School Projects

As part of the first course in the Mechatronics upper-year specialization, students were tasked to work in pairs to design and build a fully functional DC bench power supply featuring voltage adjustment and current limiting features. The project will test our knowledge and skills in a wide range of electronics-related topics including buck converter design, active filter design, interfacing with a STM32 microcontroller, and designing the physical PCB and product housing.

Currently, my partner and I have designed the first revision of the current sense module PCB and are preparing for assembly and testing once the board is produced.

To demonstrate students' understanding of kinematics in a real-world application, groups of students were tasked with identifying an existing fault in a planar mechanism to then improve upon and implementing well-justified modifications. In addition to shared responsibilities such as brainstorming potential solutions and contributing to the written report, as the simulation lead I was responsible for:

• Writing the MATLAB code for determining velocity and acceleration (both linear and angular). I implemented symmetric numerical differentiation to maximize accuracy while reducing computational time by using relatively large time steps. Linear accelerations were then translated to the links' centers of mass to facilitate force analysis.

• Creating CAD models for the original and new designs for the purposes of visualization, cross-checking the MATLAB, and demonstrating the designs' physical feasibility.

• Developing graphical user interfaces in MATLAB App Designer to allow anyone to easily operate the mechanism and visualize the velocities and accelerations.

Due in part to an unforeseeable teaching team change, my differential equations class was not provided with full solutions to our weekly practice problem sets. I sympathized with my classmates' concerns, and owing to my affinity for math and some previous experience with the course content from high school, I decided to type up my own solutions and share them with the class. I combined written explanations with a mix of MATLAB and Desmos graphics in an effort to promote more conceptual understanding. Everyone appreciated the gesture and the rigorous practice helped me achieve 98% in the course, my highest overall grade to date. 

Groups of four students were tasked with developing a lower cost competitor to modern high-speed 3D printers such as the Bambu X1C and Creality K1. My previous experience with operating and troubleshooting FDM printers motivated me to become the group leader, and under my guidance we successfully developed a high-performance machine. Individually, I was in charge of designing the horizontal gantry and print head mechanism.

A key problem I faced when designing the print head was thermally decoupling the heated nozzle from the rest of the assembly. I originally designed the main structural component to be made of ABS for its good balance of strength, stiffness, and cost. Preliminary thermal simulations showed that the long carbon steel bolts connecting the hot end and main structure would have exceeded the glass transition temperature for ABS (105 °C), which would result in the parts softening and eventually experiencing structural failure. I began by iterating through a few alternative designs to eliminate these bolts, but their associated tradeoffs were not very appealing. Instead, I opted to switch to stainless steel bolts which feature half the thermal conductivity and added ceramic insulating spacers under the bolt heads to reduce the heat conducted from the hot end. This then kept the bolt temperatures well under the glass transition.

I served as the team's chief writer, responsible for ensuring the timeliness and quality of the project's multiple written deliverables. I also contributed my digital and physical modeling skills by creating visualization aids.

This project was my first real exposure to the formal engineering process. As part of a five-member team, we conducted background research to identify the scope, gap, stakeholders, and any constraints. We then utilized a variety of idea generation techniques to help us thoroughly explore the solution space as we converged towards a final solution. As the technical lead, I was responsible for researching and applying all relevant standards and regulations, validating the physical feasibility of our proposed design, and creating CAD models of our work. Our final design proposal report earned 92%, one of the highest grades among the entire first year engineering class.