News and Announcements

Rice’s art car celebrates the Owl in the school’s centennial year

Rice University will celebrate the 25th annual Art Car Parade this weekend by entering an Owl-designed vehicle undefined called “Centenni-Owl” undefined in recognition of the school’s centennial year. The unconventional event, boasted as the largest art car parade in the world, runs from 1 to 3 p.m. May 12 along Allen Parkway, from Waugh Drive to Bagby Street in Houston. For more information on the Art Car Parade, visit www.thehoustonartcarparade.com.

Below (top) are the “Centenni-Owl,” Rice’s Art Car Parade entry, and (bottom) KTRU’s Art Car.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rice University freshmen engineer devices for Houston Zoo to feed giraffes, orangutans

By PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

Like their human cousins, orangutans enjoy food and don’t mind working a little to get it. If the menu’s right, giraffes are even less picky.

Two teams of students at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering have designed devices to efficiently, durably, safely and inexpensively meet the feeding needs of these very different residents of theHouston Zoo.

“For the orangutans, we wanted to make it like a puzzle,” said Julia Bleck, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering who got involved with the project through the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership. “They have mental skills similar to those of humans and learn things pretty quickly, and know how to be patient. We wanted to keep it interesting for them.”

A team of Rice University freshmen calling themselves The Buffoonery created a maze-like feeder for orangutans at the Houston Zoo. Clockwise, from left: Reinaldo Amendola-Mayorga, Julia Bleck, Jake LaViola, Jade Juzswik and Greta Shwachman. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Bleck is the apprentice leader of The Buffoonery, a team name taken from the collective noun used to describe a group of orangutans.Other team members are freshmen Reinaldo Amendola-Mayorga, Jade Juzswik, Jake LaViola and Greta Shwachman.

“The primate people at the zoo wanted something that would give the orangutans not just food but daily mental enrichment,” Bleck said.

Last fall the team started with more than 60 possible designs but quickly settled on the idea of a maze. By solving the maze, the Houston Zoo’s six orangutans would be rewarded with nuts or the food pellets they enjoy as a supplement to their customary fruits and vegetables. The team’s prototype is a flat box of high-impact plastic, transparent on one side. Inside is an elaborate maze of wooden slats holding a ball bearing.

With a magnet, an orangutan moves the steel ball through the maze. If the animal navigates the maze successfully, the ball trips a lever and releases a measured portion of pellets.

A team of Rice University freshmen invented a new hanging feeder for giraffes in collaboration with the Houston Zoo. The members of Team Koolookamba, from left, are Adam McMullen, Andrew Markham, Sarah Frazier, Joseph Mapula and Calvin Tsay. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The other zoo project is the creation of Team Koolookamba. All of its members are freshmen: Sarah Frazier, Adam McMullen, Andrew Markham, Joseph Mapula and Calvin Tsay. Allison Garza, a junior mechanical engineering student, was the team’s apprentice leader.

Their challenge was to design a feeder for giraffes that is safe and prevents the animals from consuming the hay it contains too quickly.

“They already feed the giraffes things like yams and fruit, and up till now they’ve been putting the hay in cargo-net feeders,” Frazier said. “The animals get their horns stuck in the net, and they eat the hay too fast.”

Using plastic pipe, the team made a barrel-like cylinder about 4 feet long and cut 3-inch circular holes into it. Filled, the barrel device holds about 7,500 cubic inches of hay. Giraffes use their tongues to grasp their food, and the small holes prevent them from quickly emptying the contents. The feeders are suspended 10 to 13 feet above the ground by winches attached to a wooden pole.

“The students worked hard on a design that met the goals of challenging the giraffes to work to get their food from the feeder and making it convenient for the keepers to get the food into it,” said John Register, the zoo’s hoofed stock supervisor. “They did several prototypes and tested them on our giraffe herd. We’re happy with the final design and plan to use it.”

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About Mike Williams

Mike Williams is a senior media relations specialist in Rice University's Office of Public Affairs.

Skin no barrier for cardiac charger

Heart-failure patients may someday get a life-saving charge from technology developed by students at Rice University.

A team of seniors designed and built a transcutaneous energy-transfer (TET) unit to power a minimally invasive ventricular assist device (VAD) being created by a Houston company. The VAD is a tiny pump inserted into the aorta via a catheter that helps increase blood flow and heal patients with heart failure.

