The 2018-19 Distinguished Seminar Series enables an opportunity for students and faculty among others to learn from six impressive mechanical engineering thought-leaders. This year, we welcome Ellen Arruda, Mark Campbell, Dennis Discher, Harriet Nembhard, David Y.H. Pui, and Alice White from institutions across the nation. They will discuss topics ranging from robotics in healthcare to nanoscale 3D printing and beyond.  

This series begins Friday, September 14th and runs through Friday, November 30th. All seminars are held from 10AM to 11AM at varying locations with refreshments provided.

Learn more about our fantastic lineup of speakers below.

Harriet Nembhard, PhD

Oregon State University
Professor & School Head of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering

Date: Friday, September 14
Location: ECCS 1B28

Alice White, PhD

Boston University
Professor & Department Chair, Mechanical Engineering

Date: Friday, September 21
Location: ECCS 1B28

Mark Campbell, PhD

Cornell University
S.C. Thomas Sze Director of the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, John A. Mellowes '60 Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Date: Friday, October 12
Location: ECCS 1B28

Dennis Discher, PhD

University of Pennsylvania
Robert D. Bent Chaired Professor, Director of NCI Phys Sci Oncology Center

Date: Friday, November 2
Location: Benson Earth Sciences Rm 180

David Y.H. Pui, PhD

University of Minnesota
Distinguished McKnight University Professor, LM Fingerson/TSI Inc. Chair in Mechanical Engineering, Director of the Particle Technology Laboratory and the Center for Filtration Research

Date: Friday, November 16
Location: ECCS 1B28

View Dr. Pui's Abstract and Bio

Ellen Arruda, PhD

University of Michigan
Maria Comninou Collegiate Professor and Chair of Mechanical Engineering

Date: Friday, November 30
Location: ECCS 1B28

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Members of the team at the 2018 Engineering Design Expo at Coors Events Center.

A senior design project for a new type of bicycle drivetrain is getting major attention in the cycling press. The project, developed with sponsor CeramicSpeed, does away with the traditional bicycle chain and gearbox in favor of a shaft drive assembly. The invention has earned a 2018 Eurobike Innovation Award.

The project is receiving worldwide attention after CeramicSpeed exhibited the technology at the Eurobike trade show, held July 8-10 in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Press Highlights

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Brian Jernigan is working to bring science learning to students who can’t come to class in person: young patients in pediatric hospitals.

That goal was on display May 17 in Mark Appling’s class at Ryan Elementary School in Lafayette, Colorado. There, third-grader Jaejune Lee played with an unusual toy. A little bigger than an iPad, the game was designed by Jernigan and at CU Boulder for kids at Children’s Hospital of Colorado in Aurora. It’s a Plinko-style toy that uses rolling beads and twisting dials to teach young learners about how water cycles from rivers to clouds and back again. 

And it got Jaejune’s vote: “I thought it was pretty cool,” he said, because of “how we learned how the water cycle works.

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Lights flashed, buzzers rang and attendees watched with rapt attention at the home of University of Colorado Boulder basketball – but with 143 teams in attendance, this was no basketball game.

Welcome to the first ever CU Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science college-wide Engineering Projects Expo, where hundreds of seniors and graduate students shared their inventions, software and solutions to real-world problems.

“It was a really exciting day, coming together with everyone to celebrate awesomeness,” said mechanical engineering senior Gage Froelich, whose team earned second place in the People's Choice competition.

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Senior and Graduate Design teams presented posters and hardware in front of alumni and industry professionals during three rounds of judging.

The teams that received the highest marks from the judges are listed below.  

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Centered around the incredible µOPM sensor technology developed by the Knappe Research Lab in the ME department at CU Boulder, a team of six undergraduate mechanical engineering seniors are designing hardware that will allow these sensors to be used for brain imaging in infants and children.

Current methods for characterizing the brain functions of an epileptic patient are very invasive and require intracranial EEG (electroencephalogram) probes to be implanted into patient's brains and monitored for days at a time. MEG (Magnetoencephalography) provides a promising solution to the current methods. This type of brain imaging allows doctors to track and observe brain activity non-invasively.

