# Engineering Design Projects (ES 100) ES 100 is a year-long capstone course for Harvard seniors. Each student in the course designs and completes a creative project that solves a specific, real-world problem. Scroll to see more projects. Coupling Multiple Particle Levitation with Mass Spectrometry: Simulation and Assessment of the Quadrupole Design SmartPass: a Non-Contact COVID-19 Screening System Modeling Enzymatic Recycling of Carbon Dioxide in Akaline Electrolytes Estill County Water District Distribution System Hydraulic Model ## Coupling Multiple Particle Levitation with Mass Spectrometry: Simulation and Assessment of the Quadrupole Design **Title**: Coupling Multiple Particle Levitation with Mass Spectrometry: Simulation and Assessment of the Quadrupole Design **Members**: Amy Brooke **About**: Chemistry in atmospheric aerosol particles affects climate and human health. Particle levitation is a novel experimental approach in atmospheric research, enabling the study of chemistry in authentic surrogates of atmospheric aerosols. Such controlled, multi-day studies that attain a high chemical specificity can be achieved using single-particle levitation coupled to mass spectrometry. High measurement uncertainty due to slow experimental throughput is a major limitation of the technique, which could be improved with levitation of multiple particles simultaneously, but this requires evaluation. In this work, the methodology of coupling multiple particle levitation in a linear electrodynamic quadrupole to mass spectrometry is investigated through an assessment of the stable trapping and sequential retrieval of multiple particles, using the ion optics field and trajectory software SIMION. Two designs, a capped linear quadrupole and a segmented quadrupole are evaluated and compared. Using technical specifications developed with the client, optimal operation procedures are established to reduce particle deviation and instability and increase retrieval efficiency. The parameter space, which consists of electric field parameters and the purge gas rate, was evaluated and its sensitivity to mass assessed. Both designs accomplish trapping and retrieval of at least five particles simultaneously. Therefore, we find that coupling multi-particle levitation in a quadrupole with mass spectrometry is a feasible methodology, capable of enhancing the throughput of current instrumentation. Furthermore, it is especially reliable when using the novel segmented quadrupole design, over the capped linear quadrupole design, which enables a highly systematic particle retrieval mechanism with a 100% retrieval efficiency. ## SmartPass: a Non-Contact COVID-19 Screening System **Title**: SmartPass: a Non-Contact COVID-19 Screening System **Members**: Jamie Caines, Daniela Villafuerte **About**: SmartPass is a non-contact COVID-19 screening system for building entry that records and analyzes vital signs as well as performs face mask detection for users seeking entrance. It uses these data in an algorithm to determine clearance for the user. ## Modeling Enzymatic Recycling of Carbon Dioxide in Akaline Electrolytes **Title**: Modeling Enzymatic Recycling of CO in Alkaline Electrolytes **Members**: John Daley **About**: A potential strategy for meeting long term climate goals is electrochemical reduction of CO2 using renewable energy. One key barrier to the commercial viability of this strategy is the loss of CO2 gas from the anolyte through a multi-step chemical process. The goal of this project is to design a novel gas diffusion electrode system that incorporates a carbonic anhydrase catalyst for efficient recycling of CO2 from alkaline electrolytes. The design will be modeled using COMSOL Software to optimize chemical and physical parameters. Ultimately, the Nocera lab will use these results to build and test a physical CO2 electrolyzer. ## Estill County Water District Distribution System Hydraulic Model **Title**: Estill County Water District Distribution System Hydraulic Model **Members**: Caleb Stickney **About**: A hydraulic model of the Estill County Water District drinking water distribution system developed in the KYPIPE software, useful for identifying problem locations and optimizing distribution system functionality Pollution-Minimal Energy Storage: A Mechanical Battery for Application in Human-Powered and Lightweight Transport Design, Model, and Characterization of Actuated appendage for HAMR Image-Guided Photodynamic Therapy for Treatment of Early-Stage Oral Cancer in Low Resource Settings Design and Validation of an Easily Machined CubeSat Structure ## Pollution-Minimal Energy Storage: A Mechanical Battery for Application in Human-Powered and Lightweight Transport **Title**: Pollution-Minimal Energy Storage: A Mechanical Battery for Application in Human-Powered and Lightweight Transport **Members**: Charles Biggs **About**: This project was centered on designing a mechanical battery that is competitive with modern batteries but which does not require the mining of environmentally damaging materials. It is meant to replace or at least compete with modern electric transportation solutions. ## Design, Model, and Characterization of Actuated appendage for HAMR **Title**: Design, Model, and Characterization of Actuated appendage for HAMR **Members**: Kahlil Wassell **About**: This