Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

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 …

Carbon Fiber Racing Wheel, Megan Sanok, Melissa Furdak, Sydney Schipani

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Industry today thrives off of competition; everybody wants their product to be the best. Across almost every field of manufacturing and design, there is a pattern of factors that companies strive for when producing their specialized products. The most effective companies can create a commodity that is relatively inexpensive, easy to manufacture, and has the ability to meet high standards. As engineers, it is ingrained in us that there is always room for improvement, and that we have been given the tools to make it happen.

When evaluating what needed to be improved in our daily lives, the SAE Zips …

Baja Rack And Pinion, Devin Jackson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Our senior design team chose to team up with The University of Akron’s SAE Zips Baja Team. The Zips Baja Team races off-road vehicles that they build every year. The team is trying to optimize and improve several sub categories for the 2019 car such as steering, drivetrain and suspension. Our design team met with a couple of the captains on the Zips Baja Team and were given a few choices of what sub category we could focus on for our project. We decided to take on the task of improving the vehicle steering rack and pinion gear system. The …

Pick-And-Place Robot For The 2019 Asme Student Design Competition, Riniah A. Foor, Megan Schmit, Aaron Urban, Jeanetta Davidsaver, Daniel Mugongo

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project was undertaken as an opportunity to participate in a holistic experience of designing, building, and competing as an engineering design team. In the ASME Student Design Competition, undergraduate students are able to experientially learn the process of design inception, manufacture, and product performance in addition to the development of critical project management skills. This is done through a creative design challenge to build a device capable of accomplishing a “pick-and-place” task in a fast and efficient manner.

Laser Ablation Of Aluminum, Erika Nosal, Zachary Rahe, Arthur Pamboukis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The laser ablation of metal carries relevance in a variety of engineering industries. This includes, but is not limited to, processes such as micromachining, or implementation on aircraft weaponry. The latter application is the reasoning for why aluminum is the specific metal in consideration, as it is commonly used for the construction of aircraft components.

The scope of this project was to optimize the energy dispersed through laser ablation on aluminum by mathematical modeling. The transient conduction process in the aluminum was modeled using a 2-dimensional cylindrical coordinate system in both MATLAB and ANSYS/Fluent. These models were adopted to simulate …

Power/Thermal Interaction Within An Adaptive Turbine Engine, Andrew K. Desomma

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Usually power take off (PTO) with a two-spool turbofan engine has been accomplished via the high pressure (HP) shaft and bleed air from the high-pressure compressor (HPC). The PTO is used to run various aircraft components such as generators and hydraulic pumps, which also produce waste heat. To better understand the coupled transient nature of balancing engine thrust, power take off and thermal management, a transient variable cycle three stream turbofan engine model has been developed to investigate the integrated behavior. The model incorporates many dynamic features including a third-stream heat exchanger as a heat sink for thermal management and …

Molecular Dynamics Study Of Sintering Behavior Of Single-Crystal, Bimetallic Core/Shell Alloy, And Intermetallic Alloy Nanoparticles, Jungmin Jeon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There has been rapidly growing interest in the sintering process of nanoparticles (NPs) among academia and modern industry due to their promising applications in additive manufacturing (AM) based on the overall improved properties at nanoscale. In the past decade a lot of experimental and computational work has been conducted to study the sintering process of powder materials. However there is still a significant knowledge gap in a fundamental understanding of the thermodynamics and nanostructural evolution of NPs undergoing additive manufacturing. This thesis aims to gain fundamental insights into melting behavior of different materials including single-crystal bimetallic core/shell alloy and intermetallic …

Experimental And Numerical Investigation Of A Novel Adsorption Bed Design For Cooling Applications, Ramy H. Mohammed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A global challenge is to develop environmentally friendly, affordable, compact and sustainable technologies to provide heating and cooling power. Adsorption cooling (AC) technology is one of the most promising ways to solve the environmental issues and cut down the energy consumption related to the traditional air conditioning and refrigeration systems. However, AC systems still suffer from poor heat and mass transfer inside the adsorption bed, which is the main obstacle to commercialization of adsorption cooling units. The main goal of this study is designing an efficient adsorption cooling cycle. In this research work, an in-depth scaling analysis of heat and …

