Senior Capstone Project

How System Engineering students plan to disrupt air travel with a blimp

Tama Moni — Wed, 18 May 2022 17:42:07 +0000

How System Engineering students plan to disrupt air travel with a blimp Tama Moni Wed, 05/18/2022 - 13:42

In This Story

The air transportation industry is entering a period of disruptive innovation. New composite materials, powerful lighter-weight batteries, and AI are enabling new classes of air vehicle designs.

Hybrid Air Vehicles (Bedford, England) and Mason Systems Engineering students are leading the charge.

“Hybrid Air Vehicles have developed a next-generation blimp using the latest technology,” explains Habiba Salada Systems Engineering major. “The helium in the blimp creates buoyancy that provides the lift force for the aircraft. The use of helium, an inert gas, eliminates the risk of fire such as what happened with the Hindenburg which used hydrogen.”

Hybrid Air Vehicles sponsored a Systems Engineering Capstone team to develop a tool to assess the best seat and payload configuration for their vehicle for routes in the U.S. market.

“The tool models passenger demand and the prices passengers are willing to pay on a specific route, and then compares the revenue to the cost,” says Adam Abu-Jamous Systems Engineering Capstone team lead. “The profit for each route can be estimated for different levels of passenger demand and different vehicle seat and payload configurations.”

The revenue-cost model used by the student team was originally developed by PhD students and faculty in the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research (CATSR) at George Mason University.

“The Hybrid Air Vehicle is best suited to short trips of less than 250 miles such as Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, or New York City,” says System Engineering student Yoseph Attai. “The vehicles do not need an airport. For example, it can lift off and land from water such as National Harbor here in D.C. This eliminates the hassle of an airport. It is much quieter than a jet, and does not emit CO₂.”

System Engineering student Basma Elqadri designed and tested the tool user interface. “The revenue-cost model is quite complicated, so we had to get really creative with the visualization for the user interface. We designed and conducted usability testing on several alternatives before we got it right.”

“Most people take the user interfaces for granted,” says Habiba Salada. “We learned the hard way just how difficult and complicated human-machine interaction can be.”

“We are thrilled with the results of the project,” says Walt Kreitler, Hybrid Air Vehicles representative in the U.S. “Hybrid Air Vehicles have taken delivery of the tool the students developed and plan to use it in design and for business development.”

This System Engineering Capstone team won first place in – the Decision Analysis Track at the 2022 General Donald R. Keith Memorial Capstone Conference held in person at the United States Military Academy on April 28, 2022 “It was a great honor to compete at the conference against some of the best Systems Engineering programs in the country,” says Adam Abu-Jamous. “I would like to thank the SE Department faculty for their support and encouragement over the years.”

“Clearly, the System Engineering students graduating from the George Mason University program are well prepared to be an asset to the workforce,” says Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department Chair John Shortle. To learn more about System Engineering, robotics, and data analytics contact Systems Engineering Department Chair John Shortle (jshortle@gmu.edu).

System Engineering Capstone student Adam Abu-Jamous and System Engineering Department Chair John Shortle.

Topics

systems engineering

Senior Capstone Project

user interface

air travel

System engineering students win award for vertiport design

Martha Bushong — Tue, 11 May 2021 16:06:44 +0000

System engineering students win award for vertiport design Martha Bushong Tue, 05/11/2021 - 12:06

Toavina Ratolojanahary, a senior systems engineering student didn’t know what a vertiport was until his first class in her senior design capstone course. Now he and his team know that a vertiport is an airport designed for aircraft that take off and land vertically.

The team of systems engineering students won first place in the fourth annual Andrew P. Sage Memorial Capstone Design Competition (SMDC-21) held in Fairfax on April 26, 2021. The project, “Design of a Vertiport Traffic Flow Management System,” developed an innovative algorithm to coordinate traffic at a vertiport.

