Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Violin Bow-Hand Prosthetic, Ron Hayes Jr, Kc Cook, Romario Lobban, Muriel Drexler

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The violin bow-hand prosthetic aims to mimic the natural hold and motion of a violinist’s bow-hand. The prosthetic is for a violinist who is missing the majority of their hand, but still has full range of motion in the wrist. Focusing on maintaining a natural playing style greatly influenced the design of the device to be user safe, durable, comfortable, easy to use, inexpensive, and practical. Many of these features were achieved by using 3D printed plastic and foam composites. These materials were selected based on strength and deflection analyses of 3-D simulations performed in SolidWorks and the ease of …

T-Shirt Strip Dispenser, Maxwell Dimgba, Syeda Mohsin, Sabrina Nguyen

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

There is a massive amount of waste around the textile industry. New garments are constantly being made and old garments are consistently finding themselves in landfills. This project aims to cut down on this waste. Mary Susan RuppertStroescu of the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a process to turn old garments into new ones in a practice known as up-cycling. By cutting old garments into half-inch strips, laying and adhering them flat on a sheet of dissolvable paper, and sewing over them in interesting patterns she is able to create extraordinary new designs. This …

Violin Bow-Hand Prosthetic, Jonathan Smith, Jonathon Azziz, Shawn Pavey

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The violin bow hand prosthetic was designed for a young violin player seeking to upgrade the functionality of his current violin prosthetic device. His current device is rigid, forcing him to play mostly with his shoulder. Since the strength of his wrist was unknown, we designed a prosthetic with enough brace flexibility to enable the user to control the bow motion with his own wrist. We also added an axis of rotation and spring mechanism to supplement this motion and provide him the equivalence of fine finger adjustments. The full design process of the prosthetic is documented in this report, …

Group M: Arliss Canister Vehicle, Greyson Bourgeois, Eleanor Macklin, Romail Dawani, Rachel Sample

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This project is a dicycle designed for the ARLISS Canister Competition. In this competition, the device is loaded into a rocket which is then launched to about 12000 ft before releasing the device. Then it must safely land and autonomously navigate to a predetermined GPS location on the ground. Due to the fact that this is a mechanical engineering design project and the time restrictions of this class, we focused on the physical aspect of the project, such as building a device that can survive the launch and landing and traverse several kilometers through the desert, forgoing the autonomous navigation …

The Mechanical Development For An Autonomous Forest Service Robot, James P. Walker

Honors College Theses

Georgia’s forests are under threat from numerous invasive species of plant, both herbaceous and woody. A primary factor in the invasive potential of any given non-native plant is the lack of natural predators and rapid reseed and regrowth cycles. To combat invasive plants, this thesis proposes an artificial, robotic predator to provide a means of controlling invasive species. Although autonomous robots are currently being developed for similar agricultural purposes, none have emerged for forestry related tasks, such as proposed in this work. The chassis, inspired by rocker bogie and similar suspension systems, has been redesigned to have eight wheels, to …

Energy Performance Certification: Misassessment Due To Assuming Default Heat Losses, Ciara Ahern, Brian Norton

Articles

Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) are issued when dwellings are constructed, sold or leased in the EU. Where the cost of obtaining the required data is prohibitive, EPC assessors use nationally applicable default-values. To ensure that dwellings are not assigned a wrongly-higher EPC rating, a standardised thermal bridging transmittance coefficient (Y-value) is typically adopted for all existing dwellings while worst-case overall heat loss coefficients (U-values) are used. Default U-values are applied to a specific building element type (roof, wall, floor etc.) based on building codes and regulations applicable at time of construction. Due to significant building fabric upgrades, default U-values are …

Group N: Fluid Flow Testing Apparatus, Jonathan Fleming, Braden Kerr, Abel Soloman

