Elements of innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability – and sometimes a combination of all three – were showcased throughout the more than 100 students projects featured in this spring’s Rose Show. The college’s annual version of the World’s Fair filled the Sports and Recreation Center’s fieldhouse with interested students, faculty, staff, and community spectators.

Projects completed this school year by first-year students through seniors across all academic areas addressed the needs of companies, organizations, and individual clients through mechanics, artificial intelligence, generative AI, Cloud computing, robotics, gaming, and software programming. Nearly every academic department was represented, including mathematics and humanities, social sciences, and the arts.

The projects’ clients included NASA, GE Healthcare, Milwaukee Tool, Wilson Sporting Goods, Beckman Coulter, the Port of San Francisco, Booz Allen Hamilton, Kalogon, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Niagara Falls Water Board, Union Health, reTHink Inc., Geeks For Kids, and Rural Health Innovation Collaborative. Projects were also part of the Battery Workforce Challenge and CubeSat, Grand Prix Engineering, and Human Powered Vehicle competition teams.

Here are descriptions of this year’s award-winning projects:

William A. Kline Innovation Award

(Honoring Former Dean of Innovation)

StrapTech: Wireless Monitoring Strap Tension Device
Multidisciplinary Program
Presenters: Ayden Ayres, Ike Farnsworth, and Ethan Rogers

StrapTech is a dummy strap system that allows semi-truck drivers to monitor the tension in their cargo straps in real time, addressing a major safety risk in the trucking industry. Designed to ensure public safety on highways, this innovative device alerts drivers to potential cargo shifts by detecting changes in strap tension. The driver can monitor the tension the strap experiences through a portable display inside the cab of the truck. The strap integrates seamlessly with existing cargo securing methods, offering peace of mind through enhanced load security.
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William A. Kline Innovation Honorable Mention Awards  

DriveTEK: A Portable, Flexible Driving Simulator Built to Safely Study the Driving Experience
Multidisciplinary Program
Presenters: Zara Burns, Liz Fogarty, Sebastein Hughes, and Chris Steiner

This flexible, portable driving simulator uses Virtual Reality technology to allow for collection of user experience data. The game tests users’ trust with self-driving cars by measuring the person’s heartrate and the time between starting the game and when the user interacts with the brake pedal or steering wheel. This project is the continuation of user experience research by Rose-Hulman engineering management professor Amir Momenipour, PhD.

EcoBlaze Chainsaw
Engineering Design
Presenters: Kaila James, Lauren Jaracz, Calvin Jorgensen, Margo Leone, Connor Luce, Prabhat Vadlamani, Quinlan Walinder, and Michael Wilson

This chainsaw enables California wildland firefighters to continue their lifesaving work while forwarding the sustainability movement by minimizing the use of fossil fuels. The device fulfills the requirements of a severe-duty firefighting tool while avoiding the use of an internal combustion engine; taking and adapting current off-the-shelf parts to create an electric chainsaw with the capability of a gas saw.

Union Health Physical Therapy Car Simulator
Mechanical Engineering
Presenters: Mateen Afkhami, Naa Ashifia Anum, Nathan Dalton, Kaley Hart, Kiley Hart, and Zak Koehler
(See project description in mechanical engineering section below)

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Red Ribbon Department Awards

White Pine Manor Site Improvements
Civil & Environmental Engineering
Presenters: Kaleb Adams, Ben Brown, Sam Lowrance, and Jake McRoberts

White Pine Manor is picturesque, affordable, and scenic event space just south of Brazil, Indiana, that’s currently used primarily for weddings because of space and environment limitations. The team completed the design of multiple on-site developments to make White Pine Manor a more desirable destination location for more events. Upon completion of this project, the location will continue to be an affordable event space while also offering more services to its customers.
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Gender Fair: Nonprofit Demographic Data
Computer Science & Software Engineering
Presenters: Baba Diatta, Dillon Duff, Richie Eaddie, and Hayden Mattick

Gender Fair is a public benefit corporation focused on giving users a simple and efficient way to inform themselves on companies and their gender fairness. The firm recognized the need for an application to transparently display nonprofit organizations’ demographic information including gender, race/ethnicity, and pay equality – allowing anyone to make decisions regarding donations and employment. The team accomplished this by gathering and cleaning data from all available sources, including IRS 990s and Candid’s public Demographic Report. There also was benchmarking and scoring organizations in various categories and a website was created from scratch to display results with visualizations.
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Show’em
Computer Science & Software Engineering
Presenters: Yingeng Liu, Thomas Yang, Andy Yin, and Leo Zhu

Show’em is a proprietary community-building and data platform built for web3 gaming communities. It not only provides a place for players and creators to connect, but also drives community participation by encouraging users to Show’em what they’ve got, highlighting achievements and assets won in-game.
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Smart Garden Appliance Monitoring and Alerts
Computer Science & Software Engineering
Presenters: Ryan Bowering, Matthew Greenberg, Rahul Siripuram, and Nhan Tran

