CHEE Teams Win Multiple Awards at First Virtual Design Day
For nearly two decades, the University of Arizona College of Engineering Design Day has been a celebration of seniors, who spend their yearlong capstone course designing and building technology for industry and university sponsors. COVID-19 restrictions meant that this year's students could no longer work together in person, and that timelines were cut short. But despite this, engineering seniors presented their creations online and got their due in a virtual awards ceremony.
This was also the first year the day was celebrated as part of the Craig M. Berge Engineering Design Program. Craig M. Berge earned his degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona in 1957. After his passing in 2017, his family, including his wife and fellow UA alum Nancy, made a generous gift to the college. The funds endowed a dean’s chair and named a program that provides hands-on design experiences for undergraduates at all levels.
CHEE students shone at Design Day, with several teams taking home projects for sustainability-focused projects.
A team of chemical engineering students won the second-place Bly Family Award for Innovation in Energy Production, Supply or Use. The team won this award for exploring the idea of powering cellphones with highly efficient, nontoxic microbial fuel cells, which get their energy from sewer water or wastewater treatment plants.
Another group of CHEE students took home the Delta Development Team Award for Sustainable Manufacturing Innovation. Their team created a method for building bricks out of recycled plastic in order to reduce waste while providing a quick, affordable way to construct emergency shelters for people displaced by natural disasters.
The team, which called its conceptual startup “Briccycle,” tested ways to fuse the plastic into bricks – including using a clothing iron and a pressure cooker. In the end, it was another household appliance that successfully molded three types of plastic into a solid brick: a toaster oven.
“When COVID-19 became a global pandemic, we had to stop our prototyping, and we quickly switched to a paper process and paper brick design,” said CHEE student and Briccycle team member Stanley Wong. “However, we did not let what we had accomplished in person together go to waste. A lot of our process is based off the results we were able to obtain from prototyping.”
Another CHEE team developed a plan for creating vertical vegetable farms in abandoned shopping malls.