Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
24 Anti-lost/theft alarming system for personal belongings
 Wenhao Li
Xiying Wang
Yunchi Sun
 Igor Fedorov design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Many precious personal belongings, either by theft or carelessness, are easily lost and will cause serious damage. According to a report by TechCrunch: US citizen, on average, lost one smart phone annually, which will cause 30 billion dollar loss of money in 2012. Not to mention the lost of wallet, which may cause the lost of your driving license, cash and credit cards.
Our idea is to use wireless communication technology to remarkably decrease the lost rating of those important items you carry. Since those personal belongings(i.e. wallet, cell-phone, keychain...) are supposed to be very close to you, we would pair them up(use transmitters and receiver) and make a portable device that could be easily hooked up/carried in your jacket/coats. This device will detect if any of the personal belongings are too far from you (for example more than 1 meter) and send out an alarm. The device should also be able to turned on/off manually with password. In case of theft, the stealer may trying to run away, so the alarm beep will also come from the losing personal belongings, with the alarm volume proportional to the distance between you and the potentially losing item.
This portable device should be able to pair up with multiple personal belongings, and the paired up transmitter on the personal belongings should be very small and light-weight, but also able to sent out high-volume alarm.

Control System and User Interface for Hydraulic Bike

Iain Brearton

Featured Project

Parker-Hannifin, a fluid power systems company, hosts an annual competition for the design of a chainless bicycle. A MechSE senior design team of mechanical engineers have created a hydraulic circuit with electromechanical valves, but need a control system, user interface, and electrical power for their system. The user would be able to choose between several operating modes (fluid paths), listed at the end.

My solution to this problem is a custom-designed control system and user interface. Based on sensor feedback and user inputs, the system would change operating modes (fluid paths). Additionally, the system could be improved to suggest the best operating mode by implementing a PI or PID controller. The system would not change modes without user interaction due to safety - previous years' bicycles have gone faster than 20mph.

Previous approaches to this problem have usually not included an electrical engineer. As a result, several teams have historically used commercially-available systems such as Parker's IQAN system (link below) or discrete logic due to a lack of technical knowledge (link below). Apart from these two examples, very little public documentation exists on the electrical control systems used by previous competitors, but I believe that designing a control system and user interface from scratch will be a unique and new approach to controlling the hydraulic system.

I am aiming for a 1-person team as there are 6 MechSE counterparts. I emailed Professor Carney on 10/3/14 and he thought the general concept was acceptable.

Operating modes, simplified:

Direct drive (rider's pedaling power goes directly to hydraulic motor)

Coasting (no power input, motor input and output "shorted")

Charge accumulators (store energy in expanding rubber balloons)

Discharge accumulators (use stored energy to supply power to motor)

Regenerative braking (use motor energy to charge accumulators)

Download Competition Specs: https://uofi.box.com/shared/static/gst4s78tcdmfnwpjmf9hkvuzlu8jf771.pdf

Team using IQAN system (top right corner): https://engineering.purdue.edu/ABE/InfoFor/CurrentStudents/SeniorProjects/2012/GeskeLamneckSparenbergEtAl

Team using discrete logic (page 19): http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/86206/ME450?sequence=1