SAN ANTONIO — A university in San Antonio put its best and brightest on display at its annual Tech Symposium.
A group of college students at the University of Texas at San Antonio are making it their mission to improve public transportation one bus stop at a time, especially on those hot summer days. They made such an impact that they received first place out of all the projects.
“We’re trying to address the hot summers in Texas,” said Robert Navarro, a mechanical engineering major at the university.
He, along with the other students in his group, tackled an issue having to do with public transportation. The goal: to bring relief to anyone who uses public transportation.
“During the hot days, they’ve seen a decrease in bus traffic as well as economic and tourism,” Navarro said of a study done in the city.
Luckily, he and his team created a solution.
“So what we’re doing is using a cooling bench with a SAWS [San Antonio Water System] chilled water network to then cool users, say, in the downtown area,” said Navarro.
He and his fellow mechanical engineering classmates spent months working on their project.
It’s an idea that has already been picked up by the City of San Antonio and will be implemented soon.
“We’re working with SAWS, VIA [Metropolitan Transit] and the city already. … They want to do a cooling corridor from the downtown campus to kind of Hemisfair Park,” said Navarro.
So how does it work?
“Right now, SAWS’ water network runs underneath downtown, so right now they’re already using it to cool the Alamodome and a few hotels in that local area. So what we’re going to do is just plug into that. We’re going to have a small reservoir of about two gallons, and what it does is run through that heat exchanger and that water then cools our water and that’s what’s running through our bench and cooling everything down,” said Navarro.
It’s not just Navarro and his team making big moves. Their project is part of the annual Tech Symposium at UT San Antonio.
Ninety projects were showcased this year. That included Angel Rodriguez, whose project stands out for good reason.
“We were a sponsored project by CPS Energy. We were sponsored to build them a digital and physical replica of part of the San Antonio Airport System,” said Rodriguez.
His project was aimed at helping with outages on the grid.
“It’s an automated system that basically finds a fault, isolates it and then restores the service of the electrical customer,” said Rodriguez.
He did such a good job that he’s got a new job he’s heading to next month.
“I basically started here as an intern, and through the project, I was able to learn more about system modeling and circuit modeling, and ultimately, my manager liked the work I was providing, and they offered me a job upon graduation in two weeks,” said Rodriguez.
Tech is the future, and these projects are about improving the lives of those in the San Antonio community.