The next generation of philanthropists:

CONTENTS2 Dean’s Message

Meet the next generation of philanthropists – 20 somethings surpass $1M in giving

4 Use IMPACT, avoid a crash In this case, go for a belly landing

8 Girl [Scout] Power “What can’t I do?”

11 Geeks Speak Need a lesson in Gobblerpedia?

12 Bridge to Prosperity “Open up my heart and see how happy I am…”

16 Anything but an Island Vacation Finding clean water for a Third World hospital

20 Ride the Lightning No carbon footprint for this motorcycle

23 Out of this World Passing the torch for space exploration

the Student Engineers’ Councilat Virginia Tech

Brian KellerStudent Engineers’ Council Chair 2010-11

ENGINEERING NOW2

In 1985 the Virginia Tech Student Engineers’ Council

(SEC) announced at a Committee of 100 black-tie dinner

its establishment of the Paul E. Torgersen Leadership Schol-

arship. The two student leaders of the SEC at the time, Jean

Skomorucha (now Jean Swartz) and Scott Taylor, chair and

vice-chair, respectively, surprised Torgersen, who was the

dean of the college, with the establishment of this $20,000

endowment.

The students of the SEC had used their fundraising skills

to ask the members of the Committee of 100 to support

the scholarship in honor of Torgersen, and the alumni were

happy to do so.

This gift started a philosophy of philanthropy that has

consumed much of the time of the members of the SEC,

who on average range in age from 18 to 22. The engineering

students of the SEC understand the value of philanthropy

before they graduate and enter the professional arena. The

SEC generates the greatest percentage of its income from

operating Expo, an engineering career fair that has grown

into one of the largest in the nation.

Expo’s continued success prompted SEC faculty advi-

sor Lynn Nystrom, who has been with the council more

than 30 years, to suggest that the student members use

Expo revenue for philanthropic purposes. In 1978, only 26

companies and government agencies registered for Expo.

In 1980, that number doubled. At the time, the revenue

essentially covered the expenditures of organizing the career

fair. But by the late 1990s, the SEC was regularly attract-

ing some 250 companies, sometimes with as many as 50 to

75 on a waiting list because of a lack of space. Revenue was

now climbing.

Nystrom was concerned that the SEC, a 501 C3 non-

profit, needed to invest its money in more than a bank

account. Her idea was for the SEC to issue a formal call for

funding proposals from engineering faculty members and

students, the primary guideline being that the funds go to

areas benefiting the largest number of students. The students

agreed and formed their own guidelines. In 1998, the

SEC made its first substantial awards to assist with college

endeavors: $30,000 to equip the Student Assistance Center

and $10,000 as seed money to help generate support for the

Freshman Design Engineering Laboratory.

In the 26 years since they established the Torgersen

Scholarship, the SEC has given more than $1 million back

to the College of Engineering’s students and faculty for a

host of projects, ranging from support of the Frith Fresh-

men Design Engineering Laboratory, mentoring programs,

and upgrades of classroom space, to a host of student

organization projects. The latter range from $20,000 in

support of the design and building of the first CHARLI, a

world-famous walking humanoid made by students at the

Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), to smaller

grants for the group Bridges to Prosperity to build lifesaving

bridges in Haiti.

The SEC executive team understands how to require

engineering students and faculty to create and present pro-

Dean’s MessageMeet the next generation of philanthropists – 20 somethings surpass $1M in giving

Virginia Tech’s Student Engineers’ Council is giving $100,000 toward construction of the Signature Engineering Building.Construction started in the summer of 2011.

www.eng.vt.edu2011 3

posals. These requests are voted on by both the

executive council and the larger general assembly

of the SEC in a three-step process. The proposal

must include the project’s impact, an overall

budget, and how the SEC contribution would be

spent.

With the additional revenue, the SEC has

undertaken some truly ambitious projects in ad-

dition to the ad hoc funding of requests. In 2006,

it created a Design Team Endowment with a goal

of reaching $500,000 by 2010. The SEC reached

its goal, and is now able to award $40,000 (the

interest off the principal) each academic year to

engineering student organizations for equipment,

conference attendance, and other essential needs.

Not satisfied, the SEC took on two additional

pledges to support the College of Engineering

during the 2010-11 academic year under the

leadership of Brian Keller. The officers signed the

paperwork for a three-year $100,000 gift to the

new Signature Engineering Building, and con-

tributed the first one-third of the pledge in 2011.

The SEC also established a $1 million unrestrict-

ed endowment for the College of Engineering,

and opened it with a $50,000 payment, naming

it in honor of their advisor, Nystrom. The SEC’s

new goal is to have the Lynn Nystrom Engineer-

ing Organization Fund completely endowed by

2020.

Clearly, the Student Engineers’ Council’s

continuing endeavors will make one of the na-

tion’s premier engineering colleges even better as

the impact of the students’ giving is realized. As

dean, I asked that this issue of Engineering Now

be devoted to the philanthropy of the Student

Engineers’ Council, and I hope you will enjoy

reading about just a few of the impacts their gifts

have made.