“To overcome road congestion, innovative companies such as Uber and Lilium, are developing an Urban Air Transportation System that flies commuters in metropolitan areas over the rush hour traffic. For example, first-class passengers arriving at Dulles Airport may want to get to their meetings on Capitol Hill, Tysons Corner, or Bethesda in less than 20 minutes,” says Ratolojanahary. "Using new battery-powered helicopters, they would fly from the airport to a landing pad at a vertiport in the urban area.”

“As you would imagine, the vertiport in an urban area is space-constrained but must handle a large volume of traffic,” says system engineering student Betelhem Kebede. “For this reason, the bottleneck in the air traffic flow will be on the ground at the vertiport, not in the air.”

The student team developed an agent-based simulation of traffic at a vertiport.

“The simulation allowed us to test out thousands of configurations to handle all plausible scenarios such as when a helicopter is low on battery and requests an emergency landing,” says systems engineering student Furat Allawi. “There are also cases when a vehicle doesn’t depart on schedule or is stuck on the taxiway. You wouldn’t believe all the things that could happen in such as small space.”

“This was a great project,” says team leader Parul Chabbra. “We spent a lot of time interviewing the stakeholders to understand their points of view and their requirements. Once we had the simulation results we cycled back and reviewed the proposed design with the stakeholders. That was probably the most gratifying part of the project.”

“Participating in the design competitions was also an amazing experience,” says Chabbra. “Teams from all over the county compete. The range of the projects addressed and the ingenuity was inspiring. That made winning the first place even more rewarding.”

“The awards in the competition is evidence of the quality of the systems engineering program here at Mason,” says John Shortle, department chair of systems engineering and operations research. “We challenge the students with a rigorous academic program to prepare them for the real world. Watching them succeed on their capstone courses is very fulfilling.”

Topics

Senior Capstone Project

systems engineering

Systems engineering team wins award at West Point competition for project Design of COVID-Safe Airport

Martha Bushong — Thu, 06 May 2021 10:02:03 +0000

Systems engineering team wins award at West Point competition for project Design of COVID-Safe Airport Martha Bushong Thu, 05/06/2021 - 06:02

In This Story

George Donohue

“Air transportation is a critical engine of the economy,” says Charlie Wang a senior system engineering major. “Not only does it provide rapid, safe, and relatively inexpensive transportation over long distances, there are 750,000 direct U.S. airline jobs and an estimated 10 million jobs in the supply chain. More than 75% of these employees were furloughed or laid off. We had to do something to address this problem.”

That is why Wang and his team of system engineers chose to explore the challenge of keeping passengers safe in the age of COVID with their Senior Design Capstone project.

The team conducted an in-depth analysis of the contagious properties of the virus and the sequence of events in which passengers are processed while traveling on an airline. For this work they won Best Paper - Decision Analysis Track at the General Donald R. Keith Memorial Capstone Conference (GDRKMCC-21) hosted by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

“As passengers travel, there is a sequence of stages in which they have to queue or be in close proximity. Examples include bag check, TSA, waiting in the lounge, boarding, on the aircraft, etc. At each one of these stages, airborne contagion is possible depending on the presence of infected passengers, their viral load, and their proximity to others” says team member Michael Strain.

“The process is too complex to analyze mathematically and relies on the interaction of a large number of probabilities,“ explains team member Dongwan Lim. “Examples of these probabilities are the probability of a random passenger at the airport being infected, the probability of proximity to other passengers in the queues, the probability of dispersion of the viral load, the probability of being in queue for longer than a time threshold, …etc. To manage this we had to build a simulation.”

“In systems engineering, we know that a multi-layered defense is better than a single layer,” says team member Bryan Kurt Fabela. “So we looked at mandatory masking, social distancing, temperature checks, contact tracing, and more. You name it, we looked at it. We even looked at the difference between surgical and non-surgical masks.”

After running the simulation using a Monte Carlo approach, the team found that the most cost-effective approach depended heavily on the base rate of infection in the community.

Wang says, “Like everything in life, there is a trade-off between benefits and cost, but the most cost-effective options are mandatory surgical masking, temperature checks, and enforced social-distancing. Speeding up processing in the queues, such as TSA and airplane boarding, is also important because it improves social distancing and reduces exposure times.”

