The next generation of philanthropists:
CONTENTS2 Dean’s Message
Meet the next generation of philanthropists – 20 somethings surpass $1M in giving
4 Use IMPACT, avoid a crash In this case, go for a belly landing
8 Girl [Scout] Power “What can’t I do?”
11 Geeks Speak Need a lesson in Gobblerpedia?
12 Bridge to Prosperity “Open up my heart and see how happy I am…”
16 Anything but an Island Vacation Finding clean water for a Third World hospital
20 Ride the Lightning No carbon footprint for this motorcycle
23 Out of this World Passing the torch for space exploration
the Student Engineers’ Councilat Virginia Tech
Brian KellerStudent Engineers’ Council Chair 2010-11
ENGINEERING NOW2
In 1985 the Virginia Tech Student Engineers’ Council
(SEC) announced at a Committee of 100 black-tie dinner
its establishment of the Paul E. Torgersen Leadership Schol-
arship. The two student leaders of the SEC at the time, Jean
Skomorucha (now Jean Swartz) and Scott Taylor, chair and
vice-chair, respectively, surprised Torgersen, who was the
dean of the college, with the establishment of this $20,000
endowment.
The students of the SEC had used their fundraising skills
to ask the members of the Committee of 100 to support
the scholarship in honor of Torgersen, and the alumni were
happy to do so.
This gift started a philosophy of philanthropy that has
consumed much of the time of the members of the SEC,
who on average range in age from 18 to 22. The engineering
students of the SEC understand the value of philanthropy
before they graduate and enter the professional arena. The
SEC generates the greatest percentage of its income from
operating Expo, an engineering career fair that has grown
into one of the largest in the nation.
Expo’s continued success prompted SEC faculty advi-
sor Lynn Nystrom, who has been with the council more
than 30 years, to suggest that the student members use
Expo revenue for philanthropic purposes. In 1978, only 26
companies and government agencies registered for Expo.
In 1980, that number doubled. At the time, the revenue
essentially covered the expenditures of organizing the career
fair. But by the late 1990s, the SEC was regularly attract-
ing some 250 companies, sometimes with as many as 50 to
75 on a waiting list because of a lack of space. Revenue was
now climbing.
Nystrom was concerned that the SEC, a 501 C3 non-
profit, needed to invest its money in more than a bank
account. Her idea was for the SEC to issue a formal call for
funding proposals from engineering faculty members and
students, the primary guideline being that the funds go to
areas benefiting the largest number of students. The students
agreed and formed their own guidelines. In 1998, the
SEC made its first substantial awards to assist with college
endeavors: $30,000 to equip the Student Assistance Center
and $10,000 as seed money to help generate support for the
Freshman Design Engineering Laboratory.
In the 26 years since they established the Torgersen
Scholarship, the SEC has given more than $1 million back
to the College of Engineering’s students and faculty for a
host of projects, ranging from support of the Frith Fresh-
men Design Engineering Laboratory, mentoring programs,
and upgrades of classroom space, to a host of student
organization projects. The latter range from $20,000 in
support of the design and building of the first CHARLI, a
world-famous walking humanoid made by students at the
Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), to smaller
grants for the group Bridges to Prosperity to build lifesaving
bridges in Haiti.
The SEC executive team understands how to require
engineering students and faculty to create and present pro-
Dean’s MessageMeet the next generation of philanthropists – 20 somethings surpass $1M in giving
Virginia Tech’s Student Engineers’ Council is giving $100,000 toward construction of the Signature Engineering Building.Construction started in the summer of 2011.
www.eng.vt.edu2011 3
posals. These requests are voted on by both the
executive council and the larger general assembly
of the SEC in a three-step process. The proposal
must include the project’s impact, an overall
budget, and how the SEC contribution would be
spent.
With the additional revenue, the SEC has
undertaken some truly ambitious projects in ad-
dition to the ad hoc funding of requests. In 2006,
it created a Design Team Endowment with a goal
of reaching $500,000 by 2010. The SEC reached
its goal, and is now able to award $40,000 (the
interest off the principal) each academic year to
engineering student organizations for equipment,
conference attendance, and other essential needs.
Not satisfied, the SEC took on two additional
pledges to support the College of Engineering
during the 2010-11 academic year under the
leadership of Brian Keller. The officers signed the
paperwork for a three-year $100,000 gift to the
new Signature Engineering Building, and con-
tributed the first one-third of the pledge in 2011.
The SEC also established a $1 million unrestrict-
ed endowment for the College of Engineering,
and opened it with a $50,000 payment, naming
it in honor of their advisor, Nystrom. The SEC’s
new goal is to have the Lynn Nystrom Engineer-
ing Organization Fund completely endowed by
2020.
Clearly, the Student Engineers’ Council’s
continuing endeavors will make one of the na-
tion’s premier engineering colleges even better as
the impact of the students’ giving is realized. As
dean, I asked that this issue of Engineering Now
be devoted to the philanthropy of the Student
Engineers’ Council, and I hope you will enjoy
reading about just a few of the impacts their gifts
have made.
