Our Projects
This page contains the projects that our members want to show to the world.
A factory for FrEDs at MIT
By Russel Bradley
The team of graduate students designed and built — entirely within an MIT lab — an assembly factory for a low-cost, reconfigurable desktop fiber extrusion system.
The factory was the students’ thesis project in the Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design. The team transformed the fiber (Fr) extrusion (E) device (D), or FrED, from a single $5,400 proof-of-concept unit to 25 units manufactured at a cost of about $200 each — a 96 percent reduction in cost.
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MIT Hyperloop
By Ajie Nayaka Nikicio
The Hyperloop concept was first released in 2013 by Elon Musk, proposing a novel land transportation system aiming to surpass the speed of a typical commercial airplane through the use of vacuum tubes and levitating pods to eliminate friction. The MIT Hyperloop II Team joined the movement by developing and showcasing an air-levitated pod prototype at the SpaceX Hyperloop Competition 2019. Ajie and his team ranked 1st among the US teams and 5th worldwide. Additionally, they won the SpaceX Innovation Award on the innovative air levitated pod design in collaboration with UT Austin's Guadaloop.
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Multi-Objective system optimization of a Mars atmospheric ISRU plant for oxygen production
By Ajie Nayaka Nikicio
The Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) is an instrument traveling to Mars onboard NASA's Perseverance rover. It will demonstrate, for the first time
ever, in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) on the surface of another celestial body. MOXIE will utilize the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars to create oxygen as a demonstration of a planned larger mission. The instrument itself will produce oxygen at roughly 0.5 percent of the scale that would be necessary to support a human mission to Mars. A scaled-up version of MOXIE would be sent to Mars twenty-six months ahead of the first human mission and would aim to produce approximately 3 kg/hr of oxygen while in operation. This production rate would fully fuel the oxidizer portion of a Mars Ascent Vehicle prior to the first crew landing on Mars, which would enable that crew to return to Earth. This is a key capability to reduce mission risk by providing a safe return option on Mars prior to the crew arriving. Additionally, the system could provide oxygen for life support systems and habitation pressure. The intent of this paper is to describe a model that has been created to optimize the design of this scaled ISRU plant. It takes lessons learned from the MOXIE project and combines them with parameters and constraints of a planned human mission to systematically identify optimal design solutions. The extensibility of MOXIE is formulated through a multiobjective optimization problem for early-stage conceptual design. The objective functions minimize the power and mass required to build this ISRU system by changing operating conditions and system architecture while satisfying a set of constraints. The subsystems modeled for this problem include carbon dioxide acquisition and compression (CAC) to compress the Mars atmosphere, solid oxide electrolysis (SOE) to produce oxygen from carbon dioxide, and liquefaction to prepare the oxygen for storage. Additionally, the power, electronics, and heat exchange systems are simulated to capture gas transfer and control mechanisms. The model is built in MATLAB and uses Simulink as a framework. Results from this multiobjective optimization study and an analysis on the scalability of the MOXIE instrument show that an ISRU system that produces 22,717 kg of oxygen over 14 months would have a mass of 7,512 kg and a power requirement of 19,526 W. These results provide NASA and other agencies with an optimized design of a scaled ISRU system and its potential to reduce cost and risk as they prepare for a human mission to Mars.
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The Potential Role of Satellite IoT in Disaster Risk Reduction in Indonesia
By Ajie Nayaka Nikicio
Indonesia lies within the Ring of Fire, making the country highly prone to geophysical disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis, in addition to weather-related disasters such as floods, landslides, and wildfires. One effective way to reduce the risk of getting
hit by these natural disaster hazards is through the deployment and operation of an early warning system, which is generally responsible for two things: identifying the hazard precursors and delivering the warning in a timely manner. Satellite communication technology has been a vital part of Indonesia's early warning system for the past decade. This includes the use of VSATs, satellite phones, and satellite amateur radio voice repeater onboard the LAPAN-A2 satellite. However, although the current system in place has managed to help many lives in the past decade, it is still very far from sufficient when benchmarked with other similarly prone regions and countries. Fortunately, the rise of massive IoT and Edge AI technologies is showing a promising development. As the cost of hardware and connectivity goes down, Indonesia may very well be able to cover the entire archipelago with a much higher density network of disaster monitoring sensors as well as warning devices to form a safer, more accurate, and more reliable early warning system. This paper investigates the opportunity for such system to be implemented and utilized by Indonesia's government agencies, including LAPAN's planned equatorial constellation. Discussions from this paper may also be relevant to other countries, especially those in the equatorial and coastal areas.
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