Richard BensonDean of Engineering

Representative History of Philanthropy of the Student Engineers’ Council1985 Creation of the Paul E. Torgersen Leadership Scholarship

1998 $30,000 to equip the college’s Student Assistance Center (SAC) and $10,000 as seed money to help generate support for the Freshman Design Engineering Laboratory

1999 $10,000 for multimedia enhancements for a lecture classroom; $10,000 for the construction of a prototype Personal Rapid Transit System (Virtual Corporation)

2000 $20,000 to Engineering Education

2001 Endowed the Nathaniel Gebreyes Scholarship, named after its 1981 SEC chair, who died in an automobile accident

2002 $46,000 for technology upgrades to classrooms, matched by the university

2003 $15,000 to Tutoring Center for hourly employees; $1,000 to Engi-neering Education Lecture Series

2004 $10,000 to Freshman Engineering Lecture Series; $5,000 to Ware Lab General Hardware Fund; $4,274 to Fuel Cell Experiment for Frith Freshman Engineering Lab

2005 $14,700 to McGyver Boxes, Freshman Program; $18,500 to Open Electronics Laboratory; $1,800 for general support for Undergradu-ate Research Symposium

2006 $7,386 to the Mechatronics Experiment in Engineering Explora-tion; $12,615 to the Joseph F. Ware Jr. Advanced Engineering Laboratory

2007 $9,330 for the Ware Lab Plasma Cutter; $5,670 for study area fur-niture for Hancock Atrium to be matched by the college; $105,000 to initiate the Design Team Fund, plus an additional $125,000 within a few months

2008 $5,411 to the Ware Lab; $4,589 to materials science and engineer-ing for furnaces; $20,000 to the RoMeLa Laboratory to fund build-ing CHARLI, a humanoid robot

2009 $40,000 in grants to engineering student organizations*; $30,000 to design team endowment; $20,000 in donations to various faculty projects

2010 $40,000 in grants to engineering student organizations and $30,000 to design team endowment; $20,000 in donations to vari-ous faculty projects

2011 $40,000 in grants to engineering student organizations; $50,000 to start a new general endowment; $30,000 toward the Signature Engineering Building; $20,000 to various faculty projects, such as a satellite station and a 3-D printing vending machine in Randolph Hall

* With the completion of the $500,000 Design Team Endowment, the Student Engineers’ Council should be able to award in perpetuity some $40,000 annually to support engineering student groups.

ENGINEERING NOW4

AVOID A CRASH

USE

By Steven Mackay

www.eng.vt.edu2011 5

When a U.S. Airways’ Airbus A320-

214 commercial jet made an emergency

ditch landing on the Hudson River—in

the water—in January 2009, America

held its breath and stood in awed

silence. All passengers and crew were

safe, and the plane’s fuselage remained

virtually intact. Veteran pilot Chesley

Sullenberger was hailed as a hero. It was a rare and some say

miraculous event.

Javid Bayandor, now an associate professor of mechanical

engineering at Virginia Tech, reacted like most people: “I was

shocked yet relieved to hear that it survived the severe impact.”

(Incidentally, Bayandor later briefly met and spoke with Sul-

lenberger at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.)

But Bayandor also had a vested interest in what had hap-

pened on the Hudson. Bayandor, who worked for years in

the aerospace industry, including with Cooperative Research

Centre for Advanced Composite Structures, Airbus Deutsch-

land GmbH, German Aerospace Center, and Hawker de

Havilland-Boeing, had during that time proposed studying

water impact landings. In 2008, he started research into such

incidents during an invited appointment at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., before moving to

Virginia Tech.

After the Hudson River incident, many in the commercial

aerospace industry decided to revisit the previously inconclusive

issue of water landings, says Bayandor. “Not many full-scale

water impact tests have been done before. It would be wildly

expensive for the aerospace companies to test-crash full-scale

models, with a new representative aircraft costing anywhere

from $250 million to $300 million.” And no one is trying that

to this day. Not with real planes, anyway.

Starting in 2010, Bayandor formed

and led a senior design student team

called IMPACT, an acronym for Impact

Modeling Project and Crash Team. The

gist: take scaled down models of air-

planes—roughly 1/36th to 1/25th scale

of the most popular commercial aircraft

—hooked to a cable zip line system and

“crash” them into a shallow water tank built inside a sandbox-

like structure. Waterproof cameras inside and outside the tank

capture the action, while sensors built inside the underbelly and

wings of the aircraft take various measurements via computer.

“Subsequent to the field trials, we constructed and carried

out numerical simulations which will be verified using the test

data from the small models,” says Bayandor. “We hope that we

eventually would be in a position to extend the trials to larger

models. The validated predictive numerical methodology that

we develop has the potential to be used as a tool during the de-

sign and impact certification processes of future aircraft, while

drastically reducing the high costs associated with developing

new products.”

The IMPACT team—comprised of seven undergraduates

and one graduate student—started from scratch. In addition

to the makeshift water tank, the scaffolding stands about 8 feet

tall, resembling a miniature power line tower. Student team

members built the towing mechanism and the tank on their

own, mostly with money provided by the Student Engineers’

Council.

Team member Alan Smisko, a mechanical engineering

student from Vienna, Va., says assembling the large wood tank

structure and filling it with 600 to 700 gallons of water for each

day of field experiments was its own challenge. “It took up to

several hours just to do that,” he says. Weather also was a fac-

In this case, go

for a belly landing

ENGINEERING NOW6

tor in the outdoor experiments. Cold temperatures meant ice,

while high winds could ruin the test parametric settings.

“Coming in at the beginning of the year with no back-

ground in finite-element analysis, aerospace, or composites was

a little daunting at the beginning,” says Jessica Gretsch, a senior

in mechanical engineering from Cary, N.C., who served as

experimentation team leader. “Everyone pushed really hard to

learn everything though and we really covered a lot of ground

this year.”

Experiments so far have shown that slight changes in veloc-

ity, rate of descent, angles of attack, and yaw and roll angles

can make a huge difference in how the model plane makes

contact with water. As the plane is a scaled model based on

the Pi Theorem it need not go fast in order to simulate the real

speeds and impacts of an actual commercial jet in a laboratory

setting. Findings thus far show that if the plane’s nose lands

first, pitched down, the aircraft’s forward section could sustain

a grave impact force that can jeopardize the plane’s structural

integrity. A belly landing—with nose slightly up—seems safest,

relatively speaking.

