The Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC) is the culmination of all regional engineering events within Canada, bringing together the best and brightest engineering students from across the country. Thousands of students compete every year, first at the school level and then at the regional level in order to earn a place at CEC. Seven events take place at the CEC: Senior Design, Junior Design, Innovative Design, Consulting, Reengineering, Engineering Communications, and Debates. Each competition tests the technical and non-technical skills of the students. This year at CEC, the University of Waterloo was well represented in Innovative Design, Senior Design, and Junior Design competitions by many extremely talented students. Despite the strong competition, all teams placed highly in their respective categories.
In the Innovative Design Competition, teams of up to four students present their design concept to a panel of judges. Designs are evaluated on technical value, functionality, and marketability. Two Waterloo teams competed in the Innovative Design Category: Project Reservoir and GraFET.
In the Senior and Junior Design Competitions, teams of up to four students are presented with an engineering design challenge. Teams then have up to eight hours to design and prototype their proposed solution, after which judges evaluate the effectiveness of their designs.
Project Reservoir: Stuart Alldritt, Ryan Gibson, Nicole Jiang, Ian Murray, Austin Cousineau (4B EE, 4B CE)
Project Reservoir is an end-to-end agricultural water control and environmental monitoring system. It consists of low-cost field sensors which collect real time soil and environmental conditions. The collected data is analysed and visualized by the web platform allowing detailed review of all farm conditions, as well as irrigation control. Project Reservoir aims to allow greater insights into the farm as well as to reduce the water used on the farm by minimizing wasted water through the detailed monitoring of soil conditions.
Project Reservoir won First Place at the Innovative Design Competition, as well as the Petri Engineering Design Award and the CEC Environmental Awareness Award.
GraFET: Laura Bahlmann, Eric Beauregard, Stuart Murray, Wenbo Cui (4B NE)
GraFET is a sensor that uses a graphene-based FET and a dipole detection method to achieve rapid and sensitive detection of harmful gases. With a sensing element smaller than an HDTV pixel, GraFET is capable of being incorporated into smartphones or wearable electronics. Individual devices could communicate with each other to create air quality maps of cities.
GraFET won Second Place at the Innovative Design Competition.
Senior Design: Eric Shi, Kenneth Geertsema, Wesley Fisher, Daniel Lizewski (3B MTE)
For the senior design, we were given 10 hours to design a robot to solve a previously undisclosed problem with limited resources. The problem was to collect food packets and water for a village. The twist was that the terrain consisted of sand, gravel, mountains, and a river separating land from food packets. We designed and built a bluetooth controlled wheeled robot and created a mechanism that combines the ability to collect both food and water. Traversing the complex terrain was the biggest challenge to overcome.
The Senior Design team won Second Place at the Senior Design Competition.
Junior Design, First place: Jackson Fisher, Colin Cooke, Michael Jonas, Mitchell Catoen (2A MTE)
The Junior Design challenge was to build a single drawbridge which could span 50cm, 75cm and 100cm gaps without any modifications. The bridge was to carry an RC car and automatically retract once the car had crossed it. The solution that was developed was a two segment bridge built out of popsicle sticks, wooden dowels, and foam board and was deployed using the weight of the vehicle and used carefully calibrated elastic bands to retract into its starting position.
The Junior Design team won First Place at the Junior Design Competition.
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