Student dedicates time to studying abroad 3 times

By Audra Giese
When Jessica Barringer was a sophomore at University of Hartford she participated in her first experience abroad, with Engineers Without Borders.
She went to India with a group of 12 students from UHa with EWB and helped give the town of Abheypur a clean water supply.
After Barringer’s initial experience abroad, she became inspired by the work she had done there, changed her major to civil engineering and worked to go abroad again to learn more about regulations and policies about limiting water usage and how water recycling could help with the crisis.
“The standard of life increases and with that you have people using more and more water,” said Barringer of the problems with water. “People just aren’t using it sustainably.”
Part of the problem is that people use the water and it is treated and put back into the freshwater supply, but at a lower quality than the original.
Barringer points out that this wastes a lot of energy and a lot of water.
“It’s a big problem and that’s why I’m going into the field. If nothing happens with this then I absolutely believe that the next world war will be over water.”
Barringer spent the fall of her junior year studying civil engineering in Galway, Ireland. After coming back home for three weeks she headed back to India for her spring semester, this time in Pune, outside Mumbai.
Though it was difficult to spend such a short time with her family and friends before leaving again on another semester abroad, Barringer found the determination to push through.
During the spring semester in Pune, Barringer took classes to finish elective requirements and quickly became used to being immersed in a large city and looking different than everyone else.
Inspired by her first time abroad with EWB Barringer also took an internship with Thermax India, an energy and environmental engineering company.
With Thermax she studied the water in the region and how the role of government plays in the attempts to find sustainable solutions for clean water.
“International relations are strained because of water policy and usage,” explains Barringer. “Huge water issues between Israel and Palestine and all throughout Africa can’t be resolved.”
Barringer points out that most major rivers in the world flow through so many different countries and when the countries upstream take more water and build dams to keep the water from flowing downstream, the countries there are going dry.
“There needs to be more policy about these main rivers in order to prevent conflict,” argued Barringer. Barringer graduates next month and has been accepted to graduate school at Oxford University in England to study Water Science, Policy and Management.
 Source: http://hartfordinformer.com/2012/04/entertainment/student-dedicates-time-to-studying-abroad-3-times/

Eppes, Milanovic, Shetty, and Daly Present Paper at Conference in India

Professor Eppes presenting at the conference.

Jenna Daly, undergraduate student in mechanical engineering

Tom Eppes, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, CETA; Ivana Milanovic, associate professor of mechanical engineering, CETA; Devdas Shetty, professor of mechanical engineering, and Jenna Daly, mechanical engineering student, presented a research paper at the International Conference on Innovation and Trends in Applied Computing (ITAC), which took place in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India, in February.

The paper, "Characterization of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Wing Design," describes the aerodynamic characteristics of a single wing design for use in an unpowered vehicle. A 2D computational fluid dynamics model was developed to predict key performance parameters. The lift/drag ratio is of primary importance to ensure the vehicle has the required glide range. The model was developed with the COMSOL 4.2 computational fluid dynamics module using the single phase flow interface with low Reynolds number k-e turbulence model. Studies are conducted for angles of attack from 0 to 15 degrees at a mean velocity of 70 m/s corresponding to a Reynolds number of about 50,000.

This work was initiated and done in-part during the new course ES 591 Multiphysics Modeling and it can be found in the ITAC 2012 proceedings published in the book form: Eppes, T., Milanovic, I., Shetty, D. & Daly, J. (2012). Characterization of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Design. In M. Kshirsagar, B. Patil, U. Gawande, L. Manzione, D. Shetty, & T. Eppes (Eds.), Proceedings of International Conference on Innovation and Trends in Applied Computing (pp. 3-6), Nagpur, Maharashtra, India. Support of WELFund and Dorothy Goodwin Summer Scholarship is gratefully acknowledged.