PROJECTS

ASHRAE 2018 APPLIED ENGINEERING CHALLENGE

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), sponsored the 2018 Setty Family Foundation Applied Engineering Challenge. This challenge tasked teams with designing a temporary shelter for use by governments, municipalities, and humanitarian agencies that provided shelter and essential domestic systems for displaced families.

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I was a member of a team of five students who took on this challenge as part of our senior capstone project for the University of Utah's mechanical engineering program. Our submission included detailed design documentation, including design methodology, estimated energy consumption, estimated capital cost, types of materials, detailed system designs and models, and maintenance requirements.

On the project, I led the work on the waste management system as well as took an active role in the higher level design choices and assumptions for the shelter.  I focused heavily on project planning, and worked to improve the effectiveness of our weekly meeting times. I helped guide the group towards identifying tangible meeting take-aways which best furthered the high level goals of the project.

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Our submission won 3rd place internationally and was recognized at the 2018 ASHRAE Winter Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. A PDF of our submission is available below.

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The Capstone Program at the University of Utah is a two semester track, and we completed our submission to ASHRAE in the first semester. For our second semester we were free from the constraints and underlying assumptions of the competition. We chose to add to our design a renewable energy generation system to fully meet the power demands of the shelter. In this semester I led the research into the feasibility of wind and solar options to reliably meet the power demands. 

See the images below for our final design, which features an eight panel solar array.

PERSONALIZED TITANIUM BOTTLE OPENERS AND TEAM LOGO

While working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution machine shop, I was allowed to pursue my own projects during lunch and after hours using shop equipment and scrap material. I used this time to make 23 custom engraved titanium bottle openers for my teammates and friends back in Utah. I designed the opener using SOLIDCAM and cut each one with an OMAX two-axis water jet cutter. I personally engraved each opener with the player's name and number using a laser engraver.

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I also designed and created a plaque of my team's logo in aluminum. I cut it using the same OMAX water jet cutter, and hand polished it using the shop's equipment.

JUNIOR MECHATRONICS COMPETITION

In my junior year, I completed the final formal design and engineering challenge required by my program for graduation. For this challenge we had to build a remote-controlled robot which would compete against the other design teams in "Robot Capture the Flag."

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Our robot, which was completely designed built and coded by the student team, had to be wirelessly controlled from an Arduino Xbee controller. It had four easy buttons on its sides, which if pressed by an opponent would shut down the robot for 30 seconds. It had to be able to move and turn to avoid other robots, enter the enemy side and maneuver to three "flags" which were small rubber balls. One of these flags had a magnet inside, and our robot used a hall-effect sensor to determine which flag carried the magnet. Once we found the magnetized ball, we had to pick up the ball and safely return it to a platform on our side of the court.

ME 1010: SECOND SEMESTER DESIGN CHALLENGE

In the second semester of my undergraduate career, we were assigned a design and engineering challenge. This time, we were tasked with writing a program in Arduino to play "robot battleship." We had to build, but not design, robots for our code to control.

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Our code had to perform image processing to find the center of each rectangle in a random array of rectangles. These rectangles each represented a ship we were supposed to hit. Having found our targets, our code told the robot to move to the correct position using an encoder strip, increment the angle of a solenoid cannon firing mechanism, and shoot a ping pong ball at the target. We then had to return the robot to its initial location where a reloading device would load another ping pong ball for the next target.

ME 1000: FIRST SEMESTER FRESHMAN DESIGN CHALLENGE

In the first semester of my undergraduate career, I was assigned a semester long design team challenge. My team used the skills we were being taught in the classroom throughout the semester to build and design a self propelled robot that would move a specified distance, then launch a ball at a target. Our design had to use the potential energy stored in an elevated mass to both move the robot, and trigger the firing mechanism.