Capstone

Introduction

The Capstone design project (EE/CME 495) is a joint class project that electrical and computer engineers take in their 4th year of school. It's intended to utilize all the skills that have been learned throughout 4 years of school and apply them to practical, real world problems.  The projects are provided by staff from the college of engineering or by professionals who work in the Industry. Students are given a list of projects to choose from at the beginning of September, and have until the beginning of April to conclude the project.

Our group accepted a proposal from MST Global under the supervision of Andrew Kostiuk, a support engineer at the University of Saskatchewan, and on behalf of our client from MST Global, Sol Gokavi.

The proposal was for a system that uses MST Global's existing hardware and software to improve underground mining operations or solve an open issue. Upon a suggestion from our client, we chose to implement an automated ventilation platform. Underground mining operations are required to ventilate the drifts with fresh air from the surface using large fans to help eliminate toxins such as diesel particulate, SO2, CO2 and CO. In conjunction with the fans, doors are used to control the air flow so that air passes through a desired path. This system would be able to control fan speed based on the population of a specified area within a mine, and also allow for the remote closing and opening of mine doors. This is a problem of importance because fans consume a lot of power and it becomes expensive when the mine is in a remote area. A mine without automated ventilation control will run fans at 100% power all the time, even if no one is working in an area where fresh air is needed.

Milestones

• Interim report and presentation (Due at the end of December)

• Final report (Due at the beginning of April)

• Final Presentation (Due at the end of March)

• Project demonstration (Due at the end of March)

Contributors

• Sol Gokavi (Client)

• Andrew Kostiuk (Supervisor)

• Kelsey Kosheluk

• Yanjuan Li

• Steven Randall

Source Code

https://github.com/benhaub/495_capstone

Final Presentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8O27La4wmw&feature=youtu.be 

Final Demonstration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8FUF4ZIOzE