“This was a non-trivial systems problem,” says System Engineering and Operations Research (SEOR) Professor George Donohue and sponsor of this project. “Too many times in society we jump to a solution without fully understanding the inter-relationships, unintended consequences, and life-cycle costs. This student team demonstrated the power of systems engineering to strip away the noise and focus on the important issues.”

The team will also be briefing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and local airport authorities.

Team members included: Charles Wang, Michael Strain, Daniel Lim, and Bryan Fabela

Topics

Systems Engineering and Operations Research

Senior Capstone Project

Volgenau School of Engineering

coronavirus; covid-19

Cybersecurity engineering design team protects critical infrastructure

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 20:14:10 +0000

Cybersecurity engineering design team protects critical infrastructure Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/05/2021 - 16:14

Industrial control systems (ICS) manage our everyday water, electricity, and gas resources. The same interconnectedness and automation that makes these systems effective and efficient also increases their vulnerability to dangerous attacks that could leave cities and states without essential resources.

A cybersecurity engineering senior design team is testing a scaled-down ICS system provided by Dragos, Inc. to help the company shore up its cybersecurity infrastructure.

Seniors Marissa Costa, Natalie Sebastian, Kyle Simmons, Andrew Smith, Santiago Taboada Patino, and Zaine Wilson are working together to address the problem “Our whole job is to poke around and complete a security assessment on the ICS that Dragos, Inc. provided. We are attacking it and pinpointing vulnerabilities that need to be addressed,” says Patino.

The team is penetration testing numerous components of the system Dragos, Inc. provided them to use. Penetration testing simulates a cyber-attack and pinpoints vulnerabilities. “The penetration testing we are doing is the best way possible to gain an understanding of how a cyber-attack could be carried out. Pen testing is like rating a bridge for how much weight it can support versus actually building a test bridge and driving progressively heavier trucks over it until it collapses,” says Wilson.

Ensuring ICS security like the one the students are working on safeguards our world’s critical infrastructure. Power plants, water distributors, and gas companies all use ICS to protect the delivery of their customers’ essential resources. “Power, water, gas—they all start at one point and end at another, typically people’s homes or businesses. ICS provides the security to safeguard those processes, and without security measures, entire power plants could be shut down by malicious cyber attackers,” says Simmons.

Dragos, Inc. delivered the system to the Fairfax Campus last fall. The team is spending their senior year penetration testing and using the vulnerabilities they find to create detection rules that can be included in future updates. Working with their faculty advisor, Assistant Professor Thomas G. Winston, and a subject matter expert from Dragos, Inc. makes the process as efficient as possible.

The Department of Cyber Security Engineering forges partnerships with companies like Dragos, Inc. to provide real-world projects for students. But this project has a specific impact that made the team excited to start. “Industrial control systems have cyber-physical effects. People can understand it easier as opposed to more obscure cyber-attacks. In this case, a system could be breached, and lives could be lost,” says Wilson.

Attacks like these have occurred across the globe and even close to home. Costa points to a recent attack in the United States that illustrated the vulnerabilities in the system. In February, a cyber attacker hacked a water treatment plant in Florida and remotely adjusted sodium hydroxide levels to more than 100 times the normal level, news outlets reported. Luckily, the system operator noticed the intrusion and immediately reduced the level back, but left unchanged, the water would have been toxic.

Dangerous attacks like those in Florida are why the team’s work is valuable to society.

The team jumped on the chance to work on this project because of its importance. They are excited they are contributing to protecting everyday life. “Industrial control systems like this one involve real people in their homes, people in a community who can be harmed by attacks on these systems," says Costa.

Topics

cyber infrastructure

Cybersecurity

cybersecurity bachelor's program

Senior Capstone Project

Senior Design Project

Mason team, 10-year-old making beautiful music together

Melanie Balog — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 12:19:27 +0000

Mason team, 10-year-old making beautiful music together Melanie Balog Fri, 04/28/2017 - 08:19

Isabella Nicola, who turns 11 on May 6, tentatively pulled the bow across the strings of her violin. The sound was as strong as her smile, and applause filled the room at George Mason University’s Long and Kimmy Nguyen Engineering Building.

