A team of students in the Center for Leadership Education’s Multidisciplinary Engineering Design course today walked away from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydropower Collegiate Competition with several awards for their design to retrofit nonpowered dams for hydropower production.
The team of students, including Seth Jayawardane (KSAS ’25), Grace Mazur (WSE ’25), Jenna Halpin (WSE ’24), Erin Lee (WSE ’25), and Jason Zhong (WSE ’24), from a variety of engineering disciplines (plus one biophysics major) worked together to design a system to retrofit Liberty Dam, northwest of Baltimore, to produce hydropower. Their novel design is fish-friendly and can easily be adapted to fit any dam that has an appropriate reservoir, no matter the age of the dam.
At the competition, the team took home first place in Build and Test, first place in Community Connections, and second place overall. Read more about their design and how their various engineering backgrounds contributed to their prize-winning solution at the Hub.