The most widely practiced method of MEG uses SQUIDs (superconducting quantum interference device). These sensors are highly sensitive to changes in magnetic fields but need to be cryogenically cooled, which prevents flexible sensor placement and results in less accurate measurements.

The student team was tasked with designing a Conformal MEG (cMEG) system that optimizes brain imaging in pediatric patients using Knappe's µOPMs. The cMEG system includes a helmet shell, sensor locking mechanism, safety release, and a frame. 

To ensure peak performance of the µOPMs, the team designed for customizable sizing and sensor placement, minimized sensor movement, and eliminated metal contaminants. Because the system is going to be used for pediatric testing, the helmet shell accommodates for patients from six months to five years old.

One of the major design challenges is that the sensors need to be in light contact with the patient's head to minimize noise. To solve this problem, the team is developing a helmet that fits all required head sizes and provides customizable sensor placement, so technicians can fit the sensors to each patient's head. 

Because the µOPM sensors are highly sensitive, vibrational and magnetic interferences need to be minimized. A locking mechanism is being developed that, when activated, ensures sensor rigidity by preventing rotational and translational movement in all directions.

Senior Design Team Members:
Feisal Alenezi
Rebecca Bullard
Zachary Marshall
Samantha Preston
Mack Tang
Yousef Taqi

To minimize magnetic interference, the materials for this project are highly restricted. No metal can be used or embedded into any of the system components. Therefore, most components are 3D printed, and all machined parts are thoroughly cleaned and tested to ensure no metal contaminants are introduced into the part during fabrication. 

Because the system is meant for human use, patient safety and comfort requirements needed to be considered. The helmet shell is made of three parts: a base and two sides. This configuration ensures the patient's head is always supported by the base, while allowing the two sides to break away in case of emergency. This break away feature is controlled by a dual activation release technology that the team developed to guarantee patient safety at all times. If the patient is under distress and applies a sufficient force to the sides of the helmet, the safety release is activated, and the helmet shell breaks open. The technician is also able to manually trigger the safety release to free the patient from the helmet. 

  Three team members will be travelling to Boston Children’s Hospital in May to install the system and train technicians on its use. 

The helmet and all its supporting features are secured to a customized frame which attaches to a patient bed at Boston Children's Hospital. There, the cMEG prototype will be used to test Knappe's µOPM sensors on pediatric patients with epilepsy. Three team members will be travelling to Boston Children’s Hospital in May to install the system and train technicians on its use.

After testing, the µOPM sensors and the cMEG system will be fabricated for clinical integration. Long term, the system could be used as a non-invasive method for diagnosing and characterizing a wide range of neurological ailments including epilepsy, autism, and traumatic brain injuries.

The team is grateful to all those that made this project possible: Svenja Knappe, Christoph Keplinger, Dr. Yoshio Okada, Design Center Colorado, ITLL, CU Mechanical Engineering Department.

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Two students working on a cooler device for long term storage of medical supplies following natural disasters.

Keats Dormont is making the world a better place through mechanical engineering. The University of Colorado Boulder undergraduate student is part of a new senior design course within the Department of Mechanical Engineering that is transforming student projects into an avenue for positive change in the world.

“This is an opportunity to design something that could make a difference for underprivileged communities. It’s rare to receive funding for such things and it’s invigorating to be a member of one of the teams tackling real world problems,” says Dormont.

The class is called Engineering for Social Innovation (ESI), and it is an offshoot of the senior design program that is a central pillar of CU Boulder mechanical engineering curriculum.

In the traditional senior design course, teams of students are paired with outside businesses or research laboratories to solve a real-world engineering problem being faced by the sponsoring organization. Working hand-in-hand with that sponsor is naturally a central component of the program.

This new section turns the concept on its head, calling for students to find a problem themselves and then determine a way to solve it. It’s an effort to both make the world a better place and deal with an issue facing the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

“One of the more-difficult aspects of the senior design program has been finding enough companies to sponsor projects. The projects take months to complete, and we have many great partners, but not every company can wait,” says instructor Dan Riffell.

Essentially, as enrollment in mechanical engineering has grown, the number of sponsors hasn’t been able to keep up. The new class is a way to continue the program and maintain its high standards.

