Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

The Analysis Of Mechanical Exfoliation Of Graphene For Various Fabrication And Automation Techniques, Lance Yarbrough

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mechanical Exfoliation of Graphene is an often-overlooked portion of the fabrication of quantum devices, and to create more devices quickly, optimizing this process to generate better flakes is critical. In addition, it would be valuable to simulate test pulls quickly, to gain insight on flake quality of various materials and exfoliation conditions. Physical pulls of graphene at various temperatures, pull forces, and pull repetitions were analyzed and compared to the results of ANSYS simulations, solved for similar results. Using ANSYS’ ability to predict trends in exfoliations, flake thickness and coverage using stress and deflection analyses were investigated. Generally, both strongly …

Large Eddy Simulation Of Fluid Mixing In Migadome Facility For The Astfe Nuclear Thermal Hydraulics Cfd Competition, Kolten Strauss

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper is a documentation of a submission to the First Annual ASTFE Nuclear Thermal Hydraulics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Competition [1]. To validate simulations of turbulent mixing in buoyancy-driven flows, an air and argon test case was set up inside the University of Michigan’s MiGaDome mixing vessel. This submission to the competition used a polyhedral mesh of about two and a half hundred thousand cells, a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of the MiGaDome, and the Wall-Adapting Local Eddy-viscosity (WALE) subgrid approximation model. The competition included a factor considering the energy cost of our simulations, so it was decided to …

Flow Characterization With Acoustic Emission Sensing, Jackson Marsh

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Acoustic emissions (AE) allow for non-intrusive sensing into many types of systems. In systems where there is flow of some type, AE is very useful as these types of systems can be characterized in many ways from the collisions or creation of the flow. Correctly setting up the AE system is extremely important. Failure to do so results in imprecision and inaccurate data being collected. Because of this synchronization techniques, sensor configurations, and data acquisition systems must all align. This can be done with off-the-shelf, commercial systems, but this does not allow for customization and the ability to tailor the …

Model-Based Comparison Of Biological Organism And Electro-Mechanical System Resiliency Strategies, Nicholas Ratycz

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Bio-inspired design has been used by many engineers to solve difficult problems or to make manufacturing processes more efficient. Biomimetics is the study of implementing the structure or function of biological substances, materials, mechanisms, and processes onto artificial ones that mimic the original. The goal of the BIASD tool is to provide bio-inspiration for engineers by studying the fault-adaptive strategies that biological systems use, rather than just their structure or function. In this thesis, the fault adaptive strategies of both a biological example and that of a real cubesat are compared using three types of model-based system diagrams to show …

Cam And Design For Manufacturing: Developing A Project-Based Learning Course, Stephen Pierson

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

To effectively serve student career success, mechanical engineering programs must teach students how to account for manufacturing considerations in design. Despite this, manufacturing education is a glaring area of need in current engineering curricula. In fact, basic manufacturing knowledge is one of the only hard skills consistently ranked as one of the greatest weaknesses of mechanical engineering hires in surveys of industrial employers over the last few decades. Without radically changing departmental curriculum to include more emphasis on design-build projects, one solution to combat this is to incubate a lab course in mechanical engineering programs in which undergraduates would practice …

Experimental And Numerical Investigation Of Air-Cooled Heat Sinks, Ethan Weems

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Lightweight and affordable cooling capabilities are critical as the physical scale of electronics continues to decrease. Air-cooled heat sinks that dissipate heat from electronic components to the surrounding air are excellent candidates to fill this role. While plate-fin and pin-fin heat sinks have been implemented extensively for electronic cooling, recent advances in additive manufacturing enable the fabrication of more complex structures. In this undergraduate Honors thesis, a means by which to generate novel heat sink geometries is presented. To that end, an experimental characterization facility is developed to evaluate existing traditional heat sinks. The heat transfer performance of the heat …

Comparative Analysis Of Command Protocols For Cubesat Data Handling Systems, Roman Dowling

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Researchers at the University of Arkansas developed ARKSAT-1, a cubic satellite with the purpose of employing an LED with a tracking system to perform spectroscopic measurements of the atmosphere.

The control board of the satellite contained several microcontrollers which worked in concert to collect and manage data. Discussed in this report are the software programs developed for the microcontrollers, dual Arduino MKRZeros, utilized as data repositories and for control of satellite peripherals. The programs discussed in this project include an original existing command-response protocol and an improved batch-command protocol, each with its accompanying data handling and storage system. These programs …