Rice tCoil – Michael Torre, Erin Watson, Tyler Young, Trevor Mitcham, Hana Wang and Alex Dobranich – made a complementary device that sits a centimeter under the skin and feeds power to the VAD. The challenge presented to the seniors, who were required to complete a capstone design project by Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering , was to charge the unit wirelessly.

“A lot of people need heart transplants, but there aren’t enough hearts available,” Young said. “One alternative is to have a heart pump implanted, but that carries risks. It’s very invasive surgery, and afterward you have to have wire leads running out of your body” to a battery pack.

As their senior design project, Rice University engineering students created a transcutaneous energy transfer system to power a ventricular assist device. From left: back, Erin Watson, Tyler Young and Hana Wang, and front, Alex Dobranich, Michael Torre and Trevor Mitcham. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The portal through the skin to a power supply can become infected, he said. But the problem is avoidable by sending power to the VAD without wires. The students’ prototype consists of a small coil and a battery that would be inserted one centimeter under the skin at the patient’s waist and wired to the VAD. The patient would also wear a belt-mounted external battery and coil to generate alternating magnetic fields and induce alternating current in the subcutaneous coil. The coils charge the battery, which can operate the pump for more than three hours.

“The patient can take the belt off for a short time, to take a shower, for instance,” Young said. “The pump will work safely off the coils or on the internal battery alone, but obviously it’s best when they’re both working.”

The team demonstrated tCoil at the Engineering Design Showcase  that was part of Rice’s recent UnConvention open house. The students put the internal and external coils on either side of a baggie containing lunchmeat to simulate power transfer through the skin. The internal unit was wired to a demonstration pump that clearly pushed red-colored water through a sleeve inside a tank.

A prototype of the transcutaneous energy transfer device created by Rice University students is meant to charge a battery under the skin that powers a tiny ventricular assist pump used by heart patients awaiting a transplant.

The student project was in response to a request from Rice alum Michael Cuchiara, director of research and development at Procyrion , developer of the pump.

“I mentored two senior design teams while I did my Ph.D. in bioengineering at Rice and helped bring a project to Maria Oden (a professor in the practice of engineering and director of theOshman Engineering Design Kitchen  at Rice) for a different client company in 2009,” Cuchiara said. “For this project, until recently, our company’s expertise was not heavy in electrical engineering design, and I knew Maria could put together a good team.”

He said the students, who were mentored by Oden and Gary Woods, a Rice professor in the practice of computer technology and electrical and computer engineering, came through for him. “The Rice team brought us a quick, capital- and resource-efficient proof-of-concept system to show we can power our device through TET,” Cuchiara said. “There’s was no reason to think we couldn’t – but until you do it, you don’t have it.”

The project is far from complete, Young said. “Erin will work on it this summer, but at some point Procyrion will take it over and continue development,” he said. “The next steps will be to miniaturize it and put it in biocompatible casing. Once that’s done, it can be implanted for large animal testing.”  Ideally, he said, the long process of approval by the Food and Drug Administration will follow.

But team members will graduate with the satisfaction of a job well done and two awards: for Best Interdisciplinary Design Project at the Design Showcase and for best medical and rehabilitation technology at the third annualRice Undergraduate Elevator Pitch Competition  last November.

Cuchiara said TET will make ventricular assist available to an ever broader set of patients. “The concept that you can induce a current in another coil without connecting them electrically has been around since Tesla ,” he said. “And VADs have been around for more than 10 years. But before, they were offered to people who were on their deathbeds. Now that we’re able to take the risk (of passing a wire through the skin) out of the equation, we’re starting to talk about bringing VADs to people who aren’t that sick and can just use a little bit of support.”

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About Mike Williams

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The "FluProof" ultraviolet lamp kills pathogens as they pass through a bus's air duct. Rice engineering student Joey Spinella says the team wanted the lamp to be visible to passengers. "So they can see that and they can have the peace of mind in knowing that this bus is clean," he said. "But another practical reason we have that is it's an indicator, you can see if the lamp is working correctly."

