May 15, 2023 Celebrating Spring 2023 Senior Design Showcase Written By: Caitlin Scott Departments: Mechanical Engineering Categories: Students|Undergraduate Congratulations to all students who shared their work at the Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Symposium on Thursday, May 4th! Over the past year, 42 design teams comprised of nearly 170 students have engaged with clients from industry, research, the community, and others to design and build solutions to complex engineering problems. Students presented posters of their work and demonstrated impressive prototypes. In spring 2023, judging returned to the showcase, with awards given for best overall, honorable mention, best prototype, and best Faustin Prinz research project. The Photon Vagabonds – Best OverallPayton Bartow, Madeline Morrell, Vijay Shah, and Jon Carlson This project will help me in my career both in terms soft and technical skills. I learned a lot about project management and owning a real world design project though this experience. It was important to be flexible through the entire course of the project because real world problems are tricky to solve and often change as you work on them. In the beginning of the project ideas for the test facility shifted quite a bit before they became stagnant making flexibility key. I grew a lot in my knowledge of thermal radiation, heat transfer, and computational modeling and hope to utilize this knowledge in my career. -Team leader Payton Bartow We sincerely enjoyed our senior project and are all proud of the accomplishments we were able to achieve over the year. The project challenged us while still being within our capabilities as beginning engineers. It means a great deal to us that our project will likely be used to benefit oceanography. –Team response Badger Buoyancy – Best PrototypeKevin Macauley, Preston Sheilds, Kendall VandenLangenberg, and JJ Schickert WiscWind – Honorable MentionTeddy Hines, Jack Hendrickson, Mitch Hendrickson, and Austin Suvari The Collegiate Wind Competition created by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) aims to prepare students from multiple disciplines to enter the wind energy workforce by providing real-world experience for researchers, scientists, engineers, educators, project managers, and businesses and sales forces. This was a unique project as it was a cross-disciplinary and cross-class-standing project. Kenzie and I are juniors (now rising seniors), in biomedical engineering on the biomechanics track, while the rest of our group consisted of mechanical engineering seniors. Kenzie and I have decided to continue this project for our BME senior design capstone project. The ability to print vertically at the end of this semester instilled greater confidence that through more design and testing we may be able to print a full-scale wrist orthotic. –Team member Julia Mastej Wristy BusinessJacob Arlandson, Lance Johnson and Warunyoo Nijjarungal with Kenzie Germanson and Julia Mastej (BME) Rolling ThunderMaxwell Lemerond, Ryan Wade, Jonah Rosenthal, and Michael Johnson Trailer Park BoysXander Ostaffe, William Condon, Michael Ostaffe, and Grayson Holter Faustin Prinz Research FellowsLearn about the current research projects. Griffin Radtke (best research project) and Jon Carlson share their research projects with ME Faculty Melih Eriten and Tim Osswald. Tyler Lee and Yiteng Ma discuss their research projects to ME Faculty Mark Anderson and Xiaoping Qian. ME students, faculty, and friends enjoyed a outdoor reception following the spring 2023 showcase.