The experiment likely would never have been realized

during the 2010-11 academic year without funding from the

The Impact Modeling Project and Crash Team (left to right) included mechanical engineering seniors Matt Henry of Chesapeake, Va.; Matt Liwanag of Virginia Beach, Va.; David Wolf of Baltimore, Md.; Andrew Rogers of Scarboro, Maine; Jessica Gretsch of Cary, N.C.; and Alan Smisko of Vienna, Va.

www.eng.vt.edu2011 7

Student Engineers’ Council, which kicked in $1,300,

as well as some financial and in-kind support from the

College of Engineering’s Joseph F. Ware Jr. Advanced

Engineering Laboratory. A majority of the remaining

money after the trial costs was used to help pay for the

IMPACT team to travel to Cambridge, Mass., in June

2011 to present its findings thus far at the MIT Con-

ference on Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics.

Bayandor and Gretsch hope the presentation will spur

more interest in the project.

Bayandor would like to see major aerospace com-

panies and federal agencies come forward with grant

funding or other support. “This has a unique potential

to significantly contribute to the aerospace industry, as

well as our knowledge of advanced aircraft design and

impact damage tolerance in future-generation aerospace

structures,” he says. “It can greatly facilitate the devel-

opment of concept crashworthy air vehicles by cutting

down heavy experimental costs.”

Bayandor plans to expand the scope of IMPACT and

provide students with more opportunities to work closely

with the aerospace industry on its immediate structural

design and analysis problems. Airbus and the European

Aeronautics Defense and Space Company already have

expressed interest in working with Bayandor’s CRASH

Lab, short for Crashworthiness for Aerospace Structures

and Hybrids Lab.

Gretsch was looking toward handing off the project

to her successors. “I learned a ton about planes, compos-

ites, and modeling, and all of that should be useful in my

future career,” she says. “However, the experience gained

from working on a team that started from nothing and

was able to present results at the end of eight months was

really the most important experience.”

Adds Bayandor on his first IMPACT team: “The

students are now at a level where they can consider them-

selves rising star researchers due to the extensive training

that we have been through during this project.”

ENGINEERING NOW8

www.eng.vt.edu2011 9

Proctor, SWE’s educational outreach chair for the 2010-

11 academic year, is a rising senior in the Charles E. Via, Jr.

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering program.

For this Girl Scout Day, she is the co-chair of the event and

extremely passionate about it.

“I was a Girl Scout…no, no, I am a Girl Scout,” Proctor

emphatically says as she smiles.

“At an early age I can recall the fun things and experiences

I had being involved with my [Girl Scout] troop. I enjoy being

around kids. Having the opportunity to share with them or

impact their life decisions in a positive way is so rewarding.

Girl Scout Day is important to me because not only might I

foster someone’s idea of community outreach and engineer-

ing, it reminds us, the SWE members, of why we came to love

engineering.”

Proctor is a member of the Virginia Tech chapter of SWE, a

network of female engineers that offers career advice, scholar-

ships, mentoring, and social and service opportunities for its

members. Service projects are geared toward encouraging other

female college students and school-age females to consider engi-

neering as their career path. They even host a fashion show for

female engineering students to assist them in choosing appro-

priate professional attire for the interview process.

SWE has more than 400 women on its LISTSERV. About

40 participate regularly. Active members pay annual dues,

which helps fund projects throughout the year. Other fund-

ing comes from corporate engineering sponsors,

fundraising, and the Student Engineers’

Council (SEC) at Virginia Tech.

“We applied for their

[SEC] slush fund and were

awarded money to aid our

volunteer and community

efforts,” Proctor says. “Portions

“Are you all excited?” [Silence]

Caitlin Proctor enthusiastically repeats the question to more than 40 Girl Scouts, 9 to 13 years old, all from Southwest Virginia troops.

“ARE YOU ALL EXCITED?”

It’s 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning and the Virginia Tech Society of Wom-en Engineers’ (SWE) 5th annual Girl Scout Day is in full swing.

Well, almost.

GIRl [Scout]

P wER By Lindsey Haugh“what can’t I do?”

ENGINEERING NOW10

of the money helped fund our annual Brownie Day in the fall,

our trip to the national SWE conference, and our spring Girl

Scout Day.”

Katie Geier, a rising sophomore, also majoring in civil

engineering and a SWE leader for the event, says, “Donations

from the SEC allow us to buy materials and supplies in order to

better teach the Girl Scouts and help them earn a

badge. Without having the necessary materi-

als or having a limited number of things, it

would have been difficult to reach out to as

many young girls.”

This particular Girl Scout Day event was

off to a quiet start.

SWE leaders demonstrate jumping jacks, “star jumps,” and

dance moves to get the Girl Scouts to loosen up, have fun, “put

on their thinking caps,” and start earning their Creative Solu-

tions badge, Geier says.

The girls respond with giggles and whispers as they hesitant-

ly participate in these ice-breaking activities.

Then the real fun begins.

To earn the Creative Solutions badge, the Girl Scouts

must complete six out of 10 requirements. The SWE leaders

proposed the following problems to the groups. First was the

Chinese Tangram, a puzzle made up of seven geometric pieces

that must be made into five different objects. Second, Ordinary

Items, Extraordinary Uses encourages ways to use everyday

items, such as paper clips, rubber bands, toothbrushes, flash-

lights, safety pins, bandages, socks, and white unlined paper for

another purpose. Third was Shipwrecked on an Island, where

participants select one person and five items to have with them

on a deserted island. Fourth was Alternative Solutions where

participants create a new ending to a well-known story or fairy

tale. Fifth was How Others Solve Problems which identifies

how various professionals solve matters in the workplace. And

last was Local, National, and Global Problem Solving which

involves listing local, national, or global issues.

