A Senior Student Design Project in Marine and Coastal Environment Monitoring

The projects are a valuable component of the science and engineering education. The design experience develops the students’ lifelong learning skills, self-evaluations, self-discovery, and peer instruction in the design’s creation, critique, and justification. Students learn to understand the manufacturer data sheets, application notes, and technical manuals. The experience, which would be difficult to complete individually, gives the students a sense of satisfaction and the accomplishment that is often lacking in many engineering courses, using traditional teaching approaches. Furthermore, the design experience motivates student learning and develops skills required in industry. The use of computer software packages for simulation and modeling to verify concepts and compare the results, giving the students additional skills necessary in the present day industrial settings. This paper discusses the development of a student project in marine and costal environment monitoring. The project involves a team of final year undergraduate students at our engineering technology program. A simple, low cost wireless sensor network with inherently long operation lifetime, developed based on low cost sensor nodes is proposed in this project. The sensor node is powered by a hybrid solar/PV and microwind power system with super-capacitor and batteries as backup units. The proposed sensing platform has the potential to be used as distributed sensing device to deploy in high density to give high spatial and high temporal water quality data, being designed for monitoring a coastal shallow water marine environment, measuring various parameters, such as temperature, humidity, pressure, etc. The sensor node takes the measured atmospheric and oceanographic data and sends them to the sink node using the wireless communication. The description of this system, the system characteristics, performances, the buoy prototype and the user application are presented in details. Various aspects of the educational experience are examined such as the educational goals of the project, project organization, and outcomes. Innovative educational approaches are described such as brainstorming session and discussion with students of highlevel choices described by a decision tree, component selections, simulations and system performance and characteristics computation. In the second part of the paper the design solution that was adopted is described in details. The adopted design solution includes: power electronics circuitry (DC-DC converter design and test), maximum power point tracking algorithms, control strategies, battery and super-capacitor selection as energy buffers, and overall system performances. The project is a good example of multi-disciplinary cooperation as well as providing valuable hands-on experimental experience. In addition to providing useful lessons in teamwork, component selection and project management, the project provides a working demonstration of wireless sensor monitoring network and energy harvesting system. The goal of the design project is to explore and enhance students understanding of the fundamental engineering principles, power circuit simulation capabilities, sensors and instrumentation and environment monitoring issues, as well as handson demonstration of system prototyping.