UCSC Engineering Department IDEASS program + Cabrillo Engineering Department present student-run projects!

Providing Vuelta Grande with Potable Water

                     Fifteen Cabrillo engineering students and two faculty members spent two weeks in Guatemala designing, building, and testing a water system for the 120-family Vuelta Grande village, just outside of Antigua.  They will talk about the engineering project as well as the cultural experience that has impacted them personally and as a future engineers.

           Rainwater catchment for schools project

         Presented by: UCSC IDEASS students

            Our goal is to increase water capture and retention in Santa Cruz through the use of low impact development (LID) projects to reduce stormwater runoff, increase our groundwater supply, reduce the amount of pollutants leaching into our waterways, and increase awareness of sustainable water resource management. Our team plans to accomplish this through the development of LID and rainwater catchment systems at two different locations: Bay View Elementary School and Natural Bridges Green Career High School. This project requires collaboration between different entities throughout Santa Cruz including Santa Cruz City Schools, the City of Santa Cruz, UCSC, and IDEASS. For Bay View Elementary we have submitted a state-funded grant (DROPS) and are working on prototyping rainwater harvesting systems for the Bay View Elementary Life Lab garden. At our Natural Bridges site we have identified the problems with the existing system and  retrofitted them to charge the system with new rainfall.  Both sites will involve an educational component involving students in construction and monitoring for the systems. Through the completion of these two projects we hope to achieve our ultimate goal of raising awareness in our Santa Cruz community about sustainable stormwater practices and the benefits of a decentralized water system.

         Graphene Synthesis and Optimizing Graphene Desalination Filters project

        Presented by: UCSC IDEASS students

         Graphene represents a recent breakthrough in materials science and researchers are focused on finding ways to improve and standardize its production so that it can used for a number of applications including reverse osmosis and energy storage. UCSC undergraduates are working with community mentors to explore new techniques for graphene synthesis to improve the quality of the resulting material and to minimize any environmental impacts resulting from the synthesis process. What makes this project unique from others is its reliance on conventional methods that could be practiced outside a university research setting. For example this team is using consumer grade materials such as a conventional microwave, blender, and sonic bath. Additionally, we are using reagents that are not toxic to the environment.  Hazardous materials such as dimethylforamide, will be replaced with a water and ethanol solution as an example. 

       A second team is working on a desalination prototype that consists of two graphene-based filters in sequence suspended within a cylindrical PVC pipe. Their objective is to test the prototype to determine whether it can filter a saline solution down to drinkable levels (< 100 ppm saline concentration) by testing conductivity. To illustrate how a graphene oxide system compares to a polyamide filter, they will also build a polyamide filtration system with a single filter of the same size. This will allow them to compare the filtration ability at certain pressures of the graphene oxide filter compared to its contemporary counterpart.