Each problem-solving activity ends with discussion of the

decision-making process, asking “why” and “how,” and then

analysis of the possible results of their decisions.

“Children often approach problems in a much different

manner than adults since they do not often restrict themselves

to feasible or practical solutions. Interacting with the kids

reminds me to take a step back and go at problems without

thinking, ‘what can’t I do?’ and instead think, ‘What could I

do?’ ” says Geier.

Another SWE leader, Theresa Garwood, poses a question

to her group of Girl Scouts, “What problems do you see in

the world today?” “Nuclear issues” is the response of a seventh

grader, who then goes on to explain her ingenious take on

the cycle of events resulting from the earthquakes in Japan in

March of 2011.

Throughout the morning the young girls are challenged

and enlightened. In an informal, relaxed question and answer

session, Donna Dix, a troop co-leader of two years from Rural

Retreat, Va., asks the SWE leaders, “How did you know you

wanted to be an engineer?”

Geier explains her inspiration was spurred by her love of

mathematics and attending a Virginia Tech camp while in high

school.

Kori Price, a freshman studying electrical engineering and

next year’s educational outreach co-chair with Proctor, says her

motivation to pursue electrical engineering came from child-

hood trips to amusement parks, where she became fascinated

with how roller coasters worked, and her curiosity about

thunderstorms.

By the end of Girl Scout Day, some 40 young girls had

earned a new badge and the SWE members hope they have

“spark[ed] an interest, so when they get older they consider

becoming an engineer,” says Geier.

“Girl Scout Day helps me learn more about younger girl’s

interests. This is important so that SWE can be effective in

reaching out to younger girls to help them become more

interested and involved in science, technology, engineer-

ing, and mathematics areas,” says Price. “I also hope that

the girls can see women like us in SWE

working toward engineering

degrees and think, ‘If they

can do it, then I can do it.’”

www.eng.vt.edu2011 11

GEEKS SPEAKWhen Chris Covington was a self-described “poor high

school kid with a limited allowance,” he found it “awesome”

that he could download the GNU/Linux operating system and a

whole array of applications to run on it for free.

Today, Covington, a senior in computer engineering, has

spent much of his college career helping others install GNU/

Linux on their laptops or tablet personal computers. And his

skill set has already landed him a

job with Qualcomm, a world leader

in the field of wireless technology

and services.

Covington is a member of the

Linux and Unix Users Group at Virginia Tech (VTLUUG),

dedicated to improving the computing skills of its members,

supporting the use of Linux and Unix on campus, and serv-

ing the local community through free software and open data

(http://vtluug.org/).

An analogy to the Linux operating system kernel might

be Wikipedia, where people are able to access the underlying

markup and modify an article’s contents. Because the underlying

source code for Linux is open, somewhat similar to Wikipedia,

interested parties are free to make changes to it. The software is

continually updated by computer gurus around the world, and

its success is validated by its use in some of the world’s fastest

supercomputers.

As the Web allows the world to move toward increased free

sharing of information, Covington’s contributions show he is a

follower of this philosophy. “I like the open ideology that Linux

was founded on,” Covington says. Most college students do.

So, in the interest of sharing

information, Covington is person-

ally responsible for the advent of

Gobblerpedia, a Virginia Tech

take-off on Wikipedia (https://gob-

blerpedia.org/wiki/Main_page). Gobblerpedia is a community-

made repository for free information about the Blacksburg, Va.,

university. The main difference he sees between Wikipedia and

Gobblerpedia is that contributors are encouraged to write local

histories never before published. This is not the case on Wikipe-

dia, where such contributions would run afoul of project goals

like easy verifiability by users around the globe. Covington sees

Gobblerpedia as growing into different guidelines. For example,

“dropping into a professor’s office to fact-check,” would be a

reasonable process in a university community, he says.

“It was harder to convince others on campus, like the Student Budget Board, of our needs,” Covington adds. “The SEC made the whole thing happen.”

Need a lesson in Gobblerpedia? By Lynn Nystrom

Continued on page 24

Chris Covington, left, and James Schwinabart, members of the Linux and Unix User Group at Virginia Tech, promote open data and the availability of free software to assist the local community.

ENGINEERING NOW12

Three children have lost their lives since 2009 by drown-

ing in the Thomonde River in Haiti.

Today, a lifesaving bridge connects the remote mountain

village of Ti Peligre with Casse, where a medical clinic and

marketplace provide resources to this Haitian town that is

often transformed into an island because of the Caribbean

country’s rainy seasons. Children and others can now walk

safely over the river below.

Engineering students at Virginia Tech were instrumental

in accomplishing this humanitarian gesture.

“This bridge connects the two towns on either side of the

river, but in reality, it goes so much further. The successful

completion of this bridge required the collaboration and

hard work of so many people around the world, including

the members of the Partners in Health based in Boston, the

town of Blacksburg, Virginia Tech, and Haiti,” says Matt

Capelli, the immediate past president of Virginia Tech’s

chapter of Bridges to Prosperity (www.b2p.org.vt.edu/).

By Lynn Nystrom

ProsperityBridge to

“Open up my heart and see how happy I am…”

www.eng.vt.edu2011 13

“I believe the true foundation and power behind the

bridge were the solid relationships and faith of the Hai-

tian communities involved and all of the people in the

world that the bridge project connected. It is a tribute

to the leadership of all,” Capelli adds.

The Virginia Tech student chapter started the

project in 2009 and completed it in March 2011.

Capelli, a civil engineering student, was drawn into

the project by Brian Cloyd, a Virginia Tech profes-

sor he had met while working on rebuilding homes

with the Appalachian Service Project. So when Cloyd asked

Capelli if he would be interested in designing the pedestrian

bridge over this often dangerous, 210-foot-wide span of the

river in Haiti, he agreed.