project involved the design and testing of an actuated tail for the micorobot HAMR that would help with bump traversal. ## Image-Guided Photodynamic Therapy for Treatment of Early-Stage Oral Cancer in Low Resource Settings **Title**: Image-Guided Photodynamic Therapy for Treatment of Early-Stage Oral Cancer in Low Resource Settings **Members**: Jessica DeVilla **About**: India has long been regarded as the oral cancer capital of the world where it accounts for over 30% of all reported cancers in the country. Due the lack of medical infrastructure, the burden of oral cancer in rural areas is especially high. To improve treatment access and efficacy in low resource settings, recent efforts have involved the development of low-cost, smartphone-based modalities for delivery of photodynamic therapy (PDT), a non-invasive method of oral cancer treatment and imaging. The aim of this project was to improve upon an existing platform for PDT delivery by implementing an automated image processing pipeline for oral tumor image analysis and treatment monitoring. An algorithm was developed to identify regions of interest from a clinical dataset and to output tumor parameters relevant for treatment monitoring and evaluation. This work presents a significant advancement to a low-cost oral cancer treatment delivery and monitoring platform which would contribute to improved treatment outcomes and quality of life in patients with cancer in low resource settings. ## Design and Validation of an Easily Machined CubeSat Structure **Title**: Design and Validation of an Easily Machined CubeSat Structure **Members**: Joseph Sanchez **About**: To address the issues of cost vs time spent on CubeSats in hopes of increasing the mission success rate, I developed an easily manufactured CubeSat structure and have released its design under an opensource hardware license. Out of Bounds Detection: Live Electrical Positional Tracking of a Soccer Ball Automated and Self-Contained Aerobic Composter for Home Use JazzMaster Buoyancy Control Unit (BCU) for Soft Robotics Education Kit ## Out of Bounds Detection: Live Electrical Positional Tracking of a Soccer Ball **Title**: Out of Bounds Detection: Live Electrical Positional Tracking of a Soccer Ball **Members**: Fahad Alkhaja **About**: This project is an electronic position tracking system that aims to detect whether a soccer ball is out of bounds by live tracking its position on a field using a combination of both GPS and IMU. This system, when placed in a soccer ball, will help referees make accurate decisions faster and eliminate the need for inconclusive video replays. Three corners of a soccer field are saved as calibration points. Then, field dimensions are calculated and the position detection algorithm is able to position the ball on the field and make the out of bounds determination and transmit that result. ## Automated and Self-Contained Aerobic Composter for Home Use **Title**: Automated and Self-Contained Aerobic Composter for Home Use **Members**: Eileen Egolf **About**: For this project I design a small-scale composter intended for residential use to address the problem of landfilled food waste. The composter is designed to be used indoors like a typical kitchen trash can and can accommodate the continuous addition of food waste from an average household. If widely used, this composter could significantly reduce the environmental impact of landfilled food waste. ## JazzMaster **Title**: JazzMaster **Members**: Alexander Mariona **About**: JazzMaster is an automated accompaniment system for jazz music which is capable of generating a musically-appropriate harmony in real time for a musician who is playing a jazz melody, including improvisations. ## Buoyancy Control Unit (BCU) for Soft Robotics Education Kit **Title**: Buoyancy Control Unit (BCU) for Soft Robotics Education Kit **Members**: Robert Jomar Malate **About**: In order to expand the underwater functionality of a soft robot mermaid prototype, I developed a buoyancy control unit (BCU) to control the depth of the robot. This BCU provides a foundation for future functionality to be built onto the robot. As part of the Soft Robotics Toolkit, this robot is part of a greater effort to design a soft robotics education kit, aimed at introducing students to the field of soft robotics. Modeling an Electric-Powered Jet Propulsion System for Commercial Aviation Applications Low-Cost, Educational Wind Tunnel Optimization of Multi-family Housing Designed with Earth and Concrete Engineering Pulmonary Monocusp Leaflets for Right Ventricular Outflow Tract Reconstruction in Neonates ## Modeling an Electric-Powered Jet Propulsion System for Commercial Aviation Applications **Title**: Modeling an Electric-Powered Jet Propulsion System for Commercial Aviation Applications **Members**: Ahmad Saaid **About**: This project consists of a series of exploratory computational models of a novel electric jet propulsion technology which utilizes a microwave ionization system to generate a plasma jet by ionizing an injected stream of high-pressure air. The Microwave Air Plasma Propulsion concept is based on the paper “Jet Propulsion by Microwave Air Plasma in the Atmosphere”, published by Ye et al. in May 2020 ## Low-Cost, Educational Wind Tunnel **Title**: Low-Cost, Educational Wind Tunnel **Members**: John