Engineering Commons^™

Heat: Hydraulic And Electric Animation Team, Tyler J. Couvrette, Michael J. Cain, Sara T. Novell, Dexter K. Yanagisawa

Mechanical Engineering

Each New Years’ Day, the Cal Poly Rose Float presents a flower-covered float to the world at the Tournament of Roses parade. This floral display, paired with moving mechanical animations, shows off Cal Poly to the world. This project strove to keep Cal Poly on the cutting edge of technology both in parade floats, and in engineering, by creating a completely electric-powered animation system.

To accomplish this, a group of students set out to make the fully electric animation system that can power both the hydraulic and electric mechanisms on the Float. This was accomplished through months of planning and …

Fluid Power Vehicle Competition, Madison Graham, Wayne Ritchie, Emily Dicks, Ariana Cupello

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Our senior design project for the Honors College and the Department of Mechanical Engineering was to design a fluid powered vehicle. Our design was tested in an official capacity against other universities’ vehicles at the Fluid Powered Vehicle Challenge hosted and funded by the National Fluid Power Association (NFPA) and its industry partners. This competition had six different evaluations for our vehicle design; three race events, midway presentation, final presentation, and safety inspection. The three different race events were the sprint race, the efficiency race, and the endurance race. The sprint race was a 475 feet speed test, the efficiency …