AUTONOMOUS DETECTION OF VEHICULAR WHEEL ALIGNMENT PARAMETERS

Vehicular technology has improved tremendously in the last few decades. Drivers and passengers are now being made more aware of their surroundings as well as the state of their cars, ergo becoming increasingly capable of making better decisions. These 'smart-vehicles' are directed by microcontrollers and microprocessors where a network of sensors and actuators provide contextual feedback for the user. Some of these features include parking and reverse assistance, collision avoidance and cruise control. In the coming years, this trend will undergo unprecedented growth as the technologies become cheaper to manufacture and implement. In fact, more advanced systems now alert the driver to realtime critical failures and problematic conditions while the simpler ones do so upon start-up. This paper provides a tested framework for a potential sensing system to alert the driver when the vehicle alignment is off. Vehicle misalignment can become an issue quickly as the following can result: Increased tire tread wear leading to reduced traction with the road's surface and ultimately higher chances of accidents as well as more frequent replacement of the tires becoming necessary. Uneven friction at contact between the road and tire can increase the resistance resulting in higher fuel consumption by the engine. Strain on multiple components within the braking system and suspension as misalignment can cause drift while in motion and additionally uneven braking. A damaged suspension is quite expensive to repair or replace. Early detection of the extent of misalignment can lead to decreased expenditure in the areas of maintenance and fuel consumption, contributing to an increase in reliability. Since many drivers, however experienced they are, may at times be ignorant of the degree of misalignment their vehicle possesses, adding this technology can serve as a potential remedy ultimately improving the user experience and vehicle longevity.

QUALITY ASSURANCE AND ACCREDITATION OF ENGINEERING PROGRAMMES AT THE FACULTY OF ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES, ST. AUGUSTINE CAMPUS, TRINIDAD

The quality of engineering education is challenging and is of paramount importance in today’s globalised world. The Faculty of Engineering at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine Campus, inherited a western education system and the accreditation systems in the five departments within the Faculty are based on the British accreditation system. The aim of this paper is to describe how this accreditation system is utilised in the Faculty of Engineering to ensure that the quality of the delivery of its programmes is at a high standard. The paper was derived from a survey carried out by the author. It describes the quality systems available in the Faculty and fully describes the steps involved in the accreditation process. The paper reveals the recent attempt at introducing the Caribbean Accreditation Council for Engineering and Technology (CACET) but concludes that until it is fully established and internationally recognised through its membership in the Washington Accord or any other comparably recognized international body, there will still be room for the international accreditation by the British institutions or other comparative international institutions at the Faculty of Engineering at UWI.

LOW COST SEISMIC DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM BASED ON OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE TOOLS

The University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre, Trinidad and Tobago, operates a network of over 50 stations for earthquake and volcanic monitoring in the Eastern Caribbean islands. These stations form a seismic network consisting of various types of instrumentation, and communication systems. Over a period of 11 years, the Centre has embarked on an initiative of upgrading and expanding the current network with combinations of broadband and/or strong motion sensors, high dynamic range digitizers and networking equipment to link each station to centralized observatories via high speed digital data transmission medium. To realize such an upgrade and expansion, the Centre has developed a seismic data acquisition system prototype built using open-source hardware and software tools. The prototype is intended to be low-cost using off the shelf hardware components and open-source seismic related software handling data acquisition and data processing in two separate modules. The prototype uses a three-channel accelerometer sensor and can process data into standard MiniSEED format for easy data archiving and seismic data analysis. A global position module provides network time protocol time synchronization within 1 millisecond for accurate timestamping of data. Data can be stored locally on the prototype in twenty-minute data files or securely transferred to a central location via internet with the use of virtual private network capabilities. The prototype is modular in design allowing for components to be replaced easily and the system software can be updated remotely thus reducing maintenance cost.

EXPERIENCES OF USING A SINGLE ASSESSMENT FOR BOTH PRACTICAL PROTOTYPING SKILLS AND INTRODUCTION TO ENERGY ENGINEERING

Engineering students are often faced with many assessment points during a semester. One of the more common assessments in an engineering programme are group-based, design and build projects. These projects often require a disproportionate amount of time due to coordination between members and resources for acquiring materials. This study relates an attempt to reduce this burden by utilising a common project as an assessment point for two separate courses: Practical Prototyping Skills and Introduction to Energy Engineering. The challenges faced by instructors in creating a project that would adequately address their individual learning outcomes are presented, along with the students’ perspective on this approach. Student surveys indicated that there was a clear understanding of how the project related to both courses and that they had sufficient support for the project, while lecturers highlighted several positive outcomes such as more student emphasis on the project, a higher standard of project and collegial support in the design and administration of the project.

EARTHWORK VOLUMETRICS WITH UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

The recent evolution of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as measuring instruments has become attractive for many surveying applications in civil engineering including the volumetric computations of earthworks in the construction of a highway. The application of softcopy photogrammetry to UAV acquired imagery has the potential to reduce data acquisition costs, time and with suitable accuracy for earthworks mapping and volumetrics. Their performance, however, is not well understood for these applications. This investigation tests the ability of the UAVs and photogrammetric software to generate volumes for the layers of material used in road construction, as well as to analyse their accuracies and limitations. Specifically, this study assesses the feasibility of UAV-based surveying in generating volumes for general earthworks in highway/road construction. Additionally, the study compares the performance of UAV-based surveying to that of Total Station surveying. Performance is evaluated along the required time for image acquisition and generating the final products, the required personnel and overall cost of survey. A segment of the Churchill Roosevelt Extension to Manzanilla was used in the assessment.

SOCIODEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS AS IT RELATES TO TRAVEL BEHAVIOUR IN SIDS: A CASE STUDY IN TRINIDAD

The objective of this research was to analyse the relationship between sociodemographic characteristics and the travel behaviour of Trinidadians. Many studies have shown that a relationship exists between the socio-economic and sociodemographic characteristics of an individual and their travel patterns. A better understanding of this relationship can influence transportation policy decisions and therefore, aid in improvement to the overall transportation structure. This understanding of travel behaviour is of particular importance in developing countries and SIDS, where there is limited geographical space, economic constraints and an influx of competitive unregulated paratransit modes into the transportation system. Trinidad, like other developing countries and SIDS, has a public transportation system that is dominated by paratransit modes. More notably, there is increasing penetration of illegally operated paratransit modes, that are aggressively competing in the market and gaining a lot of traction. Data was collected in January 2018 using a revealed preference survey of commuters’ work-based tours in, Trincity, a middle-income housing area with good highway and public transportation access. Results showed that income, age, distance from workplace and gender all affect the likelihood of public transport usage as a primary mode of a work tour and there were gender-based differences in the incidence of walking as part of the tour. Additionally, although most public transportation users considered the government bus service as the safest and illegal paratransit services as the least safe, the usage of such services was more than five times that of the bus. The research points to important service and policy actions which need to be taken to encourage and support shifts to more sustainable modes.

APPLYING FUZZY QFD MCDM TO EVALUATE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

This paper exhibits a method to improve the quality of musical instruments with the application of two Multi-Criteria Decision Making models, Technique of Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in a Quality Function Deployment (QFD) Environment. A fuzzy analysis approach was also included to accommodate qualitative data in music. The QFD was constructed with literature based on optimizing the manufacture of musical instruments. At this phase of the research, the paper focused on the physical parameters and perceived qualities of musical instruments. The proposed modified QFD was developed to identify the product features chosen by the market and aid the manufacture of musical instruments. A standard QFD recognized and scored factors to develop and manufacture musical instruments. It accommodated some core engineering variables for the musical instruments but overlooked some feature stakeholder needs. For example, the musician may not have 100% gratification while playing the instrument as the manufacturer fails to capture acoustic features to psychologically satisfy the musician’s audience. Using fuzzy logic, QFD and MCDM increased the model performance by expanding the data set. It offered the manufacturer of musical instruments a mode to capture and analyse behavioural linguistic data covering more customer requirements. Hence, the approach increased the range to correlate the physical features and psychological behaviours of musical instruments. It allowed non-technical persons to provide an improved form of reliable information. This modified QFD can also be applied to develop other products involving linguistic data.

WAVE ANALYSIS OF A L-BEAM STRUCTURE WITH A BLOCKING MASS

The wave vibration approach regards the vibrations present within a structure as waves, whereby each wave flows along a structural member and upon meeting a discontinuity; portions of the incident wave are reflected and transmitted across the discontinuity. The reflected, transmitted and propagating wave transformations are represented mathematically by matrices, which are used to develop a set of wave relation equations at each discontinuity that can be used to describe the frequency response of the system holistically. This method creates a systematic approach of analysing structures by utilizing common cases as building blocks for a specific structure. The L-joint, described as two beams meeting at right angles; is a ubiquitous case for spatial portal and structural frames, which may become geometrically complex. Such structures are well suited to a wave vibration approach due to the large number of geometric changes and the prevalence as well as recurrence of specific cases. In this paper, the L-joint expanded to include a blocking mass, typically employed in structural systems and allows for the isolation and reflection of vibration away from contiguous structural elements. Included are; variance of transmission and reflection matrix components as the size of the blocking mass increases, numerical examples and comparison to a Finite Element Model developed in ANSYS.