Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Mems 411: Frame Redesign For A Dac Machine, Alyssa Bolander, Aaron Lombardi, Harry Hixson

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This report focuses on the redesign of a 3’’ T-slot aluminum DAC frame. This design process focuses on minimizing cost and fasteners as the new frame will be made out of welded square steel tubing.

Mems 411: Torsion Tester Design Report, Ethan Bandick, Sean Wong, Jacob Sandler, Matthew Lorberg

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The goal of this project is to provide the customer, Dr. James Jackson Potter, with a lightweight, inexpensive, and accurate alternative to modern, professional torsion-testing machines. The torsion tester developed by this team will be used in a classroom setting for design competitions on 3-D printed ABS plastic torsion bars; therefore the design also accommodate a range of functions which might be useful to the customer during testing competitions, potentially including automatic stopping at failure, a reset function, and the ability to create custom functions which can integrate into the existing function library.

Mems 411: Racecar Cruise Control, Jonah Spencer, Jacob Wheelock, Amay Kejriwal

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The WashU Racing team is a student group at formula student which annually designs, builds, and tests a 1/3rd scale formula racecar. This project explores the use of an electronically actuated throttle to implement cruise control on the WashU Racing formula student racecar. Through the use of new and existing sensors on the car, in depth engine modeling, and vehicle dynamics, our team was able to make the car accelerate up to and maintain a certain speed

Mems 411: Remotely Operated Rock Collecting Vehicle, Perry Brody, Toby Utterback, Annie Mascot, Bianca Lang

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

We were tasked with designing a remote-controlled vehicle that is capable of collecting and holding “rocks”. The device had to be battery powered and operated by an RC transmitter/receiver. The physical constraints required the vehicle to fit within the designated 5.25’’ diameter and 8.5’’ long cylinder. The goal was to maximize the number of "rocks" collected in 5 minutes.

Mems 411: Group Q Rock-Collecting Rover, William Pohl, Kieran Conjar, Chris Mabley, Major Kc

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Design a remote controlled Rock-Collecting Rover that can store 35 rocks while moving, can navigate a snake-track without hitting the lines in 5 minutes, and can successfully collect 80% of the rocks it approaches.

Mems 411: Graphene Flake Finder, Calvin Ball, Jonathon Hansen, Ivan Jaramillo

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Graphene is an allotrope of carbon, a monolayer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like structure. It is a zero-gap semiconductor, has a high opacity, has a large thermal conductivity, and has the largest intrinsic tensile strength known to humankind so far. It is not yet utilized in the industry as graphene is not efficient or cost-effective to mass produce. The production of graphene is done by flakes with tape at Dr. Erik Henrikson’s lab. We will make a motorized microscope stage that helps automate the location identification of graphene flakes that have been mechanically exfoliated onto silicon wafer chips. …

Mems 411: Rock Collection Rover, Group, Kyler Schaetzle, Grant Ryals, Griffin Ancipink, Jackson Powell

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The following report has been prepared for MEMS 411 Mechanical Engineering Design Project and contains information pertaining to the selected project, the Rocker Collecting Rover Contest project. The project required the team to construct a battery-powered, remote-controlled rover that is operated with a first-person camera and can collect “rocks” and hold them off the ground without damaging them. The rover will compete in a competition against all other groups to see which group can collect the most rocks in a five-minute period.

Mems 411: T-Shirt Strip Dispenser, Christian Alexander, Joseph Goehring, David / Qifeng Tian, Justin / Jingze Zhou

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

To create a fabric dispenser for Professor Mary Ruppert-Stroescu of the Sam Fox Fashion Design School.

Mems 411: Dog Mobility Aid, Grace Vinson, Amber Griffith, Thomas Liu

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Henry, an 8-year-old dog, suffers from an angular limb deformity. We created a mobility aid for Henry to improve his quality of life. This device functions similarly to a crutch attached to the affected arm to eliminate compressive forces on his metacarpals.