Anu, a leading player in the ag-tech revolution, has appliances that allow plants to be grown in a house through rotary aeroponics. These devices use a rotating tower to house various seed pods. The team’s system streamlines the process of analyzing the sensor data that’s collected from these appliances and notifies the plant science team of any issues through messages.
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Affordable Electrosurgical Unit Solutions for Low-Income Developing Countries
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Presenters: Theodore Mitz, Sadie Park, Harris Wu, and Richard Zhou

A $7 Electrosurgery Unit (ESU) handpiece that can be sterilized and reused 100 times was designed for doctors Richard Davis and Nathan Peterson of Kenya’s Kijabe Hospital. These ESU handpieces use high-frequency electric current to achieve various tissue effects during surgical procedures. They are typically designed for single-use, hindering their adoption in developing countries. The team’s device also offers a low-power benchtop testing device that simulates a basic ESU generator.
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Consistent Cups Espresso Accessories
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Presenters: Bryce Bejlovec, Breanna Coultas, Rhian Seneviratne, and Matthew Stepaniak

For manual espresso machines, pressure and time of extraction are crucial to the quality of the espresso output. The team’s system allows the user to monitor the pressure (through a pressure transducer) and flow rate and time (through a scale). Both systems interact with a smartphone app through Bluetooth and run their own Arduino scripts.
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Rear Projection Board Game Table for Simpler Gameplay
Engineering Design
Presenter: Jeremy Bergman, Maxwell Danielson, Mikko Shaia, and Sylvan Watson

This project features a computer interface to describe a game’s setup and play instructions and has a button-controlled interface on a table that can open compartments to store game pieces. This enhances the game-playing experience by making the games easily accessible and operable.
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FreshSure
Engineering Design
Presenters: Jaxon Allen and DJ Bernard

As part of the James Dyson Engineering Challenge to improve overall food safety, the team created a FreshSure container that integrates temperature, pressure, and carbon dioxide to estimate the decomposition of the food being stored. Over time, all foods release a different amount of CO2 into the air as they go bad. The data is analyzed by processing software and relayed to its companion app, where all the info is neatly displayed. Within the companion app, customers can track all food stored in a FreshSure container, with various features, including a Fresh Sure community where recipes can be shared and artificial intelligence can give customers an estimated date of food expiration.
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Special Units and Euler Systems
Mathematics
Presenter: Shyam Ravishankar

The interaction of the units of a number field and its ideal class group has long been a topic of study in algebraic number theory. In the 1980s, Rubin discovered the notion of “special units” and it was conjectured that they encode information about the exponent of the class group. Expanding on these ideas, Kolyvagin introduced the machinery of Euler systems, and they were subsequently used by Rubin to provide a new proof of the Main Conjecture of Iwasawa theory. We use the machinery of Kolyvagin and Rubin to study the properties of special units and provide evidence for Rubin’s conjecture.
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reTHink Drip Irrigation System
Mechanical Engineering
Presenters: Rofiat Adeyemi, Kai Ellis, Reagan Knabe, Kaylee McGill, and Peyton E. Miller

An automated Olla-type drip irrigation system has been designed to harvest rainwater and feed the roots of the plants in three community gardens operated by rethink, a non-profit organization in Terre Haute that’s focused on educating the community about sustainability. These community gardens also serve as food sources for members of the community who do not have access to fresh produce. The team’s final prototype for the system consists of four pots buried underground, all connected to a hosing system which is connected to a system of two 55-gallon barrels. Rainwater from the roof is collected in barrels through a diverter added to the downspout of the gutter system. A valve is connected to the barrels, so all the volunteers will have to do is open the valve, and close it when the system is full. The system will supply a week’s worth of water to the plants, so the volunteers will only have to open and close the valve once a week.
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Union Health Physical Therapy Car Simulator
Mechanical Engineering
Presenters: Mateen Afkhami, Naa Ashifia Anum, Nathan Dalton, Kaley Hart, Kiley Hart, and Zak Koehler

A new, more spacious simulator that can be safely adjusted to various heights was designed and constructed to supplement the recovery of patients in Union Hospital’s physical therapy laboratory. The car simulator is used to simulate the entry and exit of a vehicle for patients who are rehabilitating from a stroke, hip replacement surgery, or similar condition. The team’s new model replaces an earlier version, built more than 20 years by Rose-Hulman students, which lacks sufficient interior space to accommodate all patients, and the height wasn’t adjustable.
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Filter Redesign
Mechanical Engineering
Presenters: Jackson Baker, Tunji Folayan, Reddick Herbert, Mason Kiel, and Aron Murnane

A non-disclosure agreement prevents details of this project to be made available to the public.
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Psyche Asteroid Sample Return
Mechanical Engineering
Presenters: Mandy Chick, Kiana Martin, Kayla Martinez, and Marisela Miranda

A sealing system was designed for samples collected from the Psyche asteroid, a hypothesized metal-rich planetesimal currently orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Arizona State University has partnered with NASA on a mission to obtain physical samples to gain a better understanding of the asteroid’s material composition. The team’s final design consists of a fully automated sealing system that maintains the integrity of samples from the asteroid.