Richard BensonDean of Engineering
Representative History of Philanthropy of the Student Engineers’ Council1985 Creation of the Paul E. Torgersen Leadership Scholarship
1998 $30,000 to equip the college’s Student Assistance Center (SAC) and $10,000 as seed money to help generate support for the Freshman Design Engineering Laboratory
1999 $10,000 for multimedia enhancements for a lecture classroom; $10,000 for the construction of a prototype Personal Rapid Transit System (Virtual Corporation)
2000 $20,000 to Engineering Education
2001 Endowed the Nathaniel Gebreyes Scholarship, named after its 1981 SEC chair, who died in an automobile accident
2002 $46,000 for technology upgrades to classrooms, matched by the university
2003 $15,000 to Tutoring Center for hourly employees; $1,000 to Engi-neering Education Lecture Series
2004 $10,000 to Freshman Engineering Lecture Series; $5,000 to Ware Lab General Hardware Fund; $4,274 to Fuel Cell Experiment for Frith Freshman Engineering Lab
2005 $14,700 to McGyver Boxes, Freshman Program; $18,500 to Open Electronics Laboratory; $1,800 for general support for Undergradu-ate Research Symposium
2006 $7,386 to the Mechatronics Experiment in Engineering Explora-tion; $12,615 to the Joseph F. Ware Jr. Advanced Engineering Laboratory
2007 $9,330 for the Ware Lab Plasma Cutter; $5,670 for study area fur-niture for Hancock Atrium to be matched by the college; $105,000 to initiate the Design Team Fund, plus an additional $125,000 within a few months
2008 $5,411 to the Ware Lab; $4,589 to materials science and engineer-ing for furnaces; $20,000 to the RoMeLa Laboratory to fund build-ing CHARLI, a humanoid robot
2009 $40,000 in grants to engineering student organizations*; $30,000 to design team endowment; $20,000 in donations to various faculty projects
2010 $40,000 in grants to engineering student organizations and $30,000 to design team endowment; $20,000 in donations to vari-ous faculty projects
2011 $40,000 in grants to engineering student organizations; $50,000 to start a new general endowment; $30,000 toward the Signature Engineering Building; $20,000 to various faculty projects, such as a satellite station and a 3-D printing vending machine in Randolph Hall
* With the completion of the $500,000 Design Team Endowment, the Student Engineers’ Council should be able to award in perpetuity some $40,000 annually to support engineering student groups.
ENGINEERING NOW4
AVOID A CRASH
USE
By Steven Mackay
www.eng.vt.edu2011 5
When a U.S. Airways’ Airbus A320-
214 commercial jet made an emergency
ditch landing on the Hudson River—in
the water—in January 2009, America
held its breath and stood in awed
silence. All passengers and crew were
safe, and the plane’s fuselage remained
virtually intact. Veteran pilot Chesley
Sullenberger was hailed as a hero. It was a rare and some say
miraculous event.
Javid Bayandor, now an associate professor of mechanical
engineering at Virginia Tech, reacted like most people: “I was
shocked yet relieved to hear that it survived the severe impact.”
(Incidentally, Bayandor later briefly met and spoke with Sul-
lenberger at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.)
But Bayandor also had a vested interest in what had hap-
pened on the Hudson. Bayandor, who worked for years in
the aerospace industry, including with Cooperative Research
Centre for Advanced Composite Structures, Airbus Deutsch-
land GmbH, German Aerospace Center, and Hawker de
Havilland-Boeing, had during that time proposed studying
water impact landings. In 2008, he started research into such
incidents during an invited appointment at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., before moving to
Virginia Tech.
After the Hudson River incident, many in the commercial
aerospace industry decided to revisit the previously inconclusive
issue of water landings, says Bayandor. “Not many full-scale
water impact tests have been done before. It would be wildly
expensive for the aerospace companies to test-crash full-scale
models, with a new representative aircraft costing anywhere
from $250 million to $300 million.” And no one is trying that
to this day. Not with real planes, anyway.
Starting in 2010, Bayandor formed
and led a senior design student team
called IMPACT, an acronym for Impact
Modeling Project and Crash Team. The
gist: take scaled down models of air-
planes—roughly 1/36th to 1/25th scale
of the most popular commercial aircraft
—hooked to a cable zip line system and
“crash” them into a shallow water tank built inside a sandbox-
like structure. Waterproof cameras inside and outside the tank
capture the action, while sensors built inside the underbelly and
wings of the aircraft take various measurements via computer.
“Subsequent to the field trials, we constructed and carried
out numerical simulations which will be verified using the test
data from the small models,” says Bayandor. “We hope that we
eventually would be in a position to extend the trials to larger
models. The validated predictive numerical methodology that
we develop has the potential to be used as a tool during the de-
sign and impact certification processes of future aircraft, while
drastically reducing the high costs associated with developing
new products.”
The IMPACT team—comprised of seven undergraduates
and one graduate student—started from scratch. In addition
to the makeshift water tank, the scaffolding stands about 8 feet
tall, resembling a miniature power line tower. Student team
members built the towing mechanism and the tank on their
own, mostly with money provided by the Student Engineers’
Council.
Team member Alan Smisko, a mechanical engineering
student from Vienna, Va., says assembling the large wood tank
structure and filling it with 600 to 700 gallons of water for each
day of field experiments was its own challenge. “It took up to
several hours just to do that,” he says. Weather also was a fac-
In this case, go
for a belly landing
ENGINEERING NOW6
tor in the outdoor experiments. Cold temperatures meant ice,
while high winds could ruin the test parametric settings.
“Coming in at the beginning of the year with no back-
ground in finite-element analysis, aerospace, or composites was
a little daunting at the beginning,” says Jessica Gretsch, a senior
in mechanical engineering from Cary, N.C., who served as
experimentation team leader. “Everyone pushed really hard to
learn everything though and we really covered a lot of ground
this year.”
Experiments so far have shown that slight changes in veloc-
ity, rate of descent, angles of attack, and yaw and roll angles
can make a huge difference in how the model plane makes
contact with water. As the plane is a scaled model based on
the Pi Theorem it need not go fast in order to simulate the real
speeds and impacts of an actual commercial jet in a laboratory
setting. Findings thus far show that if the plane’s nose lands
first, pitched down, the aircraft’s forward section could sustain
a grave impact force that can jeopardize the plane’s structural
integrity. A belly landing—with nose slightly up—seems safest,
relatively speaking.
