Students build products for industry

Fresh Eyes in Engineering

By Maggie Hostetler

When the fall term started, Pam Hutson knew nothing about welding. By the end of the term, according to her classmates in Mechanical Engineering 450, she was an expert.

At the beginning of the term, Alex Kim had never worked with an industrial client, but by the end he and his teammates had spent many hours communicating with two plant managers in Wisconsin and Idaho, and Kim had learned first hand, "You have to find out what your client needs before you begin designing."

Hutson, of Allen Park, Michigan, and Kim, of Vienna, Virginia, were on one of 25 student teams in ME 450, the mechanical design course for fourth-year students. The teams were challenged at the beginning of the term as they had never before in their undergraduate careers. Each received a real-life engineering design problem, many of which had been proposed by industrial firms. The teams had 12 weeks to develop a solution, manufacture a working prototype and formally present their results.

Hutson, Kim and their four teammates tackled a project sponsored by the Ore-Ida Corp., an Idaho manufacturer of potato products. To comply with the 1990 Clean Air Act, Ore-Ida must clean oil particles from the plant's exhaust system. It washes the oil out of exhaust pipes with a water spray, collects the mixture, then separates the oil and water for recycling. Unfortunately, their current system, a collection tank using a skimmer to remove the oil from the water's surface, does a poor job of purifying either the oil or the water for efficient recycling.

Ore-Ida asked the students to come up with a better system. "When we started," said Rick Garpow of Fenville, Michigan, "this was brand new to us. None of us knew the best way to separate oil and water." The team researched the problem and then brainstormed. "We came up with 42 different methods," Garpow said, "including Dawn detergent."

But time was ticking away; they had to narrow the field quickly to two: a baffle-plate system (a tank with plates to encourage separation by gravity) and a batch system (a series of joined tanks with each tank progressively separating the mixture).

The team split into two groups to research both methods and make a best-case presentation for their solution to the entire team. They also visited Monroe Environmental, a Michigan firm that specializes in oil/water separation. Monroe's advice helped the team settle upon the baffle-plate system.

With the concept decided and drawings in hand, the team faced the big test---building the prototype. Students who were used to spending their efforts on books and tests now had to get their hands dirty. In the Mechanical Engineering machine shop they learned the basics of welding, grinding, cutting and milling.

The students designed a baffle-plate system that uses suspended plates to make the oil coalesce and rise faster than in a simple tank, thus separating more oil from the water flowing through at 50 gallons a minute. They then built the tank, plates, baffles, inlets, outlets and weirs in time for Design Expo.

On Design Expo day, 25 teams lined the Atrium exhibiting projects that included a mechanical package for a holographic optical gun sight sponsored by ERIM, an automotive accessory drive tensioner from Ford Motor Co. and a low-profile automotive suspension from Michigan Seat. Projects assigned by faculty included an exercise machine, a CAT-scan target, a driving simulator, a robot neck, and an autonomous vehicle.

Prof. Allen Ward, the course instructor, believes that practical experience is a vital part of engineering education. "We can teach students only so much," he says, "then they need to put theory into practice and let mother nature teach them. The industrial sponsors also benefit because these young engineers provide them with a 'fresh-eyes' look that may lead to real solutions."

Maggie Hostetler is the science writer for the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Ore-Ida is a satisfied customer of the ME 450 course. Company engineer John Brown, who was the liaison between Ore-Ida and the student team, said the team "did an excellent job. The prototype they built was shipped to our Plover, Wisconsin, factory where it will be tested and probably implemented with minor modifications."

Other sponsors who have expressed a strong interest in using the concepts developed by the students in the last three years of the course include Xerox, Sarns 3M, NASA, GM, and Applied Process.

Firms interested in sponsoring projects for the ME 450 Mechanical Design course may contact Marcy Nautch at (734) 764-3530.