Innovation on the water

Every two weeks, Richard “Dickie” Youngk ’78 travels from Annapolis to Nix Cove, the quaint neighborhood on the coast of Virginia where he grew up fishing for summer flounders with his brothers and hunting for fiddler crabs that scuttled in the mud. 

His 96-year-old mother still lives in the house where he was raised, and after wishing her a good morning, Youngk walks down the side porch steps that he helped his father build and crosses the rolling back lawn to the cove. In the bright sunshine glinting off the Chesapeake Bay, Youngk spots the dock he helped his neighbor Andrew Chapman build, where more than 6,000 oysters float in cages just under the surface of the blue-green water. Further out is a floating pier, accessible only by Youngk’s solar-powered oyster boat, with an additional 6,000 oysters dancing in the slow, easy tide. 

Together, these 12,000 oysters make up Youngk’s hobby retirement business, Annapolis Aquaculture. Today he’s come to raise the cages up so the hot Virginia sun can burn off algae and barnacles and, much like Superman soaking up sun rays, encourage the oysters to grow harder shells.

It used to take more than 20 minutes to pull up all 12 of the 50-pound oyster cages by hand, which left the retired mechanical engineer sore and exhausted before the day even began. Now, thanks to a collaboration with students in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering's senior design course, the Major Design Experience, the cages go up in mere seconds with the press of a simple button.

“The students were amazing,” said Youngk, who spent 38 years with the civil service department of the U.S. Navy. “I gave them general guidelines of where to get started, and they took off with it. They worked individually and together very well.”

Youngk got connected to Virginia Tech after working on a previous aquaculture project with his nephew at Virginia Commonwealth University. He searched through Virginia universities and emailed them all, eager for another collaborative experience. In 2022, he partnered with the Interdisciplinary Projects course in engineering education, which served as the foundation for this most recent student project: autonomous aquaculture with electrical and computer engineering (ECE). 

Youngk worked with six ECE seniors – Logan Mathews, Daniel Reeves, Jayson De La Vega, Zachary Chu, Nathan Skirvin, and David Watson – to develop an automatic winch system that can raise and lower the oyster cages. It's controlled via cellular or low-power, long-range communications.

“This project was larger in scope than any other I’ve worked on,” said Mathews ’25, who now works as a data center technician at TEK Systems. “It required a full-stack application and a diverse range of expertise. I really had to rely on my teammates to solve our challenges, and I learned that any meaningful project is one that requires multiple people to accomplish.”

Major Design Experience's real-world impact

ECE’s Major Design Experience is a two-semester capstone course for all electrical and computer engineering students at Virginia Tech. In teams, the students partner with industry or Virginia Tech faculty to assist in solving a variety of real-world challenges, creating an incubator environment for students to get workforce training. 

For the last 10 years, students have used the course to tackle cutting-edge research, like the ultrasound system for noninvasive treatment of tumors that Thomas Lu ’25 worked on with Associate Professor Eli Vlaisavljevich. Students have also engaged with industry partners, such as NASA, Micron, Lenovo, General Motors, and Wiley|Wilson, an architecture-engineering firm.

“Our projects are always multidimensional,” said Mark Atkinson ’83, the vice president and project manager of higher education for Wiley|Wilson. “We really want the students to think outside of their desks. We do more than just the technical work; we get them involved in finding their own answers, getting their own solutions.”

Atkinson joined the Major Design Experience about eight years ago and serves as a project sponsor, regularly meeting with students as they work on projects that center current and future electrical challenges: designing an electrical distribution system for an urban campus; analyzing and meeting future needs for electric vehicle chargers on the Virginia Tech campus; and most recently, creating a microgrid design for a smart village.

As the project sponsor for the autonomous aquaculture project, Youngk taught the student team everything he knows about the natural oyster reef off-shore from his childhood home, as well as aquaculture – the production of seafood and commercial goods, habitat restoration, and rebuilding populations of threatened and endangered species.

Tiny bivalves, big challenge

Oyster farming, Youngk explained to the ECE students, begins with a seed oyster no bigger than a grain of rice. The tiny babies are gently tossed into a grow bag that prevents them from floating away with the tide, and then the bags are placed into cages, where they’re lowered into the water until they reach the right depth. As the oysters grow, their cages are periodically raised out of the water to kill off barnacles and harden their shells. 

The farm is split between two piers; one holds 16 cages with up to 1,000 market-size oysters inside each. The other, Chapman’s private pier, has five cages but can hold up to 10. The cages are hard to access and heavy and awkward to lift. That’s where the remote winch comes in. Instead of manually raising the cages with ropes – and on one pier, trying to do that from a boat – the winch only needs to be turned on with a simple signal via a graphic interface, saving Youngk a significant amount of time and sweat.

The students built the rigging and the winch system in their Blacksburg backyards, using the engineer’s process of trial and error to reach their final product. Their biggest challenge was integrating the various subsystems. “Often they’d work in isolation but would begin misbehaving when placed in tandem,” said Mathews. “The most exciting thing was seeing it work. The wave of emotions that would wash over me upon successfully completing some of our bigger milestones – screams of joys, fist pumps, high fives, it all happened at one point or another.”

Youngk installed the students’ winch over the summer, and he is already working on version 2.0, collaborating with a new batch of ECE students from the Major Design Experience program. He’s looking for a computerized system that makes it easier for even non-tech savvy individuals, like his neighbor, to use the cellular or low-power, long-range communications to start the winch system.

Photos and video by Ben Murphy