Final projects seek solutions

UNLV engineering students find ways to answer real-world problems

JACOB KEPLER/VIEWJustin Leany, Christopher Helda and Denney Shinn put the finishing touches on an evaporative cooling system during the senior design competition at UNLV. Advertisement

As part of their final project, engineering students at UNLV hope to change your life -- one minor task at a time.

For their final grade, electrical, mechanical and civil engineering students in the Howard Hughes College of Engineering had to solve a real-world problem, which they worked on for almost a year in their senior design classes. The finished product is entered into the senior design competition, where engineering majors are grouped by discipline and judged by an outside panel, which happened this year on Dec. 5. The judges this year included Ron Gross from the special programs department, Remote Sensing Labs at Nellis Air Force Base; Lee Kramer, vice president of engineering at Xtreme Manufacturing; and David Peterson from Lochsa Engineering.

"The students may not realize it, but the senior design exercise is probably the most important class that they take," Eric Sandgren, dean of the college, said.

Sandgren said the two-credit class makes students use the knowledge they have gained during their years at UNLV and face real-life challenges, such as not having enough money or time to finish a project.

"It's actually as close to the real world as they're going to come," Sandgren said.

Future engineers dressed in business attire filled the lobby of Building A inside the Thomas Beam Engineering Complex, while they waited to be evaluated by the judging panel.

Mechanical engineering majors Jacob Ludwig, James Mulford and Mike Roscoe were among those presenting. Their project, a liqui-cooled computer, attempted to solve the problem of a personal computer's ability to dispel heat from its computer processor chip. The students argued that because the majority of computers are air-cooled, a unit's capability is limited by how hot it becomes from usage.

"We devised a system to cool the computer system," Roscoe said.

The UNLV seniors developed a liquid cooling system that removes heat from a computer processor chip faster than the air-cooled method, which they say allows a computer to work 10 percent harder than with a standard air-cooled system.

"It wouldn't surprise me if some companies were started by projects from senior design," Sandgren said.

Also in the competition were UNLV seniors Bianca Davis and Arrielle Mathis, whose project was a parental keyboard alert system. Their idea was to allow parents to monitor keyboard strokes and identify words that are part of a predefined watch list. When a word on the list comes up, an e-mail will be sent to the parent, letting them know without them having to be in the same room as the child.

"There are so many issues with children viewing inappropriate content," Davis said.

Both Davis and Mathis agreed the senior design project was a learning experience, and plan to keep forging ahead with their design even though the grading portion is now over.

"It's a way to keep a child safe," Davis said. "It's a real useful design."

Other designs in the competition included an HDTV pattern generator, a miniature aerial vehicle, reverse osmosis and an automatic solar sunshade.