MAE

With the deplenishing supply of fossil fuels, worsening consequences of pollution, and rising need demand for energy, engineers have sought for alternative means of sustaining our modern lifestyle. Wind turbines have proven to be a valuable source of renewable energy across the world as they can harness natural forces while minimizing the negative effects on the environment. We seek to apply this technology on a local scale by designing and planning the manufacture of minature wind turbines for use by campers. Our goal is to create a convenient portable vertical wind turbine that is small enough to be carried in a backpack, assemblable by few people in the wilderness, and capable of charging multiple electronic devices overnight.

AIAA Design, Build, Fly is a national competition held annually for colleges to design and build a remote control aircraft. The theme for this year’s competition is electronic warfare, where our design team, named the UCI Aerial Anteaters, will maximize the transportation range of an electronics payload and antenna. Until competition day in April, our team will design the aircraft to ensure each mission is successful while maximizing the number of points received. This year's missions include carrying an electronic payload for an endurance run, as well as attaching an antenna to the end of the aircraft’s wing to simulate a jamming antenna. This team consists of students from all year levels working to design and fabricate an aircraft for this competition.

Our project is centered around an electro-permanent magnet(EPM), that ultimately can be implemented into two main iterations. The function of an EPM is to have a switchable magnet, within a nonswitchable magnet, that can have the direction of its magnetic field be switched by the input of a set current. In a larger scale application, this EPM can be incorporated with a bellow and thus when the magnetic field is switched a resulting pull force or push force of a spring would insinuate. The goal is to have the on setting of the switchable magnet induce an outward push force from a spring, and thus create force/motion just by supplying current. With the bellow, this EPM could be incorporated with artificial movement. 

Background

Domestic Hot Water for a Sustainable ADU is an undergraduate design project for Sustainability Decathlon (OCSD23) which is a collegiate design-and-build competition held in Orange County focused on sustainable housing. It challenges university teams to design and build model solar-powered homes that address climate change and California’s housing needs.

As the name suggests, our team is designing a domestic hot water heating system that is ultra-efficient, reduce overall household water usage and is affordable. The designed system will then be placed in an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) in a low-income neighbourhood in Orange County.

Goals

• System should be appropriate for an ADU
• System should be smart and connected
• Combining off-the-shelf components is preffered 
• Innovative designs can be considered if they are simple, affordable and low-maintaince

Team Name

Our team name is Hydro-Sol which is self explanatory and is applicable to our project because we are using solar energy to heat water.

Team Contact...

The elderly commonly rely on canes and walkers for balance and gait support. Similarly, crutches are commonly used after injury. All of these devices are cumbersome, force unnatural gait patterns, and greatly limit their arms. Several exoskeleton designs have been proposed in research, but they tend to be heavy and actively controlled (i.e. with motors). They also are difficult to don and doff, which does not make them very user friendly. The goal of this project is to design a passive semi-rigid assistive device that will provide moderate stability to gait and assist walking activities, while not restricting arm use.

Integrating renewable energy sources into everyday life is of paramount importance to a self-sustainable world. The Fall 2022 Small Scale Wind Turbine (SCWT) is a project that will design a portable wind turbine that harnesses wind as a natural resource to power devices. Prioritizing portability and efficiency, our turbine is designed to power camping appliances with a single overnight charge. Our design will be lightweight, cost-efficient, and easily accessible to display its practicality in camping situations. The SCWT project consists of designing and manufacturing processes to produce a turbine designed to meet engineering standards. 

The project's aim is to test and validate XFOIL, a numerical analysis tool that calculates the lift and drag forces experienced by 2D airfoil shapes. The goal of this team is to design and execute an experimental campaign to acquire reliable data for the validation of XFOIL's numerical prediction method.  The campaign involves a set of carefully coordinated wind tunnel experiments and numerical calculations to document methods and results.  With the application of the acquired data, XFOIL’s predictability is assessed through the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) framework adapted to assess modeling and simulation methods.

The Horizontal Stepping Robot is a rehabilitation tool that will allow researchers to study epidural electrical stimulation (EES), with the aim of allowing patients with spinal cord injury to regain the ability to walk. The robot will be rolled up to the patient's bed, allowing for training while the patient is still hospitalized, and support the weight of their legs to allow an “air stepping” motion. It will record the patient leg motion and allow for tracking of the patient's progress through rehabilitation. The current approach is to use pulleys, springs, and cables to design a passive system that hangs patients' legs and assists leg motion while using the microprocessor, Arduino, to collect data and attract the motion of patients' legs.

