Course Info
ME 470: Senior Design Project
As a course for senior mechanical engineering students, this class was aimed at developing, evaluating, and recommending solutions to a real-world problem subject to realistic constraints.
Project Details
For our capstone design project, my group and I worked together with the goal to create a prototype system that would desalinate ocean water using solar energy. We approached the problem with the knowledge and skills that we had developed during our undergraduate experience, and through a busy semester of research, prototyping, and testing, came out of the project having proposed a solution to the problem of water scarcity.
In this project, I worked in a group of 4 students; my responsibilities involved theoretical modeling and verification of the system using thermodynamics and heat transfer, as well as adjusting and improving the system to bring the model and the system into agreement. The system we worked with and improved upon was a simple two-chamber system that evaporated water using a heater in one chamber, and then condensed it in the other chamber. The modeling involved a variety of concepts including evaporation dynamics of bubbles, laminar flow through a channel, conductive/convective heat loss, and modeling of plate-finned condenser systems. I built and improved upon our model throughout the semester by conducting an initial literature review, and by reading common thermodynamics and heat transfer textbooks. Additionally, I developed changes to the system, including improvements to the water collection system, which helped us determine an efficiency for the system as well as verify conservation of mass and energy. I also did write-ups for all our experiments, which included plotting (in Python) and interpreting the data, as well as comparing it to our existing evaporation and condensation models.
What I enjoyed most about this project was the open-endedness of the prompt—our goal was to design a prototype system that could desalinate ocean water using solar energy, but there were many ways that we could have approached the problem, and I liked that. Through my independent research and our group literature reviews, I further developed my ability to find and evaluate useful information related to a topic, which is something I do with every project that I work on. Additionally, it was very cool and useful to develop a theoretical model for the system we were working on based off of concepts I learned in past thermodynamics and heat transfer classes.