Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect in the United States, occurring in 1 out of every 100 babies. In most cases, babies born with CHD must undergo a risky procedure with a 47% reintervention rate in which a modified adult coronary stent is implanted into the ductus arteriosus, an artery that closes shortly after birth. Starlight Cardiovascular is attempting to solve this problem by developing a self-expanding stent tailored specifically to the ductus arteriosus.

 SONOS requires our team to build a solar heat gain test rig to verify the thermal resilience of their speakers that are meant to be placed outdoors. The rig must allow SONOS to test their speaker at any location in the world. They don’t want to do the same old oven testing that is common in the industry, they want a product to mimic the exact heating effects and solar positioning of the sun throughout one day.  The intensity of the sun changes throughout the course of the day, from morning to evening and the simulator needs to do the same.

Our project aims to revolutionize the capabilities, and usability of regenerative braking systems in electric bikes. Currently, regenerative braking is not popular in electric bikes despite increasing the bikes range by up to 10%, and decreasing wear on the bike’s brake pads. The primary reason that regenerative braking is not used in electric bikes is because a regenerative braking system compromises the bike’s ability to free-wheel, i.e. pedal without cogging resistance from the motor. This is the problem our project intends to solve.

When manufacturers develop consumer products, it is advantageous to engineer in a useful degree of water resistance to help prevent unintentional damage, and to stay competitive in a tough market.

A widely-used benchmark in industry to judge a product’s level of water resistance are known as Water Ingress-Protection (IPX) standards. By subjecting a product to various amounts of water in a controlled environment, and observing how deep water has penetrated, an appropriate IPX-rating can then be assigned to that product that informs consumers about its level of water resistivity.

Northrop Grumman seeks to find a solution to be able to manually align stacked assembly of a Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC), solder sheet, and a gold plated heat spreader that are all the size of a grain of rice. Due to the delicate handling that must be used for the MMIC, programming a machine to do this task is risky and could be expensive. Our solution will align the stacked assembly by their centroid through the use of linear sliders. The importance of precise assembling yields a longer lifetime of the devices that the MMICs will be used to power.

Laxmi Therapeutic Devices is a Goleta-based startup developing a wearable glucose monitoring sensor. To ensure the sensor functions properly in the range of glucose concentrations and oxygen levels in the body, Laxmi requires a testing system that can deoxygenate and expose their sensors to various concentrations of glucose. While Laxmi currently has a system that lowers the oxygen level of a single glucose concentration, control of the oxygen level and exposure of the sensors is completely manual and requires frequent oversight and involvement.

LaunchPoint Technologies specializes in advanced hybrid electric power and propulsion systems. Specifically, they develop high power, high efficiency ironless axial-gap motors for hybrid electric aircraft. However, they do not have as much experience with designing iron-core radial gap motors which are especially important for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft required for future projects that LaunchPoint plans to bid on. Hyperion is LaunchPoint’s first prototype attempt at an iron-core motor using their new design software.