Cloyd, Capelli, and two other civil engineering students,

Nick Mason and Katie Masoero, traveled to Haiti in November

2009 to conduct a feasibility study.

“It was certainly a shock to experience Third World poverty

for the first time in my life. But what I remember the most

from that trip was how beautiful the country of Haiti was, both

the island and the people. I was overwhelmed with the Haitian

culture. They were so willing to help and serve others and to

work hard. If I were to describe the Haitians, they have unend-

ing, inspirational hope,” Capelli says.

“I want to emphasize it was not Virginia Tech students

building a bridge for Haiti. It was Virginia Tech students help-

ing Haitians build their own bridge. We could have

never completed the project without

the leadership of the Haitians,”

Capelli adds.

After the students returned from

their first trip, they went to work on

the design, enlisting the aid of two

CEE faculty members, Carin Roberts-

Wollmann and Tommy Cousins, who

have expertise in bridge design. Will

Collins, a doctoral student, also played an

ENGINEERING NOW14

integral role in helping students develop a design that would

withstand earthquakes.

The earthquake in January 2010 delayed the project, and

with the rainy season beginning each March, the students were

unable to return until November 2010. Then, surveys were con-

ducted, decisions were finalized, and they were ready to lay the

base foundations. The Haitians did the work while the students

finished their fall semester. The students returned in January

2011, and stayed two more weeks for the building of towers to

support the cables. When they left, all it needed was the wood

decking.

With 98 percent of Haiti deforested, finding wood of good

quality was no easy task. And again, they were faced with an-

other rainy season commencing in March.

However, when Capelli returned in early March, along

with the new leadership of Virginia Tech’s chapter of Bridges

to Prosperity, Chris Cooke, Tyler Welsh, Nick Mason, Kelsey

Brandt, and Kin Wong, the Haitians had completed the bridge.

However, the islanders had held off the ribbon cutting and

celebration until the students arrived on March 5 during their

spring break.

Even Mason’s father decided to join the team, telling the

students some people have to wait an entire lifetime to see two

communities come together. He wanted to see what his son

and others had accomplished.

“From now on, the Haitians have a complete sense of own-

ership. They will make all of the decisions on its upkeep and

maintenance,” Capelli says.

During the dedication, the Haitians responded to a survey

conducted by the students. Questions ranged from demograph-

ics of the users of the bridge to what it actually meant to them.

Capelli recalls one Haitian said, “I wish you could open up

my heart and see how happy I am because I can’t describe it.”

“We build bridges, but it is the relationships that we build

that really matter and the true power behind our purpose and

mission,” Capelli summarizes.

Related articles:http://www.b2p.org.vt.edu/?q=content/ti-peligre-bridge-completionhttp://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti/blog-entry/the-bridge-to-ti-peligre

www.eng.vt.edu2011 15

The importance of seed moneyWhen the Virginia Tech chapter of Bridges for Prosperity needed financial support for the concrete for the bridge foundations, it solicited funding from the Virginia Tech Student Engineers’ Council (SEC).

The SEC gave the chapter $5,000, and was one of its largest single do-nors. “We were a brand-new group with the SEC, and we did not expect the support. But the SEC gave us so much more than what we could have expected. We want a long-standing relationship with the SEC and to give back to them. They really stepped in and stepped up and we could not have completed the project on time without them,” says Matt Capelli, of Bridges to Prosperity.

After the installation of the bridge, the Rotary Club’s national chapter provided a $95,000 grant to the national organization of Bridges to Prosperity. The caveat: It will provide the successful Virginia Tech chapter with the money to completely fund two future bridges.

ENGINEERING NOW16

Can you imagine a hospital that does not have access to clean water on a regular

basis? Or a medical staff who throw their waste into a pile outside the hospital doors?

Neither can the Virginia Tech student members of Engineers Without Borders (EWB).

So, one of their current four projects is focusing on how to resolve clean water and

sanitation issues for the St. Therese Hospital in Hinche, Haiti. In another project, they

just completed the development of a maintenance and operation plan for a malfunction-

ing ultraviolet disinfection system for a free health clinic operated by the Virginia College

of Osteopathic Medicine in the Dominican Republic town of Verón.

By Lynn NystromFinding clean water for a Third world hospital

www.eng.vt.edu2011 17

“Engineers can create things that can have an impact on millions, billions of people. We have to make sure good ideas come to fruition.” — Darius Emrani

Engineering students working on both projects were able to

travel to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, divided into the

two countries, during their spring break in 2011, partially due

to the $1,000 in support from the Student Engineers’ Council

at Virginia Tech, according to Chelsea Shores, the 2010-11

president of the chapter and an ocean engineering major. “We

have to fund all of our own trips, so a large portion of our ef-

forts is fundraising,” she says.

“Once we start a commitment, such as our projects in

Haiti and the Dominican Republic, we maintain them for a

minimum of five years. This often represents a challenge as our

membership turns over. We have about 50 to 60 active mem-

bers, and we are one of the largest in the nation for the number

of projects we are involved in,” Shores reports.

Darius Emrani, one of the members of the group travel-

ing to Haiti, describes his academic spring break spent in the

central Haitian city of Hinche as anything but an island vaca-

tion. However, he left the island with a spirit of the university’s

motto, Ut Prosim, and inspired to achieve his long-term goals.

“Engineers can create things that can have an impact on mil-

lions, billions of people. We have to make sure good ideas come

to fruition,” Emrani says. “Everyday people’s needs are going

unmet, and it affects people’s health.”

