A senior design project that has the potential of being built in Sudan has accomplished what professors set out for the class.

“I think that they did a great job,” said Shane Brown, the clinical assistant professor who taught the Civil Engineering 465 course and was one of the advisers to the students who worked on the project. “They had a particularly challenging project because it’s in a country that is inaccessible to them.” The students designed a hospital for the fragile country in Africa. Professors set up the project to teach students how to design on a global basis rather than just the rules in the United States, said J. Daniel Dolan, a civil and environmental engineering professor and director of codes and standards. The students who worked on the project, which The Daily Evergreen reported about in September, agreed. “It just makes you ready for the real world,” said Mohamed Jeite, a civil engineering student who worked on the project. “That’s the point – you have to use all the courses that you took and apply it to this project.” Even things that were not taught in classes had to be learned, said Jeite, who read a textbook to learn masonry design. The group also spent six weeks finding information about what materials are and aren’t available in Sudan, he said. It all culminated in a PowerPoint presentation to two members of an advisory board, a poster display and a written report with information on design calculations, figures and tables, said Sean Johnson, a group member and civil engineering student. They also had to make certain assumptions when doing calculations and making the design, he said. For example, Sudan does not have an enforced building code. Steven Greenwood, the project manager for the group, said they looked at several options throughout the design process. For example, the project has two full design options for the foundation. In total, the report has 15 pages explaining roughly 85 pages of calculations, Greenwood said. “It sounds like a lot, but it took us 15 weeks to compose that,” he said. “Some of it sounds intimidating, but it’s really not.” Greenwood said he wanted to get on board with the project in the first place because it sounded exciting and because it would be constructed if the design were adequate. Charles Renneberg, who is part of a separate electrical engineering group working on providing power for the hospital, also said he picked the project because it would be actualized. “It makes our product useful and helpful,” he said. “It’s a project that’s going to save lives hopefully if we do our job right.” Renneberg is part of a team of four students that will present the electrical engineering aspect of the project in Spring semester, as their senior design project lasts a year. During the fall semester, the group turned in a full proposal and gave an hour-long presentation about the design it chose, he said. The students decided to build a solar farm away from the building to transmit the power to the building. The rationale for this was to make the solar farm expandable if necessary. Members from both groups said they would like to help actualize their design and go to Sudan to help build it.

Alex McDonald, president of the Engineers Without Borders club, which sponsors for the project, said the violence in the region prevents them from going to Sudan. “We’d like to have it built, but the time line for that would depend on the stability in Sudan,” he said. “The violence is keeping the university from getting involved.”