The experiment likely would never have been realized
during the 2010-11 academic year without funding from the
The Impact Modeling Project and Crash Team (left to right) included mechanical engineering seniors Matt Henry of Chesapeake, Va.; Matt Liwanag of Virginia Beach, Va.; David Wolf of Baltimore, Md.; Andrew Rogers of Scarboro, Maine; Jessica Gretsch of Cary, N.C.; and Alan Smisko of Vienna, Va.
www.eng.vt.edu2011 7
Student Engineers’ Council, which kicked in $1,300,
as well as some financial and in-kind support from the
College of Engineering’s Joseph F. Ware Jr. Advanced
Engineering Laboratory. A majority of the remaining
money after the trial costs was used to help pay for the
IMPACT team to travel to Cambridge, Mass., in June
2011 to present its findings thus far at the MIT Con-
ference on Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics.
Bayandor and Gretsch hope the presentation will spur
more interest in the project.
Bayandor would like to see major aerospace com-
panies and federal agencies come forward with grant
funding or other support. “This has a unique potential
to significantly contribute to the aerospace industry, as
well as our knowledge of advanced aircraft design and
impact damage tolerance in future-generation aerospace
structures,” he says. “It can greatly facilitate the devel-
opment of concept crashworthy air vehicles by cutting
down heavy experimental costs.”
Bayandor plans to expand the scope of IMPACT and
provide students with more opportunities to work closely
with the aerospace industry on its immediate structural
design and analysis problems. Airbus and the European
Aeronautics Defense and Space Company already have
expressed interest in working with Bayandor’s CRASH
Lab, short for Crashworthiness for Aerospace Structures
and Hybrids Lab.
Gretsch was looking toward handing off the project
to her successors. “I learned a ton about planes, compos-
ites, and modeling, and all of that should be useful in my
future career,” she says. “However, the experience gained
from working on a team that started from nothing and
was able to present results at the end of eight months was
really the most important experience.”
Adds Bayandor on his first IMPACT team: “The
students are now at a level where they can consider them-
selves rising star researchers due to the extensive training
that we have been through during this project.”
ENGINEERING NOW8
www.eng.vt.edu2011 9
Proctor, SWE’s educational outreach chair for the 2010-
11 academic year, is a rising senior in the Charles E. Via, Jr.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering program.
For this Girl Scout Day, she is the co-chair of the event and
extremely passionate about it.
“I was a Girl Scout…no, no, I am a Girl Scout,” Proctor
emphatically says as she smiles.
“At an early age I can recall the fun things and experiences
I had being involved with my [Girl Scout] troop. I enjoy being
around kids. Having the opportunity to share with them or
impact their life decisions in a positive way is so rewarding.
Girl Scout Day is important to me because not only might I
foster someone’s idea of community outreach and engineer-
ing, it reminds us, the SWE members, of why we came to love
engineering.”
Proctor is a member of the Virginia Tech chapter of SWE, a
network of female engineers that offers career advice, scholar-
ships, mentoring, and social and service opportunities for its
members. Service projects are geared toward encouraging other
female college students and school-age females to consider engi-
neering as their career path. They even host a fashion show for
female engineering students to assist them in choosing appro-
priate professional attire for the interview process.
SWE has more than 400 women on its LISTSERV. About
40 participate regularly. Active members pay annual dues,
which helps fund projects throughout the year. Other fund-
ing comes from corporate engineering sponsors,
fundraising, and the Student Engineers’
Council (SEC) at Virginia Tech.
“We applied for their
[SEC] slush fund and were
awarded money to aid our
volunteer and community
efforts,” Proctor says. “Portions
“Are you all excited?” [Silence]
Caitlin Proctor enthusiastically repeats the question to more than 40 Girl Scouts, 9 to 13 years old, all from Southwest Virginia troops.
“ARE YOU ALL EXCITED?”
It’s 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning and the Virginia Tech Society of Wom-en Engineers’ (SWE) 5th annual Girl Scout Day is in full swing.
Well, almost.
GIRl [Scout]
P wER By Lindsey Haugh“what can’t I do?”
ENGINEERING NOW10
of the money helped fund our annual Brownie Day in the fall,
our trip to the national SWE conference, and our spring Girl
Scout Day.”
Katie Geier, a rising sophomore, also majoring in civil
engineering and a SWE leader for the event, says, “Donations
from the SEC allow us to buy materials and supplies in order to
better teach the Girl Scouts and help them earn a
badge. Without having the necessary materi-
als or having a limited number of things, it
would have been difficult to reach out to as
many young girls.”
This particular Girl Scout Day event was
off to a quiet start.
SWE leaders demonstrate jumping jacks, “star jumps,” and
dance moves to get the Girl Scouts to loosen up, have fun, “put
on their thinking caps,” and start earning their Creative Solu-
tions badge, Geier says.
The girls respond with giggles and whispers as they hesitant-
ly participate in these ice-breaking activities.
Then the real fun begins.
To earn the Creative Solutions badge, the Girl Scouts
must complete six out of 10 requirements. The SWE leaders
proposed the following problems to the groups. First was the
Chinese Tangram, a puzzle made up of seven geometric pieces
that must be made into five different objects. Second, Ordinary
Items, Extraordinary Uses encourages ways to use everyday
items, such as paper clips, rubber bands, toothbrushes, flash-
lights, safety pins, bandages, socks, and white unlined paper for
another purpose. Third was Shipwrecked on an Island, where
participants select one person and five items to have with them
on a deserted island. Fourth was Alternative Solutions where
participants create a new ending to a well-known story or fairy
tale. Fifth was How Others Solve Problems which identifies
how various professionals solve matters in the workplace. And
last was Local, National, and Global Problem Solving which
involves listing local, national, or global issues.
