Portland State Magazine Winter 2012

Engineering undergraduates rarely get the opportunity to work on international-scale projects, much less ones with a humanitarian focus. Yet when Mercy Corps, a Portland-based international aid organization, needed a way to confirm that hand-washing stations and latrines installed in Jakarta, Indonesia, were improving sanitation practices, it turned to Engineering at PSU. lhe Innovation Program provided Anndee Huff and other team members with the resources to design sensors able to monitor water usage and performance for Mercy Corps. "What's unique is that we included a remote sensing device that can send the data back to Portland via the Internet so that we can analyze it here," says Huff. The project has since grown, with sensors possibly going to Haiti, and the project has already impacted Huffs career aspirations. The trip to Indonesia to install the sensors confirmed her desire to work in international development. ''If we want to help people," she says, "we have to be open to new innovative ideas that will be needed to save lives.~ Creating solutions to problems faced in developing countries requires a unique set of sensibilities. Designs must factor in the lack of reliable power sources and available replacement 10 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE WINTER 2012 parts-realities that can, for example, render donated medical equipment useless. One Innovation Program team set out to develop a low-power, durable oxygen device able to deliver the 40 percent oxygen purity necessary to save patient lives. Inspired by a NASA-born idea for an oxygen concentrator, the team, including senior Evan Rhead, achieved their goal, but it was definitely an iterative process. "We took two steps forward and one step back as we had revelations about how big the instrument needed to be, what kind of compressor to use, and how to reconfigure the valve design-but that's the norm for product development," says Rhead. He hopes that a new team of students will build on their success and get the oxygen concentrator put into use. "That would feel amazing," he says. Super spies all over the world would kill for a gadget like this. With its four mini-propellers spinning, the robotic copter being developed by students Ries autonomously-black ops style. 'Ihe quadcopter must be able to navigate unknown buildings, retrieve a Rash drive, and emerge undetected for the team, led by senior Greg Haynes, to win the International Aerial Robotics Competition in August 2012. "We are in a competition where the problem is not yet solved-so we are helping advance the state of the art," says Haynes. With the support of the Innovation Program, they were able to simply