There are 40 students working on eight teams in the new course. Their projects range from solar-powered water purification systems to devices that can detect and report wildfires in extremely remote areas. Dormont’s team is developing what’s called the Rescue Wagon, an integrated stretcher and trailer that could be hitched to bikes and motorcycles.

“It will aid problems that arise from inadequate or nonexistent emergency medical transport. It’s an inexpensive ambulance alternative that could serve congested cities and rural areas around the world,” Dormont says.

Like all senior design teams, whether in the outside sponsor or social innovation sections, the work is an “epic challenge,” to quote Dormont. Teams spend months mapping out their design, building, and rebuilding before presenting a final product at a design expo.

“All teams do their own manufacturing, but since we don’t have an outside sponsor, we don’t have pre-existing specs to work within. We have to make all those decisions on our own,” says Zach Yearout, whose team is designing a type of portable toilet to improve public health issues in developing countries

Another unique aspect of this new course is the students keep ownership of any intellectual property they develop.

“I’ve had the University tech transfer office meet with the class to talk about patents, and I’m working on building relationships with outside groups that may be interested in what we develop,” Riffell says.

Those efforts are already beginning to bear fruit for Yearout’s team which has already been in contact with a non-governmental organization in India about future possibilities.

“In the class we’re learning about business and entrepreneurship,” Yearout says. “We’re connected to this project, even after it’s done. It’s made it much cooler to design.”

This year’s pilot course is funded by grants from the CU Boulder’s Engineering Excellence Fund (EEF) and Innovative Seed Grant program.  The department is actively exploring funding models for future offerings of the course.

The ESI projects will be showcased along with industry-sponsored capstone projects from other mechanical engineering teams during the College of Engineering and Applied Science Design Expo at Coors Stadium in Boulder on April 27^th, 2018.

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Propeller-shaped part printed by team for flaw detection using vibrational analysis.

In the last several years, 3D printing has taken off as a convenient method to creating plastic parts. It has become a relatively cheap and quick way to rapidly prototype a design concept with potentially complex geometries before taking it to large scale production. If there was a way to use 3D printing for the final production as well as for the prototyping it could have large scale impacts across many different industries from aerospace to biomedical.

Just recently this has become feasible as metal 3D printing has emerged as a form of additive manufacturing. There are problems however that are hindering metal 3D printing from becoming large scale production. Our senior design project, with client Elementum 3D, aims to develop a diagnostic technique that might revolutionize metal 3D printing.

Similar to plastic 3D printing, metal 3D printing is prone to having flaws in the print that affect the functionality or quality of the part. This is less important for plastic because it is less expensive and not usually used as the final product. For metal 3D printing, it can be very costly in both time and resources to realize that a print is not up to sufficient quality.

Rendering of the moving (pink) and fixed (green) subassemblies designed by the team to enable quality sintering with the Epilog Zing laser cutter.

The current system for searching for a flaw while metal 3D printing is to image the part and search the image to try to identify flaws on the surface of the part.  This technique has significant limitations in flaw detection and scalability. With our client and director, we are exploring the feasibility of a real-time in-situ diagnostics of 3D printed metal parts. 

The technique relies on measuring the vibrational pattern of the part while vibrating the part as it is being built.  If there is a flaw, either internal or external, the vibrational pattern should change. This concept could change the course of 3D printing metal because flaws in a part would be known by the time the part was finished printing.

To start, we needed an in-house metal 3D printer that we could use for testing. We modified an Epilog Zing 16 laser cutter for this purpose.  The Zing is a good candidate for the conversion into a 3D printer because it has a strong CO­₂ laser that can sinter metal powder together, however the Zing was not designed to build three-dimensional parts.

Our redesign incorporated a moving subassembly and a stationary one, in order to allow the print to always be in the optimal focal point of the laser.  We had to design methods for vibrating the part, as well as measuring the vibrations while minimizing the observer effect. 

For this, we used a Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV) on loan from Polytech for. The LDV allowed for the measurement of the resonance frequency of the part during any stage of the print because it did not need to be attached to the printing object.

