Project Overview
Craft Beauty Lab is a GMP-compliant contract manufacturer of skincare and cosmetic products. We manufacture high-viscosity products such as balms, salves, ointments, and anhydrous formulations that must be heated before they can be transferred into production filling equipment.

We are seeking a senior engineering capstone team to design, build, test, and deliver a fully functional portable heated transfer system capable of pumping hot cosmetic balms from bulk drums into a heated filling hopper.

The primary deliverable for this project is a working prototype that can be demonstrated under real manufacturing conditions.

Project Objective
Design and fabricate a portable system capable of transferring heated cosmetic balms and salves from a bulk drum into a production hopper while maintaining product temperature throughout the entire transfer process.

The system should be designed for use in a cosmetic manufacturing environment and emphasize reliability, operator safety, cleanability, and ease of operation.
Background
Many cosmetic balms and salves are solid or semi-solid at room temperature. Before filling, they are heated until they become pumpable liquids.

Current transfer methods are labor-intensive, slow, and create opportunities for product waste and operator injury.

The challenge is to develop a portable heated pumping system that maintains the product above its solidification temperature from the drum through the entire transfer path and into the filling hopper.

Functional Requirements
The completed system should:

Transfer high-viscosity cosmetic balms and salves from a drum into a heated hopper.
Maintain product temperature throughout the entire transfer path.
Prevent product from cooling or solidifying inside the system.
Include heated or insulated product-contact components as required, including:
Drum pickup assembly
Pump
Transfer hose
Valves and fittings
Discharge assembly
Operate continuously throughout a normal production day.
Be mounted on a portable cart that can be easily moved throughout the facility.
Be constructed using cosmetic-compatible materials (preferably 304 or 316 stainless steel for product-contact surfaces).
Be designed for rapid disassembly and thorough cleaning between production batches.
Minimize product loss and retained product volume.
Include appropriate temperature controls, sensors, insulation, and operator safety features.

Engineering Scope
The student team should evaluate and select appropriate engineering solutions, including:

Pump technology
Heating method
Temperature control strategy
Insulation
Structural frame/cart design
Power requirements
Sanitary fittings and connections
Cleaning methodology
Safety systems
User ergonomics
Commercially available components may be incorporated where appropriate. The engineering challenge is the successful integration of these components into a reliable manufacturing system.
Testing Requirements
The completed prototype should successfully demonstrate its ability to:

Pump heated balm from a drum.
Deliver product into a hopper at a practical production rate.
Maintain target product temperature throughout operation.
Operate continuously during an extended production run.
Restart successfully after temporary production pauses without product solidifying in the system.
Be disassembled, cleaned, reassembled, and returned to service.
Testing should be performed using an actual Craft Beauty Lab product or a representative material with comparable viscosity and melting characteristics.
Deliverables
The project should include:

Fully operational prototype
Live demonstration of the completed system
CAD models
Engineering drawings
Bill of Materials
Electrical and control schematics
Assembly documentation
Operating manual
Cleaning procedures
Preventive maintenance recommendations
Safety assessment
Test protocol and performance results
Manufacturing cost estimate for future production
Project Success Criteria
The project will be considered successful when the completed prototype can reliably transfer heated cosmetic balm or salve from a drum into a production hopper while maintaining product temperature, operating safely throughout a production day, and allowing practical cleaning between batches.

The goal is a functional, usable piece of manufacturing equipment that can be evaluated for implementation in our production facility.
Educational Value
This project provides students with practical experience in:
Mechanical system design
Heat transfer
Fluid mechanics
High-viscosity pumping
Process equipment design
Controls and instrumentation
Sanitary equipment design
Design for manufacturability
Prototype fabrication and testing
Real-world collaboration with an industrial sponsor

Design and construct a modular overhead gantry platform capable of traversing the length and width of a greenhouse growing area with repeatable, encoder-based positioning. The platform will provide a stable, automated mounting system for photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) sensors and other environmental monitoring equipment, enabling spatially referenced data collection across the plant canopy. The system should support autonomous or manual operation, provide accurate positional feedback, and include a modular payload interface to accommodate future sensors and research tools.

Preliminary Requirements:
- The system shall provide an overhead gantry platform capable of traversing a representative greenhouse growing area in the X and Y axes.
- The system shall provide encoder-based position feedback to enable repeatable sensor positioning.
- The system shall support a modular payload interface capable of accommodating a PAR sensor and future environmental sensing devices.
- The system shall provide autonomous and manual positioning capabilities.
- The system shall collect and log sensor data referenced to the gantry position.
- The system shall operate safely within a greenhouse environment without interfering with normal greenhouse operations.
- The system shall be designed to facilitate future expansion through modular hardware and software architecture.
- The project shall include complete mechanical, electrical, software, and user documentation.

corn plants at the automated Bayer Marana facility are grown in 54-pot bench containers that move through variable growth chambers. Micro-climatic differences (airflows, humidity, shade) and physical hardware constraints (bench tilting, uneven drainage) cause individual pots to dry out at different rates. Traditional whole-bench flood irrigation fails to maintain precise moisture uniformity, leading to underwatered or overwatered sections. This project will combine RGB imaging and NDVI sensors into a unified analytical pipeline to map, warp, and overlay structural growth data with real-time color and geometric analysis. The platform will automatically isolate individual pots and flag localized dry spots before physical wilting or physiological damage occurs, allowing growers to make localized irrigation adjustments.

