait and search time spent while looking for an available parking spot on campus. This solution will utilize cameras and advanced image processing algorithms to inform users of an available parking spot in the most efficient way.

    Categories: Undergraduate

  • Magnetically-Driven Ventricular Assist Device

    PI Eduardo Divo

    CO-I Christopher Adams

    The proposed project brings together multi-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis and mock circulatory loop (MCL) benchtop experiments to analyze the hemodynamics of a proposed Magnetically-Driven Ventricular Assist Device (MVAD).



    The multi-scale CFD model combines 0D RLC (Resistance-Inductance-Compliance) chambers to simulate the effects of arterial, capillary, and venous beds coupled with a 3DCFD model of the main arterial system where the MVAD will reside. In addition, a benchtop MCL will be calibrated using vascular resistance elements and compliance chambers to validate the multi-scale CFD predictions. The MCL will be driven by a Harvard Apparatus pulsatile pump that simulates the ventricular output and the test-selection centerpiece will be the MVAD prototype. The MCL fluid will be water loaded with magnetically-charged particles (such as ferrous particles embedded in silicon spheres). A dimensional analysis will be carried out by matching fluid dynamics parameters (such as Reynolds and Womersley numbers) between the Multi-Scale CFD and the benchtop MCL. This will allow the numerical and benchtop analyses to be analogous even though they operate on different fluids (blood and water). The results of this study will serve as validation of the hypothesis that a magnetically-driven pump with no moving parts can serve to assist in the cardiovascular circulation and thus reduce the risks associated with mechanical assist devices such as thrombus formation and stagnation. 

    Categories: Undergraduate

  • Eco-Dolphin

    PI Hong Liu

    CO-I Zakaria Daud

    CO-I Ci Wen

    CO-I Dynamite Obinna

    Eco-Dolphin is the name of a fleet of adaptive and cooperative automated underwater vehicles (AUVs) that a team of students at ERAU have been working on since January 2012.

    By 2015, the platforms of the AUVs and basic navigation programs were tested. One of the major success is the demonstration of the Yellow Dolphin where four NASA astronauts participated in the NASA Extreme Environmental Mission Operation (NEEMO) during an event in the summer of 2014. Since 2015, the team started developing and testing the autonomous mission control programs based on the MOOS-IvP middleware developed by MIT and Oxford. Two peer reviewed conference proceedings with student coauthors were published. Students gave two to three presentations each year, including 

    • FURC, Florida Undergraduate Research Conferences 2012, 2013 and 2014
    • SIAM SEA conference in FIT Melbourne, FL 2014
    • CASE 2014 Creativity in the Arts and Sciences Event
    • A3I Conference at Prescott Campus, 2014
    • Discovery Day at Daytona Beach Campus, 2014
    • Embry-Riddle Undergraduate Math Conference
    • SIAM National Annual Conference

    Categories: Undergraduate

  • A Knowledge-based Consultant for Diagnosing Toxic Exposures

    PI Joel Schipper

    Joel Schipper of Electrical and Computer Engineering works with the Florida Poison Information Center to develop a knowledge-based system to aid in the timely diagnosis of exposures to unknown toxins.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff Undergraduate

  • Large Amplitude Electromagnetic Waves in the Radiation Belt

    CO-I Miles Bengtson

    CO-I Anatoly Streltsov

    When the first American satellite, Explorer I, was launched into space it inadvertently discovered one of the most significant features of our local space environment: the Van Allen Radiation Belts.  This region contains highly energetic particles that are hazardous.  This research involves one promising remediation mechanism based on interactions between these particles and very-low frequency electromagnetic waves known as whistlers.

    The Van Allen Radiation Belt is a region in the near-Earth space populated with high-energy, electrically charged particles. Because of their very high energy, these particles present a significant threat to low-Earth orbiting satellites, the International Space Station, and its human crew. The radiation damage to satellite electronics increases when the amount of energetic particles in the radiation belt increases by a factor of 10 or 100 due to the plasma eruptions on the Sun or the high-altitude nuclear explosions. Results from high-altitude nuclear tests produced in 1968 combined with modern computer simulations demonstrate that even a relatively "modest" nuclear explosion (equivalent to a few tenths of kilotons in TNT) in the upper atmosphere can reduce the lifetime of many very important and expensive commercial, military, intelligence, and communication satellites from years to months. Therefore, it is a matter of national security to develop a solid understanding of the basic physics of remediation of energetic particles from the space. One possible way to achieve this goal is to use large amplitude electromagnetic waves. They can efficiently interact with energetic particles and precipitate them from the magnetosphere into the atmosphere. We will study the observations of large-amplitude whistlers detected by the Van Allen Probes satellites in the radiation belt. We also will model these waves with comprehensive numerical models and compare the numerical results with the observed wave dynamics in the magnetosphere. The results from this project are very important for future experiments including launching waves into the radiation belt from ground antennas (like HAARP and Arecibo) or from space platforms.