Our name comes from the e-Human Powered Vehicle Competition (HPVC), hosted by the national organization American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) which we are participating in. We want to establish this new UCI senior design project as a recurring project that anyone can join. In addition, we are partnered with ASME at UCI to help get lower-classmen involved in the process so they can gain some hands-on experience necessary for succeeding in their engineering careers.

ASME hosts an endurance race that runs for 2.5 hours with many obstacles such as tight turns, uneven terrain, and inclines. HPVC at UCI will design and manufacture a recumbent, tadpole bike with a sufficient rollover protection system to keep the driver safe in case of an accident during the endurance race. The bike consists of 5 major systems: braking system, drive system, steering system, rollover protection system, and electrical system. The team has been split into three subteams: statics which consists of the bike frame, rollover protection system and seat; dynamics which consists of steering, braking, and driving; electrical which consists of the battery, electrical box and electric motor. Overall, the team aims to produce a bike that is ergonomic, safe, and easy to handle.

Renewable energy remains to be a sustainable source, exhibiting benefits such as low environmental impact and ability to be naturally replenished. SCWT Design sets out to reintroduce the utilization of wind energy by creating a small-scale portable wind turbine that demonstrates practicality for camping applications. The focuses, placed on portability and functionality, draw to a design which demonstrate capabilities for providing electrity for ordinary charging portable appliances in a camping setting (2 cell phones, camera battery charger, flashlight, backup battery bank). SCWT Design, consisting of 5 members, plans to utilize the engineering process to produce a design feasible to meet the forementioned capabilities.

UCI Cargo Plane is an undergraduate design project based on the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Aero Design West Competition. The goal of this project is to design, manufacture, and test an electric RC aircraft with Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) capabilities. 

Project Background:

For this Spring quarter project, Team MorfNX will be utilizing NX’s topology optimization tool to redesign an air duct for the 2008X X-series aircraft oil cooler. The team will examine the entire engine and cooling assembly as a whole, figuring out the maximum amount of volume the air duct can occupy (defining the design space), place geometry constraints, and boundary conditions in which the iterations of design will be fine-tuned and simulated using StarCCM+. By combining the power of topology optimization and computational fluid analysis, the team will come up with a design that can maximize the airflow for the cooling system.

Project Background:

For this Spring quarter project, Team MorfNX will be utilizing NX’s topology optimization tool to redesign an air duct for the 2008X X-series aircraft oil cooler. The team will examine the entire engine and cooling assembly as a whole, figuring out the maximum amount of volume the air duct can occupy (defining the design space), place geometry constraints, and boundary conditions in which the iterations of design will be fine-tuned and simulated using StarCCM+. By combining the power of topology optimization and computational fluid analysis, the team will come up with a design that can maximize the airflow for the cooling system.

Project Background:

For this Spring quarter project, Team MorfNX will be utilizing NX’s topology optimization tool to redesign an air duct for the 2008X X-series aircraft oil cooler. The team will examine the entire engine and cooling assembly as a whole, figuring out the maximum amount of volume the air duct can occupy (defining the design space), place geometry constraints, and boundary conditions in which the iterations of design will be fine-tuned and simulated using StarCCM+. By combining the power of topology optimization and computational fluid analysis, the team will come up with a design that can maximize the airflow for the cooling system.

The Active Antfins project works with the UCI Rocket Project Solids Team to  maximize the apogee of solid-propellant rockets. Due to external factors such as wind drift and changes in mass due to fuel burn, rockets can become unstable. To combat this, we are designing a module to keep a rocket stable by actively controlling the fins of the rocket. The Active Antins will control the rocket fins using servos, an IMU and a Microcontroller. This control module is designed around an existing solid-propellant rocket from the team. Additionally, it can be adjusted to fit into new rockets that the team develops in the future.

The solid rocket team will be designing a high power rocket to compete in the 10,000 ft Spaceport America cup next year. They also plan to develop their own solid propellant rocket motors in the near future. In order to verify the functionality of both their selected motor for the upcoming competition and the custom motors they are planning to build, the solids team will need a specialized test stand to safely measure and record the thrust of high powered rocket motors. Our goal is to design a compact, portable test stand that can characterize the thrust curves of a wide range of rocket motors with maximum stability. 

