Innovate to Grow - Fall 2018
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Capstone IDC Teams (19) Team Descriptions
Winners of the 5 Capstone Tracks are denoted with the Blue Ribbon
Team 1. Crop Cleaner
Client: Almond Board of California
Debris Separation from Almonds:Design of a device that can be attached onto a harvester or a product loader or as a stand-alone unit to effectively separate debris from the field run in almond harvesting. The device should remove the debris effectively at a high loading pace without generating dust or air blowing.
Team 2: ABDR - Track 1 Winner 
Client: Almond Board of California
Dust Reduction:The goal is to design a device that can be attached onto dust exit spout or chute of an existing almond harvester to contain the dust or divert the dust onto orchard floor with minimal dust blowing disturbance. A successful device would reduce more than 50% of dust from nut picking.
Team 3: BART Plaza Resilience
Client: Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)
Plaza Resilience: Design a solution to mitigate the effects of damage and contamination in and around its stations. The plan must address the harm that occurs to the variety of surfaces present, including concrete, granite, glass and plexiglass. It must be environmentally sustainable, cost-effective and maintenance friendly.
Team 4: Station Lighting - Track 3 Winner
Client: Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)
Station Light Monitoring: Design of an illumination monitoring system that minimizes inspection time and maintenance interaction, while maintaining surveillance of predetermined illumination levels based on industry standards. The system shall be inconspicuous and physically unobtrusive, yet capable of monitoring all hard-to-reach places. Most importantly, it must be safe to use on station platforms.
Team 5: Team Flibbin
Client: Better Engineering
Macrobin Flipping: The primary objective is to propose a method to automatically flip macrobins prior to entering the wash system, and automatically revert the bins upon exiting the wash system. This is necessary because the macrobins would otherwise fill with water as the bins have no drainage holes.
Team 6: In-situ-O
Client: Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL)
Oxygen Generation: JPL’s upcoming mission to Mars will demonstrate the production of oxygen. MOXIE (Mars OXygen In-situ Experiment) uses a solid oxide electrolyzer to split carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen. This project focuses on assessing all technologies and finding the one option that fits all mission parameters for the success of human exploration of Mars.
Team 7: Remoteling - Track 4 Winners
Client: Morning Star
MOT Removal II: The tomato harvesting machine has dedicated sorting equipment to remove “material other than tomatoes” from the product stream. Sorting systems at the processing plants are designed to remove this excess debris. This project consists of finding effective clean-in-place system recommendations for the system currently in place to prevent clogging.
Team 8: F.A.T. - Track 2 Winner
Client: Tergis Tech
UV Swaddle: This team will develop a swaddle for premature infants that can provide the same UV light provided by a bili light. A bili light is used to treat neonatal jaundice, a liver condition caused by a high concentration of bilirubin in the blood.
Team 9: Inventory Drone
Client: United States Cold Storage
Inventory Control Drone Support: This team will research and design a low profile robot that could help identify and locate the missing product(s) from our racks. The design solution should be viable and economical. Primarily, we are concerned with whether this functionality/design would work in our harsh warehouse environment.
Team 10: Bowles Farm
Client: Bowles Farming Company
Weed Seed Filtration in Water: Bowles delivers water in two ways, Subsurface Drip Irrigation and Furrow/Flood Irrigation. These delivery mechanisms are also delivering seed to the fields that were collected in the canals. Bowles is looking for a mechanism that would remove seed in water for sprinkler and flood/furrow irrigation after the water has been delivered.
Team 11: Perfect Caps
Client: G3 Enterprises
Aluminum Screw Cap Inline Measurement Automation: This team will help automate positioning and measurement of 30x60 aluminum screwcaps for continuous inline measurement, feeding data to our SPC system. We would like to incorporate a high-speed measurement system, capable of rapidly measuring critical dimensions and features based on image-measurement technology and laser profilometry.
Team 12: S&L Consulting
Client: G3 Enterprises
Screwcap Liner Gas Transmission Control: The wine industry is beginning to understand the impact of their packages’ oxygen transmission rates on the shelf-life and wine development. G3 is looking for a low cost, food-grade additive for current injection-molded liner polyolefin materials allowing the control of oxygen transmission rates and the minimization of carbon dioxide loss.
Team 13: Eyevengers - Track 5 Winner
Client: E&J Gallo Winery
Eyewash Stations: E&J Gallo’s wine cellar has 16 eye wash stations. Each scald protection valve discharges approximately 2gpm when activated. This team will help modify the feed water design that provides water at all eye wash stations so we can eliminate scald protection valves from opening and leaking water to the drains.
Team 14: Tight by Design
Client: E&J Gallo Winery
Premium Small Lot Packaging: During initial packaging runs, a critical quality issue was identified with equipment used to heat-shrink capsules onto the bottles, causing a high level of variability in package quality as well as wasted time and materials. This team will design new processes, equipment or tools for the capsule heat-shrink process.
Team 15: Storm Team
Client: E&J Gallo Winery
Storm Water Sample Collection: Storm Water sampling is an infrequent but highly important process, and,due to the unpredictability of weather,can often be difficult to manage.This team will design a system that can detect rain and automatically take samples of storm water runoff at the appropriate times and locations.
Team 16: Drum Curing Dreams
Client: Morning Star
Drum Curing Technology: Morning Star Company owns a drum manufacturing plant, producing annual quantity of 75,000 units. The product development stage is nearing completion and requires integration of a fiber tube curing process. This team will develop recommendations to implement this process and assesstheir feasibility and economic value.
Team 17: Bare Necessities
California Strawberry Commission
Bare Root Transplanter: In automated transplanting of strawberry nursery plants, bare roots are planted through a plastic cover that lays on top of the soil. The plants vary in size and shape and are difficult to manipulate uniformly. This team will design and prototype a plastic bare root transplanter for strawberry nursery plants.
Team 18: Solid Waste
Client: The Wine Group
Wastewater Solids Management:Wastewater streams produced at TWG hold solid particulate matter due to the use of both DE and Perlite filtration. DE typically sinks to the tank bottom, whereas Perlite has the propensity to float. This team will establish an efficient method of filtration for solids found in TWG’s wastewater streams.
Team 19: Happy Giraffes
Client: Valley Children's Hospital
Children’s Nose Filter Design: Face masks are worn by immune-compromised patients and visitors to prevent the influx or efflux of pathogens. Children do not tolerate face masks well. This increases vulnerability to infections or pollution. This team will design a nose filter which is comfortable and more user-friendly,especially to children.