May 7, 2012

by: Carrie Feibel

Two staffers make their departments shine

To celebrate the Rice Centennial, this year the university will honor 100 staff members who represent the best of Rice culture. Each week, two Centennial Stars will be recognized for their contributions to excellence, and we’ll introduce them in Rice News.

This week’s Centennial Stars have transformed the programs they work for and used considerable skills to make their departments shine. They are Amy Kavalewitz, Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL) administrator, and Mary Bixby, who serves a dual role as director of development for Fondren Library and executive director of Friends of Fondren Library.

Amy Kavalewitz

Kavalewitz was hired in 2006 as coordinator of the Computer Information Technology Institute, which is now the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. In 2009, she became administrator of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK); when the RCEL launched in 2010, she became administrator of that program as well.

Kavalewitz “matches high creativity with indefatigable industry to make a profound contribution” to the OEDK and RCEL, said the letter that nominated her.

“Amy has substantially shaped the culture of this highly productive space,” the letter said. She has played an invaluable role in supporting student capstone design projects, in building relationships with industrial partners and in encouraging undergraduate entrepreneurship, the letter said.

Kavalewitz has helped in crafting OEDK access policies, encouraged safety with signs and video and contributed substantially to “the creative buzz that characterizes the OEDK.” She assembled an “array of luminous judges” for the student poster competition at the RCEL’s recent Engineering Houston’s Future conference. And finally, she has “a deep facility for website development, social media and the identification of new tools to expedite our organizational operations.”

“Amy has been instrumental in organizing numerous RCEL activities with her characteristic skill,” the nomination letter said. These events often involve working with other organizations – the Rice Alliance, the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Leadership Rice, the city of Houston – and Kavalewitz “has exhibited an excellent ability to collaborate across organizational lines.”

Kavalewitz has been honored for excellence before. In 2008 she received the Rice Distinguished Employee Award, and she was the winner of the 2010 George R. Brown School of Engineering Hardy Bourland Award, which honors the school’s most outstanding staffers.

“Amy is a linchpin of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership,” the letter said. “Her personality and high standards have shaped both organizations, and her creativity is invaluable.”

Bixby came to Rice in 1996 as the executive director of Friends of Fondren Library. In 2000, she

Mary Bixby

transferred to Development to become director of development for the library. In 2002, Bixby went back to her former position with Friends of Fondren, and she now does both jobs, working part-time in each position.

“Mary has led the Friends of Fondren Library from a small club with occasional social events to a major nonprofit,” said the letter that nominated Bixby. “Friends of Fondren is arguably the best library friends group in the United States.”

In her tenure, the letter said, Bixby has led efforts to raise nearly $1.5 million for the library.

Bixby has used her skills to help the university in other ways as well.

“In addition to organizing major social and fundraising events for the Friends, Mary brought her social organization skills to leading the inauguration planning for President David Leebron” in 2004, the letter said.

Bixby’s work supports the university’s research and teaching, the letter said, and her graceful manner makes her an excellent representative of Rice.

“Mary is gracious and charming and displays courtesy, tact and consideration in her interactions with everyone,” the letter said.

To nominate someone as a Centennial Star, go to people.rice.edu/stars. For more information, contact Rebecca Millet at recognition@rice.edu.

To view previous Centennial Stars, visit http://people.rice.edu/Content.aspx?id=2147483712.

Student-devised process would prep shale gas for sale

A team of Rice University students accepted a challenge to turn shale gas produced in China into a range of useful, profitable and environmentally friendly products and did so in a cost-effective manner.

The CHBE Pandas (CHBE stands for chemical and biomolecular engineering) designed a process by which shale gas extracted in the rich Sichuan Basin could be turned into methanol, hydrogen and carbon disulfide, all valuable products in the booming Chinese economy. The Rice team was one of seven groups of students presented similar challenges for locations outside of the United States as their capstone design projects, required of most graduates of Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering.

Members of the CHBE Pandas designed the process that would turn shale gas extracted into China into a range of marketable materials with low environmental impact. From left, Apoorv Bhargava, Kavita Venkateswar, Valicia Miller, Shelby Reinhardt, Prachi Bhawalkar and Erte Xi. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

For their efforts, the Pandas – Apoorv Bhargava, Prachi Bhawalkar, Valicia Miller, Shelby Reinhardt, Kavita Venkateswar and Erte Xi – were grand prize winners at the Engineering Design Showcase, part of Rice’s UnConvention earlier this month.