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

A fluid flow testing apparatus was needed to accurately test valves relative to the conditions seen in the factory of a local St. Louis brewery. After concept generation, a rotating track that toggled the valve between open and closed was decided on by the team. Construction of an initial prototype was done over 3 weeks with a total budget of 400 USD. The initial prototype satisfied almost all of the performance goals: capable of cycling 200 times without intervention, 1 paper-towel of leakage at most, and upper reservoir level consistency within 10 percent. To improve the initial prototype, the team …

Lupd - Leisure Underwater Propulsion Device, James Abraham, Tanner Nordell, Holden Schmidt, Noah Trimark

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The main objective of this Design Project was to create a hands-free, wearable underwater propulsion device. The target consumer is leisure divers, so managing cost was important. Current products on the market do not allow divers to be hands-free while diving and are very expensive. The design process began with an interview with Josh An, a Masters Degree candidate at Washington University in St. Louis. Josh is an avid diver and wanted to see if it was possible to develop a cheap underwater jet pack for leisure diving. After multiple design concepts and mock up prototypes, our team decided on …

Sweet Spot Demonstration, Andrew Amend, Mitchell Smith, Ian Fish, Curtis Hoffman

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Our goal was to design and build an exhibit for the St. Louis Science Center to serve as a teaching tool to help explain the unintuitive concept of a baseball bat’s sweet spot to a typical children museum’s visitor, a 5th grade student, in an interesting and visually pleasing way. The sweet spot of the bat is colloquially known as the place that makes the best contact with the ball, and it is determined by a combination of the center of percussion and location of vibrational nodes. We focused on showing how the location of bat-ball impact affects the vibration …

Automated Whiteboard Eraser, Trent Houpt, Tyler Polasek, Kenny Huang, Rocky Luo

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Automated Whiteboard Eraser is a product designed to erase whiteboards with the touch of a button. With this product students and teachers will be able to save time and energy as they can continue to work without having to stop and erase. From our research others have attempted to construct similar products. We intend to improve these thoughts and designs in order to build a better and more efficient product.

Violin Prosthetic, Justin Kransdorf, Julia Rifkin, Hayden Reynolds, Payal Hukeri

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Sam, an 11-year-old violin player was born without fingers or a thumb on his right hand. In order to learn the basics of violin, he currently uses a custom made prosthetic that allows him to hold a violin bow. However, his current prosthetic does not allow for the bow angle to change relative to his wrist, and thus, he cannot perform many techniques that are important to him furthering his violin skills. Specifically, his prosthetic allows Sam to use only a small percentage of the bow. For this project, a prosthetic was designed for Sam with the goal being to …

3d Chocolate Printer Dropper, Jessica Jimenez, Jacqueline Pielli, Shuhan Zhang

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Mechanical Engineering Department at Washington University in St. Louis is working to stimulate interest in the fields of fluid dynamics and thermal sciences, as students are not typically exposed to these topics within the first two years of school. Dr. Okamoto, Jeff Krampf, and Dr. Weisensee of the Mechanical Engineering Department would like to remedy this situation by developing a laboratory experiment for first year students that utilizes a 3D chocolate printer to teach thermal-fluid concepts in a fun and engaging manner. The goal of this project is to build a chocolate droplet dispensing system, which is a part …

Ice Cream Dispensing Machine, Katie Bahnck, Rachel Lockwood, Marie White, Simone Raeth

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Each August, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) welcomes hundreds of new engineering students to its McKelvey School of Engineering. Historically, during orientation activities, WashU’s Engineering Student Services (ESS) serves dessert bars to the new students, where they must line up and make their own desserts manually. To make the dessert bar more interactive and give students a primer for what their engineering studies hold, we would like to introduce an ice cream sundae making machine to the spread. A semi-automated ice cream machine would allow students to customize their ice cream sundae while observing the everyday mechanics required to …

Asme 2020 Design Challenge, Anthony Acosta, Justine Alandy-Dy, Michael Lorberg, Nathan Vaska