Emrani knows this problem first-hand from his trip. The

hospital he visited was built in 1929, and the Haitian earth-

quake in 2010 compromised its aging problems even further

because of the increased number of patients afterward, as well

as the outbreak of cholera.

“In terms of sanitation, there were two main issues. Poor

hygiene in general was due to the lack of toilets for patients and

a lack of clean water for personal hygiene, drinking, and cleaning

the hospital. And in terms of medical waste, a recently installed

incinerator was missing one of its components and was not op-

erational,” Emrani, an electrical engineering honors student, says.

During their five-day stay in Haiti, Emrani and the other

members of his group, including faculty advisor Theo Dillaha

of biological systems engineering, met with the director of the

hospital to understand its priorities, as well as with administra-

tive specialists. They then evaluated the hospital complex, walk-

ing the site, and building a computer-aided-design diagram of

every meter of the space, including the locations of sinks, drain-

age, toilets, pit latrines, abandoned wells, water system infra-

structure, and even structural components such as bad gutters.

They met with the regional director of the national Depart-

ment of Potable Water to speak about the needs and learn

about the available sources of water.

Within a week of their trip, the students developed an

alternative to the water system

at the hospital that

addressed water pressure,

which they perceived to

be a major issue. They had

discovered that—because of

low water pressure in the public water system and the elevation

of the hospital’s water storage tank—the tank could not be filled

when it received water three times a week. A further complica-

tion was that the generators required to pump the water in the

hospital could not be run for more than eight hours per day since

the cost of fuel was prohibitive. Hence, power outages were com-

mon. Their solution: the Department of Portable Water agreed

to supply municipal water to the hospital every night, and the

hospital would then run a generator nightly to transfer municipal

water from a below ground storage tank to the hospital’s elevated

water storage tanks.

ENGINEERING NOW18

EWB may be able to accomplish more for the hospital by

working with Partners in Health, The Haitian Health Care

Foundation, and the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and

Population. The water pressure problem is just one aspect of

the teamwork. EWB is also working with the local Hinche

Rotary Club.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the island, Will Ayers, a

civil engineering major, led the EWB team that busily repaired

the ultraviolet water purification system used by the clinic and

elementary school in Verón, adjacent to the resort town of

Punta Cana. His team included Rafael Suriel, a native of the

Dominican Republic, and Jessica Hwang, of mechanical en-

gineering. They found some other U.S. colleagues there as the

Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine at the Virginia

Tech Corporate Research Center uses the medical facility as a

place to send some of its students for clinical experience.

www.eng.vt.edu2011 19

The purification system had not functioned for some five

months, and the Haitians had no ability to maintain its vital

components. Ayers and his team developed a maintenance

plan, including diagnostic procedures, a parts list, and general

cleaning guidelines. They met with the engineer at the nearby

resort and briefed him and his technicians about the plan. “The

ultraviolet aspect was the unique part of the system that they

were not familiar with,” Ayers explains.

When the EWB team left, the purification system was

working, and the clinic had a manual on how to keep it a clean

and working system. It probably helped that Ayers had already

obtained a chemistry degree and worked in water-quality

management for the U.S. Geological Survey before he decided

to pursue his second degree in engineering at Virginia Tech.

And it also helped that Dillaha has a UV water purification

system at his home near campus where the team could educate

themselves before they traveled to the island.

Corporate Sponsors

WSP Environmental

Schnabel Engineering

Wiley and Wilson

McDonough Bolyard

Malcolm Pirnie

CDM

CH2M Hill

Jansen Land Consulting

Individual Donors

Dr. Theo Dillaha

Brian McDonald

Kathy Norrenbrock

Edward Hofler

David Danner

Betty Sinclair

Marilyn Mitchell

Shirley Grossman

Chemical Engineering

Department

Honors Program

Student Engineers’ Council

John Markunas

John Allevi

Engineers without Borders-USA at Virginia Tech has its own

fundraising committee that allows it to participate in its

international projects. The funds they solicit are used to

subsidize costs for travel, material, and equipment.

Ayers, an avid traveler who at one point in his life took the

time to hike the Pacific Crest from Mexico to Canada, also pre-

pared with his team a visual assessment of the piping at Veron’s

elementary school. “It had a lot of leaks, causing a lot of loss in

pressure,” he says. A future project will probably evolve from

this discussion.

ENGINEERING NOW20

The movement toward greener, more Earth-friendly, low-emission vehicles is not just for cars anymore. It is moving toward motorcycles. Several international special-ty companies already sell electric motorcycles, and now an international race is entirely dedicated to the format. TTXGP is the world’s first zero toxic emissions motorcy-cle race series. It takes place in North America, Asia, and Europe, climaxing in Spain.

Student team builds an electric bike that can speed,

but won’t pollute

LIGHTNINGRIDE THE

By Steven Mackay

The 2010-11 BOLT senior design team includes (left to right) Paul Gray of Edgewater Park, N.J.; Rob Wax of Westchester County, N.Y.; Ben Boddery of Warrenton, Va.; Derek Coller of Yorktown, Va.; George Sink, of Bassett, Va.; and Ryan Davenport, of Chesapeake, Va.

No carbon footprint for this motorcycle

www.eng.vt.edu2011 21

In a crowded bay inside the Joseph F. Ware Jr. Advanced

Engineering Laboratory is the work of the BOLT (Battery

Operated Land Transportation) Team, a group of College of

Engineering seniors building an electric motorcycle for eventual

competition in the Grand Prix event in late 2012. For now, the

bike is mostly a skeletal chassis with wheels and some equip-

ment. The bike’s main body is a 2009 Honda CBR6000RR,

while the fork is from a Kawasaki ZX6R. The pieces were

welded together.