“We literally got the last one in the hat,” Bhargava said of the assignment handed out for their final semester at Rice. “All of the chemical engineering projects were the same, just in different locations, and how we approached the solution depended on the location.”

The team had to deal not only with processing what’s known as “sour gas” straight out of the wellhead, but also had to come up with a solid budget for the construction and profitable operation of the plant as well as a strategy to protect the environment.

“We think it’s a viable project because of what we’re transforming the natural gas into,” Venkateswar said. The process they designed would take in the raw shale gas produced in the controversial extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The primary product would be methanol, of which China is the largest user in the world. China blends methanol into gasoline and is developing cars that would run on pure methanol.

The second product, hydrogen, would be a feedstock for ammonia in fertilizer production, which has great value in the Sichuan Basin, the largest agricultural area in China. The third would be carbon disulfide, widely used in the Sichuan textile industry. The team said 99 percent of the recovered fracturing fluid would be purified into water and fed into methanol production. A small amount of crystallized sludge from fracturing chemicals would be sent to a landfill.

Team advisers Kenneth Cox and Richard Strait were inspired to issue the assignment by a Department of Energy-funded 2011 study on shale gas and U.S. national security by Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The report details the rapid development over the last decade of technology to extract natural gas from shale, an increasingly rich resource in the United States, and the resulting shift in the world’s energy economy.

“The world of shale gas presents a real interesting situation,” said Strait, an adjunct professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and former director of coal monetization and CO2 management at KBR. “We’re in boom times – if you want to produce gas at what are now historically low prices. You make no profit.” He said energy producers are considering ways to turn raw shale gas into products that will better serve the market’s needs.

“We tried to give the students problems for which there’s no current solution,” said Cox, a Rice professor in the practice of chemical and biomolecular engineering. “Major companies are looking at ways to upgrade shale gas, but no one’s built a plant to do that yet.”

Also, Cox said, “There are a lot of issues associated with the public perception of fracking, and part of the assignment was to help change that perception by offering something that was environmentally friendly, gave benefit to the community, helped clean up the water and was still able to pull a profit at the end of the day.”

He said the Pandas’ solution was “very imaginative” for their handling of the high concentration of highly toxic hydrogen sulfide found in Sichuan shale gas. “It’s 8.38 percent of the incoming feed,” said Venkateswar. “Usually natural gas feeds have it on the order of several hundred parts per million.”

“The ability to make carbon disulfide provides us a solution to the high hydrogen sulfide content,” Xi said.

Building the Pandas’ plant with the team’s innovative assembly of known technologies would cost the Chinese government $5 billion, Bhargava said. “Chemical engineering design in the real world, the way we understand it, works in three phases,” he said. “You start off with a preliminary design analysis, as we did. Then we move into another stage where the chemical engineers meet up with the mechanical engineers and start designing it in more detail: ‘What pipes do we need to go from here to there?’

“And then we meet with the architects for the final design stage: ‘OK, what is this going to look like when we build it? Is it going to look terrible in someone’s backyard?’”

Bhargava said the Pandas’ design process would generally take as many as 15 engineers six or seven months to accomplish. The team spent long hours using simulation software at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where the students aligned components and tested for the desired chemical reactions. “But a computer can tell you only so much,” Bhargava said. “A chemical engineer has to make the decisions. Our design is very, very close to what a real chemical engineer does in his or her job. We were working in a very realistic setting.”

The quality of work by Rice students was so high that another team, TEXIJI, won the annual William W. Akers Senior Design Award, as judged by a panel of industry professionals. Team members John Chapman, Ivan Loo, Anthony Mulenga, Insoo Ro, Erin Walsh and Xiaoyun Wang were honored for their project, the “clean monetization of Burgos Basin (Mexico) shale gas to dimethyl ether.”

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About Mike Williams

Mike Williams is a senior media relations specialist in Rice University's Office of Public Affairs.

Zero-G eyewash wins grand prize in Texas Space Grant Consortium event

A team of Rice University senior engineering students won Top Design Team, along with several other awards, at this year’s Texas Space Grant Consortium (TSGC) competition with a proposal for an emergency eyewash system for astronauts.