During the spring quarter, our team will design a human-powered vehicle able to be ridden by one person that can complete one or two competitions held by ASME, which include speed competition, endurance competition, and a practical usage exam. Although no actual prototype will be made this quarter, the project team is required to come up with a completely designed plan for the human-powered vehicle's assembly and testing. The Anteater-Power Vehicle has six people, each two team members from a subteam which includes Chassis, Human interface, and Powertrain. Three subteams will be responsible for one sub-system of the human-powered vehicle and collabrate together to complete the project. 

TBD

Our goal is to have a system that enables rapid, accurate tracking of the UAV in flight and deliver the relevant metrics to the ground station team so they can conduct their work more efficiently. Our plan is to create a system that supports the airMAX NanostationM 5Ghz station by allowing it to rotate 180 degrees around a vertical axis and 90 degrees across an axis tangent to the surface of the earth, relies on an independent power supply, and delivers angle adjustment information to the ground station team using code developed by the greater UAV Forge project.

The UCI rocket project seeks a method to create custom rocket tubes in-house rather than outsourcing designs to third party providers. Additionally, commercial off-the-shelf rocket tubes for various diameters are costly or not available to meet specific requirements developed by the rocket project. Therefore, the 189 composite winder team will work to develop a composite winder system capable of directly and accurately applying composite fibers onto metal mandrels, pressure vessels (such as fuel and oxidizer tanks), and rocket tube skins varying from three to eleven inches in diameter. Composite materials are preferred for this project due to their high strength to weight capabilities which serves as a reinforcement to existing rocket skins and pressure vessels during high stress flight. The overall system aims to be constructed with a total budget of $800 utilizing components that are commercially available, if components must be custom manufactured, they should be simple to machine.  

Over the world developing countries suffer from unsanitary water causing diseases such as cholera and dysentery. Our team Clean H20 2 GO is developing a portable hand pump water filtration system that is affordable, sustainable, and effective. For our design we are utilizing mechanical and carbon capture filters to eliminate most of the sediments and bacteria found in river water. Our system should be able to hold the minimum of 10 liters of clean drinking water to provide for a family of four. The mechansim for our design is a vaccum pump to efficiently filter the water and have an optimized flow rate to achieve full capacity in under 5 to 10 minutes. Other key components we look to optimize is low maintenance work and manufacturing cost to provide easy use for these communitites.

The World Health Organization published that more than 884 million people did not have access to safe drinking water in 2017. Unsanitary water can cause different diseases like cholera, dysentery, and polio. The goal of this project is to design and build an affordable, portable, and sustainable water filtration system that can provide clean drinking water for one day for a family of four in developing countries. This team will design a system that uses electric power to operate a pump or similar device to move water from the source to the designed filtration system.

• Background 
  • The autonomous target robot project is a project sponsored by the US Navy that is seeking to create a vehicle that navigates autonomously and is capable of acting as a mobile target on a shooting range.
• Goal and Objectives  
  • Design the structure for an autonomous vehicle
  • Write a program that directs the car to pre-designated GPS coordinates and presents a target oriented towards the shooter
  • Incorporate sensors that detect when the target has been shot, allow autonomous navigation, and wireless communication
  • Manufacture the robot and assemble electronics
• More Information
  • Sponsor/Advisor
    • Prof. Zak (Zaher) M. Kassas - zkassas@uci.edu
    • Nadim Khairallah - khairaln@uci.edu
  • Engineering challenge we are working on:
    • The Arduino systems that the robot functions off of can prove difficult to work if you are expecting a high amount of precision and/or lack of corrupted data
...

The Autonomous Underwater vehicle project is created by a student-led group of Mechanical Engineering students working with Professor Camilo Velez to study and manufacture a swarm of small scale robots that can swim underwater. Our inspiration for this project stems from the idea that nano robots can work together to detect, isolate and remove a single cell in the human body. In an effort to work towards this idea, our team is set to construct a number of small-scale robots that can autonomously navigate 3-Dimensionally in a swimming pool to detect and attach magnetically to a specified item.

