Our Students
The Department of Engineering encourages its students to be engaged within the department and beyond, to the broader campus, the community, and other countries. Engineering students are active in Campus and Community Day, with projects ranging from building an improved bridge for a community bike trail to building an on-campus swing that is enjoyed by students and visitors to campus. The department has been involved with engineering-specific mission trips for years; in recent years, students and professors have worked together to install alternative energy solutions at an orphanage in Honduras.
In addition to cultural engagement, students in the engineering department do some tremendous academic work, with course projects starting in the freshman year and culminating in the senior design project. Past projects have included building a robot to clean drains in the manufacturing area of a local company, designing a machine to roast coffee, and testing the aerodynamic principles of bicycle helmets.
Service through Engineering Award
The Department of Engineering awarded the 2021 Service through Engineering award to Luis Larrinaga for his tremendous contributions to the face shield project. The department used its 3D printers to provide over 10,000 face shields to health care providers and others throughout the region, and Luis was an early volunteer and a faithful participant for the duration of the project.
Academic Excellence Medal in Engineering
The Department of Engineering awarded the 2021 Academic Excellence Medal to John Mayer, the first student who completed both the electrical and mechanical concentrations — and he did so with academic excellence!
Undergraduate Research - Spring 2021
Battery Life of a Laptop and How to Maximize Use Time
Presenter: John Charles Tidwell III (Trey)
Faculty Advisor: Don Van
Almost everyone in school nowadays has a laptop, with a large amount of school work needing to use online resources. Also, almost everyone has experienced the pain of leaving their charger behind when their laptop has little to no charge left. The outcome of this 8th fractional factorial design of experiment is the duration of use of a laptop once fully charged. The overall objective expected of this experimental project is to maximize this operational duration knowing what consumes the battery's charge and to what extent. Factors affecting the outcome of this design of experiments are Brightness, Sound, Background program running, Streaming online, Multiple tabs open, and the environment (outside or room temperature). The results from this design of experiment will benefit the laptop users with tips to change settings and other ideas to conserve a battery's charge life.
Regenerative Braking: A Study on Efficiency
Presenters: Emory Craft, John Mayer, and Reagan Oliver
Faculty Advisor: Don Van
Regenerative braking is an energy recovery mechanism that converts a moving vehicle's kinetic energy into storable electrical energy. The team researched the regenerative braking process and thought about how to improve the efficiency of it. The potential solution that was researched and designed took advantage of thermoelectric generators. These generators convert thermal energy, in the form of a temperature gradient, directly into electromagnetic energy through a phenomenon known as the Seebeck effect. The team proposes that these devices be implemented near the surface of brake pads in addition to normal regenerative braking systems to collect some of the heat loss that escapes to the atmosphere.
Maximizing Precision
Presenter: Roger Baker
Faculty Advisor: Don Van
The design of this experiment investigated the effects of four factors on the precision of a commercially available small-bore rifle. The objective of this experiment is to maximize the level of precision to be similar to a custom competition rifle. The four factors are the type of ammunition, the torque on the action screw, taping the barrel, and removing the barrel band. As guided by the full factorial design of experiment, a combination of these factors will be changed for each shot group and the group will be measured for distance between impact points. The smallest distance yields the highest precision. This will be repeated until all combinations of the variables have been tried. Each experimental run will then be repeated three times to replicate the data. Lastly the results will be compared to a more expensive competition rifle.
Assistive Eating Device (AED)
Presenters: Michael Drury and Tobey Taylor
Faculty Advisor: Georg Pingen
Cerebral Palsy is a neurological condition caused by damage to the immature brain. Symptoms can include, problems swallowing, walking, reduced range of motion due to muscle stiffness, and tremors. These symptoms impact many aspects of everyday life for these individuals, and many require full time care and assistance. West Tennessee Healthcare contacted Union University regarding a patient who suffers from Cerebral Palsy. The patient has trouble using a fork to pierce food items and spillage when delivering food to her mouth and when drinking out of an open cup. Her posture is also adversely affected during mealtime. Because of these challenges, she has to rely on assistance from others to enable her to eat. West Tennessee Healthcare asked us to design a device that will enable the patient to eat with little to no assistance that she could use while in their care as well as at her own home. After researching Cerebral Palsy and common solutions for the challenges these patients face, we decided to build a device that would help support her arm through the motion of eating and drinking. Our device is based off a simple four-bar linkage utilizing cleverly placed rubber bands to offer the assistance needed to make her arm nearly weightless. The device will support her arm using a sling, which wraps around the center of her forearm and is attached to the top of the four-bar, which provides support and further simplifies the device. We have utilized primarily 3D-printed components in our design to save weight as well as money.
