Spring Mechanical Engineering Design Celebration

Mechanical Engineering Freshman Design (MEEG102: Intro to Design) is a core undergraduate course focused on introductory design and fabrication. The course sponsor is Melissa and Doug Toys, a US-based toy design firm and leader in the educational toy market. The showcase features final presentations for team design projects centered on new toy designs for Melissa and Doug. Also check out the Virtual Project Gallery below.

Clayton Hall Room 121, 122 & 124: 11:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Mechanical Engineering Junior Design is a core mechanical engineering course sequence that spans the fall (MEEG301) and spring terms (MEEG304). These courses include a year-long real-world manufacturing and automation challenge posed by two local industry sponsors, Norwalt Design and Omega Design. Teams of approximately 10 junior year students design, manufacture, and test the performance of a custom-designed autonomous bottle fill station. This spring semester showcase features end-of-project presentations and prototype demonstrations for this year-long project.

Clayton Hall Rooms 101A,101B, 120 & 101A (Finale): 12:00 – 5:00 p.m.

 

MEEG482/682: Clinical Biomechanics is an upper-division/graduate level course taken by students interested in biomechanics applications in orthopaedics and human movement sciences. Student teams will be presenting their course research projects, which involve design and execution of human motion analysis studies.

Clayton Hall, Room 119: 11:00 a.m. – 2:15 p.m.

MEEG467/667: Advanced Product Development
This upper-division mechanical engineering course focuses on the end-to-end process of designing, prototyping, and field-testing functional products. Students in the class employ a range of prototyping methods to develop more refined, functional products. Emphasis is placed on iterative prototyping, end-user testing, and market potential/scalability of products.

Clayton Hall, Room 125: 12:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Stanley Black & Decker
Project Title: Powered Coping Saw

When coping trim, you can either use a hand coping saw (see Fig.1, which is time consuming and requires expertise) or improvise with a jig saw or miter saw (which is not an intended use and can be dangerous). This project challenges students to create a powered coping saw to replace the typical hand coping saw and reduce the improper use of other tools (e.g. jig saws) when coping trim. The solution must be small, portable, battery powered, easily maneuverable, light weight, and accurate enough to cope trim with at least the same accuracy and useability as existing, unpowered coping products.

Under Armour
Project Title: Anti-Squeak Sneaks 

What’s the one sound at a basketball game you’re almost certain to hear? SQUEAK! Squeaking happens for a variety of footwear outside of basketball and has likely been around for as long as shoe’s have existed. What causes the squeak phenomenon? In order to build a shoe that is anti-squeak, we must first understand the science of squeaking and the special combination of materials, materials, surface topology, speed, force, etc. that lead to an audible sound. The goal of this project is to develop an apparatus that allows Under Armour to study and test the conditions that lead to shoe squeaks, while looking for solutions that stop squeaking in its tracks. Success for this project looks like a physical prototype that allows the user to test a variety of ground-contact materials and conditions (surface topology, velocity, etc.) to aid the development of anti-squeak footwear.

Under Armour
Project Title: Footwear Upper Containment Tester

Properly functioning footwear promotes an optimal interaction between the user’s foot and the product. It relies on the unity between the upper and bottom unit to make sure the user’s foot interacts with the product in a predictable and repeatable manner, enabling consistent performance. The upper creates unity with the bottom unit by restricting the motion of the user’s foot relative to the bottom unit (a.k.a. lockdown or containment). This ensures the foot does not move too much within the shoe during an activity and potentially lead to injury or diminished performance. Under Armour is currently exploring a more direct way to measure the containment provided by different footwear uppers to inform current upper designs and develop new solutions to continue pushing the boundaries of performance. The goal of this project is design and build a test and fixture/apparatus for cleated products that isolates and measures the degree of containment provided by an upper. Success for this project looks like a proof-of-concept test and physical prototype (fixture or apparatus) capable of testing finished good cleated products.

Team 115  – Biomaterials Testing Labs

Orthopaedics In Action (OIA) is a popular, orthopaedics-themed curriculum for middle and high school classrooms that was developed as a collaboration between The Perry Initiative, Sawbones®, and University of Delaware. This team focused on extending the OIA curriculum to college engineering classrooms through a unique set of biomaterials labs. These labs feature realistic tissue surrogates for bone, tendon, and intervertebral disc that display similar material behavior to actual tissues. The Perry Initiative and University of Delaware will partner with two commercial educational product manufacturers, Sawbones and Vernier, to release these unique labs starting in Fall 2025.

Team 114 – Virtual Orthopaedics In Action

Orthopaedics In Action (OIA) is a popular, orthopaedics-themed curriculum for middle and high school classrooms that was developed as a collaboration between The Perry Initiative, Sawbones®, and University of Delaware. OIA is currently used in nearly 2,000 middle and high schools nationwide, and this team is focused on creating a free, open-access suite of lessons for online instruction. These lessons will be released in Summer/Fall 2025.

Team 114 – Fracture Plate Bending Experiment

Orthopaedics In Action (OIA) is a popular, orthopaedics-themed curriculum for middle and high school classrooms that was developed as a collaboration between The Perry Initiative, Sawbones®, and University of Delaware. OIA is currently used in nearly 2,000 middle and high schools nationwide, and this project involves design and fabrication of a hands-on, multi-day experiment to complement a new semester-long bioengineering course for high school students called OIA: Design a Fracture Plate.

Team 1 – Fracture Plate FEA

The UD MechE Department has developed a unique, orthopaedics-themed design project for MEEG216: Solid Mechanics Lab that consists of designing and fabricating a custom femoral fracture plate. This project involves improving the instructional videos and materials related to the finite element analysis (FEA) portion of this project. These improvements have been pilot tested this semester in MEEG216 and will be rolled out for all students beginning in Spring 2026.

Team 2 – Generic IM Nail

The Perry Initiative is a nonprofit organization with a mission to broaden participation in engineering and orthopaedic surgery through hands-on exposure programs and curriculum. This project involves an improvement to the surgical simulation portion of The Perry Initiative’s Medical Student Outreach Program (MSOP), which reaches approximately 500 medical students across the country every year. The student for this project designed a generical femoral intramedullary nail that is easy to use and economical from a design-for-manufacture perspective. This new IM Nail design will allow The Perry Initiative to expand access to its MSOP programs starting in Fall 2025.

 

Senior year and graduate students in Mechatronics (MEEG476/667) show off their autonomous vehicle designs for their final course project during this one-hour design competition and demonstration.

Clayton Hall Lobby/Pit: 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Graduate students in this course compete in an additive manufacturing heat sink challenge. Over the course of this semester, students design high performance metal heatsinks that balance the need for low maximum temperatures and minimum material usage/cost.  Students must use a filament-based additive manufacturing process that makes use of green part debinding/sintering to produce all metal parts.

Clayton Hall Room 119: 3:00 – 5:00 p.m.