Lee College seniors showcase engineering projects
A six-member team of Lee College of Engineering students recently took first place in the fall semester Senior Design Expo for its completed work on the “Ingersoll Rand Pneumatic Pump Energy Harvesting Unit.” During the expo, 30 teams presented their finished two-semester projects, and 50 teams presented their first-semester design concept posters.
With the “Ingersoll Rand Pneumatic Pump Energy Harvesting Unit” project, the students’ goal was to design and prototype a muffler for an Ingersoll Rand ARO pneumatic diaphragm pump that contains an energy harvesting, conditioning and storage system for the purpose of powering an ARO pump controller. Team members were Patrick Dodd, Corbin Grohol, Sam Ludwig and Mitchell Rutledge (mechanical engineering and engineering science); Dakota Kiser (electrical and computer engineering); and Brian Barefoot (electrical engineering technology). Steven Patterson, SPX Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science, was the faculty mentor for the project.
Second place among completed projects went to the team of Joshua Conde, Dustin Gurganus and Nicholas Sizemore (mechanical engineering) and Pierre Jean (electrical engineering technology) for “Production of Tool-post for Diamond Micro-Chiseling of Retroreflectors.” The objective of this project was to design and manufacture a multi-axis rotational diamond micro-chiseling (DMC) tool-post with on-machine metrological capabilities. This on-machine metrological system comprises a removable microscopy system and a dynamic force measurement system. Matthew Davies and Joseph Owen, faculty members in the Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science Department, were project mentors.
The third place team’s project “Sealed Air Box Scanner” had the goal to find the optimum method of scanning packages to calculate the non-occupied volume by objects within a package. Team members were Wissam Bawab and John Hickner (mechanical engineering), Jose Munoz (mechanical engineering technology) and Jeremy Nelson (electrical engineering). The UNC Charlotte team used an IFM O3D Smart Sensor (photonic mixer device) as the scanner and used software development kits to develop an algorithm in Linux system to calculate void volume. Testing consisted of various size packages, non-orthogonal packages and passing packages under the scanner. A fully functional scanner will display the void volume and will be delivered to Sealed Air at the completion of the project. Patterson also served as faculty mentor on this project.
Read more about the Lee College of Engineering’s Fall 2016 Senior Design Expo and view additional images from the event on the web.