The Compost-Heated Coffee Dryer
Presenters: Palmer Bell, Benjamin Marsch, and Dakota Stedman
Faculty Advisors: Jay Bernheisel and Georg Pingen
Coffee is a worldwide staple beverage, and all who drink it rely on coffee farmers from Nepal to Guatemala to Ethiopia and elsewhere to produce the coffee bean. According to Red Beetle Coffee Labs, our client, many of these farms are not massive industrial or agricultural operations, but small businesses run by local families. The current methods for drying beans for shipment are either too expensive for small operations or suffer from inconsistencies like inclement weather. For this project we were asked to provide a cheap and reliable method so that coffee farmers could improve their economic options. We were also asked to incorporate compost heat in the design to incentivize local farms to use their waste sustainably. We began with a comprehensive study of current methods, noting their strengths and weaknesses, and then began developing a controlled dehydrating coffee shed with compost as its heat source.
Sun Tracking Solar Panel
Presenters: Michael Drury, Luis Larrinaga, and Davina Norris
Faculty Advisor: Don Van
The tilt angle of a solar panel is an important component of solar panel design. The tilt angle has a large effect on the power produced by a solar panel. Many solar panel systems have fixed tilt angles that are optimized for the location of the solar panel. A fixed angle system may be optimized for the average position of the sun, but that does not mean it is optimized for every position of the sun. The alternative to this method is to have a system that allows the solar panel system to track the sun through the sky. This ensures the tilt angle is optimized for every position of the sun throughout the day. For this project we will build a small-scale sun tracking solar panel system, utilizing an Arduino and servo-motors. We would also like to include a Wi-Fi transmitting system so that we can collect solar panel data on a laptop away from the elements, however this is not a priority of the project. We will compare the power output per day with a fixed tilt angle to the power output per day with the sun tracking. The sun tracking system will require power to run the Arduino and motors, we would like to compare the power used by this sun tracking system to the power increase due to the sun tracking system.
Capturing Energy from Sound
Presenters: Benjamin Marsch and Tobey Taylor
Faculty Advisor: Don Van
Engines, generators, pumps, and all other machines lose significant amounts of energy to the environment in the form of useless heat and sound. Although many scientists and engineers have tried to recapture that heat using various clever methods, fewer efforts have been made to recapture the lost sound energy. We are interested in exploring how much energy exists in such sound. In this study we will attempt to quantify the energy carried in sound lost from a power-producing system. We will then explore some possible methods to extract that sound energy and convert it back into useful energy, noting the advantages and disadvantages of each method.
Exploring Compliant Mechanisms for an Adjustable Thickness Airfoil
Presenters: Emory Craft, John Mayer, and Reagan Oliver
Faculty Advisors: Georg Pingen and Jay Bernheisel
The team investigated compliant mechanisms as a method for dynamically adjusting the thickness of the cross-section of an airplane wing, or an airfoil. Doing this in-flight will improve the performance characteristics of the wing. The team used many different technologies and software, including CAD, topology optimization, and multi-physics finite element analysis packages. During the design process, many airfoils were printed with different materials to determine which material would be best. The final airfoil design was implemented into a functional RC airplane.
Testing for Microbiological Contaminants in Water Filtered by Ceramic Water Filters
Presenters: Luis Larrinaga and Davina Norris
Faculty Advisor: Georg Pingen
Contaminated water is a major problem in many parts of the world, killing thousands of people every year. Transformation Nepal is an NGO which works to provide water filtration solutions for the many people in Nepal who suffer from contamination in their water supplies. Our team was tasked with developing methods of testing the ceramic water filters manufactured by Transformation Nepal to be implemented in the new water filter factory. Our team designed a testing set up to meet the needed constraints and criteria. The testing lab had to fit a 350 square foot room, be adaptable for a wide range of temperatures, and be able to test 2 to 3 filters out of every batch of 150 filters. Our set up is capable of filling about five water filters at a time, and 2 different brands of bacteria tests were run on each filter. By using a model of our designed set up, we were able to create plans for a testing lab and recommend a brand of bacteria tests as well as testing procedures to Transformation Nepal.