During Summer break, I got a chance to make some liquid art in ProTvorchestvo art studio in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I later converted that art piece into a watch face with some of the shelf watch mechanisms. I think it turned out grear!
I had an idea for a solar tracker system that has two axes controlled by a single motor. It looked great on paper but a major flop in reality. I made pretty significant mechanical simplifications in my design which accumulated into an unstable (yet somewhat working) structure. I designed and manufactured the mechanical system myself, …
My adviser and I partnered up with UML’s Plastics Engineering department to work on the new design of a light-weight solar panel. Following are some excerpts of our previously published works: PV solar energy’s initial investment is affected by shipping, handling, and operating costs. These are directly related to solar panel’s weight, frame structure strength, …
Our team at AETC came up with a solar panel defrosting system using the solar cell itself as a heating element. After further research we found out that similar approaches were already patented in 2015. We then further simplified our system to aim for a reduced cost due to distributed converter system. Our experiments showed …
Our project was featured in Lowell Sun, a local newspaper: “The most recent alliance involved students from both schools designing and constructing the solar-electric lawn tractor. With their UML mentors, Nashoba Tech students developed concept sketches, prototypes and 3-D model.” This was a joint project between UMass Lowell and Nashoba Valley Technical High School initiated …
UMass Lowell offers an Industrial Capstone Project opportunity for their senior students, where they partner up with companies from their industries to work on the real-life engineering projects. (Joke: what is the difference between theory and practice? In theory, there is no difference …). Our team worked with MACOM, on a thermal model of their …
GaN HEMT Thermal Model (Capstone Project with MACOM) Read More »
Along with Harsha, Oliver, and Prof. Mil’shtein, I co-authored a manuscript on “Non-Graded Base Si/Ge Heterojunction Transistor“. The objective of this design was to utilize the carrier mobility advantages of a pure-Ge base transistor over Si or SiGe alternatives. Lattice matching of Si and Ge materials added an additional complexity to the model. I was …
As a part of my research, I worked on several new solar cell designs that consist of a-Si/c-Si or CdS/CdSe heterojunctions with p-i-i-n configuration, as well as a cascaded a-Si/c-Si with p-i-n-n-i-p configuration. The following is an excerpt from my doctoral dissertation: Multigap solar cells such as tandem and cascaded architectures are more efficient energy …
I developed an algorithm for blood vessel recognition from contactless IR scans of a finger. This was a part of AETC’s contactless biometrics project series. AETC’s efforts were motivated by several weaknesses in traditional biometrics security applications. First, fingerprint matrix gets distorted during contacts with a scanner that deteriorates the recognition accuracy. Additionally, a single-mode …
One of the most long-term projects that I was involved in at AETC was the solar aluminum car. The idea behind this project is simple. Since our first EV prototype proved that a vehicle can be powered entirely by a solar panel given a reasonably light weight, we decided to take the next step. This …