41530 research outputs found
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ACE Mentor Program of America
No full textThis senior project examines my role and experience as a student mentor in the ACE (Architecture, Construction, and Engineering) Mentor Program\u27s Central Coast Chapter. This program emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and real-world application, utilizes simplified terminology for early learners, and provides structured deliverables tailored to the project at hand. This year, the program targeted students from San Luis Obispo and Arroyo Grande High School. The project involved designing a new fire station to replace Fire Station No. 4 in San Luis Obispo, which was chosen due to its mixed-use properties. Over the course of nine weeks, the students engaged in the Design-Build process, supported by mentors from the architecture, engineering, and construction fields. My responsibilities included developing the Request for Proposal (RFP), supporting weekly sessions, and mentoring a specific student group through the design, engineering, and presentation phases of the project. The RFP provided detailed information on the main goals of the new fire station. This included descriptions and introductions to the topics, minimum space programming, foundational and roof form design elements, and cost estimating with scheduling guidance. I also help provide technical help on software tools such as SketchUp, clarify concepts, and facilitate design feasibility reviews for my mentees’ group
Skip The Grid Bringing Light to the Darkness and Bridging the Educational Gap in Navajo Nation
No full textSkip The Grid is a unique project done in collaboration with many groups, including California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) students and faculty members, representatives from Solv Energy, Nextracker, Tribal Liaisons, Heart of America, and members of the Navajo Nation. This group delivered and installed solar panel systems accompanied by batteries, lights, and a small refrigerator. The Navajo Nation faces many problems, including higher poverty and unemployment rates when compared to the rest of the United States. The goal of the Skip The Grid project was to deliver sustainable, safe, and reliable power to homes of school-aged children in the Chinle Unified School District in Apache County, Arizona. 40 homes were selected to receive the solar systems. They were installed by teams of students, faculty, and industry representatives over a period of three days from March 24th to March 26th, 2025
Skip The Grid: Installing Solar Panels Within The Navajo Nation
No full textSkip the Grid is an initiative aimed at providing off-the-grid power, in a sustainable manner, to underserved communities within the Navajo Nation. The Skip the Grid program is led by an interdisciplinary team from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), in collaboration with SOLV Energy and Heart of America (HOA). This ongoing project addresses the lack of electricity for many young families within the Navajo Nation due to a variety of reasons, and the need to remedy this problem to allow for young students within the reservation to succeed. To combat this issue, Skip the Grid in association with the Chinlee, AZ school district chose 40 families that would receive Goal Zero solar panels, along with battery systems, lighting, and a refrigerator unit over the three days installs were being completed. While serving the community of Chinle, Cal Poly students practiced hands-on methods in problem solving, installation techniques, safety, and collaboration. In addition to the technical installations, the student team from Cal Poly developed safety protocols, pre-task-plans, cultural presentations, and educational outreach seminars that would be then presented to a variety of different elementary schools on the trip
CAED Support Shop North Wall Project
No full textThe CAED Support Shop North Wall Project was a student-led initiative aimed at reclaiming and enhancing valuable courtyard space within the CAED Support Shop. The existing wall, originally built to enclose a now-removed dumpster, had an irregular shape that disrupted the flow of the courtyard. With the dumpster gone, the wall no longer served a purpose and took up space that could be used by students. Our interdisciplinary team comprising of five Architectural Engineering students and one Construction Management student collaborated to plan, design, and constructing a new masonry wall that preserved the character of the original structure while improving functionality. The project included a full construction lifecycle: site analysis, demolition planning, design development, budgeting, scheduling, and hands-on construction. I myself as the construction manager led several construction management efforts, including the site logistics plan, demolition plan, construction methods, schedule, and budget. Our team manually bent and tied all rebar for the project and coordinated with local professionals for demolition and masonry work. This project provided critical hands-on experience in construction management, reinforced the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, and ultimately transformed an underutilized area into a more open, student-friendly courtyard
Skip the Grid: An Impactful Solar Installation Project in the Navajo Nation
