Capstone Design

Well, it's only 2 weeks into the semester, and our group has decided on a senior design project. This idea has been around for about 10 years now, but no one has yet to perfect it. Basically, it replaces the camshaft on combustion engines (which have 1 timing only for the intake and exhaust valves, or very little flexibility) with a fully adjustable electronic solenoid system.

Siemens, among other companies, is also doing research on this. They believe it can improve engine performance by up to 10%.

Here's a block diagram of our design:




Anyways, hopefully we can get it finished with a working engine. It'll be tough, but I think we'll learn a lot. We are probably going to work on a small 1 cylinder or 2 cylinder engine.

A good thing is that the university will buy supplies for our design up to $250 a person. So we have $750 to buy everything. Hopefully one of my group members will get the small engine donated :)