BYU engineering students showcase their big ideas

PROVO — While other people sit around complaining about problems, some engineering students are dreaming up ways to solve them.Twenty-seven teams of BYU engineering students presented their senior capstone projects Thursday, showcasing some of the best ideas that the young engineers are providing to major corporations around the country.Vonn Holyoak, of Fort Thomas, Ariz., and his team of five budding engineers are developing an engine for an "emerging-market vehicle," or a car targeted toward middle-class individuals in emerging markets like Brazil, China or India."Our goal is to get it up to about 60 miles per gallon, while keeping about 65 horsepower in the engine," Holyoak said.The final car will be the result of a collaboration of a number of schools across the globe, sponsored by General Motors Corp. and other companies.While the 65 horsepower doesn't even sound like Volkswagen Beetle power, Holyoak said his team's engine will combine turbo, fuel injection and a control system that will allow the car to cruise at 75 mph or more, and be able to go up a 3 percent grade.Along with the rest of his team, Steve Decker of Sacramento, Calif., completed a two-part project for John Deere Power Systems. The project included developing a magnetic-field float sensor to monitor oil consumption in test engines to help John Deere increase efficiency.The sensor that Decker's team came up with is sensitive enough to measure as little as 1/10,000th of an inch of oil consumption — better than the 1/1,000 of an inch that they were required to come up with. The other part of the system allows oil samples to be drawn from a running test engine.Other projects included a device engineered for General Mills that reduces the amount of dry powder mix that missed the bag during filling. The idea could save the company $160,000 a year.Another group came up with an idea to retrofit Union Pacific locomotives with a device to cut down on air resistance. If fully implemented, the concept is expected to save the railroad upwards of $3 million a year in fuel consumption.A group of students, including Gary Von Forell, of Fort Collins, Colo., is developing a system to remove carbon-dioxide gas from industrial flue emissions by freezing it. The drive was to come up with a way to decrease carbon-dioxide emissions more efficiently than some of the options available."All of these processes — the 12 or 13 that are out there right now — require a lot of energy," he said.The Integrated Senior Product and Process Design — Senior Capstone Program through the University's Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology is a program that puts teams of students to work designing solutions for industry-sponsored projects.