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ME 470: Senior Design Project

This is 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.

Information on this course is for the Fall 1998 offering. Last updated December 18, 1998.

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.

Each design team is responsible for developing a web page to present their efforts. The following are links to these sites.

The Critical Design Review took place on Thursday, November 12, 1998. The industry review panel was composed of: There time and valuable comments were appreciated by all. The following highlight some of the CDR presenations.

Group A: No Pain, No Grain

Group B: No Grainn Boundaries

Group C: Colonels of the Corn

Group D: Blood, Sweat and Gears

On November 23, 1998 each of the design teams was required to display all of the parts which will be used to fabricate their product. The following is a photo record of those parts.

Group A: No Pain, No Grain - Total parts count = 373

Group B: No Grainn Boundaries - Total parts count = 191

Group C: Colonels of the Corn - Total parts count = N/A

Group D: Blood, Sweat and Gears - Total parts count = 435

The product demonstration which is open to the public will take place on Friday evening, December 4, 1998 at 6:30 p.m. in Rm. 365 Fitzpatrick Hall of Engineering. The following phots highlight some of the activities associated with the product demonstration phase of this project.

Autonomous control of the system was not a trivial task. Mr. Fickel is trying to figure out how F=ma applies to his subsystem!

Putting it all together was a challenge.
The following are the completed prototypes for each group.

Group A: No Pain, No Grain

Group B: No Grain Boundaries

Group C: Colonels of the Corn

Group D: Blood Sweat and Gears
During the demonstration each of the groups successfully completed some phase of the product operation. Group C's product came closest to satisfying all of their design goals and was able to demonstrate a "throughput" of approximately 5 units per minute.

Group A: No Pain, No Grain

Group B: No Grain Boundaries

Group C: Colonels of the Corn

Group D: Blood Sweat and Gears