Fourth KAS CRSL research conference
“Innovative research and creativity at AUB”
FYP Posters
Hostler center
Thursday May 7, 2015
Schoolman: A Scholastic Management Information System
Rene Adaimi, Christian Massabni, Joseph Mourad
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
American University of Beirut
Beirut, Lebanon
Emails: , ,
Presentation type reference: Poster
Abstract
Half of AUB students take more than two hours in building their first schedule. One third fail to register a course because of an obscure restriction. This is why we propose Schoolman, a complementary application to most Scholastic Information Management Systems (SIS) which aims to simplify the lives of students and faculty by providing an intuitive and efficient way to organize and manage their courses. Features include registration facilities, scheduling and handling of grades. Chief among Schoolman’s assets is a modern Javascript UI (user interface) which allows real time feedback and conflict detection. Schoolman will thus replace a tedious, error prone and time consuming pen and paper procedure in which the students will have to figure out which courses are adequate for their schedule. In order to further minimize student frustration in the face of the competitive registration system, a report will be generated listing all the courses in demand and handed to the respective departments. This is known as the pre-registration phase and will allow for better planning administration wise, and alleviate the pressure on registration day. The data will be stored in a MySQL database on a server which uses a REST architecture and the Apache webserver.
Professors will also benefit from our new grade uploader, a script that acts as a plugin to the Banner™ SIS and offers a new perspective on the tedious task of uploading. Professors will be able to enter their grades, not one by one as the old system would have it, but simply by the click of a button, offering increased reliability and speed.
Design and Fabrication of an Angular Steering Mobile Robotic Platform
Authors Arbid Josepy, Dib Samer, Rahal Rahaf, Rahbani Dana
Emails , , ,
Department Mechanical Engineering
Preference Poster
Level Senior Students
Abstract
“Intelligent rescue robotic units” are needed in emergencies or in areas that are too difficult for people to navigate through, such as damaged infrastructures after earthquakes or buildings on fire [1]. Mobile robots sent into the areas to investigate the damage or send first aid supplies to victims should be able to overcome obstacles found in these environments, which can range from naturally rough terrains to stairs. This project concerns the development of a simple mobile robotic platform that is capable of navigating through rough terrains as well as overcoming obstacles found in human environments; the platform should also be easy to manufacture and to control from a distance. Numerous other robots have been presented to attempt to solve the problem, but their mechanical and/or electrical designs create significant complications. Some of these robots have more than a dozen degrees of freedom, others use a large number of expensive wheels, and many require advanced manufacturing techniques and control strategies [2, 3]. The objective of this work is to design and build a platform that is capable of solving the problems brought about by previous designs of step-climbing robots. A novel non-vertical steering mechanism suggested by Dr. Elie Shammas and Dr. Daniel Asmar has been proposed to solve the problem. Their preliminary design of the “swivel steering” mobile base has been thoroughly analyzed by Wael Salem, whose results mark the starting point of this work. The objective behind this work is to expand on the suggested platform by designing and building an active-joint four-wheel drive mobile robotic platform that can steer by rotating its shaft and lifting a wheel completely off the ground, a mechanism called “swivel steering” [2]. The platform must also have a simple mechanical design, a maximum step height that is independent of the wheel diameter, a minimal number of actuators, a low center of gravity and a simple control algorithm. This project contributes to developing simple mechanical and electrical systems needed to build a robot with a “swivel” steering mechanism. These systems have not been developed by any party yet and can impact the development of “rescue robots”. The poster summarizes the work accomplished by the team in six months to design, manufacture and assemble the novel platform.
Refereces
[1] A. Meghdari, F. Amiri, A. Baghani, H. Mahboubi, A. Lotfi, Y. Khalighi, R. Karimi, H. Nejat, M. Amirian, Sh. Kamali, and S. Moradi. “CEDRA,” in RoboCup Rescue Robot League Competition Awardee Paper, 2003, pp. 1-6.
[2] W. A. Salem. “Analysis of a Mobile Robot with an Angular Swivel Steering Mechanism with Applications to Step Climbing.” M.En. Thesis, American University of Beirut, Lebanon, 2014.
[3] E. Shammas and D. Asmar. “Kinematic Analysis of an Active Angular Swivel Steering Mechanism for Robotic Mobile Bases,” in Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics, 2012, pp. 2138-2143.
