UIC Engineering Expo 2020

Due to UIC’s decision to protect community health by canceling all large campus gatherings through April 30, this year’s UIC Engineering Expo—our showcase of student ingenuity and achievement—is taking place online instead. Visit our Expo website and watch our Facebook and Twitter channels during the last week of April for project highlights.

These are six of the more than 200 projects created by our students:

  • BioE

    Your tears could be a window to your health. Bioengineering students designed a tear-collecting device that could more easily harvest tears for the purpose of testing for proteins, which can act as biomarkers of disease, infection, or environmental exposure.

  • ChE

    The world has a plastic-pollution problem. A chemical engineering team aims to get plastic out of landfills and oceans and into fuel tanks by converting high-density polyethylene, a polymer used to create plastic, into biofuel.

  • CME

    What’s damaging homes in Englewood? Civil engineering students investigated via a vulnerability assessment. Among the factors they considered were historical rainfall data, which is helpful when evaluating soil settlement caused by flooding, and the impact of railyard vibrations from nearby trains.

  • CS

    Learn sign language in a new way. That is the goal of a computer science team’s interactive glove. The glove, outfitted with microcontrollers and flex sensors, trains the wearer by providing feedback on hand positioning and accuracy as the user forms sign-language letters.

  • ECE

    Electrical and computer engineering students developed a device that attaches to a phone to track a user’s physiological indicators of stress. When it senses stress, the device might disable social-media apps, use alerts to recommend limiting phone use, or suggest meditation or breathing exercises.

  • MIE

    Radiation is invisible to us— but not to a drone designed by computer science and mechanical engineering students. It features ultrasonic beacons that map radiation intensities. The device is part of Fermilab’s robot initiative, which aims to develop machines that can work in irradiated environments.