advanced e-team

Stanford University

Dairy farmers, animal processing facilities, and wastewater treatment plants use biogas generated from the anaerobic digestion of organic matter to stabilize their waste streams, facilitating processing for disposal or its conversion into usable by-products. NCIIA funding supports this E-Team in completing a technical feasibility study for a modular reactor that pressurizes and purifies biogas produced from anaerobic digestion of biomass using a closed-loop system. This will be the first step toward the commercialization of biogas-producing technology for use by commercial, industrial, and consumer clients who could benefit greatly from a reliable source of clean, renewable energy.

The US water supply and wastewater treatment is a $110 billion industry, of which $32.1 billion (30%) was spent in 2002 on capital improvements at municipal wastewater treatment facilities. In the next six years, municipalities are expected to spend an additional $100 billion to meet state and federal environmental standards. The team’s goal is to determine a practical system design and identify appropriate markets for commercialization, developing a thorough understanding of the economic value proposition for this technology

University of California, Berkeley, 2004 - $20,000

This E-Team developed a prototype device for removing arsenic from Bangladesh's drinking water. The device uses chemically treated bottom ash (residue left over from coal combustion) as the medium for removing arsenic. The invention is based on coating the surfaces of bottom ash particles with ferric hydroxide, and using this treated ash to react with, remove, and immobilize arsenic in water supplies. Lab results demonstrated that 5 gm of treated bottom ash can reduce arsenic concentration in 2.4 liters of water from 2400 ppb to 10 ppb.

The E-Team believes the final product’s pricing model will be proportional to table salt, costing <.30/kg per person per year. The business costs are also comparable to table salt.

The team consisted of four lab-based professionals in chemical engineering and physics.

University of Portland

Wheelchair basketball is among the five highest risk sports for the disabled. Injuries resulting from collisions are frequent during wheelchair basketball because the athletes must not only control the ball and the game, but also themselves and their chairs.

The Balance Sport Wheelchair E-Team has designed a less cumbersome, more responsive, and safer wheelchair that employs a simple leaning/braking system to help the athlete control herself. The seat of the wheelchair sits atop a centralized column that passes through a universal join mechanism; the column extends down where it's attached to a braking system on the chair’s two large wheels. When the player leans left, the chair turns left; when they players leans right, the chair turns right; when the player leans back, the chair stops.

The E-Team consists of four students: three undergraduates majoring in industrial design, and one member of the University of Illinois wheelchair basketball team

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003 - $16,150

80% of a product’s cost is decided early on by design, purchasing and manufacturing decisions. However, little information on cost is typically available until the design is completed and the company begins manufacturing. This lack of information about cost during product development can have a great impact on overall expense, particularly if design changes are made later in the product cycle. The Enterprise Cost Solution E-Team developed a technique, called Feature-Based Costing (FBC), that quickly and accurately estimates production and tooling costs early in the design process using readily available information. The device determines information automatically from the engineer’s solid model and does not require user input. FBC software estimates total part costs, including material, overhead, processing, and tooling costs.