Interdisciplinary Senior Design Projects Pair Real World with Classroom

A senior design project is a hallmark of engineering education at UT, a chance for students to come together and solve a real-world problem sponsored by a client in need of a solution.

That experience is a win-win for both the teams and the sponsors, as it gives students a chance to show their skills and ability to work on a team to potential employers, while also giving sponsors a fix to their problem without having to break their research and development budget by tackling the issue themselves.

Born from a bold idea that students from the Tickle College of Engineering and Haslam College of Business could work together and take projects to the next level, the Integrated Engineering Design Program was born, with Edwards Assistant Dean Keith Stanfill becoming its first director in 2018.

Now, five years later, the program is thriving, helping students put their classroom knowledge to work, and paying dividends for them down the road.

“Working in the interdisciplinary senior design (ISD) practicum has provided me with a wonderful opportunity to help solve a real world problem facing a real company, Ultrasonic Technology Solutions,” said electrical engineering senior Joseph Eaton. “ISD has taught me what it’s like managing and work with a team of individuals from different fields to plan, design, and implement a solution from start to finish. There have been extensive presentations which have helped me work on my public speaking skills, and I find this incredibly valuable too. I would recommend ISD to anyone who is seeking to apply themselves and gain valuable experience—which would also be a perfect addition on their resume—and certainly help them land a job, as I did, which I give a lot of credit to this course.”

Eaton and teammates Ryan Davis (electrical engineering), Jeremy Meanwell (finance), and Noah Varner (mechanical engineering) work under the guidance of EECS Assistant Professor Helen Cui on the project “Robotic Arm for Ultrasonic Transducer Panel Assembly Automation.”

They were tasked with designing, developing, and testing the best automated mounting process for piezoelectric transducers and to develop a plan for full-scale production. Eaton said the project broadened their vision and provided valuable knowledge with many aspects of the engineering design process that they otherwise would not have had the opportunity to gain.

Industrial engineering student Paulina Urbanowicz echoed those sentiments when speaking about the project she took part in, “Forming a Circular Economy for Glass through 3D-Printing.”

“Senior Design is a crucial class in the curriculum for engineering students as it provides a challenging experience with real-world projects to apply the skills learned throughout the engineering college experience,” she said. “As a team, we are working with Vitriform 3D to create a proof-of-concept 3D printer that uses recycled crushed glass. Since this concept is relatively new, we have had various challenges come up in terms of design and research. Although we are one team, we have divided the work into two smaller teams in order to solve the challenges we encounter.”

Urbanowicz worked with Ben Clark (electrical engineering), Georgia Stricklen (computer science), and Matthew Walker (finance) on the project under the direction of UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute postdoctoral researcher Dustin Gilmer, who co-founded Vitriform 3D with Alex Stiles while they were both graduate students at the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education.

She said working on the software and hardware of the printer has taken many iterations, but the team successfully integrated the subsystems and are researching the market for finished products and the possibilities.

“Having the exposure to work on a cross functional team has been very valuable, especially because it is very applicable to the real world and the communications that happens,” Urbanowicz said. “As a student, it is important to have these experiences to learn from and apply them later on in a career.”

A team coached by MABE Research Assistant Professor Kwai Wong took on the task of developing a process to improve the design and additive manufacturing of custom plates used in mandible reconstruction surgery.

There are many reasons why patients may require mandible reconstruction surgery whether for cosmetic purposes or to repair degradation of the bone due to cancer. During this surgery, the surgeon removes a section of the patient’s jawbone and uses a titanium plate to hold the remaining sections together.

The surgeon may then perform a bone graft to transfer bone cells from the patient’s hip to gap in their jawbone to encourage the bone to grow back between the resections. However, the recovery process for a bone graft procedure is painful and lengthy, so some surgeons elect to not perform a bone graft. When these titanium plates are installed without a bone graft, they have a failure rate of over 50 percent.

‘’Our ISD team, JaROO, was tasked with designing 3-4 titanium plate prototypes that could be reliably implanted into a patient’s jawbone without a bone graft,” said biomedical engineering student Heidi Seuss, who was part of the team that also included Payton Butler (supply chain management), Carter Hatch (mechanical engineering), Seth Kenny (business administration), and Travis Thornton (mechanical engineering). “In addition, our plates needed to be custom-fit to the unique contour of each patient’s jaw. These designs needed to be verified both through mechanical testing as well as simulated testing within the framework of Altair Inspire.”

The team approached this problem by first performing a literature review to not only better understand why the current plates fail, but also to gather ideas for their own plate designs. They designed a straight plate to act as a control during our testing, a plate with a sinusoidal pattern in the resected region of the jaw, and a plate that split into two bars in the resection.

