UW News

August 25, 2000

Flying showers, winning water skis, better fishing rods: UW professor taps group brainpower to push engineering projects forward

Transcontinental business travelers could be singing in the shower rather than enduring the weary griminess that marks the end of globe-hopping flights if Dan Brunton has his way.

Brunton is president of Aquajet Appliance Co., a Boeing Co.-backed Seattle firm marketing a recirculating in-flight shower system that proponents hope will make carry-on shampoo and shower caps common in the future. The innovative device, launched in July, is relatively lightweight, using just five gallons of water that is filtered, zapped by ultraviolet light and reused.

The technology for such a shower isn’t new. The real trick was getting players from disparate disciplines working together on developing the concept. Enter University of Washington professor James Seferis.

Seferis, a professor of chemical engineering, has pioneered a way of teaching engineering design that has rewritten the curriculum in his department. His student/professional teams were able to take the shower idea from concept to prototype in record time. They’ve seen similar successes working with other companies, making water skis more responsive and improving fly-fishing poles. His methods will likely be incorporated into other departments in the College of Engineering, according to Dean Denice Denton.

“This has made a major contribution to the improvement of undergraduate engineering education on this campus,” Denton said. “It also serves as an exemplar for transformation in engineering education at the national level.”

At the core of Seferis’ efforts is the idea that students learn better when given the chance to work in the real world with others whose talents may be different, but complementary. For Seferis, “real world” means injecting reality into the classroom in the form of practicing engineers, corporate executives and current, developing projects.

On the shower project, for example, he set up teams of chemical engineering and business students, as well as a few students from other disciplines and professional workers returning to school under a certificate program to hone teamwork skills. Boeing already had the idea for an in-flight shower, and Seferis, who consults for the aerospace company, obtained permission to bring the idea to his class. Corporate executives, including Boeing Chairman Phil Condit and Borge Boeskov, president of Boeing Business Jets, helped teach. The results speak for themselves.

“They went from concept to working prototype in just under eight weeks,” Seferis said. “The company was amazed.”

The project went through cycles with two other classes, which worked on different aspects of the device under the direction of Knowledge Training LLC, a corporation formed to help coordinate the numerous participants in the design projects under the direction of Granville Frazier, a retired Boeing executive and UW affiliate professor of chemical engineering.

Results were then handed back to Boeing and Aquajet was assigned to further refine the product and make it commercial. Seferis’ design classes don’t involve themselves in patent or intellectual property issues.

“I’m not a businessman,” Seferis said. “I’m an academic, a professor. That’s what I’m good at and that’s what I prefer to focus on.”

The initial target for the shower is owners of private business jets, although Aquajet has high hopes of marketing the product to commercial airlines for premium-class passengers as the next logical step in competition. But questions remain about how much precious seating space airlines will be willing to sacrifice to creature comforts.

The teams have had similar successes with other projects. Analysis of a composite water ski for H.O. Watersports brought the suggestion of eliminating the ski’s aluminum top plate. The result was more flex – and more control. The ski is now among the winningest in the circuit, according to Seferis.

And scrutiny of Sage Manufacturing fly-fishing poles helped pinpoint a manufacturing problem that was costing the company several million dollars a year in rejects. The class modeled heat transfer and manufacturing techniques used in making the rods and discovered that the process sometimes failed to make concentric wraps of the composite material used to make the high-performance poles.

“What they found was that sometimes they were making not exact wraps of the material – sometimes they would go just one and a half times around so it wasn’t even,” Seferis said. “They were able to help Sage optimize their manufacturing process.”

Seferis said he doesn’t want it to appear that his classes are simply solving problems for industry. The results are more a function of academia and industry cooperating in the intellectual process. And both sides benefit.

“A lot of people are seeing this as the model for how we want to do business,” he said. “It gives our students a great learning experience, and it allows corporations to tap into the collective brainpower we have in the academic world.”

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For more information, contact Seferis at (206) 543-9371 or seferis@cheme.washington.edu.