FLORIDA TECH ENGINEERING

Engineering Excellence Since 1958

2016 College of Engineering Annual Report

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TWelcome to the 2016 College of Engineering Annual Report.

The College of Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology, the largest of our university’s five colleges, continues to expand its research and educational efforts and enhance the understanding of those key areas of land, sea and space where technology and society intersect. Through our innovative curriculum and impactful blend of classroom learning and hands-on experiences, and guided by more than 150 dedicated faculty members, the College of Engineering is strengthening our nation’s technological prowess by producing well-educated engineers who are prepared to meet—and exceed—the demands of an increasingly complex and integrated world.

The report we are pleased to bring you this year highlights the outstanding scholarship and research from our students through their direct involvement in systematic courses, teamwork and projects. We strive to have our students experience exciting innovative and entrepreneurial aspects of engineering, and do so by exposing them, at the earliest phases of their education, to a broadened yet focused view of what engineering means even as we demonstrate what creative engineers do to support industry and advance society.

In this year’s report, we turn a spotlight on transportation—one of society’s most perplexing, expensive and burdensome requirements—to examine how connected and autonomous vehicles could help improve the efficiency and safety of moving people and goods. We also take a look into how Florida Tech engineering is among the leaders in addressing one of the greatest ecological challenges of recent memory: restoring the health and beauty of the Indian River Lagoon, a $3.7 billion recreational and economic engine that is in dire need of the academic leadership we are eager to provide.

To our students, faculty and alumni, I sincerely hope you’ll enjoy reading about what our creative engineering faculty and students are making and doing to improve lives now and into the future. For prospective students, researchers and those of you who are interested in learning more about Florida Tech’s College of Engineering, I invite you to contact me at coe@fit.edu or better yet, visit our university here in beautiful Melbourne, Florida.

Sincerely, Martin E. Glicksman, Ph.D., NAE Dean, College of Engineering Allen S. Henry Distinguished Professor

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About the College of EngineeringThe largest college at Florida Institute of Technology is the College of Engineering, with over 2,800 undergraduate

and graduate students and more than 150 full- and part-time faculty members. The college offers more than 45 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs, and access to the latest technology and unprecedented levels of hands-on education. Once again, the College of Engineering was ranked as one of America’s top technological institutions in engineering in the 2015–16 Fiske Guide to Colleges.

For 2015–16, the College of Engineering is comprised of the following departments: Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering and Construction Management, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering Systems, Ocean Engineering and Sciences (formerly Marine and Environmental Systems), and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

About Florida Institute of TechnologyAs scientists, engineers and technicians came to Cape Canaveral, Fla., in the 1950s to work on America’s fledgling

space program, one of them, a physicist named Jerome Keuper, was concerned about more than just the race to the moon. The former night school instructor felt there were not enough opportunities for his colleagues to advance their technical education.

So he decided to do something about it. And in 1958, using a rented classroom, Keuper founded Brevard Engineering College. It was a decidedly modest start for what would become a world-renowned scientific and technological university that remains the only such independent institution in the Southeast.

Renamed Florida Institute of Technology in 1966, the university now sits on a 130-acre campus in Melbourne, just moments from the Atlantic Ocean. It has grown in every respect, from its enrollment to its degree programs to its athletics.

Such success doesn’t go unnoticed. Florida Tech has been named a Tier One Best National University in U.S. News & World Report and in two 2016 lists, Times Higher Education ranked it one of the top 20 small universities in the world and named it one of the top universities in the United States. As the institution advances, its alumni ranks have grown to more than 60,000 strong, including five astronauts who have flown on the space shuttle, the first female four-star general in U.S. military history and a National Teacher of the Year recipient.

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TThis academic year the College of Engineering expanded and enhanced how students learn

engineering principles by introducing innovative, entrepreneurial-minded learning into campus culture. Curricular and co-curricular offerings were changed to empower undergraduate engineering students to develop both the technical skills and the mindset to positively impact society by developing unique and far-reaching engineering solutions.

Seeking to inspire students to envision possibilities and create viable, innovative products, services and processes for lasting economic and societal impact, the National Science Foundation created Epicenter, the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation, directed by Stanford University and VentureWell. Epicenter is catalyzing change in engineering educational institutions by growing a cohort of over 50 universities. At Florida Tech, mechanical engineering assistant professor Beshoy Morkos and associate dean for research Dan Kirk joined Epicenter’s Pathways to Innovation program, initiating a transformation process for integrating innovation and entrepreneurship into our engineering curriculum.

Enabling Florida Tech’s transformation is the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), a strategic partnership committed to graduating engineers with

Innovation & EntrepreneurshipEducating the next generation with 21st century skills and creating a world-class workforce are foundational

building blocks in the White House Strategy for Innovation. This is especially true for STEM fields.

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an entrepreneurial mindset to create personal, economic and societal value through a lifetime of meaningful work. Enhancing the entrepreneurial culture within the College of Engineering by adopting KEEN’s philosophy at Florida Tech, Morkos and Chiradeep Sen, an associate professor from the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Kirk and associate dean Pierre LaRochelle, along with dean Martin Glicksman and Bisk College of Business associate professor Abram Walton, established Florida Tech as a KEEN partner.