From left, Team Helios members Zachary Foster, Rob Bauer, Thierry Rignol, Malcolm Blake and Eric Lee.

In addition to the grand prize, Team Helios was honored for Best Test Procedure and Documentation, Best Poster and Model Presentation and Best Oral Presentation. The team tied for first for Forum Favorite and took home a total of $1,850 in prize money.

Helios was one of 11 teams competing in the annual NASA-sponsored event, which included competitors from Texas A&M, Texas Tech and the University of Texas.

Team members are Rob Bauer, Malcolm Blake, Eric Lee and Thierry Rignol, all bioengineering majors, and Zachary Foster, a mechanical engineering major. Their advisers are Matthew Wettergreen, a lecturer in bioengineering, and Brent Houchens, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science.

The eyewash goggles designed by Team Helios are designed to work in zero gravity.

The goal of the senior capstone design project was to create a set of goggles that would allow spacefarers to both wash their eyes in an emergency while containing and eliminating excess fluids. The team’s solution involved borrowing suction from a space toilet to help contain the rinse water.

“The comments from the judges were that this was very high-quality work, and everyone was very impressed,” Wettergreen said. “The device is successful based on the original constraints set by NASA, and with a few cosmetic modifications and superficial fixes, it could perform like a professional eyewash station.

“The device will only work in zero gravity,” he said. “So the exciting opportunity the students had was to solve a problem that won’t even be used in the environmental conditions they inhabit.”

Last year, two Rice teams undefined the Electric Owls and CardiOwls undefined shared the grand prize.

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About Mike Williams

Mike Williams is a senior media relations specialist in Rice University's Office of Public Affairs.

Maria Oden honored by American Society for Engineering Education

By PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) has honored Maria Oden, professor in the practice of engineering education and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), with its prestigious 2012 Fred Merryfield Design Award.

“Dr. Oden has helped more than 1,665 students learn engineering design processes and the value of teamwork, communications and entrepreneurial skills,” said Rebecca-Richards Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor and interim chair of bioengineering, who nominated Oden for the honor. “Last year, one-quarter of the 42 design teams participated in national/statewide competitions and won top prizes. Maria gets much of the credit for those accomplishments.”

Oden joined the Department of Bioengineering at Rice as a lecturer and laboratory coordinator in 2004; she guides the technical design efforts of undergraduates participating in Beyond Traditional Borders and the Rice 360˚: Institute for Global Health Technologies. Oden has mentored more than 160 students in 43 design teams in the two-semester bioengineering capstone design course sequence that she developed and taught.

Oden earned her Bachelor of Science in engineering and master’s and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Tulane University in 1989, 1991 and 1994, respectively, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School from 1994 to 1997. She also worked in orthopedic biomechanics and computational modeling as a senior research associate at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

In 2008, Oden became the inaugural director of the OEDK, where she has inspired hundreds of students to work in teams of four or five to complete design challenge projects. More than 15 teams have won regional and national awards at design competitions. Several of their devices are being tested in the United States and abroad, and 15 students have graduated with patent applications on their resumes.

“Maria has an incredible flair for inspiring and guiding students to solve design challenges that are ‘real world,’” said Edwin “Ned” Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering at Rice University. “The teams often end up morphing the challenge and coming up with workable prototypes, some of which result in filing of intellectual property disclosures and even the occasional student-led startup that solves the original real-world problem.”

The Fred Merryfield Design Award is presented annually in recognition of “creativity and demonstrated excellence in the teaching of engineering design.” It comes with a $2,500 honorarium, a $500 stipend for travel to the ASEE annual conference and a commemorative plaque. Oden’s department will also be given an award of $500.

Oden will receive her award June 13 at the 2012 ASEE Conference and Exposition in San Antonio.

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Mike Williams is a senior media relations specialist in Rice University's Office of Public Affairs.

LinDi a stretch for student engineers 

Another day, another four turns of the screw. That’s just a part of life for people, primarily children, undergoing the long and difficult process of distraction osteogenesis, a method to correct bone deformities that leave one limb shorter than the other.

A team of Rice University undergraduates has invented a device they hope will make the process safer and easier.