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Our project was to build a machine that would fulfill the requirements for the ASME 2020 design challenge, which was called, ”Building to the Sky.” The rules of the challenge were to build a machine that would take ordinary 8.5” x 11” sheets of paper and stack them into a tower. To accomplish this task, we decided to make our paper tower out of accordion-shaped folds that would be placed on top of each other, alternating in 90 degree orientations. Our device is divided into various sub-components, each which manipulate the paper in various ways. We first have a mechanism …

Sweet Spot Demonstration, Keval Amin, Beau Allen, Kieran Lenssen, Ricardo Del Olmo Parrado

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The purpose of this project was to create a sweet spot exhibit for the St. Louis Science Center to demonstrate the basic dynamic and vibrational theory behind the game of baseball. This demonstration focuses on the dynamics of batting and the effects that induced bat vibrations have on the energy transfer from the bat to the ball. Through this demonstration, the vibrational nodes within a baseball bat can be measured based on the ball’s contact with the ”sweet spot,” or the area on the barrel of the bat that induces the least amount of bat vibration. The project went through …

Board Erasing Device, Mark Fernandez, Christopher Sheffels, Joshua Miller

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Board Erasing Device is a portable automatic device designed to streamline a university lecturer’s board writing process by automatically erasing whiteboards while they are writing notes on adjacent boards. Our goal during this project was to design, build, and test a portable, automatic, and aesthetically pleasing device compatible with most standard whiteboards on Washington University in St. Louis’ Danforth campus. To that end, with a budget of $400, we created a prototype device to accomplish just that. Our prototype includes a felt eraser, pressed into the whiteboard via magnets. The eraser piece spans all eight feet of width on …

Jet Beluga: Diver Propulsion Wearable, Jacob Graham, Bernardo Amaral Neves, Ethan Genter

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Scuba diving is a physically and mentally challenging task performed in both recreational and professional settings. Recreational divers seek to experience the marine world for extended periods of time without buoyant resistance. Rescue divers, military personnel, and underwater construction workers train to execute complicated tasks in a limited time period. Diver propulsion vehicles can improve the quality of recreational diving as well as the effectiveness of diving as performed in professional settings. The following report describes the design and motivations for a wearable diver propulsion device that provides the benefits of increased speed and mobility while limiting the amount of …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2019, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Diver Propulsion Wearable, Joseph Lucca Paletta, Andrew Kessler, Andrew Beukelman, Nico Topulos

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This project was proposed by Jin Hwan (Josh) An, a current undergraduate student in the Olin Business School at Washington University in St Louis. Given his interest in diving and his experience with current diver propulsion vehicles, Josh has challenged us to design a hands-free diver propulsion wearable (DPW). While Josh has left the project rather open-ended for the engineers, the main challenge is to create a design that can propel the diver using a hands-free control system. Having a hands-free controller will allow the user to engage in other tasks while gliding underwater. Ideally, this design would be useful …

The Investigation Of Noise, Vibrations And Emissions Of Aero-Gas Turbine Combustion With Synthetic Kerosene Fuels, Margaret Kilpatrick

Honors College Theses

Climatic changes from aviation emissions are complex and include effects of greenhouse gases such as: CO2, NOx, and aerosols. For that reason, the objectives of this study were to investigate the noise, vibrations and emissions characteristics of synthetic kerosene combustion in an aerospace gas turbine to reduce the engine’s environmental impact. Sustainably produced synthetic kerosene is known for having low soot emissions due to little to no aromatics (compounds that create particle pollutants), and for being a sustainable alternative fuel source to imported oil. The noise and sound levels were collected using Bruel & Kjaer microphones to measure various mid …

Passive Separation Of Binary Fluid Mixtures In Microchannels Using Lattice Boltzmann Method, Mohanad Kamil Radhi

Dissertations and Theses

Fluid mixtures in real life exist in two forms: miscible and immiscible. Separation of these mixtures using chemical agents or thermal energy has both environmental and economic disadvantages. The high cost and the environmental damage caused by the traditional separation techniques have stimulated both academia and industry to seek alternatives. The emergence of microfluidics offers robust solutions for a broad span of transport problems due to the high surface to volume ratio and reduced length scales. Particularly, the separation efficiency increases significantly due to the aforementioned feature. However, there is still a pressing need of passive separations for the sake …

Static Analysis Of Circular Plates Under Mechanical Loads, Harpreet Lalia

Publications and Research

In this research statics analysis of circular plates is performed using SolidWorks.

