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New Orleans Senior Design Project

 
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wckirby



Joined: 10 Dec 2005
Posts: 355
Location: New Orleans

PostPosted: Fri Jan 20, 2006 11:56 am    Post subject: New Orleans Senior Design Project Reply with quote

During Wynton Marsailis' wonderful speech on MLK, he implored Tulane students to make a difference in New Orleans. I think the best way to do that is to dedicate our senior design project to trying to solve some of the engineering problems facing New Orleans.

I'm emailing all the mechanical engineering students who said they were interested, professors that said they were interested in helping out, and several EE/CS professors. We will most likely need a few EE/CS students in our projects, so I'd like to reach out to the other department (including the professor that runs the other senior design course) to help us recruit students and help us with their engineering knowledge.

Here's the agenda for the moment:

1.- Gather information. In order to solve a problem, you need to define the problem.

* I'm trying to organize a "Magical Misery Tour" of the devastated areas. I've got a couple of volunteer drivers to help get us out there. If anyone knows anyone working at the breach sites, it would be nice to get in there and get a tour of what they're doing. When I toured the breaches back in November, you could just walk right up to the breaches and stand on top of the temporary repairs.

* Dr. Bruce has volunteered to put me in contact with Joe Sullivan. He's a senior engineer at the Sewerage and Water Board. We need to get a tour of the pumping stations to find out what their problems are.

* If anyone else has any ideas of something we need to check out, let me know and I'll include it in the next email.

2.- Come up with ideas. Here are 2 basic ideas I've come up with off the top of my head. This doesn't have to be what we end up doing, but this is a good start to get the brain juices flowing.

* Come up with a way to automate the Wood-screw pumps. Half of Jefferson Parish and the I-10 underpass got flooded because there wasn't someone there to flip the switch.

* A smart sandbag. A few years ago, the University of Illinois came up with a "smart brick" filled with sensors and a low-bandwidth wireless card. The brick could gather information about the stresses in a building. Let's come up with a smart sandbag that can monitor the status of a levees, possibly warning where a breach will occur, and when there is a breach, people know exactly where and how large the breach is instantly.


New Orleans needs engineering and let's do what we can to help out.


NOTE- I FIRST SENT THIS OUT AS AN EMAIL. I WAS LAZY AND JUST COPY AND PASTED IT TO THE FORUM. IF ANYONE IS INTERESTED IN HELPING OUT OR HAS A CONTACT THAT MIGHT BE ABLE TO ASSIST US IN OUR ENDEAVOR, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO BE AN ENGINEER TO HELP US OUT.
_________________
Clay Kirby
11th generation New Orleanian
4th generation Tulanian
Mechanical Engineering Class of '06
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