Design And Manufacturing Of A 3d Printer For Teaching And Research, Rafiqul Noorani, Michael Lynch, Patrick Hodgkiss, Matt Fumo, Christopher Burke

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Works

The goal of this paper is to design and fabricate a 3D printer that will be the most accurate and cost-effective printer possible, while still being faster than the Rapid Prototyping (RP) Lab's Stratasys FDM-1650 at Loyola Marymount University. This project is done to greatly increase the capability of the RP lab in addition to exposing students to the design and fabrication of a 3D printer. To complete the construction of the printer, the design is originally generated in Solidworks to ensure the components would work together effectively and to aid with design selection. The frame is then constructed using …

Sae Baja Custom Caliper And Upright Design, Katelynn R. Kise

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Zips Baja Off-Road Racing team had a successful 2018 season however some aspects of the car needed to be updated and improved for the 2019 season. This reports captures the design cycle performed to improve the cost, integration, and reliability of the front braking caliper and upright.

Hydro-Aeroponic Design, Megan J. Doll, Nathan J. Boring, Meredith B. Taylor, Chancelor L. Sunkle

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

“Aeroponics” is a plant cultivation technique where roots hang suspended in the air while the nutrient solution is delivered in the form of a fine mist. NASA has done experiments in space and found out that plants grow very well with aeroponic technology. However, “Hydroponics” is the most preferred method, where plants are grown in a non-soil medium, and mostly in nutrient liquid that flows through rectangular channels. There are advantages and disadvantages to each system. With the intention of combining the efficiency of aeroponics and the compactness of hydroponics, a hydro-aeroponic system was created to grow spinach and lettuce. …

Expendable 3d Printed Rescue Drone, Matthew Chapman, Nathan Knutty, Matthew Chapman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project team designed a 3D printed, expendable drone capable of flying for 80 minutes with a 5 lb payload in order to deliver rescue supplies to individuals in distress.

Carbon Fiber Monocoque, Dan Brown, Leland Hoffman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The University of Akron’s Human Powered Vehicle Team designed a high performing, fully functioning vehicle that is safe, efficient, and practical for the 2018-2019 season. These objectives were the main priorities when it came to the initial stages of designing the vehicle. In addition, the vehicle was designed in accordance with the ASME 2019 Human Powered Vehicle Challenge guidelines to satisfy all the rules and requirements. Additional priorities have been created to teach practical engineering skills and techniques to the students participating in the project through different points in the production process including research, vehicle design, construction, and testing.

The …

Metric Coil Car, Abigail Eberly

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Coil cars are a vital part of many steel mills. They allow mills to easily transfer a coil from one location to another without the use of a crane, manual labor, or other extraneous forces. Steel Equipment Specialists, or SES, gets multiple orders every year for coil cars. While the general functions and goals of the cars remains consistent, the details, such as the size of the car, the distance between rails, and the weight/ size of the coils differs between each place. Due to this variety, SES has requested a coil car that can easily be manipulated and produced …

Theoretical Study Of Fano Resonance In A Mechanical System, Alex Alberts

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Resonance conditions are a major area of study in theoretical and experimental investigation. Normally, a resonance condition is characterized by a symmetric shape on either side of the resonance. In some cases, we can observe an asymmetric resonance shape, which is called a Fano resonance. We will study the appearance of Fano resonance in a purely mechanical system. The frequency response of the primary system is approximated using the method of multiple scales focusing on the location of the resonance condition. Then, curve fitting is used to approximate the Fano parameter associated with the system, which provides a measurement of …

Generator Design: A Study Of Optimized Airflow, Rachel Wattleworth

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The core goal of this project was to prototype, test, and evaluate a new type of fan for the Safran Electrical & Power air-cooled generators. The idea of a new fan being made for these two generators arose when they were not adhering to design requirements. A base mixed-flow fan was created to test on multiple generators. Upon creating a prototype, it will be tested to prove if it can increase the air flow, decrease temperatures, and increase power and life of the machines. They all proved to be successful and achieve the main objectives for this project. Data such …

