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Track 1: Wind Power, Energy Storage, and Smart Grid
IPRO 323: Modeling of Building-Integrated Wind Energy Modules
Instructors:
Candace Wark (Armour College of Engineering)
Dietmar Rempfer (Armour College of Engineering)

Track 2: Mapping Applications & Infrastructure Planning
IPRO 303: WishMap
Instructors:
James Burstein (Stuart School of Business)

Dean’s Choice Awards

The students, who hail from India, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Pennsylvania, and Illinois first toured the Institute of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture (IPRAC) and enjoyed a Puerto Rican lunch. They then examined the bins of materials that they plan to categorize, digitize, and make accessible to the public. The IPRO’s next step will be to sort the materials and determine how to turn documents stored in bins into material that is available  to the interested public online.

*Taken from the PRCC Newsletter*

OVERALL TEAM RECOGNITION

Track 1 – Process Innovation

IPRO 339: Piston & Piston Pin Manufacturing Process Improvement

Track 2 – Information Technology Solutions I

IPRO 369: Disease Transmission Modeling & Research

Track 3 – Information Technology Solutions II

IPRO 365: Simply Park: Innovating Solutions to Enhance the Driver Experience

Track 4 – Renewable Energy and Sustainability

IPRO 323: Modeling of Building Integrated Wind Energy Modules

Track 5 – Community Development and Service Learning I

364: Ramovation: Renovation of the Ramova Theater

Track 6 – Community Development and Service Learning II

318: Surgical Lighting System for Hospitals in Developing Countries

BEST VIDEO AWARD

IPRO 336: Implementing The Plant

Located on IIT”s historically significant Mies Campus, the event will be held in the Idea Shop (a 13,000 sq. ft. collaborative learning space and 3D digital fabrication lab) on October 13th from 10 AM – 3PM 3440 South Dearborn St. Chicago, IL 60616. Located steps from the Sox-35th red line stop. (map)

Event attendees will interact with student teams and view their exhibits. This event will feature an IIT patent-bearing alumnus as the keynote speaker and will be led by IIT’s top research faculty and the vice provost. Event attendees will have a chance to judge the projects.

The Interprofessional Projects Program (IPRO) joins together students from architecture, engineering, humanities, business and chemistry in the studio. Students, faculty and business partners (i.e. NAVTEQ, Tellabs, Exelon and Motorola)who work together to improve the human condition and K-12 education and other efforts that make the world a better place. Sustainability IPRO projects aim to preserve our environmental heritage through exploration of technologies, behaviors and practices that change our way of thinking, working and living. Entrepreneurial IPRO projects pursue these ideas with a business slant.

This is a free event with food, but attendees need to register.

Click here to register for this event.

View the program for this event!

Jacob Ernst, an architecture student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, won’t soon forget the severed power lines he saw in Haiti in January.

“Occasionally, you’ll see someone actively cutting down a power line to take the electricity,” Ernst said. “There are a lot of problems with people needing electricity, but it’s in very short supply.”

The electricity shortage in Haiti is the catalyst for a project-based class at IIT in which the 11 students are helping design inexpensive, solar-powered chargers for donated laptops in Haitian primary schools.

The interdisciplinary class, Developing Technology to Transform Education Throughout Haiti, is led by Laura Hosman, an assistant professor of political science, who studies the introduction of technology in developing nations. It is being taught for the second semester through IIT’s Interprofessional Projects Program.

In 2008, the Haitian government received a donation of more than 10,000 laptops from One Laptop Per Child, an international nonprofit that distributes small, rugged laptops to poor schoolchildren in developing countries. The laptops were given through a One Laptop Per Child promotion called Give One, Get One, in which donors could pay $399 for two of the low-powered laptops and donate one or both, Hosman said.

But in Haiti, there was a large obstacle to the donations’ success: More than 90 percent of the country’s primary schools do not have electricity, which is required for charging the laptops.

“There are so many issues and problems with bringing pieces of technology into the developing world, when it’s actually an environment that we are taking for granted,” Hosman said.

Laptops were distributed in 2009 to some of the few schools that were on or near the country’s power grid, Guy Serge Pompilus, the Haitian Ministry of Education’s coordinator of the country’s One Laptop Per Child project, wrote in an email.

Students had access to the laptops for a few months before the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the country.

The students were “immediately passionate” about the laptops, Pompilus wrote.

“They just started to experiment with the laptops,” he wrote, “and they, most of the time, outperformed the teacher in mastering the laptops.”

But the earthquake made the schools’ electricity sporadic and unreliable, Pompilus wrote.

Schools might receive a few hours of electricity each day, but it might come in the middle of the night when no one is present, Hosman said.

The unpredictability has left “thousands of laptops out there that used to have a way to charge and no longer do,” Hosman said.

