Course Projects

For this course, our group of four was tasked with a semester-long design project to address issues affecting certain groups of people or careers. We chose to focus on farmers, specifically regarding safety issues with the usage of grain bin storage systems involving grain bin suffocation. To address this problem, we sought to build a prototype of a product that used sensors to determine whether certain conditions were actively present within a grain bin that could cause such hazards to form, e.g. grain bridges. In addition, our group developed a small-scale apparatus to test our product by mimicking altering conditions of a grain bin. To track the changes over time, a two-part program was made to write the Arduino sensor readings to a spreadsheet over a set time frame. 

In the end, due to various delays that restricted our revision time, we were unsuccessful in finalizing our prototype to a fully functional state; however, the project was selected to be featured within the university’s first-year engineering showcase. 

As part of a lab for a Fundamentals of Engineering I course, our group needed to find the area of the pathways within the Ohio State University's "oval". To accomplish this, I traced a reference photo of the oval's pathways into a CAD software at a 1:1 scale, and assigned the respective sidewalk widths to each pathway. After the model was complete, the measure tool within the CAD software gave an approximate surface area of the pathways of 116,700 ft^2.

As part of our HS Engineering Academy course, we could choose whichever final project we wanted that was associated to engineering. I chose to learn how to use and setup a basic CNC desktop mill that no one had operated yet, nor knew how to. I chose to cut a basic design of a linear slider that would fit between two aluminum extrusion pieces.

* Note: Such a design for the securing clamps was not effective, as the piece was still able to slide out vertically without significant effort in pressing the jigs against the workpiece. A better solution would have been either a setup more similar to a lead-screw vise, or a step clamp securing at the top of the piece.

After a few trials of attempting to not allow the wood material to slide out of the tensioners, I was finally able to get a cut I was satisfied with. I will note that while the width dimension of the raw stock was close to 1" (1.0010") and the length dimension was further (1.0385"), this was fine as I only really needed the width to be close enough for the CAM program. The length would not make much of a difference both for the program and in real-world operation as a linear slider. 

For this lab, we were required to construct a truss bridge comprised only of 60 pop-sickle sticks, and standard glue. The goal was to support the greatest mass at the center of the bridge while the bridge was supported on either end by two tables across a 30" gap.

The V1 bridge featured triangular trusses and perpendicular sticks connecting both sides. The result was supported 40 lbs of weight masses, and the failure was caused by a warping of either side into an S-shape, eventually causing the perpendicular connecting sticks to snap. However, both triangular truss sides survived with no fractures.

The primary difference of V2 was the setup used to connect both truss sides. Instead of only using sticks perpendicular to the trusses, V2 utilized X-oriented beams. This prevented the buckling seen in the collapse of V1, and managed to support 60 lbs, a 50% increase.