Engineering students win national competition

For the second year in a row, UVic engineering students are the winners in the innovation category at the Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC).

Electrical engineering students David Shea and Brian Claus, and mechanical engineering students Toren Gustafson and Peter Crocker, grabbed the title with their miniature thruster for underwater vehicles. The low-cost but highly efficient underwater thruster would be used to propel research vehicles.

“Traditional thrusters have a housing in front of the propeller which contains a motor,” Shea explains. “However, we’ve integrated the motor into the propeller and shroud, therefore ending the need for a separate motor and housing, and also eliminating the drag or resistance that the motor and its housing creates. The technical term would be a ‘rim-driven’ design. In addition, our thruster only has one moving part in the entire design which means it’s easy to produce and inexpensive to buy and maintain.”

The thruster is receiving a lot of interest from the marine and energy industries. Currently, the students are in the process of obtaining a patent through the UVic Innovation and Development Corporation, the university’s tech transfer office.

The thruster is a spin-off project from the UVic Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Design Team (AUVic). AUVic is a group of engineering students building a submersible robot capable of completing intelligent tasks without aid from human operators.

The CEC is an annual event attended by 150 engineering students from across Canada. It promotes communication, design and ingenuity and fosters links among Canadian engineering students, industry, government and academia. This year’s competition took place in March at the University of Waterloo.