Ohio State engineering students showcase innovation at inaugural Design Showcase

More than 1,800 first year and senior engineering students presented research, capstone projects and robotics work

Graduating seniors and first-year students at The Ohio State University put their knowledge into practice during the inaugural Buckeye Engineering Design Showcase. The College of Engineering recently hosted the event at Ohio Stadium and the Recreation and Physical Activity Center on the Columbus campus.

More than 800 first-year students presented their year-long research and development projects, while others participated in the college's annual robot competition. In addition, more than 1,000 seniors presented team capstone projects, many of which were sponsored by industry partners.

The Showcase encompasses two previous events: the Engineering Foundations First-Year Showcase and the Capstone Design Showcase.

"The Capstone Showcase represents the culminating event of their academic career as an undergraduate engineering student," said Bob Rhoads, associate professor of practice and director of the Multidisciplinary Capstone Program.

"It offers the students a senior design experience, sponsored by industry, the community or even nonprofit organizations for them to go through a design process, to perfect their communication skills, to have an opportunity to work as a team and collaborate not only within the student team, but also with some type of external sponsor."

One student team presented a capstone project designed to keep campus clean. Their invention, the Trash Royale, is a hand-operated street sweeper that runs without a battery or electric power.

The team consisted of mechanical engineering students Nick Caracci, Gina Janiel, Denise Ou, Reece Pandilidis and Kurt Steelman. They worked with faculty adviser Annie Abell, associate professor of practice, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

The team members said working together to design the street sweeper not only expanded their knowledge of mechanical engineering, but also the importance of teamwork in accomplishing goals over the course of the autumn and spring semesters.

"We had a lot of success with communicating with each other in the first semester, so that in the second semester, that's when most of the man-hours hit" in building the prototype, Pandilidis said.

Janiel said she and her classmates learned to identify each other's strengths while brainstorming ideas and researching how to implement them.

"I think we each generated 20 different design ideas. From there, we went through together and filtered them out based on different things that we were looking for," she said. "There was a lot of work together, but we also had individual tasks."

On another capstone project, students analyzed data from a Berlin Heart device, a surgically implanted mechanical circulatory support system for patients with severe heart failure.

The students worked in two teams, with one team that gathered data, consisting of Ben Fabian (biomedical engineering), Alex Juarez (biomedical engineering) and Tavi Robinson (mechanical engineering). The other team that analyzed the data included of Megan Florence (biomedical engineering), Amara Jain (mechanical engineering) and Meghna Sharma (biomedical engineering).

The teams worked with faculty advisers Lauren Eichaker, biomedical engineering lecturer, and Rizwan Ahmad, biomedical engineering professor and associate professor of computer and electrical engineering. The teams also consulted with Nationwide Children's Hospital physicians Deipanjan Nandi and Lydia Wright.

The aim of the Berlin Heart project was to create a machine learning model to assist medical professionals in streamlining the process of analyzing data from the device and improving patient care, Juarez said.

"Currently, surgeons at Nationwide Children's Hospital … they have to take a video, slow down the video and then analyze" the data, which can be a lengthy process, he said. "What we're doing is, as an entire team, we're trying to make it a faster process using machine learning and AI."

Jain said the Berlin Heart team members complemented each other's skills.

"I would say this team has been my favorite team I've ever worked on," she said. "Over the semester, we've built this friendship with our whole team and we can trust each other - 'Oh, we'll get this done.'"

The advisers helped the students decide they would work most efficiently by forming two teams to first gather and then dissect the data, Florence said.

"We all started together and then as the workload grew, we decided to split the work so we could get things done faster," she said. "We had a professor who was our guide on how machine learning works and how we can train our own model of it."

Students who participated in the Showcase received hands-on experience in applying the engineering concepts they learned in class, said Kadri Parris, assistant professor of engineering education and director of the Fundamentals of Engineering program.

"In the College of Engineering, we place a very high value on experiential learning in our undergraduate curriculum," he said. "I believe that this event truly epitomizes what that means."

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