Circular plates with different material properties, thickness to radius ratios, and boundary conditions under mechanical loads are modeled and analyzed in SolidWorks.

The results are obtained for deflections of circular plates under uniform and point loads.

A three-dimensional (3D) model of circular plates is first created in SolidWorks. Then the material properties, mechanical loads and boundary conditions are defined for the plate.

It is found deflection of plates is depended on magnitude of mechanical loads, geometrical parameters, boundary conditions and material properties. Responses of SolidWorks for deflections of …

Lightweight Racing Suspension, Colin Haynes

Honors Theses

The purpose of this senior design project is to design and optimize the new suspension system for Western Michigan University’s 2020 solar car. The current solar car was 43% heavier than the average solar car, and was the heaviest single occupant vehicle competing in the American Solar Challenge. The scope of the project is to reduce the weight as much as possible from the old 2016 suspension. The new suspension weighed 34.91 lbs less than the 2016 suspension system while maintaining a minimum factor of safety greater than 1.5, compliant with American Solar Challenge regulations. The design consists of a …

A New Synthesized Microalloys Steel Ods Of High Amplitude Ultrasonically Irradiation, Marzuki Silalahi, Hanif Abdurrahman Wicaksana, Ferhat Aziz, Syahfandi Ahda, Mohamad Riza Iskandar

Makara Journal of Technology

Micropowders of oxide-dispersion-strengthened (ODS) steel have been synthesized using the ultrasonic irradiation method with variations in amplitude. The ultrasonic irradiation process is performed for 50 h at a frequency of 20 kHz with 40%, 50%, and 60% amplitudes in toluene solution. The formation of Fe-Cr microalloys in the preparation of Fe- 15Cr-0.5Y2O3 powder was analyzed using SEM-EDS, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and TEM-EDS. The percentage of Fe- Cr phase mass fraction of ODS steel micropowder formed during ultrasonic irradiation with 40%:50%:60% amplitude was 12.2%:34.1%:22.1%, with 25.67:77.02:38.51 nm crystallite size. The crystallite size at 50% amplitude was the largest, and the diffusion …

Comprehensive Inspection On The Experimental Ferritic Stainless Steel By Means Of Transmission Electron Microscopy And Neutron Diffraction Techniques, Parikin Parikin, Mohammad Dani, Riza Iskandar, Aziz Khan Jahja, Andon Insani, Joachim Mayer

Makara Journal of Technology

The field of physical metallurgy is one of the primary beacons that guide alloy developments for multipurpose materials such as the in-core structure materials for pressure vessel components and heat exchangers. The surface microstructure of new ferritic steel with significant local constituent materials was characterized by high resolution powder neutron diffractometer (HRPD) and transmission electron microscope (TEM), combined with the energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The alloy contains73% Fe, 24% Cr, 2% Si, 0.8% Mn, and 0.1% Ni, in %wt. The charge materials were melted by the casting techniques. The neutron diffractograms obtained shows five dominant diffraction peaks at (110), …

Study On Antibacterial Of Chitosan/Hydroxyapatite Doped Magnesium Composite As A Material For Bone Graft Applications, Andromeda Dwi Laksono, Teodoro A. Amatosa, Jr., Hilda Pebrianti Octaviana Sitorus, Wentika Putri Kusuma Asih, Sulistijono Sulistijono

