Portland State Magazine Fall 2019

12 Sean Krivonogoff and Blake Turner won more than $10,000 to further develop their hydrogen converter kit for cars. Small sensors created by engineering students Mikhail Mayers, Kai Brooks and Angel Gonzalez network from tree to tree to detect forest fires. Lite Devices He first worked with a team at Rogue Community College to build the kit and convert his own car to run on hydrogen. The prototype fueled a trip to InventOR in 2018 that included driving a converted car in the competition. But the pitch flopped. Turner transferred to PSU geared-up to try again. Teaming up with Krivonogoff, a business student, proved to be a winning combination. This year, Turner Automotive competed in the Cleantech Challenge—and won. That win sent them to InventOR for a second chance to pitch the conversion kit. They took second place in the statewide competition. “PSU is a school that was really focused on renewable energy,” Krivonogoff says. “And that always caught my attention—there's a ton of energy and power out there, but we're not harnessing it to its full potential.” Further, they argue that addressing climate change is now an ethical obligation that businesses need to consider. “I’m here, I want to build a business, so why not do it to help mitigate climate change,” Turner says. “Solving climate change is less of a neat thing to do now and more of a big business opportunity—because the solutions are going to have to be adopted.” Krivonogoff added that modified focal point—and moral obligation—is even being taught in business schools now. “We’re focusing on the triple bottom line,” he says. “Focus on the planet, the people and then profit comes last. Because if you’re benefiting the planet and people in the community, profit should be there, because you’re giving back.” IN THEORY, the millions of dollars in damage caused by the Eagle Creek Fire in the Columbia River Gorge could have been less if Lite Devices existed in 2017. But that fire—and the devastating Carr Fire that followed in California—served as inspiration for Lite Devices to develop a monitoring system that could help prevent another similar occurrence. “Each time we have any of these types of disasters, inevitably, the dialogue always moves toward, ‘Well, what could we have done? And how can we position ourselves to prevent something like this in the future?,’” says Kai Brooks, a PSU electrical engineering student. “ And that led us to ask, what does fire detection look like?” Brooks and his team, PSU computer engineering students Seth Rohrbach and Mikhail Mayers, found that the Oregon Department of Forestry still relies on satellite imagery and lookout towers, in remote parts of the state, to detect fires. “They're mainly using satellite imagery, which is useful, but it can be a bit slow, expensive and ineffective with cloud cover, which never happens here, obviously,” he quips. The team thought developing a sensor that utilizes a mesh network might do the trick. The small, self-powered device is attached to a tree and can detect the low-frequency wavelengths that emerge when a fire begins. Once detected, the data including GPS coordinates, time, intensity and temperature, is sent to the customer for review. “It gives the customer more visibility, and helps them allocate their