It was the first time Isabella, born without a left hand and with only partial bone from her left elbow to her wrist, had played using the prosthetic prototype created by a senior design team of five George Mason bioengineering majors who witnessed the impromptu concert.

The prosthetic is hot pink, one of Isabella’s favorite colors, and fashioned in three sections connected by straps to allow freedom of movement, with the bow attached at the end. Made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, a common thermoplastic polymer, it is light, about 12 ounces, and was produced by a 3-D printer.

It took Isabella a few tries to get the hang of placing the bow on the strings, but once comfortable, she played simple scales and then wowed with a version of Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy.”

“I’m just very happy to see it,” said Racha Salha, a member of the design team in Mason’s Volgenau School of Engineering. “I would never believe we would get such a result.”

“Extremely overwhelming,” Isabella’s mother, Andrea Cabrera, said. “I want to cry because of how lucky I am that they took over this project.”

It is a project the design team members said will continue even after they graduate in May.

Isabella, a fifth grader at Island Creek Elementary School in Alexandria, Va., has been learning to play the violin for a year. But she rests the instrument on her right shoulder (instead of the usual left) so her right hand can finger the strings, which, thanks to a local music shop, were restrung for left-handed bowing.

The simple gold-painted prosthetic she has been using was constructed from PVC pipe by Matthew Baldwin, the string director at Island Creek and a Mason alumnus.

“It wasn’t great. It wasn’t perfect,” said Baldwin, who studied music education at Mason. “I didn’t have the knowledge to take it to the next level, but I knew I could reach out to George Mason University.”

***

Her mother said Isabella’s disability was caused by amniotic band syndrome, a situation in which a fetus becomes entangled in the fibrous string-like bands in the womb. In Isabella’s case, blood flow was cut off to her left arm, causing it to develop improperly.

“But she’s proud,” she said. “She looks people straight in the eyes and says, ‘I was born like this.’ She’s a very determined little child. I think the violin came across because she wanted to be like most of her peers.”

“I can ride a bike. I can tie my shoes,” Isabella said proudly. “I personally believe that if you put your mind to it you can do it. I don’t think having one hand affects me from doing anything. If I try really hard, I can achieve what I want.”

That determination inspired the design team when they first met Isabella, the day before Thanksgiving in 2016. Creating the prosthetic became their senior capstone project, but it also became a duty.

“Seeing her smile, our feeling was we really want to help her,” said team member Yasser Alhindi. “Immediately, we said, ‘This is our Thanksgiving miracle.’ ”

In addition to Alhindi and Salha, the design team consists of Mona Elkholy, Abdelrahman Gouda, and Ella Novoselsky. The instructor for the team is Laurence Bray, associate chair of the Bioengineering Department. Faculty mentors are Wilsaan Joiner and Vasiliki Ikonomidou.

In creating the prosthetic, the students studied those already used by violinists and examined five different plastics with varied strengths and rigidities. They used PVC pipe for a crude first prototype just to get design ideas.

Because the team miscalculated the thickness of the design, the first plastic prototype crumbled after coming out of the 3-D printer.

Isabella’s feedback also was crucial. She told them the notches anchoring the binding straps between the upper arm and forearm sections of the prototype rubbed against each other. That inhibited Isabella’s ability to bend her elbow and control her bowing motion. The easy fix extended the gap between the sections.

From the second to third prototype, the section above the elbow was reduced in size to reduce the weight, which took stress off Isabella’s shoulder.

The section that holds the bow also changed dramatically from using a metal rod as an anchor (too heavy) to two bolts that hold the bow firmly, but, depending on how much they are tightened, allow flexibility of motion.

“There are three dimensions to think about,” Mason music violin instructor Elizabeth Adams said. “There’s the bow moving perpendicular across the string, there’s the tilt of the bow and the changing strings aspect. Your arm and your shoulder control all those factors. Which angles were best? That’s what I helped them with.”

