Name: Pete Brown Address: Communications
Director Phone: 520.621.3754 Email:pnb@email.arizona.edu
UA Engineering Senior Projects Compete for $13,000 in Prizes at Design Day 2012
By Pete Brown - April 19, 2012, 10:06 am
This year's UA College of Engineering Design Day will showcase student designs that save lives, track endangered species, take you virtual horse racing, support NASA missions, and more.
Engineers help people and improve the quality of life, and some of history's greatest engineering achievements started life as classroom projects.
That tradition is in full force at the 2012 Engineering Design Day at the UA College of Engineering, a creative extravaganza featuring more than 50 completely original engineering projects by over 250 students majoring in various engineering disciplines.
UA Engineering seniors have designed a micro GPS location tracker and radio transmitter to be used among a population of golden lion tamarins, foot-tall endangered primates whose numbers in the wild have dwindled to about 1,500. The team will deliver a working system to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., later this year.
UA Engineering seniors will be competing for more than $13,000 in industry-sponsored prizes.
Student projects on display at UA Engineering Design Day, May 1, 2012, in the Bear Down Gymnasium, include:
A low-cost alarm that gives an alert when children or pets are left locked in a car.
An intelligent robotic vehicle that is aware of its surroundings, for use in hazardous operations such as bomb-disposal, fire fighting, and post-disaster search and rescue.
A smart horseracing helmet for jockeys that streams sound, vision and GPS data to give viewers a virtual reality experience that creates the illusion of being in the race along with the jockeys.
A micro GPS location tracker and radio transmitter to be used among a population of golden lion tamarins, which are spectacular but endangered flame-colored miniature monkeys found in a dwindling portion of Brazil's coastal rain forest.
Many UA Engineering Design Day projects and prizes are sponsored by industry, and go on to be real commercial products. National and local engineering firms also support the projects by providing judges who rate designs and select winners for the numerous cash prizes, also provided by industry partners.
Five UA Engineering seniors recently tested their capstone design project, a NASA-sponsored multispectral camera, in a simulated Martian environment in the Utah desert.
The Interdisciplinary Engineering Design Program -- also known as Engineering 498 -- at the University of Arizona allows teams of engineering students to work directly with industry and faculty on real-life projects. Seniors from across the College of Engineering work in multidisciplinary teams to solve design problems identified by industry partners, faculty, and student clubs. This activity culminates in the annual Engineering Design Day in early May, when all teams exhibit their work to the public and external judges.
Download the Engineering Design Day Guide Book [PDF 4MB, iPad and iBooks compatible] for full details of all the engineering projects on display on May 1 in the Bear Down Gym.
AT A GLANCE UA Engineering Design Day 2012, sponsored by the University of Arizona College of Engineering.
When: Tuesday, May 1, 2012 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Awards ceremony at 4 p.m.
Where: Bear Down Gymnasium at the University of Arizona.
CONTACTS: Dr. Ara Arabyan, Engineering Design Day Project Coordinator 520.621.2116 • arabyan@email.arizona.edu
Pete Brown, Director of Communications, UA College of Engineering 520.621.3754 • pnb@email.arizona.edu
Steve Delgado, Communications Specialist, UA College of Engineering 520.621.2815 • stevend@email.arizona.edu
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