Background

Students that are a part of the UC Irvine Intelligent Ground Vehicle Team will design and test an autonomous ground vehicle that is able to navigate through an obstacle course. The technologies used in IGV encompass a wide range of applications in engineering including military mobility, intelligent transport systems, and manufacturing. 

Goals and Objectives 

The goal for students in IGV is to implement skills gained in classes while designing the vehicle and developing a method to allow it to navigate through the obstacle course. This includes usage of Finite State Machines, Ultrasonic and GPS Sensors, and microcontrollers. 

Currently, the project is in the optimization stage. The chassis has been built and the obstacle detection code, GPS, and navigation systems are nearly complete. The next steps are to reconstruct the chassis using a more flexible material as the plexiglass was very unwieldy. Furthermore, we plan to optimize the lane detection...

Like many professional organizations at UCI, FUSION takes pride in providing experience and opportunities to eager students. We believe in Social support, Professionalism, Academia, Culture, and Engineering as pillars for our club. Each of these pillars are deeply embedded in our annual engineering projects. Since the beginning of this club, iterations of the club projects gained recognition for providing valuable experience and lessons for the participating students. This year, FUSION presents the 2021-2022 Engineering Project: Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Despite the nostalgic name, this project demands several disciplines of engineering, organization, and commuincation from each of the participating students. Three teams must create a robot that collects gold coins within a provided field both autonomously and through manual control. Not only will these teams build towards item recognition and retrieval, but must also plan against other competing teams as well as FUSION's own administrative team known as the Goldkeepers. With little design restrictions and a strong budget, this year-long project will test the strategies...

The RF-controlled Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) is designed to perform jobs without a human operator onboard. Each RF-controlled UGV is designed differently to perform different tasks. An RF-controlled UGV would be perfect for the inspection of steel structures because the job could be very dangerous to human operators, and UGVs can be used for both civilians and military projects. A UGV makes it possible to perform inspections under realistic time constraints, where not only human errors will be avoided but also in locations human being would normally be unable to go. This process of steel inspection is multipurpose, meaning the UGV design will be able to accomplish multiple jobs. Furthermore, the advantages of the UGV is that it reduces injuries and fatalities in all parts of the steel inspection process.

Project Background:

For the winter and spring quarters of 2022, Siemens and Morf 3D have partnered up with the University of California, Irvine to teach senior-level Mechanical Engineering students using their CAD software, NX, emphasizing additive manufacturing in the aerospace industry. To get the UCI team familiarized with the NX software and the concept of additive manufacturing in the aerospace industry, Siemens and Morf 3D engineers will work alongside the UCI team. This project will serve as a guide to learn how additive manufacturing will be the future of the aerospace industry and the manufacturing industry because of the digitalization of engineering design projects in the industrial sectors. In this quarter, the UCI team will learn about engineering in the industry, applying applicable engineering design processes, modifying parts, making the correct design and manufacturing decisions, and ultimately designing effective support structures for the parts provided by Siemens and Morf 3D.

As technology advances, being autonomous has become a trending focus. Imagine cars can drive by themselves, foods can be delivered without human interaction, and rescuing jobs can be handled by autonomous robots. Aiming to achieve these wonderful outcomes, UCI IGV (Intelligent Ground Vehicle) team is formatted under the supervision of the UCI Mechanical Engineering department. Our goals are to design and fabricate an autonomous ground vehicle that can detect and avoid obstacles. The team is divided into three subteams, control, electrical, and mechanical. Each team has unique tasks and works closely with the others. The mechanical team mostly focuses on the mechanical side of the project. We aim to design a stable steering system that is capable of achieving a wide range of turning angles and a propulsion system that provides sufficient power that drives the vehicle forward at a reasonable speed. 

The steerable mechanical walking robot is a project that uses a motor-driven Jansen leg mechanism to move, while also using a separate servo motor to steer the robot through a bell crank mechanism. The robot is wirelessly controlled via infrared, having buttons on the IR remote command the robot to turn left or right, go forwards or backward, and also to stop.

An Arduino UNO facilitates the electronics control of the robot, processing IR signal from an IR receiver, which promptly translates it into an action. The Arduino is powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

A motion study was used with a CAD model to analyze the motion of the physical prototype before building the robot. The final prototype uses a Jansen-style leg mechanism, which uses 11 linkages to mimic the walking motion of a leg.