About
Founded in 1965, the Henry Samueli School of Engineering educates more than 4,600 students (3,728 undergraduates and 961 graduates) with an integrative approach that blends fundamentals, research and hands-on experience. The school’s aim is to unleash innovation, create opportunities and inspire ingenuity. The Samueli School’s faculty members are leaders in their disciplines who have achieved worldwide recognition for their research and dedicated teaching. The school includes six academic departments: biomedical engineering; chemical and biomolecular engineering; civil and environmental engineering; electrical engineering and computer science; materials science and engineering; and mechanical and aerospace engineering. Under the leadership of Dean Magnus Egerstedt, the school pursues research that is timely, socially responsible and cutting edge, and works in partnership with industry and state and federal agencies to promote the transfer of research to applications that benefit society. Current research thrusts include Communications and Information Technology, Energy and Sustainability, Human Health, and Advanced Manufacturing and Materials.
Samueli School of Engineering
SSOE Research Symposium Dean's Awards (126)
UCI Rocket Project
The UCI Rocket Project is an undergraduate engineering design team at the University of California, Irvine, dedicated to the design and development of liquid bi-propellant rockets. The team’s main goal is to design a liquid rocket capable of reaching 100 km for the Base11 Space Challenge. The current iteration of the rocket is designed to reach 45,000 ft as a preliminary verification of the team’s design and manufacturing capabilities. The design utilizes a pressure fed system with a propellant combination of liquid methane and liquid oxygen. As the team moves further into the testing and verification stages, development of the rocket capable of reaching 100 km begins. There are a total of four launch windows for the Base11 competition that begin in May 2020 and end in December 2021. The team has a dedicated lab space with the resources necessary for general design and assembly, but manufacturing is typically contracted to professional companies. As the space industry continues to grow, the UCI Rocket Project will continue giving undergraduate students relevant and impactful hands-on experience to prepare them for the challenges of working in the industry.
Advisors: Professor Mark Walter
Professor Ken Mease
Preventing Injury and Over-Insertion of Laparoscopic Trocars
Problem Statement: The critical step in laparoscopic surgery is the primary trocar insertion because it is executed with limited visibility of organs inside. Over-insertion frequently occurs due to either inability to stop a breaching trocar or by failure to accurately judge depth of insertion. Background: Laparoscopic Surgery is a minimally invasive surgical procedure that offers patients benefits that are more favorable than traditional open surgery. The benefits include minimal scarring, less pain and discomfort, and fast recovery. However, this procedure gives surgeons many drawbacks, such as a confined working space, reduced dexterity, and obscured vision. With five million laparoscopic procedures done worldwide in 2013, three million in the US alone, it is a necessity to address the issues surgeons are facing in order to meet the patients' growing demands for laparoscopic surgery. Advisor(s): Dr. Samir Shreim; Dr. Michelle Khine; Dr. Albert Yee. Graduate Student Advisors: Elena Liang, Phil Thomas. UCI Dean's Choice Award
Eye of Aurora
Visually impairment is an essential issue in the world that many people are trying to solve. Our project aims to help visually impaired people know what is happening around them. Therefore, we made a pair of camera glasses that can describe the scene in front of the user with sound. The describing sentences are generated by deep learning. We trained our own image caption models and found that VGG 19 as the neural network model with Flickr8k as the dataset performed best. The hardware includes a camera, an earphone, a glass frame, an LCD touch screen, batteries, and a Raspberry Pi 4. With our project, visually impaired people can truly “see” and engage with the world around them.