Leading this change within the College of Engineering is the recently hired director for innovation, Jennifer Schlegel. She brings over 15 years of experience as a principal systems engineer at AT&T and Leidos coupled with academic experience from earning a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Over the last academic year, she has introduced new learning experiences to both campus faculty and students through the KEEN partnership.

Educational expertise provided by KEEN’s network facilitated curricular changes in 10 Florida Tech courses. Over 25 engineering and business faculty engaged in professional development workshops and conferences to gain new strategies for incorporating innovation and entrepreneurially minded learning. Using extracurricular activities to build student engagement, new student educational experiences were introduced, including design

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competitions, Engineers Week lectures and competitions, Hackathon, and weekly innovation challenges.

KEEN hosted a nationwide design competition titled Creating Extraordinary Value Powered by an Entrepreneurial Mindset. At Florida Tech we leveraged the design competition as an innovative learning experience by structuring the competition much like an industry proposal by creating events that included industry/proposer’s day and design reviews. Biomedical and software engineering students Doug Brown, Thad Berger, Taylor Atkinson, Nicole Ballman and Meet Pastakis were awarded the grand prize for their design of a prosthetic arm that addressed an amputee’s physical and emotional needs for comfortable, aesthetically pleasing prosthetics capable of sensory feedback. These students along with their capstone team were also awarded the President’s Cup at the university’s Northrop Grumman Engineering & Science Student Design Showcase.

Weekly innovation challenges in the spring 2016 semester introduced another new learning experience. Breaking out of traditional classroom lectures and long-term group design projects, between 20 and 60 students gathered for one hour each week to tackle an active, hands-on challenge that allowed them to apply their technical skills while building additional skills in opportunity recognition, problem solving, design, prototyping, multidisciplinary team work, communication and collaboration.

Florida Tech’s participation with Epicenter and KEEN enabled students to receive additional educational services and connect with a nationwide network of mentors through conferences, events and communication platforms by becoming University Innovation Fellows. Florida Tech Engineering students Chris Ballantine, Briana Cantos,

Gerid Paquette, Quintcey Parrish, Nicole Telega and Chris Woodle, along with College of Business students Thomas Haynie and Alex Rumsey, successfully completed a six-week program helping students create new learning opportunities that develop an entrepreneurial mindset, build creative confidence, define problems and address challenges. This group of fellows worked to promote lectures and activities celebrating National Engineers Week on campus, created a student innovation council and hosted a 36-hour Hackathon attracting over 140 students from six Florida institutions that produced 32 prototypes demonstrating an entrepreneurial mindset.

Florida Tech continue to strengthen its campus innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem through relationships with KEEN and Epicenter and by bringing new learning experiences, shaping our campus culture and creating the next generation of high-tech entrepreneurial engineers with a human touch.

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2016 SENIOR DESIGN SHOWCASE

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Nearly 140 projects from seniors in Florida Tech’s

colleges of engineering and science highlighted academic achievement and technical prowess at the Northrop Grumman Engineering & Science Student Design Showcase on April 8, 2016. The showcase included projects and posters developed by undergraduate students, working on their own or in teams, from all academic departments in the College of Science and the College of Engineering. Participating students, who must conceive, research and/or design and implement their projects, gained hands-on experience in applying science or engineering knowledge and the fundamental principles of their respective majors. Projects ranged from a solar-powered boat and a lunar rover to a drone capable of operating underwater and a solar-powered autoclave.

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Connected Vehicles at Florida Tech

The next worldwide transportation revolution

is vehicle connectivity, which allows vehicles to

exchange real-time information with other vehicles

and the surrounding infrastructure. It will enable

properly equipped private vehicles, public transit,

bicycles, pedestrians, trucks, trains, traffic signals

and cell phones and other devices to communicate

with one another, contributing to the emerging

area known as the Internet of Things.

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TThis technological advancement has the potential to improve safety, increase mobility and reduce

environmental impacts on our surface transportation network. But it will impose new challenges, as well.

Florida Institute of Technology’s Interdisciplinary Transportation Research group is developing solutions that will help users, system operators and governments address the challenges of this new technology and harness its great potential. The group brings together faculty and students from the departments of engineering systems, civil engineering and construction management, and electrical and computer engineering with combined expertise in the areas of transportation and intelligent transportation systems, simulation, socioeconomics, industrial processes, communication technology, construction and infrastructure management.

Students working on connected-vehicle research will be exposed to hands-on experience with computer traffic simulation models, field equipment set-up, testing, integration, data collection, data mining, and the tools and algorithms to develop vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure applications. They will work with distinguished faculty who offer their thoughts, below, on the exciting research to come:

Aldo Fabregas, assistant professor, department of engineering systems: “Transportation agencies strive to keep the current systems at operational levels to facilitate the movement of goods and people. With the inclusion of connected and eventually automated vehicles, a complex network of interacting systems is created. Understanding these interactions will help manage the transition to mass deployment, minimize implementation/maintenance costs for

supporting infrastructure and help to meet transportation applications requirements.”

