This honors thesis proposes a sustainable solution for providing off-grid solar energy to rural communities lacking grid energy infrastructure. The proposed design emphasizes sustainability, low cost, reliability, and ease of maintenance and manufacturing. The report compares pre-built solar systems currently available for purchase with the proposed design. The project includes a user manual draft to ensure long-term sustainability and troubleshooting. Additionally, there is a detailed engineering design for a battery storage solution, electrical component design, and solar panel mounting system. A rural community in northern Arizona serves as an example for the project completed in collaboration with ASU's EPICS program and EWB Chapter. The project is ongoing, with future work to optimize and improve the proposed system design.

The EPICS program, an acronym for Engineering Projects in Community Service, provides students an opportunity to create engineering solutions to “real world” problems. This honors thesis project is a collaboration with the EPICS program, the Vietnam Smart Agriculture EPICS team, and the Da Nang University of Technology (DUT) in Da Nang, Vietnam. The goal of the Vietnam Smart Agriculture EPICS team is to design an accessible system to reduce water consumption for Vietnamese small farmers through the use of smart agriculture technology. In January of 2023, my EPICS team and I were able to travel and interview five farmers in the Tra Que Farm to complete a needs assessment. The focus of this thesis project is to provide background research and to complete a feasibility study to aid the Vietnam Smart Agriculture EPICS team in developing a smart agriculture device to aid small farmers with overwatering. The thesis includes a literature review investigating solutions for evaluating the water needs of crops, delves into insights gathered from interviews with Vietnamese small farmers, and data collected from their farms.

The thesis will explore sources of scientific funding, analyze the impacts of intellectual property, describe the reproducibility/replicability crisis, and explore various scientific policies. Additionally, this thesis will determine whether all scientific findings should be released for total transparency, if everything should be kept under lock and key to maximize profits and protect the intellectual property of the scientists, or if there should be some healthy medium between the two. For each option, the inherent positives and negatives will be discussed to show how scientific research can change to best fit the needs of everyone involved. Furthermore, this thesis will explore possible solutions to remedy the issues found and how such propositions can be reasonably applied. The research was conducted through a series of interviews with expert faculty members on the Arizona State University Campus. Ultimately, in order for improvements to be made, a number of changes need to happen at a foundational level through a series of new science policy and research practice implementations.

As a result of the increase of pollution related to industrialization in Vietnam, acid rain has become a prevalent issue for Vietnamese farmers who are forced to rinse their crops – risking damage due to overwatering and poor harvest. Thus, the team was motivated to develop a solution to harmful impacts of acidic rainwater by creating a system with the ability to capture rainwater and determine its level of acidity in order to optimize the crop watering process, and promote productive crops. By conducting preliminary research on rainfall and tropical climate in Vietnam, existing products on the market, and pH sensors for monitoring and device material, the team was able to design a number of devices to collect, store, and measure the pH of rainwater. After developing a number of initial design requirements based on the needs of the farmers, a final prototype was developed using the best aspects of each initial design. Tests were conducted with varying structural and aqueous materials to represent a broad range of environmental conditions. While the scope of the project was ultimately limited to prototyping purposes, the principles explored throughout this thesis project can successfully be applied to a fully-functioning production model available for commercial use on Vietnamese farms. Given more time for development, improvements would be made in the extent of materials tested, and the configuration of electronics and data acquisition, in order to further optimize the process of determining rainwater acidity.

As a result of the increase of pollution related to industrialization in Vietnam, acid rain has become a prevalent issue for Vietnamese farmers who are forced to rinse their crops – risking damage due to overwatering and poor harvest. Thus, the team was motivated to develop a solution to harmful impacts of acidic rainwater by creating a system with the ability to capture rainwater and determine its level of acidity in order to optimize the crop watering process, and promote productive crops. By conducting preliminary research on rainfall and tropical climate in Vietnam, existing products on the market, and pH sensors for monitoring and device material, the team was able to design a number of devices to collect, store, and measure the pH of rainwater. After developing a number of initial design requirements based on the needs of the farmers, a final prototype was developed using the best aspects of each initial design. Tests were conducted with varying structural and aqueous materials to represent a broad range of environmental conditions. While the scope of the project was ultimately limited to prototyping purposes, the principles explored throughout this thesis project can successfully be applied to a fully-functioning production model available for commercial use on Vietnamese farms. Given more time for development, improvements would be made in the extent of materials tested, and the configuration of electronics and data acquisition, in order to further optimize the process of determining rainwater acidity.

As a result of the increase of pollution related to industrialization in Vietnam, acid rain has become a prevalent issue for Vietnamese farmers who are forced to rinse their crops – risking damage due to overwatering and poor harvest. Thus, the team was motivated to develop a solution to harmful impacts of acidic rainwater by creating a system with the ability to capture rainwater and determine its level of acidity in order to optimize the crop watering process, and promote productive crops. By conducting preliminary research on rainfall and tropical climate in Vietnam, existing products on the market, and pH sensors for monitoring and device material, the team was able to design a number of devices to collect, store, and measure the pH of rainwater. After developing a number of initial design requirements based on the needs of the farmers, a final prototype was developed using the best aspects of each initial design. Tests were conducted with varying structural and aqueous materials to represent a broad range of environmental conditions. While the scope of the project was ultimately limited to prototyping purposes, the principles explored throughout this thesis project can successfully be applied to a fully-functioning production model available for commercial use on Vietnamese farms. Given more time for development, improvements would be made in the extent of materials tested, and the configuration of electronics and data acquisition, in order to further optimize the process of determining rainwater acidity.

The objective of this report is to discover a skyhook’s ability to change the plane of another spacecraft’s orbit while ensuring that each vehicle’s orbital energy remains constant. Skyhooks are a proposed momentum exchange device in which a tether is attached to a counterweight at one end and at the other, a capturing device intended to intercept rendezvousing spacecraft. Trigonometric velocity vector relations, along with objective comparisons to traditionally proposed uses for skyhooks and gravity-assist maneuvers were responsible for the ultimate parameterization of the proposed energy neutral maneuver. From this methodology, it was determined that a spacecraft’s initial relative velocity vector must be perpendicular to, and rotated about the skyhook’s total velocity vector if it is to benefit from an energy neutral plane change maneuver. A quaternion was used to model the rotation of the incoming spacecraft’s relative velocity vector. The potential post-maneuver spacecraft orbits vary in their inclinations depending on the ratio between the skyhook and spacecraft’s total velocities at the point of rendezvous as defined by the parameter called the alpha criterion. For many cases, the proposed maneuver will serve as a desirable alternative to currently practiced propulsive plane change methods because it does not costly require a substantial amount of propellant. The proposed maneuver is also more accessible than alternative methods that involve gravity-assist and aerodynamic forces. Additionally, by avoiding orbital degradation through the achievement of unchanging total orbital energy, the skyhook will be able to continually and self-sustainably provide plane changes to any spacecraft that belong to orbits that abide by the identified parameters.