Soft Pneumatic Exosuit for Warehouse Worker Assistance

One of the leading sources of injuries in warehouses is manual lifting. While rigid
exoskeleton systems have been proposed and demonstrated for years, these systems have
chronically suffered from issues such as insufficient power supplies, incompatibility between the
designed joints and human physiology, and injuries due to overpowering the operator, including
repetitive motion injuries. Recently, soft, lightweight exosuits have been explored as safer
alternatives to exoskeletons due to their inherent compliance and elasticity.
For this project, you will need to design a soft exosuit and demonstrate it. You will need
to learn how to manufacture soft actuators, design pneumatic systems and source appropriate
parts, and learn about biokinematics in order to minimize the risk of injury. It is also likely that
you will need to learn how to sew and how to 3D print casts for the soft actuators.
A successful project will demonstrate a suit that is safe to use while maximizing
assistance to the user and the amount of time that the suit can operate.

Hybrid Electric Aircraft/Drone

In the last decade, battery powered private aircraft have been developed and
demonstrated for the first time, and private companies are starting to sell these planes. Electric
aircraft are significantly cheaper to maintain, do not burn the leaded fuel used in private planes,
have much higher engine reliability, and allow for much longer intervals between servicing the
engines. However, these aircraft are seriously limited by the current battery technology, which
has about one tenth the energy density of liquid fuel. Consequently, electric aircraft have much
smaller ranges than conventional engines. It is possible that a hybrid electric aircraft could retain
many of the benefits of an electric aircraft while still maintaining a range similar to that of a
conventional aircraft.
For this project, you will need to choose and build an open-source airframe, design and
select appropriate power generation and engine parts, identify regulatory restrictions for aircraft
size and test flights, and minimize the total aircraft weight.
A successful project will demonstrate a fixed-wing aircraft that has a longer range than
an equivalent battery-powered aircraft.

Energy-Efficient Combination Washer/Dryer

While having a separate unit for the clothes washer and clothes dryer is sufficient, a
combination unit is potentially cheaper, requires less supervision by a user makes better use of
space in a home, and more energy efficient. Combination washer/dryer units exist, but current
models are inefficient and slow, leading to poor market adoption. Several candidate
technologies have the potential of improving combination washer/dryer units.
For this project, you will need to modify an existing side-load washer to dry clothes
without removing them from the washer. To do this, you will need to design and manufacture a
drying function into the washer, apply thermodynamics and heat transfer principles to properly
scale the technology for the expected use cases, design for ease-of-use, tightly integrate the
drying system into the washer, and rigorously measure the energy consumption, and iterate on
the design.
A successful project will demonstrate a working washer/dryer unit that operates on a
reasonable timescale.

V2 High impact shear-thickening fluid sports equipment

As sports continue to become more competitive, the equipment that supports these
sports continues to evolve. In recent years, injuries due to insufficient protective gear has
started to become more apparent, especially in the case of brain injuries in football. New
material approaches to improving sporting equipment are needed. One possibility is using
dilatant, or shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluids, to allow sports equipment to be flexible
during natural play but passively stiffen when large forces impact it.
    For this project, you will need to collaborate with High Impact Technologies, a spin-off
company from a Yale research lab, to design and test a 2-dimensional layered composite for
mitigating shoulder injuries. You will explore multiple concepts for how to contain the fluid while
retaining breathability and test the impact behavior of the design. It is expected that this project
will require a large number of iterations.
    A successful project will demonstrate rigorous progress toward a flexible shear-thickening
composite that can be used in a 2-dimensional piece of sporting equipment for protecting
against shoulder injuries.