Rodrigo Mesa-Arango, assistant professor, aagement: “For years, civil engineers have provided highway designs, traffic solutions and transportation policies based on the behavior and capabilities of human drivers. Since connectivity will assist drivers and automate several of their tasks, we will embrace cross-disciplinary collaboration to understand the interdependencies of this new complex systems, revise our assumptions, and predict the overall impact of connected vehicles to society.”

Troy Nguyen, associate professor, department of civil engineering and construction management. “The connected-vehicle environment is a complex system of systems with challenges in big data management, equipment interoperability, system governance, system reliability and information security. Engineers involved in the development of connected vehicles by necessity will have multidisciplinary backgrounds in order to address the technical challenges posed by an evolving transportation system with varying degrees of connectivity, automation and diverse human factors.”

Carlos E. Otero, associate professor, department of electrical and computer engineering: “Connected vehicles will naturally become part of the Internet of Things. However, the versatility of these new ‘things’ will require adoption of new wireless technology and interoperation with existing ones. The introduction of these systems will place an extreme demand on the radio spectrum, so we need to look for efficient ways to use the radio spectrum and to secure these systems once they are connected.”

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Connected Vehicles at Florida Tech

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Lagoon ProjectsOver 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of a coast, and the health of coastal waters

has a direct impact on a region’s economy and the well-being of its population. Here in the Sunshine State,

the Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s east coast is a treasured estuary with a $3.7 billion annual regional

economic impact. But in recent years, the IRL has been in obvious distress, with poor water quality, algae

blooms, seagrass die-offs, bird and mammal mortality events, and massive fish kills.

Recognizing the need to bring engineering and science together to restore the lagoon, Florida

Institute of Technology associate professor of ocean engineering Robert J. Weaver, with the support of faculty and administration, spearheaded the formation of the Indian River Lagoon Research Institute (IRLRI).

In the two years since the inception of the IRLRI, Weaver and other researchers have secured over

$6.5 million in funding to support the health of the lagoon. The bulk of that funding, over $4 million, has gone toward projects related to environmental muck dredging. IRLRI member John Trefry, a Florida Tech professor in ocean engineering and sciences, has shown that the legacy loading of muck is responsible for substantial amounts of nutrient loading in the IRL. The excess nutrients cause algal blooms that impair the water quality. Removing this muck has been identified as one important tool to improve water quality in the lagoon. Additional projects include coordinating the outreach and education component of the IRL National Estuary Program, studying the circulation in the IRL and investigating the causes and effects of large algal blooms.

Oysters, valued for their filtering properties, are encouraged to grow near man-made structures in the lagoon through the Living Docks program.

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Restoring the natural filtration capacity of coastal estuaries

is another critical management tool. Within Florida Tech’s College of Engineering, Weaver has been involved in eco-engineering projects such as his “Living Dock” concept, which he has worked on with research assistant professor Kelli Hunsucker. The Girl Scouts and Indian Harbor Montessori have provided community support. The “Living Dock” involves designing oyster mat systems to place on the pilings of docks along the lagoon. The mats encourage oysters and other filter feeders to settle on the pilings away from the smothering muck, with the goal being to restore the natural filtration system.

Weaver partnered with associate professor of

biological sciences Jonathan Shenker to develop a “Floating Bio-remediation Platform” concept. This structure provides a protective frame on which marsh grasses, mangroves, seagrasses and bivalves can be grown in the open lagoon. The concept relies on the natural nutrient and suspended solid

removal properties of the plants and bivalves to improve water quality. The engineering challenge is to design a structure that can survive the high-energy, corrosive environment while protecting the plants growing upon it.

Beyond eco-engineering, Weaver, along with Florida

Tech professors Steven Lazarus and Gary Zarillo, is working to advance research on circulation in coastal estuaries. With models developed via high-performance computing that predict flushing and residence times, Weaver and his colleagues are using that data to guide engineering designs to increase flushing and improve water quality.

The problems facing Florida’s Indian River Lagoon are not unique; estuaries everywhere are threatened as coastal populations grow. Florida Tech and its Indian River Lagoon Research Institute are at the forefront of research into and the development of solutions to coastal water quality problems that affect communities worldwide.

Robert Weaver grows native plants for the Living Shoreline project with the goal to prevent shore erosion with natural barriers.

EN-443-716http://coe.fit.edu | www.fit.edu

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERINGPriMA Prosthetics, a 3D-printed pediatric prosthetic arm that could be manufactured and sold at a far lower cost than traditional electric prostheses, won the President’s Cup award as the top College of Engineering project at the 2016 Northrop Grumman Engineering & Science Student Design Showcase. Team members were Taylor Atkinson, Ryan Babbitt, Nicole Ballman, Thaddeus Berger, Clyde Brown, Meet Pastakia, Justin Pavao, Austin Spagnolo and Zuhoor Yamani. The project also won the award given to the top project from the Biomedical Engineering Department.