Mems 411 - Prosthetic Arm Group W, Spencer Gladstone, Lila Dickstein, Nate Bloedorn, Matthew Riak

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The customer, Ilana, sought to find a prosthetic arm to replace her current static
prosthetic. She has gotten used to using a prosthetic with no variable grips and
a somewhat heavy weight that can be a burden when dealing with her child or
day to day tasks. The design described in this report is an electronically powered
prosthetic that used a button to change between open and closed grips.

Mems411: We Rock N’ Roverin', Amy L. Xue, Ash Caine, Emily Ma

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The goal of this project is to create a remotely-controlled rover that can reliably collect dice. The customer, Chiamaka Asinugo, requires a device that meets the needs of a potential challenge that the WURocketry Team might face in future “NASA Student Launch” competitions. These needs include the rover being able to fit into a theoretical payload cylinder that is 5.36" in diameter and 8.5" long and the rover weighing less than 3.5 lbs.

Mems 411: Rock-Collecting Rover, Nathan Fetchel, Derek Bivins, Emerson Hatina

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This project was a MEMS 411 Senior Design project completed for a potential future WashU Rocketry Team rover contest. The rover was required to be battery operated, controlled by an RC transmitter/receiver, and utilize micro-servo motors for actuation. The rover was required to be navigated via 1st person camera. The rover needed to weigh less than 3.5 lbs, and able to fit into a 5.36" diameter and 8.5" long cylinder. The "rocks" needed to be stored inside the rover and to be collected without using adhesive.

Mems 411: Asme Student Design Vehicle, Raymond Sullivan, Matthew Spichiger, Daniel Melka

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Design a robot to compete in the 2022 ASME Design Competition

Mems 411: Cnc Fabric Dispenser, Hayato Takai, Lizbet Suarez Mendoza, Jp Bermudez, Jeffrey Dai

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This project aims to help Mary Ruppert-Stroescu with her zero-waste fashion project. The goal of this tool is to help Mary efficiently lay down fabric across a sheet of sticky paper to make a yard of reused fabric. The goal of our team was to create a machine that can work alongside Mary, rather than having her spend all her time at the machine. We wanted to make a machine that can work independently of Mary, so that she can focus her time on other things.

100s of lbs of fabric waste is part of American today. Mary's mission is …

Mems 411: Softball Pitching Machine, Sebastian Laboy, Molly Mcnamara, Thomas Burke

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This report includes our complete final project for MEMS 411 in the Fall 2022 semester. For this project, we chose to fill the need for a pitching machine solely focused on the needs of softball players. For this project, our customer is a collegiate softball player named McKenna Jablonske.

Mems 411: Best Prosthetic Arm, Zhun Cheng, Finn Witt, Alexander Abdulla, Zhuoqun Wang

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Prosthetic is generally used to aid people with disabilities and perform tasks otherwise hard for them. As our senior design project, we designed and built a prototype prosthetic partial forearm for a customer to be used in her daily life and work. The important needs of the customer towards the prosthetic were identified, which were: being lightweight, simply actuatable, aesthetically discrete, easily detachable, resilient, easy to clean, safe for children, and easy to carry.

Mems 411: Fire Temperature Gradient Sensor, Anna-Sophia Eberhardt, Dexter Allen, Christopher Allen, Mikayla Jenkins

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Fire Temperature Gradient Sensor to understand the interaction between prescribed forest floor burns and tick-borne disease ecology.

