The Most Project-y Time of the Year

We're more than halfway through the semester, and I'm doing projects in three of my four classes. Here's a little bit about what I'm working on at the moment:


Principles of Engineering
The project in PoE takes up about half the semester, and it has to include significant mechanical, electrical, and software components. I'm on a team of five. The team is made up of a super senior, two juniors, a sophomore, and an exchange student, and we have a really wide variety of engineering experience and parts of the project that we're interested in focusing on. (That was very intentional on the part of the professor; he tried to balance the teams pretty well.) We've decided to build a water curtain. The water will fall to create images, and we're also hoping to vibrate the streams of water using speakers.

So far, we've started some work on software, talked about plans for electrical, and done some mini proof-of-concept pieces for the mechanical side. When we first came up with the idea of using music, we tested that with a small speaker, and we were able to see the effect we wanted. Our first solenoid valves came in the mail on Thursday, and we had a chance to test them in class. They worked really well (much better than we expected, actually), so right now we're pretty excited about where the project is going.

Materials Science
We finished up the first project the week before the break and formed teams for project 2. The first project was about exploring the properties of various objects, and my team looked at three different strengths of bolts. We got to look at etched samples under a microscope to figure out the microstructure of the metal to identify the type of steel, and we also broke all the bolts in the strength tester!

The broken samples. We turned down the center of the bolt to create a dogbone shape, which is the standard shape for tensile tests.

The fracture surface of the high strength bolt

The optical micrograph of the low strength bolt. The dark lines are the grain boundaries.

The second project focuses less on properties of existing objects but more on making and processing objects and materials. My team is making Prince Rupert's drops, little bulbs on glass that withstand very high loads if you press on the head but shatter into dust when you apply a little force to the tail. We're trying to find the minimal conditions to make a viable drop, and then we're going to try to break the drops on the bulb in a compression test.

A few successful Prince Rupert's drops!

Making a drop

Mechanical and Aerospace Systems
In MechAero we've been building ornithopters, flying vehicles that flap their wings, all semester. We first focused on the flapping mechanism and then on the wing mechanism, and now we're putting it all together to make the vehicles fly. Here are a couple of videos of what we've done so far:

A simulation and video of our flapping and steering mechanisms

Two wing mechanism designs. The wings were designed to have different stiffness on the upstroke and the downstroke.