Makara Journal of Technology

Hydroxyapatite (HAp) is one of the constituent minerals of bone and teeth, that has been widely used for synthesizing bone graft. Due to the limitation on properties of the hydroxyapatite, it is doping with Magnesium (HAp-Mg). The addition of Chitosan (Chi) was expected to improve the antibacterial properties of HAp-Mg. The present research aims to study the influence of Chitosan with 0, 5, 15, and 25 wt% addition on biocompatibility properties of Chi/HAp-Mg composite. HAp-Mg was synthesized using the sol-gel method; meanwhile, Chi/HAp-Mg composite was manufactured by mixing Chitosan in acetic acid, and HAp-Mg was added into the mixture. The …

Evaluation Of Primal-Dual Splitting Algorithm For Mri Reconstruction Using Spatio-Temporal Structure Tensor And L1-2 Norm, Mia Rizkinia, Masahiro Okuda

Makara Journal of Technology

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an essential medical imaging technique which is widely used for medical research and diagnosis. Dynamic MRI provides the observed object visualization through time and results in a spatiotemporal signal. The image sequences often contain redundant information in both spatial and temporal domains. To utilize this characteristic, we propose a spatio-temporal reconstruction approach based on compressive sensing theory. We apply spatio-temporal structure tensor using nuclear norm, in addition to the wavelet sparsity regularization. The spatio-temporal structure tensor is a matrix that consists of gradient components of the MRI data w.r.t the spatial and temporal domains. For …

Influence Of Nh4f In Dextran Based Biopolymer Electrolytes: Conductivity And Electrical Analysis, Muhamad Hafiz Hamsan, Mohd Fakhrul Zamani Kadir, Shujahadeen Bakar Aziz, Muhammad Amirul Solihin Azha, Saifful Kamaluddin Muzakir

Makara Journal of Technology

Dextran polymer host was doped with different concentrations of ammonium fluoride (NH4F) via casting technique. In this present work, dextran-NH4F film has been employed to investigate the ionic conductivity using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy from 50 to 5 MHz. The highest room temperature conductivity is achieved at (2.33 ± 0.76) × 10-3 S cm-1 with 40 wt.% NH4F. The electrolyte is found to obey Arrhenius rule at high temperature with activation energy of 0.21 eV. Dielectric analysis has been performed to obtain better understanding on the conductivity pattern. The dielectric parameters e.g. ɛreal, ɛimag, Mreal, and Mimag have been tested as …

Acute Toxicitystudy Of Choline Based Ionic Liquids Towards Danio Rerio Fish And The Aggregation Behavior Of Their Binary Mixtures, Mansoor Ul Hassan Shah, Nasruddin Nasruddin, Suzana Bt Yusup, Muhammad Moniruzzaman

Makara Journal of Technology

Marine oil spills are effectively controlled by chemical dispersants. However, the toxicity associated with it reduce its employment in marine environment. To overcome this limitation, the acute toxicity of choline based ionic liquids was evaluated as a potential low toxic variant for oil spill remediation. Further, the aggregation behavior of the individual as well as their binary mixtures was also evaluated by employing tensiometry technique. The half-lethal concentration, LC50on zebrafish (Danio rerio) of three choline based ionic liquids showed that the studied ionic liquids (ILs) fall in the range of “practically nontoxic” ( 100-1000 mg L-1).Various micellar properties showed that …

Neutron Diffraction Study Of Multiferroic 0.6nife2o4/0.4batio3 Composite, Engkir Sukirman, Yosef Sarwanto, Syahfandi Ahda, Andon Insani

Makara Journal of Technology

Neutron diffraction study on the 0.6NiFe2O4/0.4BaTiO3 multiferroic composite has been carried out. The 0.6NiFe2O4/0.4BaTiO3 multiferroic composites have been synthesized by solid reaction method. In this study, 20 g of BaTiO3 (BTO) and 20 g of NiFe2O4 (NFO) compounds were prepared from the powder raw materials of BaO3 and TiO2 for BTO, and NiO and Fe2O3 for NFO. Furthermore, both BTO and NFO were each crushed for 5 hours using High Energy Milling (HEM). Then the BTO and NFO were calcined in the furnace at 950 °C/5 hours and 900 °C/5 hours, respectively. Both NFO and BTO precursors were manually mixed …