Aircraft Engine Particulate Matter Emissions From Sustainable Aviation Fuels: Results From Ground-Based Measurements During The Nasa/Dlr Campaign Eclif2/Nd-Max, Tobias Schripp, Bruce E. Anderson, Uwe Bauder, Bastian Rauch, Joel C. Corbin, Greg J. Smallwood, Prem Lobo, Ewan C. Crosbie, Michael A. Shook, Richard C. Miake-Lye, Zhenhong Yu, Andrew Freedman, Philip D. Whitefield, Claire E. Robinson

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

The use of alternative jet fuels by commercial aviation has increased substantially in recent years. Beside the reduction of carbon dioxide emission, the use of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) may have a positive impact on the reduction of particulate emissions. This study summarizes the results from a ground-based measurement activity conducted in January 2018 as part of the ECLIF2/ND-MAX campaign in Ramstein, Germany. Two fossil reference kerosenes and three different blends with the renewable fuel component HEFA-SPK (Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids Synthetic Paraffinic Kerosene) were burned in an A320 with V2527-A5 engines to investigate the effect of fuel naphthalene/aromatic …

Effect Of Passive Clean Air Injection Into The Wake Region Of A Moving Ground Vehicle, Angelos Kaminis

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The wake region on a moving ground vehicle is responsible for 70% of the aerodynamic drag when the speed of 90km/h is achieved. The topic of wake region manipulation has been revisited multiple times and with varying techniques. When manipulating the flow utilizing a fully passive method, pressure drag can be reduced, increasing the overall performance of the vehicle. To ensure high velocity fluid injection, a venturi shaped roof was implemented with an inlet size of 352mm x 12.7mm, and 2 outlets of size 88.011mm x 25.4mm resulting in an area of 4,470.959 for both inlet and outlet to maintain …

Design And Fabrication Of A Low-Cost And Programmable Dip Coating Machine, Christy Dunlap, Skylar Featherstone, Matthew Smith, Man Vu, Amanda Williams, Jason Bailey, Han Hu

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Dip coaters provide a compact device that can be used to obtain uniform and consistent coatings on a substrate. This article describes a less costly dip coater design with similar specifications to other dip coaters. The machine consists of a NEMA 23 stepper motor, touch screen display, and acrylic housing to protect the substrate from dust. The machine is programmed using Arduino IDE, allowing for easy changes to be made. The small size of the dip coater makes it ideal for use in labs. The majority of the components require no alterations after purchase, allowing for easy replacements and construction.

Increased Panel Height Enhances Cooling For Photovoltaic Solar Farms, Sarah E. Smith, Bianca Viggiano, Naseem Ali, Timothy J. Silverman, Martin Obligado, Marc Calaf, Raul Bayoan Cal

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems suffer substantial efficiency loss due to environmental and internal heating. However, increasing the canopy height of these systems promotes surface heat transfer and boosts production. This work represents the first wind tunnel experiments to explore this concept in terms of array flow behavior and relative convective heat transfer, comparing model solar arrays of varied height arrangements - a nominal height, extended height, and a staggered height configuration. Analyses of surface thermocouple data show average Nusselt number (𝑁𝑢) to increase with array elevation, where panel convection at double height improved up to 1.88 times that of the …

Metaversekg: Knowledge Graph For Engineering And Design Application In Industrial Metaverse, Utkarshani Jaimini, Tongtao Zhang, Georgia Olympia Brikis

Publications

While the term Metaverse was first coined by the author Neal Stephenson in 1992 in his science fiction novel “Snow Crash”, today the vision of an integrated virtual world is becoming a reality across different sectors. Applications in gaming and consumer products are gaining traction, industrial metaverse applications are, still in their early stages of development with one of the challenges being interoperability across various metaverse development platforms and existing software tools. In this work we propose the use of a knowledge graph based semantic data exchange layer, the Metaverse Knowledge Graph, to enable seamless transfer of information across platforms. …

Me-Em Enewsbrief, September 2022, Department Of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, Michigan Technological University

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering eNewsBrief

No abstract provided.

