Sponsor
A solar still enables purification of brine water through thermal distillation process. Through this project, students will fabricate and test a multi-effect solar still system under a novel solar concentrating technology. The key questions that will be addressed under this project are: still performance enhancement achieved by using the mirrors, solar concentrator parameters, enhancement in still productivity with concentrators, cost for small scale and large scale testing.
Sponsor
NMSU
An external condenser is one of the key components of a thermal desalination system. Through this project, students will design an external condenser for a solar based thermal desalination system. Students will build a box and fill it with a heat storage medium. This heat storage medium will absorb the heat from the vapor generated from the desalination system. Condensation occurs on the outside surfaces of the box and is collected as pure water. Students will tune the contents of the heat storage box (mass of the heat storage medium, size and shape of the box, etc.) to achieve the best condensation scenario (in other words, obtain the maximum amount of condensed pure water).
Sponsor
NMSU
Lamb wave is a type of ultrasonic waves that are guided between two parallel free surfaces, such as upper and lower surfaces of a plate, and are suitable for structural health monitoring applications since they travel long distances. This project focuses on the damage detection method for structures with free surfaces such as aircraft, missiles, pressure vessels and ship hulls using ultrasonic guided waves. An excitation input signal collected at normal conditions serves as baselines, and subsequent signals collected at defected conditions detect the presence of a defect and its location.
Sponsor
NMSU
The increasing demand of food, both in terms of quantity and quality, has raised the need for intensification and industrialization of the food and agricultural sector. Internet of Things (IoT) is a highly promising family of technology capable of offering many solutions towards the smart farming, precision agriculture, revolutionary supply chain management. Moreover, to solve challenges like resource efficiency, disease and risk management, it is important for the food, farming, and meat production sector to stay on top of their production process, monitoring and if needed controlling every part of it. Brining IoT to the food and agricultural sector can help achieve this goal. In this project, students will design the system that comprises data capturing and decision-making functionalities that are built on top of an implementation of IoT.
Sponsor
NMSU
Mobile diagnostics has gained attention in environmental monitoring, agro-food sectors, and healthcare, which allows for rapid and point-of-care detection of toxins. The current methods for ensuring food safety rely on resource-intensive examination of chemicals and/or pathogens. In remote areas, however, resources are scarce and sophisticated analysis is often difficult. The ubiquitous availability of smartphones enables a broad accessibility in remote or rural regions. Smartphones are equipped with numerous components that can be employed for measurement and detection, such as a fast processor, digital camera, visual display and user interface. Students will develop a smartphone-based mobile diagnostic platform for food analysis by augmenting a smartphone by other accessories.
Sponsor
NMSU
The goal of the project is to investigate the damage detection method using elastic wave that allows constant health monitoring of the engineering structure in real-time and in-situ. The elastic wave measurement will be carried out by a waveform generator and the received signals by PZT sensors are collected on a digital oscilloscope and the data is processed using Matlab.
Sponsor
X2nSat
The two primary goals of this project are to develop a temperate measurement device that can measure the ocean water temperature and transmit the data via satellite communications. The device will be mounted on a boat that will be traveling from San Francisco to Hawaii. The device will measure the temperature of the water up to 30 ft. in increments of 5 ft. Items to be considered are: what sensors to use for the temperature measurements; frequency of the temperature measurements; design of the communication system; method to deploy and retrieve the sensors; method to keep the sensors at the correct depth; and mounting of the device.
Sponsor
NMSU
Through this project, students will design an optimization model for the United States military’s fuel supply chain in Texas and New Mexico. The presented model will use a simple yet practical mathematical programming approach to gain insight into the military’s fuel delivery network.