Senior Design Team:
Nick Seitz
Chris Worsdale
Eric Fisher
Anouk Uragoda
Kevin Oh
Grant McNutt
Director:
Dr. Gerard Carroll
Client:
Dr. Jacob Nuechterlein - Elementum 3D

We learned that the testing would not be as easy as quickly printing a piece of metal and measuring the vibrations. The Zing was being pushed to its limits of performance because of how demanding the printing was.  We were using the machine for functions that it was not designed for, so we had to diagnose, troubleshoot, modify, repair the Zing, the sensors, and data acquisition to allow for proper measurements.

While this system became more complicated than initially intended, the idea and the technology has the potential to change large sectors of the manufacturing industry. Many engineering industries would be affected by the ability to create a 3D printed metal part and knowing the presence and size of flaws.  This technology would open the door for the use of metal 3D printing as a major player in advanced manufacturing.

Special Thanks:
Polytech – LDV loan
Epilog – Support and advice for Zing

Illustration of the motion of the stage as a part is printed. The metal powder for the part (shown in pink) is contained within the retaining ring (shown in green).

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Alex Lubar reads the anemometer measurements while Wilson Hughes flies a drone at CU Boulder South Campus.

Domino’s, UPS, Amazon, and the United States military are just a few examples of institutions interested in using drones as automated delivery systems for financial, logistical, and environmental reasons.

Drones save on employee costs, and they utilize otherwise unused airspace. They are far greener than loading everything into a car and driving it to its destination across a densely crowded city.

But when drones start to encounter powerful gales with no pilot to guide them, they need a system to help them avoid these dangers.

This was the pitch that Jeppesen, a Boeing company, gave us when they hired our Senior Design team for the Micro-Weather for UAV Operations project.

The Colorado-based company tasked us with designing a system to avoid inclement weather and direct a drone into safer conditions, while at the same time adding supplementary data to the world’s most advanced forecasts.

Our team was excited to be chosen for the project and work with Matthew Hendrian and Anna-Lisa Mautes of Jeppesen. Our enthusiasm turned to intimidation, though, when our first discussion consisted of weather forecasts, data processing, flight optimization, and something called HRRR. We spent the first month of our project researching what each of these topics were, then determining whether or not we had the ability to achieve a working system involving each one.

  Because we couldn’t directly measure the wind speeds from the drone, we had to use linear algebra and trigonometry tilt angle of the drone to infer the values of the wind speeds buffeting the drone. 

Knowing what we had to do, though, was a big step from being able to do it. The High-Resolution Rapid-Refresh (HRRR) model forecast is encoded in a data format called GRIB, a method of data packaging designed for the gigantic sets of data required by weather forecasts to do modelling. After learning what HRRR was, we had to learn how to decode it into usable data.

Part of the project was to be able to operate many drones on the same system, so we had to use a service called LoRaWAN Cloud for the drones to be able to work together while in the air. In order to alter the internal operations of the drones, we had to interact with the autopilot software on the drone, called ArduPilot, both through another program (we ended up using QGroundControl to test the drone) and through its internal code. Throughout the course of the project, the team coded in four different programming languages.

Team 21, from left to right: Hanwen Zhao, Mahdi Ghanei, Alex Lubar, Wilson Hughes, Joe Parnell, and Hamza Albar.

Because we couldn’t directly measure the wind speeds from the drone, we had to use linear algebra and trigonometry tilt angle of the drone to infer the values of the wind speeds buffeting the drone. It turns out that going into the project, the only thing we already knew how to do was how to learn something new.

Our team started the school year barely knowing each other and unsure of how to navigate this project, but got lucky with a dedicated team and an engaging project.

With the help of many people both inside and out of the Senior Design program, and the guidance of our project director, Dr. Marina Vance, we have succeeded in many of our goals.

Eight months later, we are presenting about our accomplishments at AUVSI XPotential Technology Conference in Denver. We are proud in our accomplishments in automatic drone weather detection and avoidance.

Engaging with our clients at Jeppesen gave us the opportunity to have professional experience to guide us into our careers with confidence.We are proud of our achievements, and are grateful for this exceptional experience.

A group photo of the team and their sponsor, Jeppesen, following a final Flight Demo.

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