The Ventilated Sports Bag was one of the many projects on display at the College of Engineering’s Winter Senior Design Expo, a biannual event highlighting the college’s capstone program.
Hockey players and their families know the smell all too well. That unmistakable bag odor known for stinking up homes, cars and locker rooms.
There are Reddit threads galore on what to do about hockey gear stench, but a group of NDSU engineering students think they might have found a new answer.
“The fastest way to prevent that smell from developing is to kill the bacteria right away,” said Alexander Bratsch, a mechanical engineering major. “That bacteria is growing from sweat so we needed to figure out how to evaporate that sweat as fast as possible.”
The Ventilated Sports Bag was one of the many projects on display at the College of Engineering’s Winter Senior Design Expo, a biannual event highlighting the college’s capstone program.
Every major in the College of Engineering includes a capstone experience.
The course immerses student teams in hands-on design projects. Many are for industry clients, others are more entrepreneurial, giving teams the chance to work with start-ups, inventors or their own innovations.
After using fluid dynamics to figure out the velocity of air need to meet their evaporation goals, the Ventilated Sports Bag team, which also included mechanical engineering majors Michael Christensen, Jack Schlink and Joshua Stenman, settled on a four-fan system capable of removing 1.1 kilograms of water, or 40 ounces, in eight hours.
“We had a lot of different iterations looking into different types of fans and figuring out how many holes we really needed to get the right velocity,” Bratsch said.
Their system circulates air using 3D printed outlets designed to equally distribute air throughout the bag. But the team didn’t want to only rely on evaporation to kill bacteria, so they added UV lights on the inside of the bag and designed a custom clamp assembly on one of the fans to blow in essential oils.
“There are essential oils that will help kill bacteria or you can just add a new scent to your gear to replace that dirty sweaty smell,” said Bratsch.
The team hasn’t decided on taking the next step with their design, but they know their ideas can be applied to more than just hockey. Fighting odor on all types of sports equipment, hunting and fishing gear, or anything that gets wet or covered in sweat.
Senior Design Expo events are held twice per year and are always open to the public. The Spring Senior Design Expo featuring projects from all of College of Engineering programs will be held May 8, 2025.
Companies or individuals interested in partnering with the College of Engineering on a Senior Design project can learn more at its Industry Connections page.
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