The Armour R&D program provides Illinois Tech undergraduate engineering students research and development opportunities to apply their engineering skills to areas of high relevance and global impact. This year-round program offers Armour undergraduates the chance to work alongside an engineering faculty member on projects that tackle real-world problems including water desalination methods, detection of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer using magnetic resonance and molecular imaging techniques, designing biomaterials for therapeutic delivery and tissue regeneration, and developing open-source GPS, while gaining skills that are highly valued in the engineering profession. Armour R&D participants receive a stipend to work with a faculty member in their research laboratory, allowing them to gain valuable research and development experience and professional mentorship. Participants selected for this competitive program conduct their project over the course of 10 weeks during the semester and showcase their work at the Annual Armour R&D Expo.
Application Due: 3/31 at 5 PM CST
Contact email: engineering@iit.edu
Application for New Application
Application for Continuing Application
Below are a list of possible research opportunities but students are not limited to the below projects, they may work with a faculty mentor to apply with a project of their own:
Instructor: Marcella Vaicik
Available Spots: 2
This project is focused on drug delivery using a novel nanoparticle emulsion system we are optimizing to deliver gene therapies to cells. The cells we are developing the system for a are difficult to deliver gene therapies to using commercially available systems.
Instructor: Mohammad Miralinaghi
Available Spots: 2
Connected and autonomous vehicles show promise for increasing roadway safety and capacity. The goal of this course is to research transportation infrastructure design in the era of connected and autonomous vehicles. This includes implementing research in several areas, such as traffic signals, road design, and public transit and parking infrastructure. Through the project, the students will learn about cutting-edge aspects such as the impact of vehicle connectivity, and automation on our future roadway systems.
Instructor: Mohammad Heidarinejad
Available Spots: 2
This project will focus on exploring the impacts of indoor air cleaning strategies on indoor air quality and health outcomes in different indoor settings. Specifically, the project for this semester will look into how indoor air quality and health is impacted by air cleaners deployed in the homes of people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The project will also involve testing of air cleaner efficacy in laboratory and field settings. The student will work with two faculty members, one postdoc, and graduate students in assessing solutions. Students interested in indoor air quality and health implications are highly encouraged to apply to this project.
Instructor: Mohammad Heidarinejad
Available Spots: 2
This project will focus on developing building systems semantic models that integrate best practices in computer science, such as knowledge representation, reasoning, machine learning techniques, with other engineering models (electrical, mechanical, architectural). So far, a list of modeling constructs and a sample semantic model for the building applications are developed and the next step is to develop a sample semantic model of a real building using existing well-established ontologies and the pieces we have so far. Knowledge of working with object-oriented programming languages (e.g., Python/Java), understanding of semantic web technologies (e.g., XML, RDF, SHACL, SPARQL), or familiarity with building mechanical systems and tools (i.e., Revit, AutoCAD) would be beneficial.
Instructor: Mohammad Heidarinejad
Available Spots: 3
This project will focus on developing low-cost steam traps and radiator valve controls solutions using microcontrollers. Students with a background in coding, prototyping, or building test circuits on breadboards will potentially work together with the current graduate students. The idea is to leverage recent developments in low-cost sensors and microcontrollers to develop and deploy smart building sensing and controls solutions, especially for our steam systems. Knowledgeable in some (not all) aspects of breadboard design to a printed circuit board (PCB), assembly and fabrication using 3D printers, programming in C/C++ or Rust for embedded systems and microcontrollers, familiarity with microprocessors, or basic scripting skills in Python or similar to help with data analysis would be beneficial.
Instructor: Mohammad Heidarinejad
Available Spots: 2
This project will focus on design, installation, and testing of components for a teaching and research environmental chamber that is being constructed in the CAEE department. The student will work with the faculty to prepare drawings for the installation sensors, actuators, controllers and work on the communication protocol. Knowledge of building systems and instrumentation would be beneficial.
Instructor: Mohammad Heidarinejad
Available Spots: 2
This project will focus on the application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in buildings. The student will work with a faculty to perform indoor and outdoor CFD simulations for a variety of building applications. Knowledge of modeling and understanding of CFD would be beneficial.
Instructor: Mohammad Heidarinejad
Available Spots: 2
Decarbonization of building energy and energy systems have gained popularity in recent years. This project will focus on developing decarbonization and electrification strategies for building energy systems. For example, the project will include characterization of air source heat pumps, especially their COP and backup heat performance for different scenarios. Knowledge of the heat pump cycle and programming will be a requirement.
Instructor: Mohammad Heidarinejad
Available Spots: 2
This project will assess impacts of developing filtration strategies for homes that are cooled with rooftop evaporative (“swamp”) coolers which is common in hot and dry climates. These devices are economical, energy efficient, and effective at cooling in dry climates. However, evaporative coolers bring in large quantities of unfiltered outdoor air, creating a serious hazard when wildfire smoke and heat events coincide. The project characterizes performance of common evaporative coolers, proposes novel filtration solutions, and analyzes the particulate matter during the study. A combination of lab work and data analysis are part of this project.
Instructor: Mohammad Heidarinejad
Available Spots: 2
This project focuses on creating 3D of building mechanical systems to demonstrate how all building heating, cooling and ventilation systems are built and also connected to other parts of a building.
Instructor: Ren Wang
Available Spots: 2-3
The project aims to improve our understanding of adversarial attacks and adversarial training in deep learning by visualizing the loss landscape of deep neural networks, which in general hard to plot. Additionally, the project will explore the concept of robust mode connectivity, which describes a robust path in the model parameter space that can be found by connecting two robust models. We want to visualize the path in the high-dimensional parameter space to better understand the robust mode connectivity.
Experience Information
- Sponsor
- Armour College of Engineering
- Start Date
- Feb 6, 2023
- End Date
- Apr 28, 2023
- Apply By
- Dec 22, 2022