Each problem-solving activity ends with discussion of the
decision-making process, asking “why” and “how,” and then
analysis of the possible results of their decisions.
“Children often approach problems in a much different
manner than adults since they do not often restrict themselves
to feasible or practical solutions. Interacting with the kids
reminds me to take a step back and go at problems without
thinking, ‘what can’t I do?’ and instead think, ‘What could I
do?’ ” says Geier.
Another SWE leader, Theresa Garwood, poses a question
to her group of Girl Scouts, “What problems do you see in
the world today?” “Nuclear issues” is the response of a seventh
grader, who then goes on to explain her ingenious take on
the cycle of events resulting from the earthquakes in Japan in
March of 2011.
Throughout the morning the young girls are challenged
and enlightened. In an informal, relaxed question and answer
session, Donna Dix, a troop co-leader of two years from Rural
Retreat, Va., asks the SWE leaders, “How did you know you
wanted to be an engineer?”
Geier explains her inspiration was spurred by her love of
mathematics and attending a Virginia Tech camp while in high
school.
Kori Price, a freshman studying electrical engineering and
next year’s educational outreach co-chair with Proctor, says her
motivation to pursue electrical engineering came from child-
hood trips to amusement parks, where she became fascinated
with how roller coasters worked, and her curiosity about
thunderstorms.
By the end of Girl Scout Day, some 40 young girls had
earned a new badge and the SWE members hope they have
“spark[ed] an interest, so when they get older they consider
becoming an engineer,” says Geier.
“Girl Scout Day helps me learn more about younger girl’s
interests. This is important so that SWE can be effective in
reaching out to younger girls to help them become more
interested and involved in science, technology, engineer-
ing, and mathematics areas,” says Price. “I also hope that
the girls can see women like us in SWE
working toward engineering
degrees and think, ‘If they
can do it, then I can do it.’”
www.eng.vt.edu2011 11
GEEKS SPEAKWhen Chris Covington was a self-described “poor high
school kid with a limited allowance,” he found it “awesome”
that he could download the GNU/Linux operating system and a
whole array of applications to run on it for free.
Today, Covington, a senior in computer engineering, has
spent much of his college career helping others install GNU/
Linux on their laptops or tablet personal computers. And his
skill set has already landed him a
job with Qualcomm, a world leader
in the field of wireless technology
and services.
Covington is a member of the
Linux and Unix Users Group at Virginia Tech (VTLUUG),
dedicated to improving the computing skills of its members,
supporting the use of Linux and Unix on campus, and serv-
ing the local community through free software and open data
(http://vtluug.org/).
An analogy to the Linux operating system kernel might
be Wikipedia, where people are able to access the underlying
markup and modify an article’s contents. Because the underlying
source code for Linux is open, somewhat similar to Wikipedia,
interested parties are free to make changes to it. The software is
continually updated by computer gurus around the world, and
its success is validated by its use in some of the world’s fastest
supercomputers.
As the Web allows the world to move toward increased free
sharing of information, Covington’s contributions show he is a
follower of this philosophy. “I like the open ideology that Linux
was founded on,” Covington says. Most college students do.
So, in the interest of sharing
information, Covington is person-
ally responsible for the advent of
Gobblerpedia, a Virginia Tech
take-off on Wikipedia (https://gob-
blerpedia.org/wiki/Main_page). Gobblerpedia is a community-
made repository for free information about the Blacksburg, Va.,
university. The main difference he sees between Wikipedia and
Gobblerpedia is that contributors are encouraged to write local
histories never before published. This is not the case on Wikipe-
dia, where such contributions would run afoul of project goals
like easy verifiability by users around the globe. Covington sees
Gobblerpedia as growing into different guidelines. For example,
“dropping into a professor’s office to fact-check,” would be a
reasonable process in a university community, he says.
“It was harder to convince others on campus, like the Student Budget Board, of our needs,” Covington adds. “The SEC made the whole thing happen.”
Need a lesson in Gobblerpedia? By Lynn Nystrom
Continued on page 24
Chris Covington, left, and James Schwinabart, members of the Linux and Unix User Group at Virginia Tech, promote open data and the availability of free software to assist the local community.
ENGINEERING NOW12
Three children have lost their lives since 2009 by drown-
ing in the Thomonde River in Haiti.
Today, a lifesaving bridge connects the remote mountain
village of Ti Peligre with Casse, where a medical clinic and
marketplace provide resources to this Haitian town that is
often transformed into an island because of the Caribbean
country’s rainy seasons. Children and others can now walk
safely over the river below.
Engineering students at Virginia Tech were instrumental
in accomplishing this humanitarian gesture.
“This bridge connects the two towns on either side of the
river, but in reality, it goes so much further. The successful
completion of this bridge required the collaboration and
hard work of so many people around the world, including
the members of the Partners in Health based in Boston, the
town of Blacksburg, Virginia Tech, and Haiti,” says Matt
Capelli, the immediate past president of Virginia Tech’s
chapter of Bridges to Prosperity (www.b2p.org.vt.edu/).
By Lynn Nystrom
ProsperityBridge to
“Open up my heart and see how happy I am…”
www.eng.vt.edu2011 13
“I believe the true foundation and power behind the
bridge were the solid relationships and faith of the Hai-
tian communities involved and all of the people in the
world that the bridge project connected. It is a tribute
to the leadership of all,” Capelli adds.
The Virginia Tech student chapter started the
project in 2009 and completed it in March 2011.
Capelli, a civil engineering student, was drawn into
the project by Brian Cloyd, a Virginia Tech profes-
sor he had met while working on rebuilding homes
with the Appalachian Service Project. So when Cloyd asked
Capelli if he would be interested in designing the pedestrian
bridge over this often dangerous, 210-foot-wide span of the
river in Haiti, he agreed.
Cloyd, Capelli, and two other civil engineering students,
Nick Mason and Katie Masoero, traveled to Haiti in November
2009 to conduct a feasibility study.
“It was certainly a shock to experience Third World poverty
for the first time in my life. But what I remember the most
from that trip was how beautiful the country of Haiti was, both
the island and the people. I was overwhelmed with the Haitian
culture. They were so willing to help and serve others and to
work hard. If I were to describe the Haitians, they have unend-
ing, inspirational hope,” Capelli says.
“I want to emphasize it was not Virginia Tech students
building a bridge for Haiti. It was Virginia Tech students help-
ing Haitians build their own bridge. We could have
never completed the project without
the leadership of the Haitians,”
Capelli adds.
After the students returned from
their first trip, they went to work on
the design, enlisting the aid of two
CEE faculty members, Carin Roberts-
Wollmann and Tommy Cousins, who
have expertise in bridge design. Will
Collins, a doctoral student, also played an
ENGINEERING NOW14
integral role in helping students develop a design that would
withstand earthquakes.
The earthquake in January 2010 delayed the project, and
with the rainy season beginning each March, the students were
unable to return until November 2010. Then, surveys were con-
ducted, decisions were finalized, and they were ready to lay the
base foundations. The Haitians did the work while the students
finished their fall semester. The students returned in January
2011, and stayed two more weeks for the building of towers to
support the cables. When they left, all it needed was the wood
decking.
With 98 percent of Haiti deforested, finding wood of good
quality was no easy task. And again, they were faced with an-
other rainy season commencing in March.
However, when Capelli returned in early March, along
with the new leadership of Virginia Tech’s chapter of Bridges
to Prosperity, Chris Cooke, Tyler Welsh, Nick Mason, Kelsey
Brandt, and Kin Wong, the Haitians had completed the bridge.
However, the islanders had held off the ribbon cutting and
celebration until the students arrived on March 5 during their
spring break.
Even Mason’s father decided to join the team, telling the
students some people have to wait an entire lifetime to see two
communities come together. He wanted to see what his son
and others had accomplished.
“From now on, the Haitians have a complete sense of own-
ership. They will make all of the decisions on its upkeep and
maintenance,” Capelli says.
During the dedication, the Haitians responded to a survey
conducted by the students. Questions ranged from demograph-
ics of the users of the bridge to what it actually meant to them.
Capelli recalls one Haitian said, “I wish you could open up
my heart and see how happy I am because I can’t describe it.”
“We build bridges, but it is the relationships that we build
that really matter and the true power behind our purpose and
mission,” Capelli summarizes.
Related articles:http://www.b2p.org.vt.edu/?q=content/ti-peligre-bridge-completionhttp://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti/blog-entry/the-bridge-to-ti-peligre
www.eng.vt.edu2011 15
The importance of seed moneyWhen the Virginia Tech chapter of Bridges for Prosperity needed financial support for the concrete for the bridge foundations, it solicited funding from the Virginia Tech Student Engineers’ Council (SEC).
The SEC gave the chapter $5,000, and was one of its largest single do-nors. “We were a brand-new group with the SEC, and we did not expect the support. But the SEC gave us so much more than what we could have expected. We want a long-standing relationship with the SEC and to give back to them. They really stepped in and stepped up and we could not have completed the project on time without them,” says Matt Capelli, of Bridges to Prosperity.
After the installation of the bridge, the Rotary Club’s national chapter provided a $95,000 grant to the national organization of Bridges to Prosperity. The caveat: It will provide the successful Virginia Tech chapter with the money to completely fund two future bridges.
ENGINEERING NOW16
Can you imagine a hospital that does not have access to clean water on a regular
basis? Or a medical staff who throw their waste into a pile outside the hospital doors?
Neither can the Virginia Tech student members of Engineers Without Borders (EWB).
So, one of their current four projects is focusing on how to resolve clean water and
sanitation issues for the St. Therese Hospital in Hinche, Haiti. In another project, they
just completed the development of a maintenance and operation plan for a malfunction-
ing ultraviolet disinfection system for a free health clinic operated by the Virginia College
of Osteopathic Medicine in the Dominican Republic town of Verón.
By Lynn NystromFinding clean water for a Third world hospital
www.eng.vt.edu2011 17
“Engineers can create things that can have an impact on millions, billions of people. We have to make sure good ideas come to fruition.” — Darius Emrani
Engineering students working on both projects were able to
travel to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, divided into the
two countries, during their spring break in 2011, partially due
to the $1,000 in support from the Student Engineers’ Council
at Virginia Tech, according to Chelsea Shores, the 2010-11
president of the chapter and an ocean engineering major. “We
have to fund all of our own trips, so a large portion of our ef-
forts is fundraising,” she says.
“Once we start a commitment, such as our projects in
Haiti and the Dominican Republic, we maintain them for a
minimum of five years. This often represents a challenge as our
membership turns over. We have about 50 to 60 active mem-
bers, and we are one of the largest in the nation for the number
of projects we are involved in,” Shores reports.
Darius Emrani, one of the members of the group travel-
ing to Haiti, describes his academic spring break spent in the
central Haitian city of Hinche as anything but an island vaca-
tion. However, he left the island with a spirit of the university’s
motto, Ut Prosim, and inspired to achieve his long-term goals.
“Engineers can create things that can have an impact on mil-
lions, billions of people. We have to make sure good ideas come
to fruition,” Emrani says. “Everyday people’s needs are going
unmet, and it affects people’s health.”