Power Wheelchair Canopy, Mohamed F. Battah, Joshua D. Brown, Dujuan J. Mcclendon, Gavin M. Francisco

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Some power wheelchair users can not drive and independently hold an umbrella at the time because they do not have much upper body strength. Therefore, users are unprotected from the rain and are getting soaking wet. One of the members of this group is in a wheelchair and faces this problem. He has previously searched for something to protect him from rain, but could not found something he could independently use. What users need is a powered umbrella that attaches to their power wheelchair. There is no such umbrella available in the market. In this project, the solution to this …

Fatigue Tester, Nicholas Fazio

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to combine all my experience, knowledge and skills that I’ve acquired over the years as a Mechanical Engineering Technology student to completely design and build a fatigue tester. This will give me valuable experience in the process of designing and assembling a product and give me a great example to add to my portfolio. The tester will be completed through a process of researching design and modeling. Once everything is properly calculated and designed the parts that can be fabricated will. The rest will be ordered and then everything will be assembled. Upon completion, …

Recumbent Bicycle Balancing Aid, James Hager

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For our senior design project, our team will be consulting to create a balancing aid system intended for the recumbent bicycle shown below in Figure 1. The owner of the bicycle is Robert Henderson, a former United States Navy sailor from Northeast Ohio who picked up biking and skiing while he was stationed in Maine in the late 80’s. While there, he took to the mountains on the rugged terrain and brought this passion of biking back home to share with his wife, Johanna once he completed his service to his country. Biking became an integral part of the …

Interlaminar Damage Detection In Composite Materials, Hariharan Rangarajan

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Using ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) for high-temperature applications in jet engines increases durability and reduces weight and cooling requirements resulting in improved efficiency and fuel savings. Understanding, detecting, and monitoring different types of damage is essential to achieve optimal performance of CMC components. The Direct Current Potential Drop (DCPD) method is a non-destructive technique of estimating damage in composite materials.

DCPD technique works by measuring nodal potential differences when current is flown through the material. Direct current spreading in different woven and laminate composites is modeled to follow a ladder resistor network in which the nodal voltages decrease exponentially as …

Testing Of A Human Powered Vehicle, Bailey Conard, Marlee Reynolds

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The University of Akron’s Human Powered Vehicle Team designed a high performing, fully functioning vehicle that is safe, efficient, and practical for the 2018-2019 season. These objectives were the main priorities when it came to the initial stages of designing the vehicle. In addition, the vehicle was designed in accordance with the ASME 2019 Human Powered Vehicle Challenge guidelines to satisfy all the rules and requirements. Additional priorities have been created to teach practical engineering skills and techniques to the students participating in the project through different points in the production process including research, vehicle design, manufacturing, and testing.

The …

Examination Of Ice Impactor And Mold, Matt Wilson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This research project investigates impact and damage response of composite sandwich structures impacted with solid ice at extreme low-temperature. Composite sandwich structures of carbon fiber reinforced polymer sheets lining a polyvinyl chloride foam core are subjected to low-velocity impact at arctic temperatures. This impact will be delivered by a solid ice tool-tip via a drop impact testing machine. Data and test results acquired will be composed into a research report that will be submitted to The University of Akron and published in a scientific journal. This project builds upon the earlier study by Elamin, Li, & Tan (2018).

Surf Zone Tilt Current Meter, Troy Heitmann

Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Fellowship Reports

Coastal tides and free surface gravity waves locally interact with the nearshore bathymetry generating spatially diverse circulation cells. Collectively, the cells form a current velocity flow field where net transport of geological, chemical, or biological, particulates takes place. Within the surf zone, dynamic instabilities lead to chaotic evolution and mixing, where single point, observations fail to quantitatively char­acterize the system as a whole. Governed by advanced theories, numerical models provide the necessary sampling resolution to study surf zone processes over large do­mains, but the model must be validated with field observations to draw meaningful conclusions. The acoustic Doppler current profiler …

Developing In Situ Dissolved Inorganic Carbon Dioxide Instrumentation, Beckett Colson

Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Fellowship Reports

The ocean carbon system plays a critical role in regulating carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. With increased anthropogenic carbon input, it is even more important to understand the system through measurements, models, and predictions. Unfortunately, the spatiotemporal resolution of ocean carbon system measurements is limited by a lack of in situ instrumentation. The support of the Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Fellowship has enabled me to make significant progress in developing an in situ carbon system instrument for the deep sea. The instrument will measure both total dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and the partial pressure of carbon dioxide …

Link Foundation Fellowship Report, Eric Nieves

Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Fellowship Reports

Magnetic anomaly detection (MAD) is a leading technique for the detection and localization of obscured magnetic targets via exploiting the field anomalies they create. This is especially true in marine environments when looking for unexploded ordnance (UXO), because the DC magnetic field is not highly influenced by numerous types of media (i.e. water) or weather conditions. MAD is also a passive technique, which allows it to go unnoticed by the target. Whereas current applications of MAD have been shown to be effective for localizing single targets at a time, the development of a method for multiple localization would the robustness …

Aerodynamics Of Fan Blade Blending, Clint J. Knape

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Blending is a method of fan and compressor blade repair. The goal of the blending process is to remove stress concentration points such as cracks and nicks along the leading, trailing, or tip edges of the blade. The stressed areas are typically removed by grinding or cropping away the surrounding material. For integrally bladed rotor (IBR) disks, repairing a damaged blade is much more economical than replacing the entire disk. However, the change in shape of the blade will change the local aerodynamics and result in mistuning, both structurally and aerodynamically. In a worst case scenario, the change in the …

Analytical And Experimental Investigation Of Time-Variant Acceleration Fields, Justin A. Williams

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Devices expected to operate in elevated or non-standard acceleration fields are often tested in similar conditions prior to deployment. Typically these tests only simulate steady-state acceleration fields in one direction. However, real acceleration fields often vary both directionally and temporally. Designing experiments to produce these conditions requires careful forethought and analysis in order to understand the emergent acceleration components that result from the methodology. An experiment was designed and executed on a horizontal centrifuge in which the radial acceleration varied sinusoidally between -10 < a_r < 10 g. Negative acceleration was achieved by rotating the test article relative to the radial acceleration vector using a servo motor. A model was developed that predicted the acceleration field at every point along the test article. The model provided important information such as the acceleration magnitude and direction anywhere on the test device at any point in time. This model was then used to optimize the velocity profile of the servo motor to minimize experimental artifacts.

Adaptive Identification Of Classification Decision Boundary Of Turbine Blade Mode Shape Under Geometric Uncertainty, Ian M. Boyd

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Integrally Bladed Rotors (IBR) of aircraft turbine engines suffer from fluctuations in the dynamic response that occurs due to blade to blade geometric deviations. The Stochastic Approach for Blade and Rotor Emulation (SABRE) framework has been used to enable a probabilistic study of mistuned blades in which a reduced order modeling technique is applied in conjunction with sets of surrogate models, called emulators, to make predictions of mistuned mode shapes. SABRE has proven useful for non-switching mode shapes. However, switching mode shapes have non-stationary or discontinuous response surfaces which reduce the accuracy of the surrogate models used in SABRE. To …

Using Cfd To Improve Off-Design Throughflow Analysis, Troy J. Lanchman

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In turbomachinery design, complex internal flows give rise to significant losses and blockage whose effects are difficult to properly analyze without detailed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods or experiments. In a typical design method, CFD is used in conjunction with simpler throughflow or cascade codes to hasten the process. However, the lesser physical accuracy of the design codes demands the inclusion of models to improve the accuracy of the throughflow codes. This thesis aims to use CFD data to generate improved loss and blockage models for a 2D compressor throughflow code by matching throughflow data to CFD data using optimizations. …

Development Of A Computer Program For Transient Heat Transfer Coefficient Studies, Sri Prithvi Samrat Samayamantula

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At the present time, the magnitude of transient convective heat transfer is approximated using heat transfer coefficient correlations developed for steady state conditions. This is done by necessity, as transient heat transfer correlations are not readily available. There is a rare transient heat transfer correlation found in the literature, but the number of correlations available can be counted on one hand. In addition, the literature does provide some plots of Nusselt numbers for specific cases of transient convective heat transfer, but these are limited to the specific case for which they were developed. The work presented in this thesis is …