My Projects

The goal of the Gantry Crane project was to model the system and produce equations that would be able to calculate the position of the crane's load at any time when given an input. The scope was to produce all of the resources for a controls engineer to pick up the project and design an electrical feedback controller to operate the crane. The project was completed by myself and 3 other Junior engineering students, Derek Beck, Bradley Long, and Wyatt McKibbon. I spearheaded the initial mechanical systems modeling and set up the system of differential equations in Matlab. In the attached report, I imported equations in LaTex from Maple to create professionally formatted and easy to read equation more efficiently than typing them directly in Word. I also created all of the plots using Matlab to demonstrate the potential movement of the crane's load when given an example voltage. All of the skills I learned and used during this project, both in communication and technical, will be useful in my pursuit to work in robotics and systems engineering as a career. For communication, the clean design of design plots in Figures 9, 10, and 11 can clearly communicate the results at a glance and the professional style of writing and displaying equations help create an easier starting point for the next engineer.

Everyone that has been in college knows the struggle of trying to find places to put a laptop, calculator, notebook, and textbook on a lecture hall's swing up desk. The presentation focused on the stakeholders and what was important to each group, as well as presenting three potential designs. For this PowerPoint, we used Assertion Evidence styling to ensure clarity and reduce distraction. I produced the SolidWorks models and helped research what students needed through surveys.
The report, on the other hand, dives deeper into the prior art available and my team's finalized suggested design including material properties, maintenance, and practicality. It also includes interviews with the head of Facilities and others at Rose-Hulman. I learned how to make figures as clear as possible by pointing out what I wanted the reader to see, so while even skimming the paper, one can immediately comprehend the majority of the main points based solely on the figures. As in Figures 19 and 20, I rendered professional pictures from SolidWorks assemblies that would be appropriate for any level of report or presentation. Both of these will be useful when creating board presentations or project proposals as a systems and mechatronics engineer in the future.

During my summer internship with Peerless of America II, inc. I had many opportunities to work with the maintenance, quality, and production crews to troubleshoot and solve issues that some of them dealt with for years. My largest project was building, wiring, and programming a CNC tubing bender almost completely from spare parts. I worked closely with the machinist and the production workers to figure out the best improvements I could realistically make to allow for more accurate bends that also saved time and mone. I also worked with the quality manager to create documentation that followed ISO 9001 standards for operating procedures and safety instructions for a new refrigeration coil coating system.
These and other projects are included in the portfolio overview for the internship. I created this document for the president of the company to explain to the board the importance of interns as well as serving as my internship summary presentation, as I ended up working until the last hour on finishing up other documentation and troubleshooting manufacturing machines. It is important, in any career, to summarize projects in a non-technical style as I mostly used in this document, but engineers need to have this skill as we have trouble, more than most, in explaining our work without being too technical and using too much jargon.

A truly fun and freeing group project was sand casting wax seals. The purpose of this was to gain experience in the designing parts that would allow the mold to be released from the sand. We pushed the boundaries and ended up with very shallow designs, but learned what we would need to change for the next time. I designed the pattern that was 3D printed and worked with my group members to complete an honest analysis in the memo of what went well and what we would change. The biggest issue we ran into was the size of the designs we wanted to indent into the wax seals, the small spaces didn't allow enough draft angle and the sand wasn't able to escape the mold. This practice of reviewing what went well and what didn't is important for any profession and especially for engineers. I will use skill this in my career when communicating with my boss a review of a project or a progress update. To try and fix the designs after sand casting, we used Dremel tools to emboss the patterns into the seals. However, this resulted in varying levels of success in sealing envelops with, unique, designs.

The sheet metal case for the kitchen scale pushed me to consider many aspects of product design simultaneously, as well as figuring out what needed to be communicated to the boss or client in the memo. I led the design, and after brainstorming, my team and I decided the most important aspects for this product would be ease of cleaning, ease of storing when not in use, ease of use, ease of assembly, and keeping the pricing as low as possible. I took these elements and created a 3D cad model in SolidWorks. We decided to create a design that would have two parts stamped out of a single sheet and bent into the casing displayed in Figure 1. I have learned that if schematics or virtual models are used in a presentation or report, as in Figures 1 and 4, the important elements can shine through and time is saved in removing backgrounds and distractions from actual photographs. My group members Liz Foesch, Austin Strozier, and Michael Gassen, calculated the majority of the other data about the cost of production, and I helped them research and find hardware that would satisfy the needs of the budget and the ease of use. The consideration of what needs to be communicated as well as simplicity in figures, will help me in my career to explain what I am doing to others more clearly.