Senior Design teams showcase accomplishments at trade show-style presentation

This week, 21 ME 470 teams presented their final senior design projects to the public in an exhibition-style trade show. Each group worked all semester on a project sponsored externally by a company or organization or internally by a MechSE faculty member.

“This is basically their summative assessment of what they’ve learned in engineering so it’s not only ‘can you solve the problem technically,’ which is what we hope from their education, but also ‘can you communicate effectively how you’re solving a problem and work to understand a sponsor’s needs and effectively deliver what they’re looking for,’” said Michael Moccio, one of the course TAs for this semester.

Each team of four to five students met with their sponsor to determine the problem that needed to be addressed. They then spent the semester coming up with a solution and presented it at the trade show, either through data-validating a testing procedure or by creating a physical prototype demonstrating their product.

 “My biggest takeaway from the project was definitely teaching myself Denavit–Hartenberg parameters, which are usually used in robotics for kinematic analysis. I didn’t have any experience with robotics before taking this class,” said Ashton Krepelka, who worked on a project for Peddinghaus to help  improve their steel processing.

“I really enjoyed working with a corporate sponsor and being able to develop a product that could potentially go into mass production and be used in cars,” said Mary Cate Foley who worked on a high-current fuse element design for Littelfuse.

“A lot of labs and projects in other classes are typically very strict and very specific in what you have to do. You’re given a lab manual that you have to follow. This was a lot more open-ended in terms of what we were directed to do; we had recommendations and guidelines that our sponsor gave us as well as what they wanted to get from us overall, but in terms of how we got there we had a lot of freedom in choosing how we wanted to proceed, what experiments we wanted to do, how many samples we wanted to test, and overall scheduling,” said Kamil Skibinski who worked on determining if a manual weld repair process was sufficient for Collins Aerospace.