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Epsilon Engineers Volunteering at Alma Mater Event

April 19, 2018

 

Staff Engineer Abbegail Nack and Project Engineer Nick DeFilippo will be at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) on Friday, April 20th to act as judges during WPI’s Project Presentation Day. On Project Presentation Day, WPI students present the results of their Major Qualifying Project (MQP), which is a professional-level design or research experience typically completed in teams and often sponsored by corporations or other external organizations. Nick and Abbey, both recent graduates of WPI who have participated in Project Presentation Day, will be judging presentations for the Chemical Engineering department.

 

Abbey’s MQP analyzed the costs associated with a condominium’s decentralized wastewater treatment system and proposed several cost-saving measures to reduce the community’s expenses. She also examined why operation and maintenance (O&M) manuals for wastewater treatment facilities often fail to meet operators’ needs and proposed revisions to MassDEP’s guidance document on O&M manuals.

 

Nick’s MQP strived to accurately evaluate the flavor profile of wine based on chemical composition using GC-MS. He also evaluated methodologies to circumvent detection limit issues for many of the flavor compounds while still maintaining the integrity of the ratio of compounds in the wine. Nick’s project was part of a larger set of projects intended to analyze all steps of the wine making process and the resulting wine in order to allow wine makers to more accurately know what chemicals they should be aiming for to get the desired flavors and what raw materials and process parameters they needed to obtain that wine composition.