Engineering Student Takes His Capstone Design Project to Kenya to Help Rural Farmers

Alex Schettino decided for his mechanical engineering capstone design project to take on the challenge of improving agricultural productivity in Western Kenya where food security is a problem faced by many rural farmers.  After discussing the issue with Dr. Bernard den Ouden (Philosophy Professor) and Dr. David Pines (Civil Engineering Professor) who had traveled to the region in summer 2009, Alex used his creativity in designing a mechanical thresher that used appropriate and affordable materials in Western Kenya.

With funding from friends of the College of Engineering, Technology & Architecture, Alex and Dr. David Pines traveled to Kenya in July 2011 to fabricate, test, and demonstrate the thresher for harvesting amaranth grain.  The stage was set for a very successful trip by Dr. Marcia Hughes (Center for Social Research Assistant Director, University of Hartford) and Marene Ferguson (Hartford Art School Student) who coordinated the building of the thresher at a local polytechnic school during their trip to Kenya in June 2011.  Also, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) partnered with Alex in coordinating demonstrations of the thresher at three farms growing amaranth grain. 

 

The construction of the thresher was successful and it was time to head to the fields to test out the thresher and get feedback from the farmers on what they like and on potential improvements to the design.

 

Many of the farmers, both men and women, tested the thresher.  Feedback was very positive!!

Tests were then done to compare the mechanical thresher that Alex designed to the traditional method of threshing with flails.  It was no contest, the rural farmers comments were “machine thresher is much easier and takes less energy,” “product is much cleaner with no rocks or sand,” and “good amount of seeds from amaranth harvested using machine.”

Weighting the Amaranth

Traditional Method of Threshing

Clean grain from Machine Thresher

Much Work Remains to Clean Grain

 

There is still much work ahead of the University of Hartford team to bring the thresher to market.  We continue to work with KARI in providing outreach to the community and helping us create a market where the local artisans sell the affordable thresher to rural farmers who use it to increase their productivity.  A win-win situation all around and a sustainable solution to solving the food security problem facing rural farmers in Western Kenya and a model that can be replicated in East Africa and beyond!

CETA’s first recipient of the Dorothy Goodwin Summer Scholarship

 

Surface Temperature of a Potato and Electric Field within a Microwave Oven

                                    

Symmetrical Airfoil Velocity Magnitude: Angle of Attack 20°

Jenna Daly, a senior mechanical engineering student from Pleasant Valley, NY, is CETA’s first recipient of the Dorothy Goodwin Summer Scholarship – a highly selective research grant sponsored by WELFund. Ms. Daly has spent this summer modeling complex fluid flows with multi-physics solvers such as COMSOL and FLUENT. She is currently involved in Computational Fluid Dynamics research on vortical flows with Professor Ivana Milanovic. Ms. Daly is working to match her simulation’s data to the experimental data; that is to say, she is using FLUENT and Tecplot in an attempt to validate the simulation she has created. If she can do so, one can have confidence in the simulation and use it for other experiments. You can learn more about Ms. Daly and her activities checking her LinkedIn profile:

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=107976329&trk=tab_pro

Vampire Tutoring is back!

Vampire Tutoring for

Math, BIO & CHEM

 

Tutors are now available for walk-ins MATH—Mondays and Wednesday

      (beginning Sept 7)

10pm-Midnight in Hawk Hall 106

Math Courses: 110, 140, 144, 145

BIO/CHEM—Tuesday (beginning Sept 13)

10pm-Midnight in Hawk Hall 106

BIO: 110, 111, 122, 123       CHEM: 110 and 111

Milanovic Participates in NASA University Programs Summer Poster Session

Ivana Milanovic, associate professor of mechanical engineering, CETA, presented her work at the NASA GRC University Programs Poster Session on August 11 in Cleveland, Ohio. The title of her poster was "Effect of Artificial Perturbation of Wake Vortices in Jets in Cross-Flow."

Milanovic also successfully completed the 2011 NASA Faculty Fellowship Program. The fellowship was hosted by the Turbomachinery and Propulsion Systems Division and the duration of tenure was 10 weeks, during which Milanovic conducted an experimental investigation of unsteady wake vortices of jets in cross-flow in order to explore the possibility of periodic perturbation of these vortices with the method of oscillating tabs.

Nagurney Presents at Montreal Conference

Ladimer S. Nagurney, associate professor of electrical, computer, and biomedical engineering, CETA, was coauthor of a paper, "Medical Nuclear Supply Chain Design: A Tractable Network Model and Computational Approach," presented at the Seventh Conference on Integrated Risk Management in Operations and Global Supply Chains at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, July 31-August 1, 2011.

The conference, co-sponsored by McGill University, the Management Science Research Center at the Desautels Faculty of Management, the Group for Research in Decision Analysis (GERAD), a multi-university research center located in Montreal, and the Boeing Center on Technology, Information and Manufacturing (BCTIM) at Washington University in St. Louis, was intended to facilitate and stimulate interactions and knowledge sharing on important issues of risk management in global supply chains. The conference extended beyond stimulating research presentations to constructively challenge current practices and research paradigms, and, with a single track, offered the opportunity for productive interactions among speakers and conference participants.

The paper, coauthored with Anna Nagurney of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, develops a tractable network model and computational approach for the design and redesign of medical nuclear supply chains focusing on the supply chain of the most commonly used radioisotope for medical imaging utilized in cardiac and cancer diagnostics. The generalized network model, which derives formulae for the arc and path multipliers that capture the underlying physics of radioisotope decay, is a multiple criteria system-optimization model that includes total cost minimization, the minimization of cost associated with nuclear waste discarding, and also risk management, coupled with investment (or disinvestment) costs. Its solution yields the optimal link investments as well as the optimal product flows so that demand at the medical facilities is satisfied. It's framework provides the foundation for further empirical research and the basis for the modeling and analysis of supply chain networks for other very time-sensitive medical products.

See a copy of the presentation.

Source: http://www.hartford.edu/daily/Articles.asp?MainID=11079&Category=4