VCU news

By Cheryle Caplinger
School of Engineering

On Friday, April 24, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Engineering seniors will present their yearlong academic projects at the 2015 Capstone Design Expo at the Science Museum of Virginia. 

This spring’s expo will feature an unprecedented number of projects completed by student teams across the school’s five departments through advantageous partnerships and a surge in industry sponsorship. The event opens at 9:30 a.m. with general public viewing and concludes with the award ceremony at 2 p.m.  

“Capstone is the pinnacle of the senior design experience,” said L. Franklin Bost, executive associate dean of the School of Engineering. “The education experience is paramount, and part of this is getting the students involved in the environment.”

Close working relationships with faculty and industry advisers enable students to practice problem analysis, solution-based investigation and prototyping in a real engineering workplace.

Ben Ward, Ph.D., associate professor, is the new Capstone Designcoordinator.

“Last academic year, we had 62 projects, 10 of which were sponsored from outside the School of Engineering,” Ward said. “This year, out of the total 77 projects, 45 were sponsored from outside.” Partners include Jefferson Lab, Dominion, Evonik Industries and Newport News Shipbuilding, as well as VCU Health Sciences.

Two project examples with exciting potential for industry innovation are "Big Data Indexing for Terabyte Scale Document Search” and "Wind Energy Harvesters for Urban Small Scale Power Generation.”

Timo Selvaraj, co-founder of SearchBlox software, mentored computer science students Zachery Johnson, Tri Nguyen and Thomas Veale on the first project. Their research offers an alternative to cloud storage. “This project has been really exciting,” said Selvaraj, “working with the students to direct them toward the right goals, working in a team setting and also giving them the technical background to go about implementing the product.” 

"Wind Energy Harvesters for Urban Small Scale Power Generation” gave electrical and computer engineering students Zachary Gartrell, James McNamee and Andrew Krupacs hands-on experience designing novel methods for power generation. 

“If we can figure out a way to make these produce a lot of power for really cheap, we could start seeing them built into the architecture of buildings to have people producing their power locally and reduce the strains on power plants,” Gartrell said.

Capstone Design Expo will display approximately 70 student team projects in a forum open to sponsors, faculty, students, benefactors of the School of Engineering and the general public. Ward said, “The value of Capstone Senior Design is not just ‘Can I get an ‘A’ in this course,’ but ‘Can I apply what I have learned to be successful in my first job?’”

Prior to the expo, the Mark A. Sternheimer Grant for Capstone Senior Design is presented to projects exhibiting outstanding innovation and entrepreneurship. Representatives from companies in the Greater Richmond area judge the winners, who are given the opportunity to showcase their projects to professionals in the engineering field on April 23. 

Public parking is available at the Science Museum of Virginia for general viewing on Friday, April 24. Round-trip VCU bus transportation will be available from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. every 30 minutes between the School of Engineering East Hall, 401 W. Main St., and the Science Museum of Virginia.

Discover more about the Capstone Design Expo athttp://www.egr.vcu.edu/senior-capstone-design/home/.

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