College of Engineering

Fall 2023 Senior Design Project and Team Information by Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Computer Science

» Flood Control Simulation – Data Visualization
Project Team Members: Riley Batilla, Danielle Gable, Westin Hart, Daniel Jordan, Jake Keenan, Jacob Mendez, and Sho Sakane

Many people live near bodies of water which on occasion produce flooding. Oftentimes, people notice flooding when roads become obstructed due to rising water levels. Many of these roads are critical infrastructure for residents, who use these roads to acquire necessary goods, earn a living, and help those in need. Most people are completely unaware of their own risk to flooding until after it has damaged their home, disrupted their travels, or otherwise caused them harm. Our tool, Tennessee Tech’s FloodTools, aims to assist in creating a more informed populace and assist disaster and emergency managers by providing four primary functions:
1. Display a real-time approximation of how water is positioned on a map (with streets, buildings, etc.), based on heights collected from sensors and other data sources.
2. Allow users to create alerts based on a specified water level at one or more sensors.
3. Host this system online such that anyone with access can use the tool.
4. Make our project’s methods transparent, such that additional data sources (i.e. other sensors, newer street-data, etc.),or tools can be added to improve the functionality of the system over time.
The following paragraph describes the usage FloodTools aims to accommodate. A user navigates to our website, hosted on Tennessee Tech’s network. This user can create an account, and configure alerts for themselves, by selecting one or more sensors and water levels. This alert would send them an email once their selected sensor detects a water level greater than their specified threshold. Additionally, users can view high quality, detailed map data for the entire South-Eastern United States. By leveraging this map data alongside rendering tools and geological data, our tool can display which areas on the map are likely to be covered in water. The map data includes a multitude of features, such as the names of rivers, lakes, roads, interstates, etc., which provide context to the users. In addition to providing real-time data, our tool enables hypothetical projections, based on a provided water level. This feature could enable users to prepare in advance of high-water events, by observing which routes are likely to be inaccessible. In summary, our online tool will provide users with a projection of how water is likely to be located based on multiple data sources and our own rendering methods.
» FCS-SN

Project Team Members: Benjamin Whitaker, Hunter Sawyer, Parker DelBene, Yves Paultre, Austin Lane, Abanoub Samor, and Simon Nakhonekhong

The purpose of our project is to update, document, and prepare a sensor network for deployment, as well as for future maintenance and development. The purpose of this sensor network is to monitor water levels within a given watershed, providing early warnings and analysis for potential flood events, and is designed to be easily built and deployed using inexpensive and commercially available materials. This specific instance is intended for deployment within the Falling Water River watershed, with the possibility for future instances being deployed elsewhere or made available to other groups for their own use.
» Fertilizer Friends - Tennessee Nutrient Database

Project Team Members: Christine Ong, CJ Stefanich, Connor Phillips, Eli Parker, Jackson Hanchek, Lillard Hinkle, Ricky Romanach-Santiago, and Winter Thomas

The Fertilizer Friends worked with the Tennessee Nutrient Task Force to achieve the goal of creating a webpage for an easy way to access and download the data stored in their database. The Tennessee Nutrient Task Force’s database is composed of data from water testing locations across the state of Tennessee. Our webpage allows researchers to filter, visualize, and download their needed data. Researchers are able to filter the data using multiple categories and download the results in the form of a .csv file. The webpage also features an interactive map that allows researchers to visualize the testing site locations and the HUC-8 sections. Our group used React JS, ArcGIS, MySQL, and NodeJS to create the frontend webpage and communicate with the task force’s database.
» NCAEC-C Scholarship Student Management System Project

Project Team Members: Deanna King, Davari Reeder, Preston Nicholson, Kelsey Duncan, Asa Rentschler, Garrett Trias, and Caspian Moore

The team is to create a secure and maintainable software for CEROC that abides by all Tennessee Technological University and ITS EAS standards. This software is web-based, and will serve as a dashboard primarily for the financial associates and mentors of cybersecurity scholarship winners. The application’s primary goal is to ease the process of managing individual students by securely storing documents, internship details, and editable demographics. An interface for writing and storing student help session notes will also be provided.
» Hilltop Cloud Data Storage for Battery Energy Storage System (BESS)

Project Team Members: Matthew Krizman, Hossana Haileleul, Dalton Champion, Christian Coronel, Trevor Trosin, Laderian Harris, and Donley Mcmahan

Batteries, especially larger capacitance batteries, are becoming more common in things such as electric vehicles. These batteries end up degrading over time, which results in the loss of total capacity, so they end up getting replaced by newer ones and tossed away. However, these old batteries can still be reused. One of the ways to repurpose these batteries is for the use of holding charge in a power grid. Since they are being used on a power grid, it is important to monitor various conditions such as temperature, total capacity, and current grid activity as these will affect a battery’s performance. The goal of this project is to develop a dashboard for a cloud system which can be used to display various information on the batteries. This will help communities decide whether it would be more beneficial to use the repurposed batteries instead of direct power from the grid.
» Demand Response Portal

Project Team Members: Elijah C Monroe, Evyn Price, Nick Omelchenko, Serena L LaBelle, Shelby Smith, William Goodson, and Brian Lee

In a power grid, load fluctuates between periods of high demand and low demand. At peak periods it is possible for the demand for power to exceed a provider’s supply, requiring the provider to either purchase power from their neighbors or reduce the load through rolling blackouts. Smart Grids provide an alternative response through Demand Response (DR) programs, in which customers are provided an incentive to reduce power consumption during a peak period. This voluntary deduction can save the consumers money on their power bill while allowing the power provider to shift load from peak to non-peak times. Deployment of a DR program requires the ability for both consumers and power providers to see visualizations of data collected during a DR event. We are creating a web-based portal to allow these stakeholders to see data generated during a Demand Response event such as participating customers, credits to be paid, and forecasted vs actual load. Data generated during a Demand Response event will be sent to our database, analyzed, and then displayed in the web portal.