April 16, 2015, BY Kathryn Kopchik

A 2013 project for Pik Rite by mechanical engineering students on the design of tomato processing equipment.

The College of Engineering at Bucknell University will host two Senior Design Expos on April 23 and April 28.

Seniors in Civil and Environmental Engineering will present their work in oral presentations on Thursday, April 23, from 7 to 9:45 p.m. in Dana 113 (Gardner Lecture Hall) and Dana 134.

A design expo and project showcase will be held on Tuesday, April 28, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Larison Dining Hall, with senior teams from Biomedical, Chemical, Electrical, Computer, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering plus class projects from Biomedical, Computer, Electrical Engineering and IDEAS courses.

Both events are free and open to the public.

"We're bringing most of the senior design presentations to a common location and time, to help boost the visibility and audience and generally better celebrate our students' accomplishments as they solve real problems for real clients," said Margot Vigeant, associate dean of engineering and professor of chemical engineering.

April 28 Expo and Showcase
Projects featured at the showcase include:

  • A quick-response emergency relief "radio" that allows for the reception of images and text messages encoded over the FM broadcast band (Electrical and Computer Engineering);
  • A bullet detection system for measuring the accuracy of competitive bench-rest shooters (Electrical and Computer Engineering);
  • Tesseract, a music discovery mobile application that allows users to discover new music (Computer Science and Engineering);
  • Energy Dashboard, a website that provides graphical visualization of campus energy consumption (Computer Science and Engineering);
  • A thermoplastic vacuum former that operates on a standard outlet (Mechanical Engineering).

Projects designed in conjunction with industries include:

  • A cleaning method for a large consumer-products company's industrial shower system (Chemical Engineering);
  • An analysis of transparent display-glass production methods for a large glass and ceramics company (Chemical Engineering);
  • Energy- and water-use reduction through heat integration analysis for a local facility for a large chemical company (Chemical Engineering);
  • A user-focused iOS application — WAMI (Wireless App-based Mobile Inventory) — for the Public Library for Union County (Electrical and Computer Engineering);
  • A project that models the physical characteristics of a large paper and adhesive company's adhesive reaction to predict performance (Chemical Engineering).

Attendees for the April 23 event are requested to enter and leave between presentations. Attendees for the April 28 event may use a shuttle bus from visitor parking at the stadium.