Conference proceeding
A Senior Student Design Project in Marine and Coastal Environment Monitoring
Association for Engineering Education - Engineering Library Division Papers, p23.101.1
23 Jun 2013
Abstract
A Senior Student Design Project in Marine and Costal Environment MonitoringThe projects are a valuable component of the science and engineering education. The designexperience develops the students’ lifelong learning skills, self-evaluations, self-discovery, andpeer instruction in the design’s creation, critique, and justification. Students learn to understandthe manufacturer data sheets, application notes, and technical manuals. The experience, whichwould be difficult to complete individually, gives the students a sense of satisfaction and theaccomplishment that is often lacking in many engineering courses, using traditional teachingapproaches. Furthermore, the design experience motivates student learning and develops skillsrequired in industry. The use of computer software packages for simulation and modeling toverify concepts and compare the results, giving the students additional skills necessary in thepresent day industrial settings. This paper discusses the development of a student project inmarine and costal environment monitoring. The project involves a team of final yearundergraduate students at our engineering technology program. A simple, low cost wirelesssensor network (WSN) with inherently long operation lifetime, developed based on low costsensor nodes is proposed in this project. The sensor node is powered by a hybrid solar/PV andmicro-wind power system with super-capacitor and batteries as backup units. The proposedsensing platform has the potential to be used as distributed sensing device to deploy in highdensity to give high spatial and high temporal water quality data. The proposed WSN is designedfor monitoring a coastal shallow water marine environment, measuring various parameters, suchas temperature, humidity, pressure, etc. The sensor node takes the measured atmospheric andoceanographic data and sends them to the sink node using the wireless communication. Thedescription of this system, the system characteristics, performances, the buoy prototype and theuser application are presented in details. Various aspects of the educational experience areexamined such as the educational goals of the project, project organization, and outcomes.Innovative educational approaches are described such as brainstorming session and discussionwith students of high-level choices described by a decision tree, component selections,simulations and system performance and characteristics computation. In the second part of thepaper the design solution that was adopted is described in details. The adopted design solutionincludes: power electronics circuitry (DC-DC converter design and test), maximum power pointtracking (MPPT) algorithms, control strategies, battery and super-capacitor selection as energybuffers, and overall system performances. The project is a good example of multi-disciplinarycooperation as well as providing valuable hands-on experimental experience. In addition toproviding useful lessons in teamwork, component selection and project management, the projectprovides a working demonstration of wireless sensor monitoring network and energy harvestingsystem. The goal of the design project is to explore and enhance students understanding of thefundamental engineering principles, power circuit simulation capabilities, sensors andinstrumentation and environment monitoring issues, as well as hands- on demonstration ofsystem prototyping..
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Details
- Title
- A Senior Student Design Project in Marine and Coastal Environment Monitoring
- Creators
- Radian BeluIrina Nicoleta Ciobanescu Husanu
- Publication Details
- Association for Engineering Education - Engineering Library Division Papers, p23.101.1
- Publisher
- American Society for Engineering Education-ASEE
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Engineering Leadership and Society/Engineering Technology
- Identifiers
- 991019222533104721