When your client at an engineering firm gives you a project that involves designing and building a working model, you will surely want to be sure the model meets the client’s needs. Three Electrical and Computer Engineering students are doing this in the Senior Clinic Lab as part of preparing their senior project that will be presented at the Technical Open House on April 21.
Nicholas Coates, Devis Mndambi, and Dinh Ly have been working under Prof. Mike Scarpulla to “design a high-speed capacitance meter that is intended to capture the dynamic capacitance properties of semiconductor junctions,” they said.
This will enable them to measure the property of solar cells. Prof. Scarpulla is studying how that depletion region changes. The students’ are attempting to capture the changes in real time to give them a better understanding of the changes.
“The capacitance changes really fast,” Nicholas said.
A capacitance meter may only be able to give updates every second, or every quarter of a second. The goal is to get an analog real time update on the order of micro seconds.
To begin the project, Nicholas, Devis, and Dinh, reversed engineered a Boonton Model 72B. The device was created about 40 years ago. The reverse engineer would allow the team to create a model that uses newer circuitry.
“We were working on calibrating it to ensure proper operation,” they said.
“We have designed a breadboard proof of concept, run circuit simulations in TINA and LTSpice, written code with a Raspberry Pi simulation, and designed a more advanced prototype in KiCAD that we hope to send off soon to be fabricated and used to build the first functional prototype of our device,” the team said.
Nicholas works for Aerel Design, an engineering consultant based in Salt Lake City. Nicholas said that the firm’s engineers have been giving them team feedback to help with the success of the project.
Throughout their extensive time working on their project, Nicholas, Devis, and Dinh have seen the value of working together and depending on each other as each person focuses on their critical role in the project.