    Categories: Undergraduate

  • Project Courier

    CO-I Greg Diehl

    CO-I John Robbins

    Project Courier is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) delivery service that would operate across the ERAU campus aimed at allowing for quick delivery of documents, packages, and potentially food. 

    Logistically, the design of the project is relatively simple. A modified UAV will fly from one delivery point to another based on a preset flight path. The delivery points will be either structures in outdoor locations or open spots for personal pickup such as in front of the Student Village or in front of the College of Arts and Sciences.  At each drop off zone there will either have to be a storage container for the payload or a user present to collect the deliverables; either way the focus of this project is so that students and staff could be able to access other university services via this delivery with ease. When a UAV runs low on battery, programming will be in place that will return the UAV to a dedicated charging hub allowing for, hopefully, a closed and automated system.

    Despite the simplification above of the team’s goals, the work involved will be complex and multidisciplinary. We will involve skills in the field of programming, CATIA, structural engineering, aeronautical engineering, human resources, aeronautical law, logistics, and leadership. This calls for a team composed of everything Embry-Riddle does and because of our parallel goal of catalyzing individuals anyone will be able to join. 

    Categories: Undergraduate

  • Neuromuscular-Activated Armband for Safety Operation of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

    CO-I Eduardo Divo

    CO-I Victor Huayamave

    CO-I Jeremy Brown

    The goal of this research is to implement wearable technology using neuromuscular activation and electrocardiograms signals to successfully operate small UAS using safety parameters proposed by the FAA.

    In recent years, wearable technology using gesture recognition has gained increasing attention in the field of human-machine interaction. One technology proposes the use of myoelectric controllers to collect electromyography (EMG) signals from user’s neuromuscular activation as inputs. Available commercial devices have accomplished gesture control by detecting motion and muscle activation in different groups of skeletal muscle. In addition to wearable technologies, the use of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) has seen an increase in popularity. The popularity and affordability of small UAS has also increased the number of new and inexperienced hobbyists and many are concerned that this will lead to the unsafe use of these vehicles. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has proposed a new set of regulations for commercial small UAS. However, few manufacturers have implemented safety features to their UAS. Therefore, we propose to engage in a research project where wearable technology using neuromuscular activation and electrocardiograms signals can be implemented to successfully operate small UAS using safety parameters proposed by the FAA. Our hypothesis is that we can measure abnormal spikes in heart rate and then establish these spikes as a threshold for safety of the UAS user.  Then unexpected spikes in heart rate can be detected and transmitted to an armband.  Using these thresholds, we can change the trajectory of the UAS to avoid collisions with the user.

    Categories: Undergraduate

  • Autonomous Satellite Recovery

    CO-I Devonte Grantham

    CO-I Janet Marnane

    Embry-Riddle Future Space Explorers and Developers (ERFSEDS) will be attending a rocket competition in Utah this coming June, and they will receive extra points for the competition if they have a research project (not built by their club), Inside of their rockets. In collaboration with ERFSEDS, the Society 4 S.P.A.C.E. team would like to send a small satellite attached to a quad-coper as the research project (payload) for ERFSEDS rocket.

    This project consists of building a quad-rotor that can fit in the space constraints of a rocket. This Rocket will reach an altitude of 10,000 to 20,000 ft. The Quadcopters objective will be to collect atmospheric data as it descends. The plan is to create a new chassis for the quad-copters electronic components and arms that will allow the quad copter to fold its arms inwards to meet the required space constraints.  After launching the rocket, the quad copter/satellite will be deployed at the maximum altitude and begin collecting data once jettisoned from the rocket. Once reaching 1,000 feet the quad-copter will be programmed to deploy a parachute. Once it has reached a safe velocity, the engines will engage at around 400 feet (the maximum altitude for any civil autonomous or r/c vehicle) and the quad-copter will be autonomously navigate to a prearranged location. Flight planning will be done using the open source application Mission Planner. In addition to the critical components of the quad-copter, our design will integrate a number of other data by collecting sub-systems currently being used in the weather balloon project designed by the Society 4 S.P.A.C.E. team. These sensors will be able to collect pressure, temperature, humidity, wind and video. This project will provide it’s user with a better understanding of rocket propulsion system, UAVs in high altitude/velocity, and the effect of launch on the payload. The A.S.R.V will also drastically improve the data retrieval process, because it will bring the data directly to the user so the user does not have to search for it. 

    Categories: Undergraduate

11-20 of 22 results