Predicting Defects In Laser Powder Bed Fusion Using In-Situ Thermal Imaging Data And Machine Learning, Sina Malakpour Estalaki, Cody S. Lough, Robert G. Landers, Edward C. Kinzel, Tengfei Luo

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Variation in the local thermal history during the Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) process in Additive Manufacturing (AM) can cause micropore defects, which add to the uncertainty of the mechanical properties (e.g., fatigue life, tensile strength) of the built materials. In-situ sensing has been proposed for monitoring the AM process to minimize defects, but successful minimization requires establishing a quantitative relationship between the sensing data and the porosity, which is particularly challenging with a large number of variables (e.g., laser speed, power, scan path, powder property). Physics-based modeling can simulate such an in-situ sensing-porosity relationship, but it is computationally costly. …

Design And Simulation Of Intelligent Control Algorithms For Bimanual Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery Training System, Ali Ebrahimi

Link Foundation Modeling, Simulation and Training Fellowship Reports

Vitreoretinal surgery is among the most delicate surgical tasks in which physiological hand tremor may severely diminish surgeon performance and put the eye at high risk of injury. Unerring targeting accuracy is required to perform precise operations on micro-scale tissues of the eye. The objective of this project is to develop robotic platforms and intelligent control algorithms to provide a safe bilateral steady-hand eye manipulation for surgeons, which can potentially lead to autonomous surgical procedures. This will in tum enhance patient safety and surgical outcome which can be very beneficial to both patients and surgeons.

2022 (Fall) Ensi Informer Magazine, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the fall of 2022.

Impacts Of Preferential Vaporization Of Multi-Component Liquid Fuels On Near-Limit Combustion Behaviors, Seungjae Lim

Theses and Dissertations

Combustion technologies used in energy conversion devices involve multi-phase and multi-component combustion behaviors associated with chemical kinetic characteristics coupled with spray dynamics. For reliable engine operation, the engine operation envelope is necessarily required to be determined by near-limit combustion behaviors such as flame flashback, lean blowout, ignition, and extinction, which are influenced by both fuel chemical and physical properties. Liquid fuels are composed of a wide range of molecular structures and weights, therefore exhibiting relatively large distillation temperature range. When fuel chemical properties change during fuel vaporization, preferential vaporization effects could play a considerable role in near-limit combustion behaviors. In …

Towards Modeling Of Induction Welding Of Thermoplastic Laminates With A Mixed Finite Element Boundary Element Approach, Florentius Johannes Van Zanten

Theses and Dissertations

There is an increased interest in induction welding of carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite laminates within the aerospace industry. Currently, optimal manufacturing process parameters (e.g., current, power, and frequency settings, coil movement speed, etc.) are determined through an experimental trial-and-error approach. To reduce the need for an experimental approach that can determine the manufacturing process parameters, which would be expensive in both time and money, accurate and computationally efficient numerical tools are desired. This research is focused on improving the existing numerical tool, WelDone, in regard to its speed and accuracy.

WelDone utilizes a hybrid element formulation that combines traditional …

Molten Salt Thermal Properties Database – Thermochemical Development And Thermodynamic Assessment Of Various Molten Salt Systems, Johnathon Chandler Ard

Theses and Dissertations

The Molten Salt Thermal Properties Database – Thermochemical (MSTDB-TC) is a validated open-source database for thermochemical modeling of molten salt reactor (MSR) relevant fluoride and chloride salt systems. The database has been created and populated by leveraging available models from literature as well as completing novel system assessments. The development and contents of the MSTDB-TC v1.2 initial release are detailed along with various system assessments performed in the course of the work. The database utilizes a major strength of the CALPHAD thermodynamic modeling method. This is the ability to estimate higher-order system behavior by combining modeled lower-order systems, …

Self-Sensing Smart Products In Smart Manufacturing Systems, Juergen Lenz, Eric Macdonald, Ramy Harik, Thorsten Wuest

Faculty Publications

We are surrounded by a growing number of products with embedded intelligence relying on sensors and internet access. These smart products, that already transform our lives, are also physical entities that need to be manufactured. Manufacturing today similarly relies on data and data-driven insights to improve quality, efficiency, and safety on the shopfloor. This paper discusses the vision to utilize the ability of smart products to sense and communicate already during their own manufacturing to enrich the smart manufacturing system’s data for better insights development and optimization. We furthermore, discuss the barriers and opportunities embedded in such a paradigm shift.