Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Eagle Medical Tray Denesting & Debris Removal Process, Nicholas Allen Ungefug, Noah Chavez, Susana Shu-Lin Okhuysen, Michael Augustine Pennington

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Eagle Medical Incorporated is a contract medical device packaging and sterilization company. The company purchases thermoformed medical packaging trays, which maintain the sterility of medical devices, from various manufacturers. To ensure packaging quality and to prevent cleanroom contamination, Eagle Medical inspects and sterilizes each blister tray that they order. This process is an essential non-value-added activity that creates a bottleneck. Cleanroom employees must stop packaging medical devices and attend to the processing of blister trays and packaging solutions. The blister trays arrive at Eagle’s facility in nested stacks. Vibration and movement during shipping further compresses the stacks, which makes separation …

Chemical Clean Automated Loader, Jordyn Bryner

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

TTM Technologies (TTM) is a global printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturer. The work described in this report was completed in the TTM North Jackson, Ohio location. This plant focuses primarily on the manufacturing of rigid and rigid-flex PCBs for the aerospace and defense industry. TTM North Jackson has an ongoing labor dependency issue due to the shortage of workers the nation is facing. To solve this problem, TTM has focused the efforts of their new engineers and interns on automating processes that are labor dependent. The goal is to provide design guidance to be used later by TTM to automate …

Development Of A Low-Cost, Photovoltaic-Powered, Automated Water Recovery System, David E. Daley

Master's Theses

An existing water filtration system at the Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute (CIMWI) wastes approximately 25 gallons of water per day rinsing out solid waste under light load. To reduce CIMWI’s water and energy consumption, an automated system was designed and built to recover the rinse water and return it to the existing filtration loop. Models for fluid system requirements, basic energy needs, and photo- voltaic energy generation were created to aid in component selection. Basic sensors and electronics were programmed in Python for use with a Raspberry Pi single board computer to collect and process water recovery data …

Cnc Feed Drive Control, Ryan J. Funchess, Caleb P. O'Gorman, Nick J. Desimone, Juan M. Majano, Samuel K. Wong

Mechanical Engineering

This document serves as the Final Design Report (FDR) for a senior project developed by our team: four senior Mechanical Engineering students and one computer engineering student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). While the project was completed for, and sponsored by, Professor Simon Xing of Cal Poly, the remainder of the university’s controls professors will be indirectly benefited from this project. Our goal was to design and implement a functional CNC Feed Drive to be used for educational demonstrations and data collection. This document discusses our early product research and benchmark goals, which established constraints …

Automated Bottling Station - Packaging System, Lauren Nicole Zinzilieta

Honors College Theses

This report focuses on the packaging system used at the end of the FESTO bottling station that is located in EP 2355. The system will be made up of an x-y 300 mm x 300 mm gantry system, an Arduino, two micro-stepping stepper drivers, and two 152.4 mm (6 in) single acting cylinders with a 3D printed bracket attached to both. The gantry system will be located at the end of the conveyor belt and will be programmed to pick up three bottles at a time and then will move a specified number of steps in both the x and …

Smart Home Pet Feeder, Andrew Markja, Simona Zdravev, Timothy Zubek, Christian Jackson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The goal of this project was to design a Smart Home Pet Feeder that will allow the owner to feed their pet using 4 different methods. The methods are: manually, scheduled, app/url, Alexa/Google. The advantages of this design are that it will become convenient for pet owners who are busy and unable to make it back to their house to feed their pets remotely or for those who enjoy the use of technology from within their home for no-trouble feeding.

Implementation Of An Autonomous Guided Vehicle (Agv), Allen St. Myers, Alan Miller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report thoroughly represents a proposal to AAM Metal Forming Minerva for the implementation of an AGV (Autonomous Guided Vehicle) Unit. Our recommendations are made with consideration to existing manufacturing processes and demonstrate how using an AGV would be a net positive investment for the company. By first examining the current operating costs, a three-tiered proposal is tailored based on increasing investment cost. Each tier increase encompasses the previous tiers’ proposed improvements while also growing in complexity and investment cost. The results of our research indicate that our Tier 2 proposal will provide the most benefit to our facility now …

Rinse Tank Salinity Automation, George Pahoundis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Manufacturing processes are often consisted of many different processes and sub-processes. Each of these carries its own level of importance and impact to the overall picture. In this particular sub-process, salt is rinsed from a product via a rinse tank: a tank whose salinity may not exceed a certain level and whose temperature must not fall below a certain level. This setting is a prime opportunity to implement an automated control system to allow these parameters to be met with upmost efficiency. With potential savings in excess of $20,000 per year and an estimated payback period of 8 weeks, the …

Automated Runout Measurement Tool, Ethan Tisch

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

A new measurement process and tool is to be developed to improve the existing method for measuring runout on the commutators of brushed DC product.

