PUC Chronicle

Issue date: 12/11/06 Section: News

Media Credit: Nathyn D. Gisbon John Magee presents his senior design project entitled 'Central Repository of Personal Data for Universal Access' to Professor William L. Robinson.

Brains were engaged last Saturday night as the senior engineering final design presentations were shown in the Lawshe building. After much hard work, students finally got the chance to show off their creations and inventions in front of their peers and professors.
According to Professor Edward Pierson, each team of two or three students was assigned a project and faculty advisor. While students are free to suggest their own projects, the final project choice is up to the professor in charge of the course. Each team was given two semesters to design the project and solve the problem proposed.
"The first stage is to really define the problem," said Pierson. "Then brainstorm on solutions and then a final design."
The teams are also charged with doing literature checks, work plans, weekly and monthly reports, oral reports and more.
The goal of the senior design projects is to help the students make the transition from the problems solved in school, to team based projects done by engineers that may last for months or years, said Pierson.
"We were assigned a large group of equipment and were basically told to make it work," said Charles Churchill of his project, 'Implementation of a Manufacturing Cell'.
The equipment included a robotic arm, small computer system and a safety curtain of light that would shut off the entire system if anything passed through it. Churchill's partners were Amandeep Arora and Abhishek Mehra.
Robert Armstrong, Jiane Shao and Rahul Singhal created a successful way of managing water in a 100 ft creek bed. The group had to recirculate over 3,000 gallons of water, de-chlorinate the supply as well as be able to replace any water lost due to power failure.
"I had fun doing it," said Armstrong. "It's something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. It only cost us about $400, and when you compare that to the costs of some other projects, that's not much."
"At the beginning of the second semester, the teams have to define what they want to accomplish, and most were successful," said Pierson. "The oral presentations this year were particularly good."

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools