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AME 470: Senior Design Project - Fall 2001 Offering

A senior level requirement for all students in the Mechanical Engineering curriculum. This site contains information on this course and links to student project sites.

The Course:

The course is presented as a team-based, product-focused design-build exercise. The students are organized into small design build teams and each team is responsible for the concept definition, design, documentation, fabrication and testing of a specific mechanical system. Information on the project and progress of the student groups will be provided as the course progresses. Comments regarding this course are encouraged and can be directed via email to the instructors listed below.

This semester the course has added a number of new aspects. The first involves the type of "product" being designed and the second the "corporate environment" in which the product development process takes place. In recent years the products have been "machines" whose desirable performance attributes were defined for the student design teams and the designs were strongly influenced by available technology. This semester the students are designing "consumer products" for which they were required to define the product and its desirable attributes. To assist in this process, the design teams are working with students from the Mendoza College of Business Marketing Department and the College of Art and Letters Industrial Design program.

Students from Dr. Joseph Guiltinan's marketing class in Product Innovation will use the concepts developed by the mechanical engineering design teams to perform market assessments and assist in evaluating the feasibility of each of the concepts. Students from Dr. John Caruso's Digial Design class in the Design Program in Arts and Letters, will use these concepts to develop 3-D visual renderings for the concepts. The second of those changes that involve the corporate culture allowed the students to select the manner in which their design team would function during the semeter. They were given the option of choosing between a framework that is structured similar to many product design processes in a variety of industries and organized by "management", or a framework based upon a less-structued, design studio environment. The results of this "experiment" will be interesting!

The student design teams will be asked to contribute to this web site and links to their efforts will be added throughout the semester.

Fall 2001: Interactive Child's Toy

Last updated December 12, 2001.

The following document (in .PDF format) provides some information on this semester's project.

The Project Description in the form of a Request for Concepts

Each design team has the option of developing a web page to present their efforts. Links to these sites will be made available as the semester progresses.

The following student groups are participating in the project this semester.

Each design team presented a mid-project status report on Thursday, Oct. 18. The following links highlight those presentations.

The following highlight some of the design team efforts and these will be collected throughout the semester.

Team AME470, Inc. - Concept "Water Hog" a remotely controlled "water gun."

The following links provide information presented by this group at their weekly design reviews.

The preliminary concept - Concept_Presentation
Automation and embedded control - Autoembedded
Sensors and actuators - Sensors_and_Actuators
Internal mechanisms - Internal_Mechanism_Power_Supply
Safety - Safety
Manufacturing and Assembly - Manufacturing

The following sketches were prepared by the industrial design consultants from the Digital Design class and illustrate an initial concept for the Water Hog.

Team PitchPals - Concept "The PitchPal" a training aid for little league pitchers

The project schedule

A prototype for sensor development

Team Superbad - Concept "TBD" a remotely controlled vehicle for "little" kids

System concepts

The Concept Design Review took place on Thursday, December 6, 2001. The review panel included:

Mr. Tony DeSimone, Fisher-Price, Inc.
Mr. Jim Tappel, IDEO, Chicago
Dr. Robert Dunn, Integrated Engineering and Business Practice Program, U. of Notre Dame
Dr. Joseph Guiltinan, Chairman, Marketing Department, Mendoza College of Business
Dr. John Caruso, Department of Art, Art History and Design

The University particularly wishes to thank the industry participants for their comments and insight regarding this project.

The visuals from the student presentations, in ".pdf" format, can be accessed through the following links.