Electro-Mechanical Systems Commons^™

Areosense, Josephine Turney

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The AeroSense growing system is designed to make indoor aeroponic gardening easy and accessible for everyone. By combining sensors, automation, and AI, the system can monitor and adjust humidity, lighting, and nutrient levels to help plants thrive without requiring expert knowledge. The goal is to create a self-regulating garden that takes the guesswork out of growing fresh herbs and vegetables at home. The project involves building a working aeroponic prototype equipped with misters, pumps, and environmental sensors, all managed by a Raspberry Pi. Using computer vision and machine learning, AeroSense will be able to assess plant health and respond automatically …

Automation And Habitat Development For A Space Based Marine Life Environment, Logan Trimmer, Alexander Hang

Harrisburg University Other Works

This project was a cross-collaboration between the Environmental Sciences and Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics programs for the company Monolith Space.

The goal of this project was to design an autonomous system to be able to track qualities of water in an aquaculture system designed to be sent to space.

The Prototype Of A Fully Automated Pressuremeter For Various Geotechnical Applications, Anuar Akchurin

Theses and Dissertations

The geotechnical engineering field requires high-quality in-situ testing equipment that ensures consistency in the test execution. This research focuses on developing and testing a prototype of a fully automated pressuremeter control unit to allow the industry to obtain reliable and controlled stress-strain data, thereby improving efficiency and reducing testing time.

The objectives of this work are to design and develop a system with the necessary components to perform the pressuremeter test, integrate the testing procedure into the state machine design, enable automated testing, and validate the results by comparing the stress-strain data with that obtained from the existing hand-operated pressuremeter …

Simplified Molecular Diagnostics Methods For Environmental Testing Of Pathogens And Other Applications, Mohammad Dehghan Banadaki

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Environmental Surveillance (ES) has emerged as a powerful tool to monitor the emergence and persistence of a pathogen within a facility or community using wastewater/water analysis. Over the past four years, implementation of ES has experienced an explosive acceleration, driven by efforts to monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2, which has made ES a routinely used public health tool in many locations. We can now use ES to measure the emergence/presence/abundance of different viruses (e.g., SARS-CoV-2, influenza, mpox), bacteria (e.g., E. coli, V. cholerae, antibiotic-resistant strains), fungi (e.g., C. auris), and other biological markers indicative of infectious diseases. However, its broad …

Design And Implementation Of Smart Automation For Sustainable Plastic Recycling With Iot Integration, Mostafa Abdelaziz, Mahmoud Khedr, Amr Bakkar, Yossef Zidan, Abdelrahman Youssef, Mahmoud Magdy

Mechanical Engineering

Plastic pollution poses a critical environmental challenge, infiltrating ecosystems and impacting human health. One innovative solution involves repurposing recycled plastics into interlocking blocks as a sustainable alternative to concrete in construction. However, manual production methods hinder scalability, efficiency, and product consistency while generating material waste. This research addresses these limitations by automating the production process using PLC and IoT technologies. The findings demonstrate that automation significantly enhances production rates, ensures consistent quality, and minimizes waste, thereby improving operational efficiency and environmental sustainability. IoT is integrated to enhance the system's capabilities by providing real-time connectivity and data exchange. The IoT dashboard, …

Autonomous Bottling And Packaging System - Mechanical Bottling Portion, Kathryn Gray

Honors College Theses

This report details the complete mechanical design of an autonomous bottling automation system. This system is fully integrated with a bottling and packaging system. The scope of the full project is to successfully bottle and cap twelve small bottles (approximately 68 cm3) in under three minutes and thirty seconds. The bottles shall be filled with an “electrolyte” and water mixture, and the mixture should be fully mixed. To complete this task, two tanks will dispense liquid (one electrolyte, and one water) into the bottles. Each tank shall have a measuring chamber, that will fill with the correct amount of volume …

Pulse-Width Modulation Spray System Performance And Development Of A Novel System To Optimize Spray Use Efficacy, Prashanta Pokharel

Theses and Dissertations--Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

The overarching objective of this research was to enhance our understanding of pulse width modulation (PWM) based nozzle control system and develop an intelligent nozzle control system for agricultural spray applications. This dissertation focused on measuring and analyzing the transient nozzle pressure characteristics and performance under PWM control. Additionally, it explored the development of an innovative multi-degree-of-freedom (DOF) nozzle control system for precise chemical applications in specialty crop systems.

The pressure dynamics of a PWM system were studied by developing an instrumentation system capable of operating a solenoid valve and recording pressure signals. A nozzle body and two manifolds of …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Micro-Manipulation Using Learned Model, Matthew A. Lyng, Benjamin V. Johnson, David J. Cappelleri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Microscale devices can be found in applications ranging from sensors to structural components. The dominance of surface forces at the microscale hinders the assembly processes through nonlinear interactions that are difficult to model for automation, limiting designs of microsystems to primarily monolithic structures. Methods for modeling surface forces must be presented for viable manufacturing of devices consisting of multiple microparts. This paper proposes the implementation of supervised machine learning models to aid in automated micromanipulation tasks for advanced manufacturing applications. The developed models use sets of training data to implicitly model surface interactions and predict end-effector placement and paths that …

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.

Developing A Curriculum For Marine Mechatronics Technicians, Vukica M. Jovanovic, Petros J. Katsioloudis, Ana Djuric, Mileta Tomovic, Thomas B. Stout

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

A growing trend within the U.S. Navy is to streamline operations by deploying ships with less sailors, who are more highly skilled technicians that are trained to do a wide array of jobs. Modern ships also include various automated systems that require more highly skilled technicians for maintenance. Outdated warship designs are now being replaced with industrial grade automation equipment. Such equipment is being used in warships that encounter harsher environments than what exists in the civilian industry. Hence, there is a need for training in regards to industrial grade automation equipment for military and civilian ship repair partners. Marine …

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 …

Automating The Fret Slotting Process Using A Plc Controlled 1.5 Axis Mill, James Stratton

Purdue Polytechnic Masters Theses

Stratton, James A. M.S., Purdue University, August 2011. Automating the Fret Slotting Process Using a PLC Controlled 1.5 Axis CNC Mill. Major Professor: Richard Mark French.

Can automation assist small job shops and hobbyists in the production of stringed instruments? This research set out to answer the question using a quantitative approach to determine if an economical CNC machine could be produced in such a fashion as to seamlessly join the workshop as an affordable, yet precise instrument to aid in the production of stringed instruments. The key was to incorporate common industrial automation equipment into the operation of the …