Emrani knows this problem first-hand from his trip. The
hospital he visited was built in 1929, and the Haitian earth-
quake in 2010 compromised its aging problems even further
because of the increased number of patients afterward, as well
as the outbreak of cholera.
“In terms of sanitation, there were two main issues. Poor
hygiene in general was due to the lack of toilets for patients and
a lack of clean water for personal hygiene, drinking, and cleaning
the hospital. And in terms of medical waste, a recently installed
incinerator was missing one of its components and was not op-
erational,” Emrani, an electrical engineering honors student, says.
During their five-day stay in Haiti, Emrani and the other
members of his group, including faculty advisor Theo Dillaha
of biological systems engineering, met with the director of the
hospital to understand its priorities, as well as with administra-
tive specialists. They then evaluated the hospital complex, walk-
ing the site, and building a computer-aided-design diagram of
every meter of the space, including the locations of sinks, drain-
age, toilets, pit latrines, abandoned wells, water system infra-
structure, and even structural components such as bad gutters.
They met with the regional director of the national Depart-
ment of Potable Water to speak about the needs and learn
about the available sources of water.
Within a week of their trip, the students developed an
alternative to the water system
at the hospital that
addressed water pressure,
which they perceived to
be a major issue. They had
discovered that—because of
low water pressure in the public water system and the elevation
of the hospital’s water storage tank—the tank could not be filled
when it received water three times a week. A further complica-
tion was that the generators required to pump the water in the
hospital could not be run for more than eight hours per day since
the cost of fuel was prohibitive. Hence, power outages were com-
mon. Their solution: the Department of Portable Water agreed
to supply municipal water to the hospital every night, and the
hospital would then run a generator nightly to transfer municipal
water from a below ground storage tank to the hospital’s elevated
water storage tanks.
ENGINEERING NOW18
EWB may be able to accomplish more for the hospital by
working with Partners in Health, The Haitian Health Care
Foundation, and the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and
Population. The water pressure problem is just one aspect of
the teamwork. EWB is also working with the local Hinche
Rotary Club.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the island, Will Ayers, a
civil engineering major, led the EWB team that busily repaired
the ultraviolet water purification system used by the clinic and
elementary school in Verón, adjacent to the resort town of
Punta Cana. His team included Rafael Suriel, a native of the
Dominican Republic, and Jessica Hwang, of mechanical en-
gineering. They found some other U.S. colleagues there as the
Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine at the Virginia
Tech Corporate Research Center uses the medical facility as a
place to send some of its students for clinical experience.
www.eng.vt.edu2011 19
The purification system had not functioned for some five
months, and the Haitians had no ability to maintain its vital
components. Ayers and his team developed a maintenance
plan, including diagnostic procedures, a parts list, and general
cleaning guidelines. They met with the engineer at the nearby
resort and briefed him and his technicians about the plan. “The
ultraviolet aspect was the unique part of the system that they
were not familiar with,” Ayers explains.
When the EWB team left, the purification system was
working, and the clinic had a manual on how to keep it a clean
and working system. It probably helped that Ayers had already
obtained a chemistry degree and worked in water-quality
management for the U.S. Geological Survey before he decided
to pursue his second degree in engineering at Virginia Tech.
And it also helped that Dillaha has a UV water purification
system at his home near campus where the team could educate
themselves before they traveled to the island.
Corporate Sponsors
WSP Environmental
Schnabel Engineering
Wiley and Wilson
McDonough Bolyard
Malcolm Pirnie
CDM
CH2M Hill
Jansen Land Consulting
Individual Donors
Dr. Theo Dillaha
Brian McDonald
Kathy Norrenbrock
Edward Hofler
David Danner
Betty Sinclair
Marilyn Mitchell
Shirley Grossman
Chemical Engineering
Department
Honors Program
Student Engineers’ Council
John Markunas
John Allevi
Engineers without Borders-USA at Virginia Tech has its own
fundraising committee that allows it to participate in its
international projects. The funds they solicit are used to
subsidize costs for travel, material, and equipment.
Ayers, an avid traveler who at one point in his life took the
time to hike the Pacific Crest from Mexico to Canada, also pre-
pared with his team a visual assessment of the piping at Veron’s
elementary school. “It had a lot of leaks, causing a lot of loss in
pressure,” he says. A future project will probably evolve from
this discussion.
ENGINEERING NOW20
The movement toward greener, more Earth-friendly, low-emission vehicles is not just for cars anymore. It is moving toward motorcycles. Several international special-ty companies already sell electric motorcycles, and now an international race is entirely dedicated to the format. TTXGP is the world’s first zero toxic emissions motorcy-cle race series. It takes place in North America, Asia, and Europe, climaxing in Spain.
Student team builds an electric bike that can speed,
but won’t pollute
LIGHTNINGRIDE THE
By Steven Mackay
The 2010-11 BOLT senior design team includes (left to right) Paul Gray of Edgewater Park, N.J.; Rob Wax of Westchester County, N.Y.; Ben Boddery of Warrenton, Va.; Derek Coller of Yorktown, Va.; George Sink, of Bassett, Va.; and Ryan Davenport, of Chesapeake, Va.
No carbon footprint for this motorcycle
www.eng.vt.edu2011 21
In a crowded bay inside the Joseph F. Ware Jr. Advanced
Engineering Laboratory is the work of the BOLT (Battery
Operated Land Transportation) Team, a group of College of
Engineering seniors building an electric motorcycle for eventual
competition in the Grand Prix event in late 2012. For now, the
bike is mostly a skeletal chassis with wheels and some equip-
ment. The bike’s main body is a 2009 Honda CBR6000RR,
while the fork is from a Kawasaki ZX6R. The pieces were
welded together.
