Comfort Emeaba '26, mechanical engineering, recently received a 2nd place award for undergraduate poster presentations at the Emerging Research National (ERN) Conference, held at the end of March in Atlanta, Georgia. Emeaba won in the category of Technology and Engineering - Civil, Mechanical, and Industrial. 

She presented the poster “Power in Motion: Hybrid Pendulum-Based Vibration Energy Harvesting,” based on the research she conducted in the Energy Harvesting and Design Optimization Lab (EDLab) under the guidance of associate professor of mechanical engineering Soobum Lee. One of the EDLab’s research objectives is to optimize the health monitoring process of wind turbine blades by developing a hybrid self-powering solution—piezoelectric and triboelectric pendulum mechanisms—for the monitoring sensor device. Emeaba’s project tests the feasibility of the power generation performance of the repeated back-and-forth motion of the pendulum mechanisms, which are driven by the change in gravitational direction when attached to a slow, rotational object similar to a wind turbine.

We congratulate her on this great achievement!