Winter 2022 senior design projects include a Pull-up Power Meter, more visible buoys

Mechanical and aerospace engineering students at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering presented their capstone senior design projects on March 16, showcasing projects ranging from a more comfortable soft robotic prosthetic, to a solar car vehicle suspension, a dermal cooling vest and more. 

In the senior design course, teams of students apply their hands-on skills and knowledge of engineering theory to solve a real-world engineering challenge sponsored by a local company or research lab. They have 10 weeks to put all they’ve learned into practice, working within real world constraints like budgets and timelines. 

The small orange and red radar 
reflector sitting on the buoy
antenna makes the buoy far more
visible to nearby ships.

This quarter, one team of students was challenged with creating a radar reflector for the Coastal Data Information Program(CDIP) at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. CDIP maintains a fleet of buoys in U.S. waters around the world equipped with various sensors and instruments to gather wave and climatology data. Occasionally, ships don’t see these buoys on their radar screens, and collide with them, causing damage and downtime for the data-gathering instruments. To make these buoys more visible and reduce collision, the students designed a spherical radar reflector to sit on the buoy’s antenna, which is visible from 5 times as far away as the existing long, cylindrical radar reflector being used. Their reflector means the CDIP buoys will show up on ship radar screens at a distance of 500 meters away, compared to the current 100 meters that existing reflectors reach. Currently, one of the student-designed radar reflectors is being used on a data-gathering buoy off the coast of Imperial Beach in San Diego, California. 

A printed circuit
board inside the black boxes contains 
a load cell and battery, allowing the
force of each arm to be 
measured in real time. 

Another team, sponsored by UC San Diego senior associate athletic director Matthew Kritz, was tasked with developing a tool for athletes and coaches to measure muscle disparities in different arms to prevent injury and develop training plans. The students designed a pull-up power meter that detects the force applied by each arm as someone does a pull up or other upper body exercise, and reads out that information in real-time on a web app. A small box containing a printed circuit board, load cell and battery can be attached to various types of suspension straps, and will wirelessly transmit the force applied by each arm independently, via Bluetooth, to the app. This data can help athletes correct any imbalances, thereby reducing injury and reaching their peak performance. 

More information on the senior design course or sponsoring a project here: https://sites.google.com/a/eng.ucsd.edu/mae156b-projects/sponsor-info