UC Merced engineering students pitch their projects

About 50 teams of UC Merced students showed off their semesterlong projects Friday during Innovate to Grow, an annual engineering expo.

The teams are made up of students from different areas of study, who work with organizations and industries to define engineering problems, and come up with the technology to solve it.

Travis Requena, a senior mechanical engineering student, and his team worked with San Francisco-based bicycle handlebar company Helios to design self-powered lights for bikes.

The 28-year-old Los Angeles native said the project is the culmination of all of his studies. “We take everything we learned in our four-year career, and we put it into a project,” he said.

He said there is nothing else on the market like his product, which uses a current generated by the pedals and electroluminescent paint to light up the bike’s wheels without batteries. California has more cyclists killed in collisions with cars than any other state, with 338 fatalities between 2010 and 2012, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.

The projects on display ranged in focus, from ideas on harvesting sweet potatoes and composting toilets to ionizing water and automating turbines.

Sam Traina, vice chancellor for research and economic development, said the projects are meant to give the students real-world experience, and allows them to show off their creativity. “They design a solution to a problem,” he said.

Another team worked with Pelco, a Clovis company that makes surveillance cameras, to make an aftermarket product for people who already have cameras. Garrett John, another senior who studies mechanical engineering, said the product would be of interest to homeowners or small-business owners.

John, 22, from San Diego, said most homeowners have fixed cameras that cannot pan or rotate. He said the cameras that do rotate can be too expensive for homes or small businesses. His product would be attached to the fixed cameras already owned by a homeowner, allowing the camera to move and be controlled by a computer or smartphone.

All of the products made by the students are prototypes and are owned by the companies that sponsor the project. But, the hands-on experience benefits the students, too. “It’s engineering experience we get to put on our résumés,” John said.

Several teams also designed apps for smartphones. They were more than just games, with apps that focused on health, scheduling and organizing pickup games of basketball, to name a few. Many provisional patent applications have been filed on inventions from past Innovate to Grow projects.

Teams with projects that could make money will have opportunities to expand and develop their ideas in the UC Merced Venture Lab, a business incubator set to open soon in downtown Merced.

This story was originally published May 15, 2015 at 2:34 PM with the headline "UC Merced engineering students pitch their projects."