The result of Adams’ input is a joint near the prosthetic’s bow holder that mimics wrist movement but is stiff enough to allow Isabella to control bow position with the pronation of her forearm.

“So cool,” Adams said. “Everybody involved is willing to try stuff, and that’s what this project is. It’s a combination of trial and error.”

***

When Baldwin, the string teacher from Island Creek Elementary, contacted Mason about Isabella, Bray was cautious.

“Having an end user is great,” she said of Isabella. “But she’s still a child. We wanted to help her, but we didn’t want to give her false hope.”

Those concerns seemed so long ago, as design team members surprised Isabella at her last fitting with an attachment that will allow her to grip a bicycle handle. There is talk of designing another attachment that will allow her to apply nail polish, and of producing a lighter and stronger prosthetic made of nylon fiber.

“It’s really exciting,” Novoselsky said. “This really shows me how applying your knowledge will affect people directly.”

“That’s important,” Joiner said. “One of the draws of bioengineering is helping people. As a department, our projects are evolving toward that. It’s definitely something we are trying to achieve.”

Student-developed diagnostics could change tuberculosis detection, treatment

Melanie Balog — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 16:36:52 +0000

Student-developed diagnostics could change tuberculosis detection, treatment Melanie Balog Fri, 04/21/2017 - 12:36

The TB Assured team (from left): Sara Sharif, Sameen Yusuf, Rohit Madhu and Marissa Howard. Photo provided by Rice 360.

Once thought to be under control, tuberculosis—the infectious, contagious lung disease—is on the rise around the globe. Nearly a third of the planet’s population is affected by the disease, according to figures by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with nearly two million deaths reported in 2015.

Treatment is lengthy, cumbersome and labor-intensive. Detection is limited to skin tests, blood tests and chest X-rays, which are not always available to medically underserved populations.

That’s why two detection systems developed by four bioengineering seniors at George Mason University’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine have gained a following and netted research awards for their developers: Marissa Howard, Sameen Yusuf, Rohit Madhu and Sara Sharif.

The detection systems, called TB Assured, offer both a “dipstick” test, similar to a home pregnancy test, and a hand-held electrical detection system, similar to a glucose meter for testing blood sugar levels in diabetics.

Both are noninvasive, portable and inexpensive and could upend the way TB is detected—and ultimately treated—around the world.

Howard, originally from Richmond, Va., is the team leader who envisioned the tests. Yusuf, from Alexandria, Va., serves as project manager on the electronic version of the test. Madhu, from Washington, D.C., is the materials lead, helping with the 3-D printing, writing part of the code and helping with testing. Fairfax, Va., native Sharif conducts the intricate and complex testing required to move the project forward.

Earlier this month TB Assured entered the annual Virginia-North Carolina symposium of the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation sponsored by the National Science Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Howard took first place for her oral presentation.

Meanwhile, team members Yusuf and Sharif were in New York City for the American Society of Microbiology Conference on Tuberculosis. While not a competition, the conference exposed the George Mason team’s efforts to key stakeholders in TB research.

On April 10, the team won one of five research excellence awards and $1,000 at Mason’s Volgenau School Engineering Undergraduate Research Celebration.

In March the four were competitively selected to present at the Rice 360° 2017 Global Health Technologies Design Competition, where they faced 23 competitors from universities around the world and a panel of judges made up of leaders in the fields of global health and diagnostic technologies, Howard said.

The Mason team placed third.

“We received great feedback about our project and about George Mason in general,” she said, adding that she plans to complete her master’s degree in biology while continuing to work on the TB project.

While TB Assured is still in development, prototypes have proven to be successful, said the team’s mentor, Alessandra Luchini , the Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine professor at Mason’s Science and Technology Campus in Manassas.

“Scientifically, they have all the proof that the test is going to work,” Luchini said.

Lance Liotta, co-director of the Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine, who is also guiding the team, acknowledged that the “project has been transformative for the students and is a highly original strategy for detecting early TB.”