The Colorado River may be a little less polluted and noisy in the future because of efforts by Polytechnic engineering students.

The students will be continuing research on developing a new “green” electric motor for the Grand Canyon River Outfitters Association for the second year in a row.

Each year for the next three years, ASU will be given $20,000 in funding for the project. ASU had the most students working on the project last year at 15, compared to NAU, UA and the University of Utah — schools also working on the project.

“[The students] get to help solve a real problem. It prepares them for real employment,” said Chell Roberts, chair and professor of the Department of Engineering at the Polytechnic campus.

He said the students were working on two different types of motors in the last year and found that one worked better, so future students will continue work on that motor.

“We tried two different approaches — one was better than the other,” Roberts said.

Roberts said he initiated part of the project and suggested the association work with ASU and other schools.

He said Mark Grisham, executive director of the association, also probably selected ASU for the project funding because of the quality of projects students have completed.

“He kind of selected us based on what he was seeing in our projects,” Roberts said.

Grisham said his association has partnerships with the four schools.
“We’re sponsoring research projects related to the overall goal of creating an alternative motorboat system,” he said.

Grisham said the goal of the project is to reduce noise and emissions by creating a new motor.

“The idea is to see if we can use technology to reduce the effects of the downsides,” he said.

Grisham said people who ride the boats with new motors in the future will see a change.

“We’d like to improve the experience as much as possible,” he said.
Matthew Magruder, an engineering student with a concentration in mechanical systems who graduated in May, worked on the project last school year on one of the two ASU teams.

“[The teams] had done a lot of projects before starting this one,” he said. “Really the only difference was the project was a little more complicated than anything we’d done in the past.”

Seven people were on his team and eight were on the other.
“I was in charge of the design phase when we were going through alternative solution generation,” Magruder said.

He said his group worked on the motor for an eight- to 12-day trip, which would run on the lower part of the Colorado River.

“Ours has to be able to operate for several days without being plugged into a power grid,” Magruder said.

The other group was working on a motor that would last three hours and require more power since it was on the upper part of the river, he said.

Although Magruder said he doesn’t plan on being a practicing engineer and will be involved in international relations and governmental work, he said he will still be able to use some of the skills he learned.

“It was a real world problem, working with several [engineers], … having to coordinate with a customer,” he said.

Dale Scott Jenne, a multidisciplinary engineering student who graduated in May, also worked on the project last school year.

“I’ve always just been interested in the energy field,” Jenne said. “There’s a lot of people that try and find answers to the energy field, but they don’t actually go out and do it.”

He said he specialized mostly in the mechanical portion of things.
“I mostly dealt with the actual motor, controls and the design of some of the pieces,” he said.

Jenne said the project gave him skills to help him in the future.

“It’s given me some actual real-world experience for a problem that hasn’t been solved yet,” he said.

Reach the reporter at
reweaver@asu.edu