In collaboration with Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston, the students came up with “LinDi,” a self-adjusting, automated linear distractor. It eliminates manual manipulation of the screw with a motorized process that makes the gradual growth of new bone a more natural process. And for the first time in such a device, they have built in a force-feedback loop that protects fragile tissues and nerves from being overstressed.

Rice University students, members of Team Break and Make, show their prototype of LinDi, a motorized linear distractor to automate the process of correcting bone deformities, primarily in children. From left: Stephanie Herkes, Alvin Chou, Mario Gonzalez, Raquel Kahn and Elaine Wong. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

To correct deformities suffered by as many as 10 million children due to trauma, infection or congenital causes, surgeons break a bone and apply a distractor that stretches the bone as it heals and gently nudges the arm or leg to a more appropriate length.

The distractor incorporates long pins sunk right into the bone on either side of the surgical break. As the bone heals, but before it sets, the patient uses an Allen wrench to give the drive screw a quarter turn four times a day and push the pins further apart a tiny bit at a time.

That’s inconvenient, even risky if a child or parent forgets to make the adjustment, said Rice mechanical engineering student Raquel Kahn. And wearing the bulky brace is no treat, either.

Team members Kahn, Alvin Chou, Mario Gonzalez, Stephanie Herkes and Elaine Wong took LinDi on as their senior design capstone project at the behest of Gloria Gogola, an orthopedic hand and upper-extremity surgeon at Shriners who specializes in pediatrics.

The LinDi linear distractor automates the process of lengthening children’s bones by continually separating the surgically broken bone as it heals. The device invented by Rice University seniors is intended to make the process safer and easier for children who suffer from bone deformities. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

“The process of limb lengthening undefined essentially creating a localized mini-growth spurt undefined works well for bones, but is very hard on the soft tissues such as nerves and blood vessels,” Gogola said. “This team has done an outstanding job of designing a creative solution. Their device not only protects the soft tissues, it will ultimately speed up the entire process.”

“The problem with the current device is that there’s a lot of room for error,” Kahn said. “You can imagine that one might forget to turn it once, or turn it the wrong way, or turn it too much. And a lot of problems can arise in the soft tissue and the nerves surrounding the bone. That’s the limiting factor of this process. But LinDi implements a motor to make the distraction process nearly continuous.”

Kahn said the motorized, battery-operated LinDi adjusts the device almost 1,000 times every day, “so the process is more gradual and continuous, similar to actual bone growth.”

Working at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), the students had access to all the materials and expertise they needed to conceptualize, build and test a prototype even while completing their coursework. “We’re teaching students the importance of prototyping as early as possible,” said Marcia O’Malley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and the team’s faculty adviser. “Even if it’s cardboard and tape, they’re able to visualize a project early in the process.

“One of the big features of this project is the force sensor,” she said. “If the loads on the tissue are too high, the device shuts the motor off.” O’Malley said early tests with strain gauges paid off in the team’s level of confidence when the time came to build a working prototype. “The great thing about the OEDK is that everything is so accessible here. I could say, ‘Well, that team over there is working with strain gauges. Go talk to them and find out how they’re doing it,” she said.

Current patients wear distractors for as long as it takes to complete the process, typically stretching a limb for two to four months, Kahn said. Then they leave the device on for six more weeks, like a cast, while the bone sets. Each of the Rice students wore a standard distractor (minus the bone-drilling part) for 24 hours to get a feel for what patients endure. “The hardest part was we kept banging into things,” Gonzalez said.

But through interviews with Gogola’s patients, they learned how tough children are. “We were really concerned, because it looks like a pretty scary, uncomfortable process,” Herkes said. “It looks like a torture device. We asked one little boy who had it on his humerus his No. 1 complaint and he said, ‘My school uniform is red, and it doesn’t match.’”

Through Shriners, the team got the opportunity to perform short-term animal testing that “helped us work out some of the kinks we weren’t aware of in the device,” Herkes said.

“We’ve gotten some nice results,” Kahn added. “Our device is doing what we want it to do.”

Though the students are about to graduate, they expect another team to continue development of the LinDi. One goal will be to make the device less bulky, and therefore curtail wear and tear on both the distractor and the patient.

 

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About Mike Williams

Mike Williams is a senior media relations specialist in Rice University's Office of Public Affairs.