No full textOver the past four years, a team of interdisciplinary students and faculty from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), Heart of America, and generous industry sponsors (SOLV, Goal Zero, NextTracker, Elite, and TCB Builders) have brought their time, effort, and resources together to complete a service trip, called Skip the Grid. The trip’s primary goal is to provide a reliable source of power, light, and refrigeration to families with school age children in the Navajo Nation where these resources are absent or unreliable otherwise. This year’s trip took place over Cal Poly’s academic break from March 23rd to 27th, 2025 throughout the greater Chinle, Arizona location. The project team, consisting of 20 Cal Poly students, faculty, industry sponsors, and HOA trip directors, gathered in Northwest Arizona from various fields, backgrounds, and locations for a week of solar installations. By the end of three installation days and a handful of community engagement events, the team brought power to a total of 40 homes, interacted with a great number of Navajo families, taught hundreds of elementary school students the impact of solar, and collectively learned a great deal from Navajo life and culture
AS-998-25 Resolution to Establish a Mutual Defense Compact to Protect Academic Freedom and Shared Governance in the California State University System
No full textResolves that the Cal Poly Academic Senate calls on university leaders to work collaboratively to protect the integrity of our academic mission and communicate regularly and transparently about external threats to academic freedomand shared governance; and it further resolves that the Cal Poly Academic Senate urges the CSU Chancellor and Board of Trustees to establish a Mutual Academic Defense Compact – with participation from CSU campuses, faculty senates, and the Academic Senate of the CSU (ASCSU) – that includes a shared legal and communications defense fund, a coordinated system-wide response to political interference, and a standing summit of CSU leadership, faculty governance, and legal experts to protect the integrity and autonomy of all CSU campuses; and further resolves that this resolution be distributed to the Cal Poly President, the Cal Poly Provost, the Cal Poly Vice Presidents and Assistant Vice Presidents, the Cal Poly Deans, the Cal Poly Department Heads and Chairs, Unit 3 Employees of Cal Poly, CSU Chancellor\u27s Office, CSU Board of Trustees, ASCSU, CSU Senate Chairs, California Faculty Association (CFA) Statewide President, CFA Chapter Presidents, Cal Poly CFA Chapter President, and California State Legislators
Building a Novel Question-Answering System using Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the California Fair Political Practices Commission
No full textThe California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) receives a high volume of inquiries via email from public officials, the general public, and other agencies, which currently requires staff to manually search through informational documents and manuals to provide timely responses. This process is both labor- and time-intensive.
To address this challenge, we design a question-answering (QA) system that drafts responses to emailed questions by retrieving relevant information from the FPPC’s manuals using a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework. Although the current implementation focuses on a single manual, the system is designed to be adaptable to the broader set of FPPC documents. By converting the FPPC’s pub- licly available PDF manuals into Markdown files, we parse and segment text into sec- tions, retrieve documentation relevant to a query, and utilize a large language model (OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4.1) to generate responses grounded in the retrieved text.
Our hypothesis is that a RAG-based QA system with custom document parsing for information retrieval performs better, i.e. gives more accurate and correct answers grounded within the source data, than direct application of state-of-the-art LLMs like ChatGPT.
We validate our approach through manual review of retrieval accuracy and generated answers, as well as through a survey on Prolific, where participants compare responses from our system against those generated by directly querying ChatGPT with the FPPC manual
Experimental Study of Gas-Dynamic Heating in Hartmann-Sprenger Tubes for Rocket Engine Ignition
No full textIgnition systems for chemical rocket engines typically rely on hypergolic propellants or auxiliary electrical hardware to supply the energy required to initiate combustion. The resonance igniter is a simple and robust alternative to these conventional methods, capable of inducing autoignition of non-hypergolic propellants without an external ignition source. At the core of this concept is the Hartmann-Sprenger Tube (HST), a device in which a high-velocity jet of gas impinges on a resonance cavity. This interaction establishes self-sustaining gas oscillations within the cavity that heat the propellants to their autoignition temperature. To facilitate the development of a functional resonance igniter at Cal Poly, this thesis investigates three parameters identified as primary drivers of heating performance and oscillation behavior in an HST: nozzle pressure ratio (NPR), nozzle-cavity spacing (S/d), and cavity length (L/d). A modular HST apparatus was designed and constructed to enable a broad parametric survey of these variables and their effects on the oscillations within conical resonance cavities. Three interchangeable cavities were designed based on prior research, with geometry optimized to maximize heating and produce sufficient temperatures for igniting high-performance rocket propellants. Heating trends within the resonators were found to depend strongly on HST operating mode, either Jet Regurgitant Mode or Jet Screech Mode, and varied significantly between geometries and test conditions. Lumped-capacity solutions were applied to extrapolate short-duration test data, providing estimates of the average steady-state gas temperatures within the resonance cavities. Ultimately, the highest measured cavity-wall temperatures reached 606°C with external insulation and 454°C without, corresponding to estimated average steady-state gas temperatures of 619°C and 469°C, respectively