One Laptop Per Child’s involvement in donations usually ends when the laptops get into the recipient countries, said Bruce Baikie, president and chief executive officer of Green WiFi, a nonprofit that provides solar-powered wireless Internet to developing countries.

“The issues of getting Internet connectivity and power are for the host countries to work out,” said Baikie, who has been a technical adviser to the IIT class.

That’s where the IIT project comes in.

Pompilus approached Baikie in 2009 at a One Laptop Per Child conference in Rwanda, where they began brainstorming how to use solar power to charge the laptops in Haiti. Baikie took the idea to Hosman, who pitched the idea for the class to IIT.

The IIT students, working with Baikie, have completed a design for an inexpensive system that will use solar panels connected to batteries and a charge controller to create a direct-current-only charge for the laptop batteries.

“Right now, solar seems to be the most dependable power source from a long-life standpoint,” Baikie said. “And Haiti has plenty of sunshine.”

The systems will be able to last for 15 to 20 years with little maintenance, he said.

The IIT group plans to return to Lascahobas, Haiti, in May to install solar power systems in two elementary schools that will charge hundreds of laptops.

The class is trying to raise $37,000 to fund travel and the implementation, Hosman said. So far, it has raised about $6,500.

If the class does not raise enough money, students will continue fundraising with the hopes of installing the systems in the fall, Hosman said.

Ernst — who went on a site-assessment trip to Haiti in January — believes in the project because the IIT group will be working with Haitians, teaching them how to install and maintain the devices and giving lessons on solar energy, he said.

“A lot of the fixes that people are doing are short-term fixes, whereas education can be more of a long-term, actually sustainable fix for the country,” Ernst said. “We’re not just going to drop off these solar panels and say, ‘Here’s your electricity; I hope it works for you.’”

The IIT students have partnered with engineering students at the State University of Haiti, who are creating French and Creole educational content for the laptops.

In a whirlwind eight-day trip to Lascahobas, Haiti, following nearly a year’s worth of planning, designing, and hard work, a team of IIT students from IPRO 335: Developing Technology to Transform Education throughout Haiti successfully carried out their first solar powering deployment in early August, providing the EFACAP school in Lascahobas with the capability to charge 500 OLPC XO laptops with a direct current (DC)-only solar system. According to research by the team and OLPC, the installation is the largest single-school solar laptop-charging deployment in the world.

Led by Assistant Professor of Social Sciences Laura Hosman, IIT students Dhara Shah, Jacob Ernst, Mario Berrones, Regine Antenor, Ryan Tillman, Simon Brauer, and Stevie Brummer joined Bruce Baikie from Green Wifi, Fabrice Urrizalqui from the French-American School in San Francisco, Guy Serge Pompilus and Adam Holt from OLPC, State University of Haiti engineering student Carl Friedrich Lacrete, and four members of the NGO Haiti Outreach to execute the deployment.

IPRO 335 students worked since August 2010 on the design, drawings, fundraising, lesson plans, and all the various parts of the project. Starting in January 2011, they raised $25,000 to buy all of the equipment and make the travel and deployment possible. The flexibility and replicability of their design was put to the test in multiple ways, as the team improvised and overcame a last-minute change in the school receiving the deployment, a customs problem with some equipment, and the threat of a tropical storm.

The team set up a brand-new library at the school, full of books in French and Creole, and created an inventory, catalog, and a system for checking out the books. The team talked with the teachers at the school about using the library, about lesson plans on solar power that the team will continue to develop over the coming semester, and carried out a baseline survey on electricity, technology, and laptop usage in the home and classrooms. The team also provided training to the local maintenance staff in solar system upkeep.

The team hopes to make another trip to Haiti in just four months to complete a second installation at a second school in the Lascahobas area and return to the EFACAP school with improvements and a system check-up. The amazing work of these students to bring solar solutions to Haiti is entirely reliant on the generosity of donors who fund the trips. You can help the team demonstrate the scalability and sustainability of their model with the second deployment in December by donating here.

Find more info about the deployment, and many more photos, onHosman’s blog post about the trip.

OVERALL TEAM RECOGNITION

Track 1 – Information Technology Solutions

IPRO 345: Adoption & Implementation of Diabetes Electronic Support Center at Mount Sinai Hospital

Track 2 – Sustainability and Community

IPRO 322: Integrated Solar System Design

BEST VIDEO AWARD

A tie between the following teams:

IPRO 346: Harvesting & Beneficial Use of Condensate from Air Conditioning Systems

IPRO 348: The Universal Car Project: Applying Open Source Concepts to Global Automobile Design Platforms

The purpose of M.O.R.E Life is to design a cost-effective mobile operating room that can be easily deployed and transported into disaster relief situations in order to provide a sterile and sanitary surgical environment for victims.