Seuss said their literature review revealed that a sinusoidal pattern could lower the stresses acting on the holes of the plate in that region. Additionally, they found that a large reason why plates fail is due to them having to perform under both tension and compression simultaneously, so the idea for the “double barrel” plate was to allow one bar to be in tension while the other undergoes compression.

“We printed these plates first out of resin to ensure the prototype models were accurate before sending them off to be manufactured out of titanium,” Seuss said. “While the plates were manufactured, we worked on refining our simulation framework to ensure that mechanical and simulated testing could occur at the same time.”

She said the project has been difficult but very rewarding, and that she learned a lot about the systems engineering process and how to design complete solutions to complicated problems.

“Additionally, I have learned about all the potential complexities that arise when designing an implant to be installed within the human body for long periods of time,” Seuss said. “While the interdisciplinary senior design program has many more deliverables and requirements than the standard departmental senior design, these deliverables have been invaluable in preparing me for a future career in engineering design.” 

The project, “Mandible Reconstruction Plate Design Optimization with FEA,” was sponsored by tmCMF, a high-tech company focused on cranial and facial surgery. Key points of the task were that the team had to reduce time waiting on the acquisition of mandibles, reduce costs, and create better outcomes for patients.

Other projects included the following projects.

Visualization of Attribute-based Access Controls on Blockchain 

• Sponsor: CGI Federal
• Coach: Scott Ruoti
• Team: David Huang (computer science), Hanson Lam (computer science), Ian MacDougall (computer science), Caroline Rinks (computer science), Ashna Tipirneni (supply chain management).
• Project: Develop a visualization tool to display Attribute Based Access Controls in the Blockchain. Leverage the Web 3.0 architecture with additional goals to create something without causing performance or security issues.

Module-based Portable Power Bank (120V + USB-C) 

• Sponsor: Volkswagen EPC
• Coach: Leon Tolbert
• Team: Andy Chin (computer engineering) Marco Garcia, (computer engineering), Harrison Parker (electrical engineering), Elizabeth Sutton (electrical engineering), Maggie Vaughn (accounting)
• Project: Develop a business model for and prototype of a portable power bank to provide 120 VAC and 5 VDC power to provide off-grid power for camping and other applications. The system should use depleted EV battery modules and provide standard electrical duplex outlets and USB connectors. The system should be small enough to fit in the trunk of a car.

HVAC System to Drop Peak Energy Demand and Curb CO2 Emissions

• Sponsor: Edgewell Personal Care
• Coach: William A. Miller
• Team: Sam Banks (mechanical engineering), Mun Choong (business analytics), Zach Laser (mechanical engineering), and Job White (mechanical engineering)
• Project: Optimize the design of a 350-ton HVAC system to minimize energy costs. Explore ways to utilize waste heat from various production processes to improve the overall cooling of the facility. Develop a capital plan and prioritization of system improvements.

Material Handling Automation and IIOT Data Integration

• Sponsor: Real Alloy Recycling, Inc.
• Coach: Enrique Macias de Anda
• Team: Sejal Jinturkar (mechanical engineering), Jack Krimmel (industrial engineering), Sarah Norris (aerospace engineering), and John Turner (economics)
• Project: Design a system to automate handling, marking, storage and data records entry for aluminum Recycled Secondary Ingots (RSI) after the molding process. The system is expected to eliminate safety hazards, ergonomic issues, labor availability issues, and human errors. Verify system performance via simulation. Identify suppliers and create a capital plan for budgeting and implementation.

Modular, Multi-Use Water Treatment Skid for Radiological and Chemical Cleanup Applications

• Sponsor: United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR)
• Coach: Sankar Raghavan
• Team: Morgan Louis (management), Jenna Stevens (mechanical engineering), Kate Schildmeyer (civil engineering), Hannah Selph (industrial engineering)
• Project: Research water treatment technologies that can be deployed to treat and discharge water generated during UCOR D&D activities. Design of treatment media, process parameters, treatment equipment, and modularity/interchangeability of components must be optimized as part of this effort. The team should identify overall cost savings for implementing a modular water treatment skid concept over designing and procuring custom treatment skids for each project.

Cloud-based Bot to Match Up Natural Language Questions to Relevant Content

• Sponsor: RegScale Corporation
• Coach: Amir Sadovnik
• Team: Matthew McIntyre, Swasti Mishra, Soofi Punjani, Jiawei Wu, and Franklin Xie
• Project: Crawl the RegScale website documentation with a Bot that takes natural language questions to look up relevant help files, examples, and controls. Crawl past data entry for similar requirements/controls in the RegScale platform. Provide previous examples client can pick from to ease data entry burdens. Develop and implement an online ROI tool.