Utilize Honeywell multiple ATLAS MIMO radars to create a 360 degree radar tracking system that will be vehicle mounted. The goal would be to stitch radar output from all radars into one single 360 view and track targets on this single view (i.e. so common tracker for all 3-4 radars). This will enable multi target tracking. Stretch goal would be to detect very low RCS moving objects like birds, small drones etc.

Trees, in particular topical trees, have a large impact on the global carbon cycling and with increasing climate change we need to understand the feedbacks of natural ecosystems on the global atmosphere. Most researchers have focused on leaf gas exchange, however like skin all plant surfaces exchange carbon with air.
The full accounting of a tree's carbon cycle has not really been achieved. This project challenges students to try to achieve this on a real time basis: to measure the carbon uptake by leaves, the carbon stored in stems, and the carbon lost from stems, and roots and soil with one single integrated system.
The project will develop a stand alone system that will integrate carbon exchange dynamics of a whole tree by measuring gas exchange and important environmental factors such as light, temperature, humidity, and water content. The project will need to design gas exchange components for tree stems and soil gas exchange and integrate these with leaf gas exchange cuvettes, a gas analyzer (Licor 7810 via ethernet cable and MQTT protocol), environmental sensors (light, temperature, humidity, and soil water content), and stem dendrometers.
The complexity of this project lies both in making excellent gas exchange measurement from a variety of surfaces (leaf, stem, and soil) and the integration of sensor and gas exchange data. The holy grail would be if the carbon exchange from the different surfaces could be displayed on a screen at a 30-60 minute time frame, or near real-time.

The current BenchMark Advanced Staining System utilizes a waste separation process that relies on gravity, which requires a minimum height to achieve optimal separation of oil and water. The next generation advanced staining system will have a different waste stream that will challenge current gravity-driven separation.

The goal of this project is to design a waste separation system that is optimized for the new waste stream, while meeting the necessary requirements.

The final deliverable is a waste separation unit for the next generation advanced staining system.

Need:
Society has lost its sense of humor! An autonomous pie face robot is needed to restore levity to mankind.

Objective:
Inspire the next generation of STEM students by applying the engineering process to a novel and fun pie face robot.

Scope:
Create a robot capable of delivering a pie face to any clown in sight.

Requirements
• Autonomously create a pie
o Ingredients may be whipped cream, chocolate chips, butterscotch, or others…
• Capable of assessing each target – is this an innocent human or a clown in need of a pie face?
• Deliver the pie face rapidly and accurately to all valid targets
• Share the design process and the final design with an audience of middle or high school students
o Be candid about the design process, what went well, what could be improved?
o Ultimate end goal is inspiring the next generation of STEM professionals
• Open source design – share the engineering design process with all

CHALLENGE:
Are you ready, willing, and able to be a part of dynamic, fast-paced Senior Design team that is going to inspire the next generation of STEM professionals?

To continue the development of a fully autonomous, low-profile, highly efficient, and accurate system that can be carried on the back and quickly deployed to win carnival games by targeting, recognizing, and engaging the highest priority targets.
OBJECTIVE:
- Identify and engage priority targets while excluding selected targets
- Portable and small footprint deployment
- Set up and take down quickly
- Accurate and precise on moving and size-varying targets

The team is expected to carry the project from requirements through a demonstrated, documented prototype. The work includes, at minimum:
1. Work with ONTO Innovation engineers to understand the measurement objective, review the sponsor requirements, and flow them down into a complete set of system requirements.
2. Evaluate off-the-shelf scanning Fabry-Perot solutions and components against a custom design built from individual components, trading performance against the $2,500 material-cost target.
3. Design the optical cavity — including mirror selection, cavity length, finesse and free spectral range — and perform the supporting tolerance and alignment analysis.
4. Design the mechanical sensor housing and mounting, including any fiber or free-space interfaces, mechanical tolerance analysis, and an enclosed, compact package suitable for integration into a commercial interferometer.
5. Design the electrical subsystem: piezoelectric transducer drive electronics, photodiode sensing, digitization, and the processing solution.
6. Develop software to acquire, process, display, and record the transmission signal, and to determine longitudinal mode spacing.
7. Build the prototype and integrate the optical, mechanical, electrical, and software subsystems.
8. Test the assembled system against the sponsor requirements using the provided laser and iterate the design until performance targets are met.
9. Deliver documentation for alignment, operation, and calibration, along with design reports and test results, and present the completed system at Craig M. Berge Design Day.

The basic goal of this project is to complete the previous Capstone project, codenamed ATLAS.
Atlas is intended to be a semi-autonomous robot that can travel around AMARG and perform logistics assistance by delivering tools and equipment to technicians in the field, and transporting aircraft components that they have removed back to a central location. This would reduce the amount of time AMARG technicians spend performing these logistics tasks and maximize their time working on the aircraft.
The previous students produced a non-functional prototype. The body is a modified electrical go kart, and is mostly functional but needs reinforcing. The steering linkage in particular is unreliable, overly fragile, and suffered some breakages during last year’s final testing. The cargo bay is a lockable steel box that is in good condition, but is not attached to the kart. The motor and battery are in good condition and believed to be suitable. The LIDAR, cameras, and overall brains of the ATLAS are not functional, and need to be replaced. This project, therefore will focus on electrical engineering, optical engineering, software engineering, and system integration with minor mechanical engineering requirements.