CFD Model of a Solar Wind Energy Tower
Rani Assaf, Elias El Zoghbi, Mohamad Al-Sharif, Kevin Chiha
Abstract
The aim of this project is to build a 3D CFD model of a solar wind energy tower using ANSYS FLUENT in order to simulate its performance under realistic weather conditions in the region of Saudi Arabia. The main advantage that the Solar Wind Energy Tower offers over the traditional energy sources is its clean electricity. The concept of the operation of the tower is based on as follows: dry air is collected on the top of the tower where the cool water droplets are sprayed which are then immediately evaporated by the hot dry air; the dry air becomes denser and consequently accelerates downwards (downdraft) by gravitational effects. The air flowing down at high speeds reaches the base of the tower where multiple turbines are installed to produce electrical energy. The numerical methodology starts by drawing the exact tower geometry (Height = 1000m, Base Diameter = 560m) followed by generating the numerical grid. In order to mimic the weather conditions in Saudi Arabia, a virtual environment was constructed around the tower, not reported earlier. The Lagrangian-Eulerian (LE) approach is adopted to resolve the multiphase flow nature of the problem. In this approach, the humid air is treated as a continuous phase by solving the time-averaged Navier-Stokes equations; whereas, the water droplets are treated as dispersed (discrete) phase. The continuous and dispersed phases are fully coupled where exchange of mass, momentum and energy occurs via source terms. Wind speed and temperature profiles were assigned as boundary conditions based on correlations (to account for variations in height) and from gathered weather data of Saudi Arabia. The sprayer located at the top of the tower was modeled using the surface sprayer implemented in FLUENT. Water droplets are ejected with a spray rate which is dependent on the humid air flow rate entering the tower (≈ 7 grams of water liquid per kilogram of air) each of diameter 100 micrometers and a temperature of 24oC. Moreover, a simple conceptual prototype of the tower was built to show the notion of the tower operation.
Optimization of cooling system of Injection Molding Process
Ahmad Ayoub, Ali Al-Mostafa Atweh, Ibrahim Helbawi , Mahdi Hijazi
Department of Mechanical engineering
Injection molding process is a technique used to produce plastic bodies. The main steps in the process are injection, cooling, ejection, and ventilation. However, cooling takes the greatest portion of time (about 80%), thus decreasing the cooling time will result in a direct increase in the productivity and thus an increase in profits. The main purpose of our project is to reach design standards and methods that would decrease the cooling time while keeping the plastic piece as defect free as possible, all while understating the physics of the problem. The economic aspect will also be taken into consideration as the results will directly be implemented in the local industry.
First, we did a literature review to comprehend the whole process and the main parameters that we can control. In addition, we identified the main standards that indicate whether the product is acceptable or not (volumetric shrinkage, weld lines, air traps…), and the parameters that mainly affect them, such as the temperature gradient and cooling rate. Our sponsor, COPAR for Molds and Mechanical Engineering, is a company that designs and reaches prototypes to be produced on a large scale. It relies on trying multiple designs and it manufactures many prototypes, usually with defects until it reaches acceptable results. This process is time consuming and economically inefficient. They mainly rely on a simulation program, “Autodesk MoldFlow”. Our focus is to understanding the way Autodesk MoldFlow does the analysis, and to discover the true potential of this software until we are able to do actual designs using the software. Autodesk MoldFlow will be used to simulate the injection molding process with the aim of optimizing the cooling system. The simulations are accompanied with analytical models built from first principles. The result of the project will be either verifying the cooling system designs utilized by the sponsor, or finding better designs than what they actually used, and thus we will ultimately be helping the local industry.
Quantum Computing
Final Year Graduation Project
Rafeh, Bayan
Department of Computer Science
Saleh, Adel
Department of Computer Science
Zakhour, George
Department of Computer Science
March 26, 2015
Abstract
Quantum algorithms are intrinsically di_erent than classical ones, formany reasons, the most relevant being that the CPU performs preparemanipulate-measure cycles as opposed to fetch-execute ones. Moreoverthe linearity of the Schr odinger equation forces all operations to be unitaryinvertible matrices. It is thus natural to obtain this difference betweenthe quantum and classical environment.
Our project is to formalize and construct this environment, a \functional"programming language and a quantum virtual machine with quantumcontrol that can be ran as a service on any machine. No such languagenor pure quantum machine has been developed before. What has beendeveloped are procedural programming languages that combine classicaland quantum code in one place which is executed in a hybrid quantumclassicalvirtual machine. Splitting this system makes more sense andmakes the environment more modular (similar to what we predict willhappen if quantum computers were to exist).
Presentation Preference Poster.
Smart Heads-Up Display for Cars
ECE department
Group members:
James
Yves
Christelle El Ters
Price: Best FYP Poster for seniors
Abstract:
The automotive industry involves billions of people every day. The average person spends 101 minutes a day driving. Statistics provided by the Lebanese Internal Security Forces show that there were 3305 car crashes in Lebanon in 2013, leading to 564 casualties. Other statistics provided by Michael Pines law firm in San Diego state that the number one cause of accidents is distracted driving. The goal of our final year project is to design and develop a prototype for a smart Heads-Up Display (HUD) for cars that enhances driving safety by creating a new user interface for the vehicle that displays all necessary information without the need to look away from the road. Our product provides state of the art safety features such as obstacle detection and safe Heads-Up navigation, it also interfaces with the user’s phone to display caller ID and SMS alerts, all without distracting the driver. Our HUD design is divided into five logical blocks: display, control, image processing, phone interfacing and navigation. The display block displays the information and maintains the windshield’s transparency. Information displayed includes navigation information, phone information, and road obstacles. The control block collects information and data from the others blocks and commands the display block. Based on the current speed and environment, the control block enables/disables functionalities to address safety issues. The image processing block processes images from a real time feed of the road and extracts useful information such as obstacles, hazards and Points of Interest. The phone interfacing block feeds information from the phone to the control block while the navigation block handles all GPS and guiding tasks. The challenges we expect to face are mainly to find a feasible yet complete solution to display our information in transparency.