Components—such as the electric motor—sit on a work-

bench nearby or on shelves in a cabinet. Other senior design

projects also share the cage, including a robotic-wheeled device

designed to work on the moon and another contraption that

resembles a massive rat maze. Looking at the bike—a black

carbon body that one day will sport the Hokie Pride colors of

orange and maroon—is one of the team’s leaders, Rob Wax, a

senior from Westchester County, N.Y.

“I love two wheels,” Wax says with a grin. He started riding

dirt bikes as a child with a friend and the boy’s father, and the

hobby stuck. Wax street races—legally, he adds—and owns a

motorcycle, which he sold in April as part of his preparation to

move to Wisconsin for a post-college job. For him, joining the

BOLT team was natural, and instant.

“I wanted to find a project with two wheels,” he says, add-

ing that he was looking to put his motorcycle knowledge and

skills to use while learning.

Not everyone on the team is a motorcycle enthusiast like

Wax. One participant self-mockingly said he liked bicycling.

But whatever their connection to the project, faculty advisor

Saied Taheri, himself once a motorcycle sports participant and

enthusiast, has seen his students grow. “I could see the students

mature during the course of the project, where they looked at it

as a hobby when we started and took it very seriously as things

progressed,” says Taheri, an associate professor of mechanical

engineering.

This is the second BOLT electric motorcycle effort overseen

by Taheri. The first team finished in the 2009-10 year, but due

to finances was unable to compete in the worldwide finale of

the TTXGP event after doing quite well stateside. The chief

sponsor of the motorcycle took the vehicles once the competi-

tion was finished.

The current team opted for a combination of the two mo-

torcycle models, building on their own equipment, and adding

a 200-pound battery. It will feature DC batteries with AC out-

put, top out at 120 mph, and be able to hold a constant speed

of 80 mph. The bike is designed as a racer, but will eventually

be made highway ready. The engine will be an AC20 Thunder-

struck, as it was during the first BOLT effort. The motorcycle’s

design has developed from its beginnings as a magic-marker-

on-paper concept to CAD work on the Ware Lab’s computer

lab. Bowing to TTXGP weight limits, the team must keep the

vehicle under 500 pounds. Thus far, the students are well under

that threshold.

Safety is paramount in the design; the battery and electric

motor’s contacts with the outside elements must be limited,

and the batteries, meant to be changed out with ease, must be

Ryan Davenport, of Chesapeake, Va.; and Paul Gray, of Edgewater Park, N.J., work on a cylinder for BOLT.

ENGINEERING NOW22

(Left to right) John Meier, of Sterling Va.; George Sink, of Bassett, Va.; and Derek Coller of Yorktown, Va., all work on the bike, which will be finished by rising seniors during the 2011-12 academic year. The goals: race the electric bike in competition, and with zero emissions.

absolutely secured during motion in case of a crash. “We need

to bolt the batteries down very securely,” says one team mem-

ber. “We cannot have them coming off at 200 pounds.” The

engine and batteries must also be air-cooled to prevent over-

heating, which could cause the bike to break down.

Funding has been hard in the current economy for this

group as well. The Student Engineers’ Council (SEC) kicked

in $1,750 in the spring and $1,500 in the fall, and several

sponsors—Boeing, General Motors, FFR Trikes, Solutia—have

donated parts and/or money.

“The Student Engineers’ Council funding was quite vital

as they were very supportive of our team,” says team member

Ryan Davenport, of Chesapeake, Va. “Their requirement of

our team to become more active in their events allowed us to

get our name out to many more students than we were nor-

mally able to. We hope that the future BOLT teams will take

advantage of the SEC’s offers to stay active in the engineering

community and receive all of the support that the SEC

will give.”

The team hasn’t gotten everything it needs easily, so it

has turned to fundraising. “They got disappointed when we

couldn’t find any sponsors for the batteries,” says Taheri. “There

are a bunch of molds that we need to develop for fairings

to make the bike aerodynamically compatible with the race

requirements in addition to a host of other parts and pieces

which we still need.”

“We spend it right after we get it,” says Derek Coller, of

Yorktown, Va., the team’s 2010-11 leader.

The seniors on the 2010-11 team hope that by next year

their motorcycle—sleek and gleaming with its orange and

maroon paint job—will be taking practice laps at the Virginia

International Raceway in Danville, Va. This team will be work-

ing on their individual careers when the motorbike sees its rac-

ing glory, first in North America, and if successful, in Spain for

a world championship event. But the 2010-11 team members

will keep in touch. “I’d like to keep an eye on things and see

how it goes,” says Coller. “I think we have a good team for next

year. It looks promising.”

www.eng.vt.edu2011 23

Out of this

WORLDPassing the torch for space exploration

Virginia Tech College of Engineering juniors Nastia Ilinichna Soukhareva and Cameron Crowell stand in front

of the university-run observatory just off Prices Fork Road in Montgomery County. The students hope to put the

facility – located down a country road in a field — to more use during the 2011-12 academic year, possibly with

school tours and other events.

By Steven Mackay

For about five years Virginia Tech was without a Students

for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) club.

The group was dormant until the summer of 2010, when two

groups of students—one led by Cameron Crowell, a junior

from Winchester, Va., and the other by Brian Keller, a junior

from Charleston, W.Va.—decided to restart the group. The ef-

forts were launched separately unbeknownst to each other just

days apart. Keller was first, Crowell second.

“I got the idea to start something like that because there

were not many space-related activities at Virginia Tech at the

time that I was interning at NASA,” says Keller. “I knew a lot

of (aerospace and ocean engineering) students and I knew that

the campus could use something like that, and that with my

understanding of registered student organizations I could build

it.”

