John Free Physics and Engineering Seminar – Virtual Presentation – Friday April 17, 2020 at 4:30PM

Please join us on a Zoom Virtual Presentation of the Dr. John U. Free Physics & Engineering Seminar Series 2020 featuring faculty and Physics & Engineering senior research presentations. This series encourages collaboration and information sharing between programs and divisions and promotes an atmosphere that supports undergraduate research.

The URL to launch the Zoom Presentation is as follows:
https://encedu.zoom.us/j/371300676?pwd=Vnp1eTE2aG1FalB3cE0vWm1vek1Gdz09

The presentations scheduled for the April 17 installment of the series are as follows:

Manage budgeting on the fly: A software/mobile application for easy and comprehensive management of personal budget
by Claire Umuhoza Kayihura BSc Candidate, Computer Engineering 2020

Where does all your money go? Most people struggle with saving and tracking their money. This project will provide a strategic way to solve the issue of overspending. An issue due to not knowing how to track money or setting limitations on personal spending capability. It could be time-consuming and useless doing yearly budgets manually since it may not help future expenses and savings. This mobile application will help clients keep track of their money by categorizing their expenses. In developing this app, flutter is used as a framework and Dart, as a programming language, for the front-end and user interface (UI). Firebase provides real-time database and the back-end to store all the relevant information on the cloud. The goal is to provide a platform that will make it easy for clients to be aware of their expenses, keep track of their incomes from different accounts, prevent overspending and provide means to be able to save for the future.

A handheld magnetometer for monitoring seismic disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field
by Dylan Louviaux BSc Candidate, Electrical Engineering 2020

Since the beginning of time, man has fought to explain the nature of earthquakes and tried to develop means to forecast them. Despite active research in the area in the last 100 years, to date there are no definitive means of forecasting earthquakes. Most agree that the main reason why earthquake forecasting has not been possible is because all current approaches are based on mechanical deformation of the earth’s crust near faults. Here comes a new approach: monitoring the energy build up that always precede an earthquake sometimes months before it occurs. In this project, we develop a way of monitoring the disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field due to seismic activities that precede earthquakes. Magnetic anomalies correlated with subtle movement of tectonic plates and manifesting as magnetic field spikes ranging from 10-12 nanoTesla are monitored using a fluxgate magnetometer. Our goal is to develop an inexpensive, yet accurate class of fluxgate magnetometers for field application and research. By combining electronic craftsmanship and three microscopic fluxgate magnetometers, we were able to achieve the precision needed to potentially detect small magnetic anomalies that can be associated with seismic activities before earthquakes.