ENGITank Sea Life Revival Project

Saving California’s coastline, one buoy at a time

Sea Life Revival Project was a design submission for Engineering Student Council’s ENGITank design competition. Through this 10 week design competition, 8 teams race to engineer a product that addresses a modern day issue and compete for a cash prize.

Meet the team

• Ethan Vincent Pizano
  • Filter and Static Engineer
• Adrian Francisco Duran Ornelas (CoLead)
  • Embedded Systems Engineer
• Christine Ly (CoLead)
  • CAD Engineer and Manager
• Maximilian Christof Stark
  • Static Engineer
• Aditya Amit Honap
  • Filter Engineer
• Weixin (Jackie) Zhang
  • Embedded Systems Engineer

Design Overview

In order to address the overwhelming amount of microplastics in our planet’s oceans, we have commited to engineering a solution that will help fix the damage that has already been caused. Our design consists of a two part system, involving a buoy and filter in order to efficiently filter containminated waters.

The buoy assembly was designed with ease of use in mind. We have developed a winch system that makes the replacement of used filters easier than competitors. Additionally, by aggressively targetting a low price point, we were able to undercut the market price for ocean filtration devices.

Electrically, the design consists of tightly packed microcontrollers inside a waterproofed cylinder to ensure their functionality when in the open ocean. The embedded system consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 as the main processor, and several additional sensors to collect telemetry from the enviorment. In order to ensure the buoy is powered, it is outfitted with six watt solar panels that charge a lithium ion battery throughout the day when the sun is avaiable. In order to communicate with the buoy, it is outfitted with a two kilometer range LoRa Radio, easily linking to a SLRP computer on the coast line.

The full presentation is below: