Spring Mechanical Engineering Design Celebration

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.

Multipurpose Room A, B & C – 1-5 p.m.

Mechanical Engineering Freshmen Design (MEEG102: Computer Aided Design) is a core undergraduate course focused on introductory design and fabrication. The course sponsor is Melissa and Doug(r) 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(r). Also check out the project gallery for “advertisements” for these toy designs as well as a separate gallery for each student’s individual mini-project, a wooden pull toy.

Rooms 209/211, 213, 217 – 1-5 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.

Room 218 – 11:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Multipurpose Rooms B & C – 4:40 – 5 p.m.

Stanley Black & Decker
MEEG466: Design & development of a manually adjustable transmission

The Fastening Team at Stanley Black & Decker, Hand Tools, Accessories, & Storage (HTAS) division develops accessories that attach to a ¼” hex impact driver as part of an attachment product line called Impact Connect. These attachments offer end users an alternative to both hand tools and power tools and are powered by the impact driver. In the early stages of design, engineers need to identify the ideal input speed for a particular attachment based on the targeted application. An adjustable transmission will help to experiment with different input speeds so the optimal range of speed and torque is delivered to each unique attachment.

An early stage prototype of this required manually adjustable transmission has been developed. The system functions using a continuously variable transmission (CVT) and has successfully demonstrated the proof of concept. This independent study will focus on further development of the existing CVT system into a fully functional transmission system that can be directly used by Stanley Black & Decker.

Team members:
Marcus Ceglinski
Eman Rios
Gianni Saracino
Suneil Harzenski

NASA
MEEG466: Flexible Tire Footprint Contact Measurement

The mTRAX Planetary Labs group at NASA Glenn Research Center is working on the development of flexible, non-pneumatic off-world tires as well as working with contractors who plan to deliver vehicles that include novel flexible tire designs. A critical characteristic in design and performance evaluation of a flexible tire is its contact footprint on the terrain surface. The pressure distribution and physical shape of the footprint affect tractive performance of the tire and are therefore critical to measure in a tire prototype. A system capable of measuring the physical shape and pressure distribution of a flexible tire contact on variable terrain, like planetary regolith or sand, would provide a great deal of insight into how a given tire performs as compared to performance estimated during design stages.

The objective of this project is to deliver a first prototype of a measurement system that is capable of measuring the various performance parameters while a notional tire is under load on sandy terrain in a laboratory, single-wheel test assembly (like TREC or similar).

Team members:
Hannah Epstein
Matt LeCates
Kenny Madden
Matthew Ongtawco
Xavier Stephenson

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.

Room 218 – 3:00 – 5:00 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.

Room 219 – 2:00 – 5:00 p.m.