Rotating Poles
ABSTRACT:
Marai factory in Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest factories in the region. This company uses crates to distribute its products to all the country. After distribution, the crates are placed on a conveyor belt which inputs the crates, one after the other, to a washer which cleans from any dirt. For stacking purposes, it is required to orient the crates in the same direction (either all at 0 degrees or at 180 degrees) after they exit the washing stage on the conveyor. For this purpose, Technica has developed a mechanism that detects crates orientation and rotates those that are not correctly oriented. However, the current implemented system is operating at its maximum speed capacity, which is 2400 crates per hour. Since Marai is increasing its production rates and is consuming more crates, a faster speed is required to satisfy these new requirements. Another problem faced in the current system is that the detection part of the mechanism (that detects the crate orientation) is not robust enough and fails when a crate has a remaining piece of dirt on it that was not removed in the washing process. This causes a problem since if a wrongly-oriented crate is not detected and by consequence not rotated, it would not be able to stack up properly with the other crates, and even worse, would make the whole pile of stacked up crates fall on the ground. For these reasons, we design first a mechanism system called “the rotating poles” that contains lots of mechanical components (spur gears, bevel gears, sprockets, chain, bearings) with only one servo motor that should be able to rotate the desired crates in a rate of 3000 crates per hour with a motor speed of 22 rpm only(it is a low rpm value and the mechanism can be accelerated if higher rates were needed). Also, we used labVIEW to write a program that detects a certain shape in the crate and compares it to a specific shape given by the user in order to decide if the crate should be rotated or not.
A new gold nanoparticle embedded Gelatin hydrogel helps in engineering and repair of neural tissue
Alexandre Doumet, Alexandre Toubia, Joseph Kassab, Samir Arif1,
1 Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Email : , , ,
Supervisor: Dr Anwarul Hasan*,
*Biomedical Engineering and Department of Mechanical Engineering, AUB
Presentation Type Preference: poster
Abstract
The regeneration and repair of the central nervous system and nervous tissue is a challenging problem for which no effective reproducible therapy has been found yet. The inherent inability of the regrowth of axons limits the regenerative capacity of the central nervous system. In this work, we have developed a gold nanoparticle embedded methacrylated gelatin (GelMA) hydrogel for repair and engineering of neural tissue. This novel hydrogel will then be characterized in order to prove its useful conductive properties. We have characterized this novel hydrogel using Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy as well as Ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy. We have conducted these studies for different Gold nanoparticle concentrations to study the extent to which they affect the properties of our hydrogel. We have also studied the swelling properties of the gelMA. We will be analyzing the behavior of cells when grown in the prepared hydrogels and establish a relationship between the composition of our hydrogel with an enhanced neural tissue regeneration.
Design of a novel microfluidic chip to permit the testing of cytotoxicity of nanoparticles
Alexandre Doumet, Alexandre Toubia, Joseph Kassab, Samir Arif1,
1 Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Email : , , ,
Supervisor: Dr Anwarul Hasan*,
*Biomedical Engineering and Department of Mechanical Engineering, AUB
Presentation Type Preference: poster
Abstract
The use of nanoparticles in medical applications is creating new breakthroughs in medicine and health care day by day. Due to the nanoscale dimensions of these particles they have unique properties, such as their ability to infiltrate the nuclei of cells through the pores of cell membrane and nuclear membrane which allows the drugs to be delivered directly inside the cells and even inside the cell nuclei. Many of these nanoparticles such as Ag and TiO2 nanoparticles, however, may harm the DNA of the cells. A thorough understanding of the cytotoxicity of these particles is therefore a growing necessity of time. The current methods for the investigation of cytotoxicity include MTS assay, SRB assay, and clonogenic assay, which have severe limitations including high cost, longer time requirement and increased reagent use. In the current project our aim is to design and develop a new microfluidic device for investigation of cytotoxicity of nanoparticles. The microfluidic device was designed and optimized using a computer simulation software ANSYS. The effect of channel thickness and flow velocities was studied on the distribution of the gold nanospheres within the microfluidic chip. The design of our chip allowed the obtaining of a concentration gradient which permitted the simultaneous testing of different concentrations of these nanoparticles on cells. Our future study is directed towards the manufacturing of the chip using PDMS