Schmidt **About**: My ES100 project was on the design of a low-cost, educational wind tunnel for undergraduate institutions. A lot of work was done with the computational fluid dynamics software COMSOL to iterate on the geometry and structure of the wind tunnel, while some work was done on simulating a power plant setup with a physical build. The finished project included 3D models of the full wind tunnel with a bill of materials listing each part. This was definitely a great learning experience in being resourceful, especially considering that everything was done at home. A full, final physical build is shown. ## Optimization of Multi-family Housing Designed with Earth and Concrete **Title**: Optimization of Multi-family Housing Designed with Earth and Concrete **Members**: Juliet Nwagwu Ume-Ezeoke **About**: The outcome of this project was a software for generating optimal parameters defining structural and facade systems for multi-story homes in order to minimize their financial and environmental cost, while maximizing indoor comfort of occupants. The technique hinged on designing to the strengths of concrete, the world's most popular building material, and compressed earth, its more sustainable alternative. [Juliet Nwagwu Ume-Ezeoke recording (video)](https://harvard.zoom.us/rec/share/YfDqrc_YfZaTse4Fnz_XvgJgh8uF6_Y8nho59pAx7oO9ULLZ8tBtcZSpl_2pqM0h.GxC3TXGAFmWJwFXt?startTime=1619399833000) ## Engineering Pulmonary Monocusp Leaflets for Right Ventricular Outflow Tract Reconstruction in Neonates **Title**: Engineering Pulmonary Monocusp Leaflets for Right Ventricular Outflow Tract Reconstruction in Neonates **Members**: Nina Uzoigwe **About**: This thesis presents a geometrically optimized pulmonary monocusp leaflet for right ventricular outflow tract reconstruction in neonates. With isotropic material properties resembling expanded poly-tetrafluoroethylene, it was adjusted for free edge length and axial height based on dynamic mesh simulations within COMSOL Multiphysics Software. This was performed until markers of pulmonary regurgitation, namely orifice size during maximum closure and coaptation height with the vessel wall, were less than 1% and greater than 3mm, respectively, during a 15-20% increase in vessel diameter. This novel work presents the first leaflet of its kind that can withstand wider vessel diameters resulting from patient growth. Trike Eco-Car Exploiting Multi-Agent Cumulative Reward to Speed Up Reinforcement Learning A Fully Synthesizable Phase-Locked Loop A Probabilistic In-band network Telemetry CHeckER (PITCHER) ## Trike Eco-Car **Title**: Trike Eco-Car **Members**: Allan Cramblitt **About**: A look at developing an automotive prototype with reverse three wheel and tandem passenger seating design for improved fuel consumption values. ## Exploiting Multi-Agent Cumulative Reward to Speed Up Reinforcement Learning **Title**: Exploiting Multi-Agent Cumulative Reward to Speed Up Reinforcement Learning **Members**: Victor Qin **About**: Future robotic systems are multi-agent systems, comprised of smaller robotic systems that required deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods to control. While these methods are powerful, they require a lot of data, and current parallel RL methods (where multiple agents try to solve the same problem) depend on piling together data and updates to make better policies. I designed a new parallel RL method that builds better global policies by taking a weighted average of all agent policies, and tested it on a inverted pendulum and quadcopter environment. My method showed good improvement over the single-agent RL algorithm, with potential to demonstrate these improvements on more algorithms and platforms. ## A Fully Synthesizable Phase-Locked Loop **Title**: A Fully Synthesizable Phase-Locked Loop **Members**: Matthew Giles **About**: I design a circuit that takes in a 50 MHz reference clock signal and steps it up to 800 MHz to form a clock signal that will be used within a chip design project that a research group on campus is working on. The circuit used is a phase-locked loop (or PLL), and this particular design is made using only digital circuitry and can be synthesized using only standard logic cells, which are the building blocks of digital electronics. ## A Probabilistic In-band network Telemetry CHeckER (PITCHER) **Title**: A Probabilistic In-band network Telemetry CHeckER (PITCHER) **Members**: Gabriele Oliaro **About**: The goal of this project is to design a real-time telemetry software (PITCHER), with an accuracy that is comparable to the In-Band Network Telemetry (INT) framework, and a greatly reduced reporting rate. In particular, the proposed solution will aim to render the INT collectors capable of automatically filtering redundant or irrelevant telemetry information out, and reporting only the data pointing to some new network event. PITCHER will be useful to network operators, data-center administrators, and internet service providers to perform real-time network monitoring. Indoor Composting Chamber for Apartment Dwellers ## Indoor Composting Chamber for Apartment Dwellers **Title**: Indoor Composting Chamber for Apartment Dwellers **Members**: Araceli Marcial **About**: A gravity-fed, mechanical composting chamber was designed to address the need for indoor composting solutions.