Sand Casting, by Pi Tau Sigma
Sand casting is an industrial process used to make large metallic parts, usually with a lot of internal features. Pi Tau Sigma held a sand casting lab, where visitors got to pack sand molds by hand, watch the metal be poured, and take their hardened metallic creations home. The kid-friendly designs included a car, a star, and a dinosaur. They cast aluminum, which melts at a lower temperature and hardens faster, using scraps from various department labs.
The process is very recyclable, as both the mold and the excess material can be reused. For some jobs, sand casting is more efficient than most other manufacturing processes, especially for products with internal features. It isn’t as fast as a permanent molding process, such as injection molding, but high quantities of finished product are still very attainable.
MNMS Clean Room
The Micro- Nano- Mechanical Systems Clean Room is used in ME 487, Theory and design of Micro- and Nano-Electromechanical Systems. In the course, the students learn photolithography, metal deposition, deep reactive ion etching, and create both a piezoresistive sensor and a microfluidic logic chip to get hands-on experience in advanced fabrication processing. These processes can be used in the students’ individual research.
The full-body suits worn into the clean room were demonstrated at the exhibit. “A lot of these wires are thinner than human hair,” said Glennys Mensing, the director of the MNMS Cleanroom and the instructor for ME 487. “If hair were to get between the wires or even break them, these devices would not work.”
Photovoltaics, by Chandini Jain and Dinkar Nandwana
Solar panels are typically made out of silicon, and are about 20% efficient. A student research group created a model of a dye-sensitized solar cell, where a dye is used as a semiconductor between the photo-sensitized anode and the electrolyte, by using raspberry juice as their dye. The students presenting this display, Chandini Jain and Dinkar Nandwana, were a pair of first-year master’s students in mechanical engineering with Professor Elif Ertekin. The raspberry juice used as a semiconductor, taken from a store-bought product, has free electrons that can move to higher energies when exposed to sunlight, and electricity can be produced. The raspberry-juice cell, used as a model for more complex photovoltaic cells, was about 1% efficient, but produced a voltage when exposed to a lamp at the exhibit.
Thermal Imaging, by the Society of Women Engineers
The Society of Women Engineers hosted an exhibit about thermal imaging, which is a technology that senses infrared radiation to construct a visual representation of the distribution of heat in objects or over a certain area. It is used to find insulation leaks, temperature differentials in electronics, and sometimes helps in finding fugitives or animals. The exhibit had a number of different demonstrations for the practical use of such technology, including finding a warm ping-pong ball underneath plastic cups, and hiding a warm ping-pong ball in a glass cup (where the infrared radiation was reflected, therefore making the ball invisible to the infrared camera).
Hydraulic-Powered Go-Kart, by the Society for Experimental Mechanics
The Society for Experimental Mechanics displayed their hydraulic go-kart, a product of almost two years’ work that is nearing completion. The vehicle runs on gasoline, with hydraulic regenerative braking that allows them to build power from the work that is done while slowing the car down. The go-kart, unlike the vehicles built by SAE, is not being made for a competition, but for experimental purposes in hydraulic power. After completing the go-kart and running tests on its efficiency, they plan to publish the data. “It’s very new,” said Greg Wilk, the president of the club and a junior in Engineering Mechanics. “So we at SEM like to take newer, emerging technologies and try our hand at it.”
Formula Hybrid, by the Society of Automotive Mechanics
needs. Parallel hybrids are a more common design, The Formula Hybrid SAE Team competes in the Formula Hybrid International Competition, held in early May in New Hampshire. Their design for their hybrid vehicle this year will be a series hybrid, meaning that it will be driven by an electrical motor with no mechanical connection to the engine. Instead, there is another engine tuned for running a generator that stores energy in battery packs when it is able, and allows the electrical motor to draw off of those energy packs (and sometimes the generator itself) as it because they are less complex and allow for a large gas motor and small electric motor. “Parallel was sort of status quo for the competition, we wanted to explore new territory,” said James Younce, a sophomore in Electrical Engineering. “It’s kind of exciting, pushing the limits of electric racing.”
Concrete Crushing, by the Society for Experimental Mechanics
The Society for Experimental Mechanics demonstrated the power of the Southwark-Emery testing machine, an apparatus that can perform both compression and tension tests at loads up to 3,000,000 lbs. The machine itself was originally installed at the university in 1930. It is one of only three machines remaining in the United States at a university, the other machines residing at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and The University of California in Berkeley, California. It can test scaffolding and long shores, which are objects that are normally impractically big for such tests at any typical facility. The machine performs between 50 and 70 tests a year for industry. For the demonstration, SEM performed a compression test on a cylinder of solid concrete, 3 feet tall and 18 inches in diameter.