Alumnus Cleans Attic and Spawns Senior Project

A trip to the attic by alumnus Tom Sprouse resulted in a Rose-Hulman senior civil engineering project last year.

Sprouse, a 1966 civil engineering alumnus, approached a team of civil engineering students to design an energy-efficient subdivision in Davidson County, North Carolina.  Sprouse said he was trying to design a practical energy efficient community and asked the students to look a various alternatives.

The team focused on a whole subdivision and individual homes, according to Robert Houghtalen, head of the Rose-Hulman Department of Civil Engineering.  Because the subdivision was in North Carolina, the students did the work on a remote basis using e-mail and Geographic Information Systems (GISI) on the Web, he added.  GIS provides mapping with a database behind it that allowed the students to study elevations and existing improvements in the area under study.

 “The team did a great job of analyzing the property and preparing a document that will be used as the basis for project justification and scope.” Sprouse said.  He noted that work should begin on part of the study site next spring.

The motivation for the project came when Sprouse was cleaning his attic and came across his senior project which focused on a future design for Hulman Field (the Terre Haute airport).  “I saw our senior project and wondered if they still did that at Rose-Hulman,” he explained.  “I called the Civil Engineering department and submitted my project for consideration.”

Energy-efficient housing has become a sideline for Sprouse who works full time in his software business that provides process modeling for major pulp and paper companies in the United States, Canada and South America.