ME Winners

Woodruff School Innovation Shines at Capstone Design Expo

December 3, 2024
By Chloe Arrington

Georgia Tech students once again showed off their innovation and ingenuity with over 100 teams from three colleges and nine schools presenting their senior design projects at the Fall 2024 Capstone Design Expo. Projects showcased a variety of creativity and inventiveness, seeking to provide solutions for real-world problems in industry, developing communities, and those with real commercialization potential.

The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering was represented by 39 teams at this semester's expo and saw success in several categories. Team Megatronics, comprised of Woodruff School students Jonathan Hampton, Matthew Hawn, John Heyerdahl, Evan Rodgers, Avery Skolnick, and Coleman Thompson, won best overall mechanical engineering project.

Megatronics designed a fully autonomous sock packaging system for commercial manufacturers to receive, bag, label, and box socks. Their team was sponsored by clothing manufacturer Crystal S.A.S., which works with companies such as Lululemon and ALO to create various clothing products.

Mechanical engineering student Jongseob Lee was a member of the best interdisciplinary project-winning team Tap Labs, along with students Songji Eun (EE), Aryan Gupta (EE), Juan Macias Romero (CmpE), and Daksh Sehgal (CS).

The team developed a low-powered communications system for national parks to allow visitors with mobile phones to reach help — and each other — even with no cellular signal. The network is solar-powered, unobtrusive, and can send text messages and locations.

The team initially intended to build an emergency network to help find lost hikers in sprawling national parks. But they quickly realized they could do more.

Tap Labs was one of several groups participating in capstone design through the CREATE-X entrepreneurship program. They hope to continue developing their network and test it in Atlanta-area parks.

"Talking to park rangers and looking at the numbers, search and rescue is a huge problem. However, the problem that visitors face every day is communicating with others in their group. There's often no service," said team member and electrical engineering major Aryan Gupta. "So, if we're already making a service that lets you contact SOS or emergency medical services, it's not a huge leap for us to also include a way to communicate with other people in the park."

Team Agrivoltaic Vineyards, which included mechanical engineering students Akash Chennuri, Jonathan Choi, Ciera Hudson, and Savannah Luney, received the award for best industrial design and engineering project. The team co-designed an agrivoltaic system with Palestine Polytechnic University and the West Bank community to provide the ability to generate power, increase future economic development, and preserve legacy with a long-term climate-resilient crop-shading system in family-owned farms in the West Bank.

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Along with the overall wins, five of the eight teams who received honorable mentions included mechanical engineering students, four of the teams were comprised of exclusively mechanical engineering students, and the fifth was an interdisciplinary team. 

Honorable mentions were given to: The Mechs (ME), MyField (ME), No Bugs, Just Features (ME), Six Sigma (Interdisciplinary), and Woodward Truck Month (ME).

For the first time, the fall expo also included a redux of sorts for past projects. Five teams from a new pilot interdisciplinary course, Product Design and Realization, were charged with building on concepts created by past capstone design teams and moving them closer to marketable products.

The course, aimed mainly at third-year business, engineering, and design students, is part of a new initiative called TechMade. TechMade aims to give Georgia Tech students hands-on exposure to the full sweep of product realization, from design to manufacturing, regardless of their major.

See Woodruff School winners from the Capstone Design Expo below and click here to view a photo gallery from the event.
 


Companies, entrepreneurs, and organizations interested in sponsoring projects in the Capstone Design class can contact Director of Design & Innovation Amit Jariwala. For more information on what projects are a good fit for the course, please review this brief YouTube video.

Some content taken from the news article, Lung Surgery Patients, Lost Hikers Could Benefit from Top Capstone Expo Projects, written by the College of Engineering.