Components—such as the electric motor—sit on a work-
bench nearby or on shelves in a cabinet. Other senior design
projects also share the cage, including a robotic-wheeled device
designed to work on the moon and another contraption that
resembles a massive rat maze. Looking at the bike—a black
carbon body that one day will sport the Hokie Pride colors of
orange and maroon—is one of the team’s leaders, Rob Wax, a
senior from Westchester County, N.Y.
“I love two wheels,” Wax says with a grin. He started riding
dirt bikes as a child with a friend and the boy’s father, and the
hobby stuck. Wax street races—legally, he adds—and owns a
motorcycle, which he sold in April as part of his preparation to
move to Wisconsin for a post-college job. For him, joining the
BOLT team was natural, and instant.
“I wanted to find a project with two wheels,” he says, add-
ing that he was looking to put his motorcycle knowledge and
skills to use while learning.
Not everyone on the team is a motorcycle enthusiast like
Wax. One participant self-mockingly said he liked bicycling.
But whatever their connection to the project, faculty advisor
Saied Taheri, himself once a motorcycle sports participant and
enthusiast, has seen his students grow. “I could see the students
mature during the course of the project, where they looked at it
as a hobby when we started and took it very seriously as things
progressed,” says Taheri, an associate professor of mechanical
engineering.
This is the second BOLT electric motorcycle effort overseen
by Taheri. The first team finished in the 2009-10 year, but due
to finances was unable to compete in the worldwide finale of
the TTXGP event after doing quite well stateside. The chief
sponsor of the motorcycle took the vehicles once the competi-
tion was finished.
The current team opted for a combination of the two mo-
torcycle models, building on their own equipment, and adding
a 200-pound battery. It will feature DC batteries with AC out-
put, top out at 120 mph, and be able to hold a constant speed
of 80 mph. The bike is designed as a racer, but will eventually
be made highway ready. The engine will be an AC20 Thunder-
struck, as it was during the first BOLT effort. The motorcycle’s
design has developed from its beginnings as a magic-marker-
on-paper concept to CAD work on the Ware Lab’s computer
lab. Bowing to TTXGP weight limits, the team must keep the
vehicle under 500 pounds. Thus far, the students are well under
that threshold.
Safety is paramount in the design; the battery and electric
motor’s contacts with the outside elements must be limited,
and the batteries, meant to be changed out with ease, must be
Ryan Davenport, of Chesapeake, Va.; and Paul Gray, of Edgewater Park, N.J., work on a cylinder for BOLT.
ENGINEERING NOW22
(Left to right) John Meier, of Sterling Va.; George Sink, of Bassett, Va.; and Derek Coller of Yorktown, Va., all work on the bike, which will be finished by rising seniors during the 2011-12 academic year. The goals: race the electric bike in competition, and with zero emissions.
absolutely secured during motion in case of a crash. “We need
to bolt the batteries down very securely,” says one team mem-
ber. “We cannot have them coming off at 200 pounds.” The
engine and batteries must also be air-cooled to prevent over-
heating, which could cause the bike to break down.
Funding has been hard in the current economy for this
group as well. The Student Engineers’ Council (SEC) kicked
in $1,750 in the spring and $1,500 in the fall, and several
sponsors—Boeing, General Motors, FFR Trikes, Solutia—have
donated parts and/or money.
“The Student Engineers’ Council funding was quite vital
as they were very supportive of our team,” says team member
Ryan Davenport, of Chesapeake, Va. “Their requirement of
our team to become more active in their events allowed us to
get our name out to many more students than we were nor-
mally able to. We hope that the future BOLT teams will take
advantage of the SEC’s offers to stay active in the engineering
community and receive all of the support that the SEC
will give.”
The team hasn’t gotten everything it needs easily, so it
has turned to fundraising. “They got disappointed when we
couldn’t find any sponsors for the batteries,” says Taheri. “There
are a bunch of molds that we need to develop for fairings
to make the bike aerodynamically compatible with the race
requirements in addition to a host of other parts and pieces
which we still need.”
“We spend it right after we get it,” says Derek Coller, of
Yorktown, Va., the team’s 2010-11 leader.
The seniors on the 2010-11 team hope that by next year
their motorcycle—sleek and gleaming with its orange and
maroon paint job—will be taking practice laps at the Virginia
International Raceway in Danville, Va. This team will be work-
ing on their individual careers when the motorbike sees its rac-
ing glory, first in North America, and if successful, in Spain for
a world championship event. But the 2010-11 team members
will keep in touch. “I’d like to keep an eye on things and see
how it goes,” says Coller. “I think we have a good team for next
year. It looks promising.”
www.eng.vt.edu2011 23
Out of this
WORLDPassing the torch for space exploration
Virginia Tech College of Engineering juniors Nastia Ilinichna Soukhareva and Cameron Crowell stand in front
of the university-run observatory just off Prices Fork Road in Montgomery County. The students hope to put the
facility – located down a country road in a field — to more use during the 2011-12 academic year, possibly with
school tours and other events.
By Steven Mackay
For about five years Virginia Tech was without a Students
for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) club.
The group was dormant until the summer of 2010, when two
groups of students—one led by Cameron Crowell, a junior
from Winchester, Va., and the other by Brian Keller, a junior
from Charleston, W.Va.—decided to restart the group. The ef-
forts were launched separately unbeknownst to each other just
days apart. Keller was first, Crowell second.
“I got the idea to start something like that because there
were not many space-related activities at Virginia Tech at the
time that I was interning at NASA,” says Keller. “I knew a lot
of (aerospace and ocean engineering) students and I knew that
the campus could use something like that, and that with my
understanding of registered student organizations I could build
it.”
