Student design teams, under the direction of a faculty coordinator, develop engineering solutions to practical, open-ended design projects conceived to demonstrate the value of prior basic science and engineering courses. Ethical, social, economic and safety issues in engineering practice will be considered as well. During the spring semester, students apply previously learned engineering principles to the solution of real problems in an actual industrial setting. Student design teams work under the direction of faculty advisors and industrial liaisons. Opportunity will be provided for objective formulation, analysis, synthesis and evaluation of alternative solutions.
Companies usually try to avoid stopping a production line.
Recently, however, one local company asked UST engineering students to help stop its assembly line. CyberOptics, a manufacturer of industrial inspection equipment, builds a machine for inspecting circuit boards during the assembly process. The company, headquartered in Minneapolis, asked MSE seniors to design a stopper arm to arrest individual circuit boards on an assembly line just long enough to measure them. This year's senior design team, Kyle Peterson, Mike Mata, Edgar Valencia, Paul Rutten and Tom Torborg, found as in most manufacturing jobs, the hardest part of the project was to understand customer needs. The students brain stormed for possible solutions, then selected and tested the most simple.