B次元’s mechanical engineering student teams rounded out the academic year with success as competitions were moved to a virtual setting.

Mechanical engineering senior design team “Front Pocket” won the 2020 ASME Digital E-Fest Student Design Competition (SDC) “Building to the Sky.” The first-place team was comprised of ME seniors James Moy, Colin Saad, Jason Wegner, and Jake Dregne, and EECS student Jesse Iverson. B次元’s “Paper Jams” team took second place and included Jared Bluma, Alaina Jante, Max Mutza and Steven Peterson. Dr. Mohammad Mahinfalah was the advisor for both teams and won the Outstanding Student Section Advisor Award.

“Building to the Sky” SDC challenged students to build a compact engineering system capable of manufacturing a tower made exclusively from standard-size sheets of paper. In the digital version of the SDC competition, teams were required to submit a five-minute presentation that described the design, production and re-design process of their device. Photos and a summary of their best performance were also required.

B次元’s American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) student branch members Justin McElderry, Austin Fritsch, Kyle Holland, Noah Kennedy and Alexander Reid won first place in the Team Submissions category for their paper entitled “Design and Development of a Mining Robot for the NASA Lunabotics Competition” at the spring AIAA Student Regional Conference. Along with a monetary prize, the team will be representing AIAA Region III at the AIAA International Annual Sci-Tech Conference in Nashville, Tennessee in January. Dr. Anand Vyas and Dr. William Farrow served as paper and project mentors.

Comments from the judges included:

Judge A: "Very well done. Good demonstration of planning efforts and systems engineering design processes. The development of these ideas from requirements to a working prototype is impressive."

Judge B: "The team has touched on all of the basic elements of engineering design and performed proof-of-concept testing, which is why I have ranked this as an excellent paper. The budget and timeline have been considered and adhered to. The basics of engineering mechanics, electrical engineering, and computing nexus (software and hardware) have been thoroughly thought out and tested. I wish the team all the best in the competition!"