Keller served as president of the group at first. The club
found two faculty advisors, Kevin Shinpaugh, director of
cluster and research computing at Virginia Tech, and Troy
Henderson, assistant professor of aerospace and ocean engineer-
ing. There were also some bumps while reworking the group.
An original plan to design a heavy launch vehicle for a NASA-
sponsored competition fell by the wayside. Crowell eventually
took over the group because Keller was busy with his own
duties – serving as the Student Engineers’ Council chair for the
2010-11 academic year.
We wanted to “make the club more of a societal club where
students would have opportunities to explore the space industry
and do outreach to get more people involved,” says Crowell.
“This is the type of club SEDS traditionally is.”
The group had an operating budget of more than $5,000 a
semester, according to Keller. “In addition, I connected them
with the national SEDS organization, which then published an
article about us in their quarterly newsletter,” he adds.
The club attended a spring rocket launch at Kentland Farm
in Blacksburg that was sponsored by the American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics. The group also hosted Nahum
Arav, an associate professor in Tech’s College of Science physics
department, for an informal talk that ranged from early space
exploration to economic discussion on the costs of space travel
to satellites. It attracted about two dozen people from various
majors and of various ages. A handful of people in the room
remembered watching the Space Shuttle Challenger explode on
ENGINEERING NOW24
Jan. 28, 1986, but most of the attendees appeared to be watch-
ing the video footage for the first time.
“The rest (of the year) was basically planning and doing
logistics for next year,“ Crowell says. “This summer a few of us
are going to try and get our amateur rocketry licenses, with an
idea to eventually compete in a rocketry competition SEDS
hosts and/or build rockets.”
Nastia Ilinichna Soukhareva, a junior in aerospace engi-
neering from Northern Virginia, says she would like to see the
group host events for local school children on campus or at
observatories just off Prices Fork Road or near the Mountain
Lake resort in Giles County. During the summer break, she
planned to attend a Space Camp-type event at NASA’s Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Crowell says he hopes
other SEDS members can participate in similar summer efforts
and that the group can participate in various space-themed
competitions.
Student Engineers’ Council funding already has been vital
to the group. “The funds needed to start the club were very
important,” Crowell says. SEC funds even helped with basic
necessities, such as advertising, building a temporary kiosk for
the Drillfield, and having identifier polo shirts made. “Funds in
the future will help with sending representatives to conferences
that are attended by many leaders of the space industry, help
pay for projects the club takes on, and help us to do outreach in
local schools,” he adds.
A new interest in space exploration is timely, Crowell says.
“There are changes going on in the space industry that are just
as important as what happened in the 1960s. With the end of
the Space Shuttle program, the torch has been passed off to pri-
vate companies to ‘get people to space,’ and already the price to
do so has dropped tremendously. It’s exciting to be witnessing
these events and it’s easy to get inspired to be involved.”
Even though the club now consists mostly of engineering
students, Crowell and Soukhareva want to see it encompass
all majors and interests. “One of my goals is to get the word
out that space isn’t just for engineers; we need people to get
involved from business backgrounds as well as communica-
tions, art, journalism, and even agriculture—people need to eat
in space, you know,” he said.
Keller agrees. “My hopes are that they can find a way to
bridge gaps between majors and colleges, bringing students
together and build excitement about the space industry within
Virginia Tech by pushing for more faculty research in the astro-
propulsion and other space-related fields.” High-profile speak-
ers and participation in national conferences and competitions
also are on his wish list.
His chapter on the Linux and Unix Users Group has also
ventured into map-making, putting Blacksburg and campus in
extraordinary detail into the online OpenStreetMap project.
This map, tailored for all Hokie followers to use, shows the
routes and up-to-the-minute locations of Blacksburg Transit
buses, as well as pedestrian paths (including where stairs are),
volleyball courts, recycling bins, bike racks, and trails
(http://map.vtluug.org/).
For Engineers’ Week, the group hosted an arcade games
booth. With borrowed projector, screen, and Wiimote, they
gave booth visitors a chance to play with some of the recre-
ational software that GNU/Linux has to offer.
To improve upon its ability to assist Virginia Tech students,
the group petitioned the Student Engineers’ Council in 2010-
11 for $800 in support to install a dedicated server for its com-
puting needs. Previously, their work was conducted on a virtual
machine. With the financial support, they bought all of their
own parts, including a “tricky power supply and an oddball
connector,” Covington says, and spent hours putting the server
together, with the help of their advisor John Harris, a systems
engineer in the College of Engineering.
By the time the group held its 2011 Installfest, when its
experienced computer geeks were on hand to assist other
students with the installation of the free software, the server
was in place. With a few clicks and about 30 minutes of time,
Covington and his cohorts were able to install the GNU/Linux
software on each new machine brought to the event.
GEEKS SPEAK Continued from page 11
The College of Engineering’s Development Office hosted an appreciation luncheon, recognizing the more than $1 million in gifts that the Student Engineers’ Council has awarded to numerous engineering projects sponsored by Virginia Tech. President Charles W. Steger was the guest speaker. From left to right are: John Sherwood, director of finance; Rebecca Dickos, vice chair; Steger; Brian Keller, chair; Richard Benson, dean of engineering; and John Lohr, Expo chair for 2011.
Credits:
Dean: Richard C. Benson
Editor and Writer: Lynn Nystrom
Writers: Steven Mackay and Lindsey Haugh
Art Director: David Stanley
Designer: Robin Dowdy
Photographers: Kelsey Kradel, John McCormick, Jim Stroup, Steven Mackay, and members of the EWB and Bridges to Prosperity student groups.
Contributors: Richard Lovegrove
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ENGINEERING NOW College of EngineeringVirginia Polytechnic Instituteand State UniversityBlacksburg, Virginia 24061