 "Photo: Thomas Gounley")
Their research project wouldn't have looked out of place on a track somewhere, but on Wednesday afternoon it was parked in front of Kingsbury Hall and having it sit still is a shame. It's capable of going 0-60 mph in 3.5 seconds.
"We are UNH Precision Racing Team and we participate in a FSAE (Formula Society Automotive Engineering) event," said Jeremy Seiferth, Technical Team Captain. "So the car we built meets the regulations for FSAE."
The team's small black Formula One-style car greeted visitors to Wednesday's Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Symposium (ISE), one of over 20 events within the university-wide Undergraduate Research Conference (URC).
Visitors often lingered to look at the car and ask questions of the 14 engineering students who worked on it. The team hopes the car will attract similar attention in two weeks in Detroit, when it will compete against approximately 150 other cars designed by teams from around the world in the annual FSAE event. It will be evaluated in both performance and design.
The team is an annual fixture at the ISE. A new crop of seniors tackles the project each year.
"Every year we build a new car," said Seiferth.
The best the team has ever done at the FSAE event is 51st place, out of about approximately 150 teams from around the world. However, the team is looking to better that mark this year.
"We're hoping for top 20 in Detroit," said Seiferth.
The race will be the culmination of what has been an intensive year-long project for the team, who estimated they spent 50-60 hours per week per person on the project.
"And that's on top of classes and homework," said Seiferth.
The team spent the fall semester designing the car, according to Electrical Team Captain Matthew Borowski, and then began building it over winter break. The final touches continued until the last minute.
"We clear-coated the body last night and put the stickers on this morning," said Phil Lord, Controls Team captain.
Precision Racing was not the only project attracting attention at the event. Over 90 research projects, comprising the work of hundreds of students, crowded the halls of Kingsbury.
Projects were divided into seven categories, representing various aspects of the science, engineering, and math fields.
Although projects had titles that ranged from the whimsical ("Heaven Forbid, Loss on the Grid! Increasing Efficiency of the Electric Grid") to the serious ("High-Resolution Magnetostratigraphic Analysis of the Denver Basin's Kiowa Core: Testing Paleocene Astrochronologies"), and dealt with everything from the state ("Home Sweet Home: Reducing Residential Energy Use in New Hampshire") to outer space ("Orbital Dynamics Analysis for NASA Mission"), some projects had a scope that was a little more limited.
In the Civil Engineering section, nine students presented a project that might interest Gables residents who either hop on the bus or endure the long walk to the main campus. They created a design for a Gables Pedestrian Bridge over the railroad tracks.
"I think it was the connection to campus," said senior Tyler Reisdorf, as to why they chose the topic. "Students in the Gables have to walk a roundabout route to the main campus. We thought it'd be nice to have a shorter route."
Besides shortening the route to campus, Reisdorf says the proposed bridge would ease congestion and prevent students from having to walk through A Lot, a potentially dangerous situation.
"A big part of the project was also ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act)," said Reisdorf.
Besides stairs, the plans for the bridge also included a lift for people with disabilities. Reisdorf says there is no route from the Gables to main campus that is ADA compliant.
For the group, the project was the chance to apply what they had learned.
"A lot of our designs were done while we were learning about this stuff in class," said Julie Muldoon, project manager.
The group started working in the fall by doing a feasibility study, which demonstrated the need for a pedestrian bridge, then moved on to research and design, ending finally with a poster and 3-D computer simulation of the project for the event. They will follow up their appearance at the ISE by presenting to faculty and writing a final report.
If all the posters became too much, and Kingsbury's layout became too confusing, visitors could always hope they came across Matthew Lape and Mark Taipan and their presentation on the development of a "Kingsbury Location Awareness System."
The two designed a BlackBerry-lookalike device with three functions. Its first is location determination. Numerous access points around the second floor of Kingsbury Hall act as a beacon, giving off a signal that the device, which uses wireless Internet, can read. The device picks up multiple signals at once, and can determine its location based on how far it is from each access point, similar to how a GPS unit works.
"There's only one spot where you'll get these exact readings from the access points at the same time," said Lape, a senior electrical engineering major, demonstrating the device.
The device can also act as a tour guide, offering textual information on nearby rooms based on the user's location.
Finally, the device can also act as a navigator, allowing users to plug in a desired destination and offering directional arrows.
The inspiration for the project came about from the two's involvement with Project54, an on-campus research group.
"Through that we were given the challenge of creating an easier way of navigating through a specific area," said Matthew Lape, a senior Electrical Engineering student.
The URC continues until this Saturday, when it culminates with the COLSA Undergraduate Research Conference, held 7:45 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the New England Center.
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