Design DRC Boots for Cooling Horse Legs

ME S-STEM Scholar, Mr. Dai Nguyen, with his group members Chris Haley and Rehman Qureshi, have worked on designing a DRC Boot for cooling horse legs.  This was part of their CAPSTONE design project.  They proposed to use a phase-change material at 28C as the coolant inside a designed galloping boot wrapped on a horse leg.  COMSOL simulation results demonstrated decreases of leg skin temperature from 35C without the boot to 31C with the boot, and the cooling penetrates more than 15 mm to the deep tissue region.   They later tested the designed boot on horses and they were glad to see temperature reductions in the horse leg during and after horse galloping.  Students in the group learned the design process, and numerical simulation of the temperature contours in the leg using a commercially available software based on the Pennes Bioheat Equation.  The research was directed by Drs. M. Zupan, J. Gurganus, and L. Zhu.