Parked on a siding at Entroncamento Station, Helianto does not wait for passengers or freight to start moving. Instead, this miniature train awaits the green light from students at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, who are monitoring its performance as part of their CAPSTONE project. Two teams, each consisting of four students, brought Helianto to the Portugal Railway Summit, organised by the Portuguese Railway Platform, held on May 20 and 21 in Entroncamento. The aim was to showcase their work to industry leaders, government representatives, and experts.
This is further proof of the “hands-on” approach embodied by CAPSTONE projects. Proposed by companies, institutions, or students’ organisations and supervised by teams of professors and researchers from Técnico, these projects seek to solve real-world challenges, allowing master’s students to consolidate their learning by integrating and applying the concepts they have acquired throughout their academic journey.
“CAPSTONE projects offer students the opportunity to address real-world challenges”, explains Miguel Cacho Teixeira, President of Técnico’s Pedagogical Council. According to him, these projects provide a chance to develop “essential soft skills like communication and teamwork within a complex multidisciplinary environment, closely resembling what they will encounter in the job market”.
In fact, the activities in Entroncamento, conducted as part of the CAPSTONE programme, served as the first large-scale tests of various systems in the Helianto prototype: the solar panel system, the in-wheel motors, the regenerative braking, and the structural integrity of the vehicle were all put to the test.
“The CAPSTONE programme allowed us to study, design, and build each subsystem of the prototype in a way that reflects a real-life design environment”, said Aliya Ibrahimo, a Técnico student and leader of ISTrain, the first Portuguese students’ organisation dedicated to competing in international railway challenges. Founded in 2024, ISTrain designs, builds, and tests scale-down electric locomotives, with its first prototype, the LOCO1-Andorinha, competing this month in the United Kingdom.
In addition to this project, Técnico master’s students can apply, until 22 June, to six other projects under this “new model for master’s dissertations, in the shape of multidisciplinary, integrative curricular projects designed to address real-world challenges”, as described on the Capstone Programme website.
Along with Helianto, the list of projects also includes a proof-of-concept inverter for a competitive electric motorcycle, developed by the TLMoto students’ organisation; the use of nanobubbles for disinfection and pollutant degradation processes, in partnership with Bubtex; the development of new vehicle classification methods, in collaboration with Brisa, and three other projects proposed by Fidelidade—the creation of an integrated model for the classification and identification of climate vulnerability, the analysis of the impacts of climate change on air quality and health, and the assessment of the potential impact of climate change on water resource management.
