Presentations Wrap Up A Summer of Innovation

08/07/2018

Another summer at the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design (CEID) means another round of innovations. The sixth cohort of the SEAS Summer Design Fellows gave their final presentations last week.

The nine students compose four teams of two to three members, each working in the CEID's Klingenstein Design Lab on a specific project that they could work on and complete by the end of the 8-week session. As SEAS Deputy Dean Vincent Wilczynski noted, the projects were not only of very high-quality, "all of our teams have something that could probably continue on from this point forward.”

Soil Drying - Natalie Irwin ‘21 and and Seila De Leon ‘21 spent the session working on a durable, portable, and inexpensive device that could dry a soil sample within a few minutes. The project began at the request of Yale's Ucross High Plains Stewardship Initiative as a way to simplify the reading of carbon levels in soil on agriculturally productive land. The student team brought a prototype to Wyoming to do some field testing. Representatives from Ucross said the device was “exactly what we were thinking of.”

LitKit - Alex Epstein ‘18 and Dylan Young ‘18 asked the audience how many used microscopes in high school. Nearly everyone raised their hands. That meant they were probably familiar with the image of static onion cells displayed on the screen. “What you probably did not see were molecular machines moving around in cells in real time,” Epstein said. He and Young spent the summer working to correct that. They developed an apparatus that could convert optical microscopes into fluorescent microscopes - affordable enough that high schools could purchase them, and still capable of being used for modern scientific research.

DropLets - Michelle Tong ‘21, Sinem Sinmaz ‘20, and Ting Gao ‘20 worked on a project inspired by Gao’s grandmother’s house. Gao remembers staying there and hearing the dripping faucet, counting the drops and calculating how much water was being wasted. It was a lot. “This is not just problem with her, it’s a problem worldwide.” Instead of building something to fix the plumbing, they aimed for a bigger change. “Probably the most effect approach is to look at how we can change human behavior and motivate people to fix their faucets,” Tong said. To increase people’s awareness of the problem, they devloped a device that calculates in real time how much water is being use, and how much is being wasted.

The Orb - The team of Lance Chantiles-Wertz ‘19 and Isaac Shelanski ‘20 worked on a device designed to enhance the experience of visiting a museum. The project drew out of Making Spaces, a course held at the CEID in 2017 in which students collaborated with the Smithsonian on possible uses for a temporary space at the Arts and Industries Building (AIB) on the National Mall. Chantiles-Wertz and Shelanski set out to make a device that was accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds, hard to break and easy to maintain. Envisioning broader applications for it, they also used a flexible circuit board to create a similar device to be worn on the wrist.