After an armature is manufactured, the commutator is inspected by placing the completed rotor assembly in one of several non-standard measurement fixtures. An indicator is then positioned on the commutator. A trained operator proceeds to rotate the armature while taking runout and bar-to-bar measurement at various positions along the length of the commutator.

This existing process is slow, costly, and unreliable. For these reasons, there is substantial economic pressure to develop a superior method for …

Furnace System Improvements, Kenji K. Anzai, Ethan Fedor, Patrick Zailaa

Mechanical Engineering

This Final Design Review (FDR) documents the work done by the group to manufacture the system to deliver improvements to the furnace in the Cal Poly microfabrication laboratory (better known as the cleanroom). The document describes the material covered in the Scope of Work (SOW), including background research, customer needfinding, and the problem statement, material associated with concept development and selection for Preliminary Design Review (PDR), material detailing the design and manufacturing plan of the system for Critical Design Review (CDR), and new material detailing the manufacture of the system for FDR.

Research done for the SOW resulted in a …

3-Dimensional Automated Heat Flux Calibration Device, Victor Raul Chacon, David Madison Morrisset, Alex Michael Schnorr, Kevin Scott

Mechanical Engineering

This document aims to describe the problems in current radiant heat source heat flux calibration techniques and the approach our team took to solve them through automation. The following sections outline the basic premise of the problem we addressed and who our end product benefited. The proceeding sections addresses the research that we have performed regarding heat flux measurements and automation. This research includes current solutions – mostly partial solutions for problems that are similar but not exactly like ours. Following the background research, we define objectives, with specific details that outline how we evaluated different possible solutions, and how …

X-Beam Alignment System, Whittaker Ian Hamill, Joseph Michael Falcao, Robert Kim-Yan Tam

Mechanical Engineering

The goal of the project was to design, build, and test an automated machine for Micro-Vu that will align a pair of rails to the necessary precision and affix said rails to Micro-Vu's X-Beam as to reduce manual labor and human error.

Forest Sign Maker, Victor Espinosa Iii, Kevin Ly, Lisa Yip

Mechanical Engineering

Executive Summary:

The Inyo National Forest is arguably one of the most beautiful locations in California, containing natural masterpieces such as Mount Whitney and the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. Despite its magnificence, the Inyo National Forest can be a treacherous region. The Friends of the Inyo take pride in being able to facilitate the viewing experience for all outdoorsmen by maintaining the mountain trails, which includes providing adequate trail signage.

Unfortunately, there is a fundamental issue with the recent state of trail signage in the Inyo National Forest: the rate at which signs are being vandalized or naturally destroyed is …

Semi-Automated Glass Mat Splice Operation For Asphalt Shingle Line, Justin Bracci, Harry Zhao, Chad Linafelter

Mechanical Engineering

The following report details the senior project sponsored by GAF Materials Corporation, Shafter, CA in regards to semi-automating a glass-mat splicing table for asphalt roofing shingle production. Herein includes details, research, design, and analysis regarding the semi-automation of the gluing processes for the splicing table. A working prototype was manufactured and tested for the future implementation onto GAF’s production line or further senior project involvement.

Automated Foosball Table, Jim R. Stefani, Alex J. Herpy, Brett Gordon Jaeger, Kevin S. Haydon, Derek Alan Hamel

Mechanical Engineering

This project is the second iteration of an automated foosball table for Yaskawa America as a trade show display. The table is meant to provide an interactive experience which highlights the speed and precision of the Yaskawa hardware. The first iteration of the project was mainly focused on creating the physical hardware for the system and to begin the basic programming for the system. This phase of the project was focused on finalizing the physical hardware of the system, implementing the vision system and to continue the basic programing of the system AI. A third team will be assigned to …

Automated Foosball Table Year 1: Final Project Report, Juan David Gutierrez-Franco, John Inlow, Jesse Graham, Larry Huang

Mechanical Engineering

This project is a first iteration of an automated foosball table designed and created using servomotors provided by Yaskawa to create an interactive tradeshow display where guests can play against the algorithms developed in the PLC (programmable logic controller) controlling the servomotors. There will be a second iteration of the project done by a different team directly following this one. The motion components were selected with the intent to be able to surpass the reaction times and speeds of expert human players. There are a total of eight servomotors, four controlling linear actuators for translation of rods, and four controlling …