Keller served as president of the group at first. The club

found two faculty advisors, Kevin Shinpaugh, director of

cluster and research computing at Virginia Tech, and Troy

Henderson, assistant professor of aerospace and ocean engineer-

ing. There were also some bumps while reworking the group.

An original plan to design a heavy launch vehicle for a NASA-

sponsored competition fell by the wayside. Crowell eventually

took over the group because Keller was busy with his own

duties – serving as the Student Engineers’ Council chair for the

2010-11 academic year.

We wanted to “make the club more of a societal club where

students would have opportunities to explore the space industry

and do outreach to get more people involved,” says Crowell.

“This is the type of club SEDS traditionally is.”

The group had an operating budget of more than $5,000 a

semester, according to Keller. “In addition, I connected them

with the national SEDS organization, which then published an

article about us in their quarterly newsletter,” he adds.

The club attended a spring rocket launch at Kentland Farm

in Blacksburg that was sponsored by the American Institute of

Aeronautics and Astronautics. The group also hosted Nahum

Arav, an associate professor in Tech’s College of Science physics

department, for an informal talk that ranged from early space

exploration to economic discussion on the costs of space travel

to satellites. It attracted about two dozen people from various

majors and of various ages. A handful of people in the room

remembered watching the Space Shuttle Challenger explode on

ENGINEERING NOW24

Jan. 28, 1986, but most of the attendees appeared to be watch-

ing the video footage for the first time.

“The rest (of the year) was basically planning and doing

logistics for next year,“ Crowell says. “This summer a few of us

are going to try and get our amateur rocketry licenses, with an

idea to eventually compete in a rocketry competition SEDS

hosts and/or build rockets.”

Nastia Ilinichna Soukhareva, a junior in aerospace engi-

neering from Northern Virginia, says she would like to see the

group host events for local school children on campus or at

observatories just off Prices Fork Road or near the Mountain

Lake resort in Giles County. During the summer break, she

planned to attend a Space Camp-type event at NASA’s Marshall

Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Crowell says he hopes

other SEDS members can participate in similar summer efforts

and that the group can participate in various space-themed

competitions.

Student Engineers’ Council funding already has been vital

to the group. “The funds needed to start the club were very

important,” Crowell says. SEC funds even helped with basic

necessities, such as advertising, building a temporary kiosk for

the Drillfield, and having identifier polo shirts made. “Funds in

the future will help with sending representatives to conferences

that are attended by many leaders of the space industry, help

pay for projects the club takes on, and help us to do outreach in

local schools,” he adds.

A new interest in space exploration is timely, Crowell says.

“There are changes going on in the space industry that are just

as important as what happened in the 1960s. With the end of

the Space Shuttle program, the torch has been passed off to pri-

vate companies to ‘get people to space,’ and already the price to

do so has dropped tremendously. It’s exciting to be witnessing

these events and it’s easy to get inspired to be involved.”

Even though the club now consists mostly of engineering

students, Crowell and Soukhareva want to see it encompass

all majors and interests. “One of my goals is to get the word

out that space isn’t just for engineers; we need people to get

involved from business backgrounds as well as communica-

tions, art, journalism, and even agriculture—people need to eat

in space, you know,” he said.

Keller agrees. “My hopes are that they can find a way to

bridge gaps between majors and colleges, bringing students

together and build excitement about the space industry within

Virginia Tech by pushing for more faculty research in the astro-

propulsion and other space-related fields.” High-profile speak-

ers and participation in national conferences and competitions

also are on his wish list.

His chapter on the Linux and Unix Users Group has also

ventured into map-making, putting Blacksburg and campus in

extraordinary detail into the online OpenStreetMap project.

This map, tailored for all Hokie followers to use, shows the

routes and up-to-the-minute locations of Blacksburg Transit

buses, as well as pedestrian paths (including where stairs are),

volleyball courts, recycling bins, bike racks, and trails

(http://map.vtluug.org/).

For Engineers’ Week, the group hosted an arcade games

booth. With borrowed projector, screen, and Wiimote, they

gave booth visitors a chance to play with some of the recre-

ational software that GNU/Linux has to offer.

To improve upon its ability to assist Virginia Tech students,

the group petitioned the Student Engineers’ Council in 2010-

11 for $800 in support to install a dedicated server for its com-

puting needs. Previously, their work was conducted on a virtual

machine. With the financial support, they bought all of their

own parts, including a “tricky power supply and an oddball

connector,” Covington says, and spent hours putting the server

together, with the help of their advisor John Harris, a systems

engineer in the College of Engineering.

By the time the group held its 2011 Installfest, when its

experienced computer geeks were on hand to assist other

students with the installation of the free software, the server

was in place. With a few clicks and about 30 minutes of time,

Covington and his cohorts were able to install the GNU/Linux

software on each new machine brought to the event.

GEEKS SPEAK Continued from page 11

The College of Engineering’s Development Office hosted an appreciation luncheon, recognizing the more than $1 million in gifts that the Student Engineers’ Council has awarded to numerous engineering projects sponsored by Virginia Tech. President Charles W. Steger was the guest speaker. From left to right are: John Sherwood, director of finance; Rebecca Dickos, vice chair; Steger; Brian Keller, chair; Richard Benson, dean of engineering; and John Lohr, Expo chair for 2011.

Credits:

Dean: Richard C. Benson

Editor and Writer: Lynn Nystrom

Writers: Steven Mackay and Lindsey Haugh

Art Director: David Stanley

Designer: Robin Dowdy

Photographers: Kelsey Kradel, John McCormick, Jim Stroup, Steven Mackay, and members of the EWB and Bridges to Prosperity student groups.

Contributors: Richard Lovegrove

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ENGINEERING NOW College of EngineeringVirginia Polytechnic Instituteand State UniversityBlacksburg, Virginia 24061