Student engineers show off experimental projects

Team members and their Mousetrap Car Project are, from left, Michaelena Borreggine, Jennifer Pahnke, Matt Reber and Dan Fitzpatrick. Photo by Kathy Flickinger

While they may not represent the cutting edge of automobile technology, mousetrap cars provide more than enough challenges for their student creators, who must design a vehicle to travel as far as possible on spring power.

In early December, 18 teams, composed primarily of freshman mechanical engineering students, brought their creations to the Pearson Hall gymnasium for the MEEG 101 (Introduction to Mechanical Engineering) Celebration and Mousetrap Car Contest.

Not only were they required to build a mousetrap-powered device, but students also had to predict how far the vehicles would travel each time the devise was engaged.

Dick Wilkins, mechanical engineering, said that while professors provide the mousetraps, students must build the cars, which cannot exceed 12 inches in any dimension and must provide a receptacle to hold a soda can positioned vertically.

"The wheels are actually CDs," Wilkins said. "The soda cans are partially filled with sand, and the amount is varied with each heat or race."

The cars, with ticket prices coming in at under $5, must be self-contained and travel at least 1 meter. The real challenge for the students is being able to predict accurately how far each unit will travel with changing payloads.

After the performance trials, the distance traveled by each car gets recorded on a data collection sheet, and a complicated formula determines the MPI, or Mousetrap Performance Index, with the top 10 teams qualifying for further rounds until an eventual winner emerges.

While this group of freshman mechanical engineering students was putting their distance estimating skills to the test, students in MEEG 401 Senior Design 2000 were putting the finishing touches on design presentations for the six-credit course required for all mechanical engineering seniors.

These final presentations, held Friday, Dec. 8, in the Composites Center Presentation Room, represent the final stage in a course designed to give mechanical engineering students the freedom to pursue general and technical electives in spring of their senior year.

The course includes the development of system designs, benchmark test practices and the designing, fabricating, assembling, testing and improving prototype models.

"This year all the design processes were industrially sponsored, and the semester-long time frame is comparable with industry practices in the real workplace," Wilkins said. "This has been an excellent learning experience for the teams." ?

The class permitted seniors to show their expertise with such projects as a shower rod sleeve assembly, high viscosity dispersion system, child-resistant bottle closure, roll gap adjustment system, pinstripe applicator system, adhesive testing system, handling placement system and a print sleeve cut off system.

"This was the first year that two groups of mechanical engineering students gave final presentations so close to each other," Wilkins said. "By doing so, it gives people a chance to see what students are doing at the beginning of their academic careers and how they finish up."

-Jerry Rhodes