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On Friday, April 22, LU College of Engineering hosted the annual Senior Design Symposium. Graduating seniors presented their final capstone projects, representing the culmination of a year of work, to industry judges. This year, a total of 38 teams from Civil and Environmental, Chemical, Electrical, Industrial and Mechanical Engineering competed to win a chance to become the grand champion of the symposium. 

“Senior design is a very important part of the engineering degree. A person is tasked with a topic they are not familiar with and told to create something out of the skills they have learned over their time at school. Most people probably think ‘that should be easy’ but in truth, it isn’t” said Bradley Gray, electrical engineering ’22. “A person must spend time researching a way to achieve the goal of the project, implement it, and deal with the problems that arise from the implementation. Most of the learning that I did in the project was getting hardware in my hands and trying to implement systems that had only been theorized by the team. Ultimately, I believe that’s where the learning happens, and I am happy to have done it. I will always be able to take the skill of being able to troubleshoot with me.”

“We have worked hours, late nights, early mornings over the span of two semesters” said Kyleigh Dixon, civil engineering ’22. “It was definitely nerve-racking to present in front of our professors that we’ve had over the years, but it was also a great feeling to know that we have come to this point and now we’re done!”

Department winners included “DG2” for Chemical Engineering, “Touchdown Engineering” for Civil and Environmental Engineering, mentored by Colby Howell, PE and Tyler Heneki, “Process Improvement for Transmission Liners at Bell Textron” for Industrial Engineering, and “HPVSea” for Mechanical Engineering, funded by OCI Beaumont, TotalBoat, Kieschnick Industries, and Callahan Machine Works Inc, and Interdisciplinary team “It is Rocket Science.” “Team Vulcan” won the Electrical Engineering Department prize, and were named Grand Prize winners. The winning group was mentored by NASA’s George Salazar, and was funded by the Texas Space Grant Consortium.

“It was exciting to learn something new. We learned new processes and used different machines that we have never used before” said Dylan Morgan, mechanical engineering ’22.
“This took everybody. Everyone pitched in and we all did our best until we made the final project. The timeline came pretty fast and everything kept piling up but we buckled down and got it all finished. 

Although there could only be one winner per category and one overall winner, the volunteer judges, who represent industry in each field, had a difficult time choosing a winner this year. They ultimately chose “Team Vulcan” for their project titled Vehicle Interchangeable Electronic Controller Network System.

“Working together really showed how difficult it is to work remotely on one project the entire year. We all live in different areas, ” explained Alexander Bahrim, electrical engineering ’22. “I personally work at an automation firm in Houston. Planning team meetings, ordering the right parts, and spending hours a day on discord [for] team meetings, along with the incredible efforts of my teammates on the network system, compiling and displaying the code for the GUI, and building the entire assembly made this all possible.” 

The Senior Design Symposium would not be possible without our many sponsors, including ExxonMobil, Chevron Phillips Chemical, INEOS, Motiva, and the American Society of Chemical Engineers.