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Design, Build. Compete. UConn Formula SAE Among the Best in the World.

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by Kassidy Manness
ME Communications
kassidy.manness@uconn.edu

Formula SAE Club ready for another exciting year of designing, building, and competing.

“Design. Build. Compete” is the motto that drives the determined and creative minds that make up the Formula SAE club here at UConn. Their club, consisting of many Mechanical Engineering students, is responsible for designing and building, all on their own, a formula style race car that is supposed to compete in two competitions by the time May rolls around.

Every season, the club, headed by president, Cara Connors, breaks up into subteams that are each responsible for one aspect of the car. An average meeting, which happens every Tuesday and Saturday, consists of the head of each subteam reporting out any updates, set backs, or solutions they have and saying what their next steps are. At this point in the year, the main thing each club member is working on is the design portion where they work on calculations and talk with the other subteams to make sure it will all work together. As the year continues, they will then focus more of the building and fabrication work before going into the testing of the car to ensure that it works. Everything is done by students, though; the driving, testing, and manufacturing, even though the do have some help from local and extended sponsors in order to help with the manufacturing costs and equipment.

Consistently, throughout the season, the club looks at the past models they have created and evaluate what went right and what can be developed further. Connors was able to mention a few of the changes and development they were making to the design this year, “Last year was the first year that we had an aerodynamic package, so an undertray on the car. We’re looking to develop that further, validating the design we had last year, and making it better for this upcoming year. We’re looking at better ways to mount that undertray. There’s a lot of weight optimization going on.”

What all of this ultimately leads up to for the club are two competitions, the Formula Michigan, which occurs in May, and the Formula North Competition, which happens in Ontario, Canada at the beginning of June. UConn’s club has done consistently well at each competition, but they usually base the success of their car on the Michigan competition, as it is the largest one. It, generally, has about 120 international teams that come out. This past year, UConn’s Formula SAE placed 11th out of the 120 teams. Connors said that they are hoping to crack the top 10 this year.

At the competition, there is more than just racing that occurs in order to decide the winning cars. There are multiple dynamic events that they compete in to test the car’s physical performance in acceleration, skidpad, autocross, and endurance. There are also static events that are evaluated to look at the cars design presentation, business marketing presentation, cost report, and fuel economy.

 

Formula SAE is open to any major, not just Mechanical Engineers. They meet every Tuesday at 6:30 pm and Saturday at 12 pm at their shop on Depot Campus. For any interested, new members, you can go to the Visitor’s Center and be picked up by club members thirty minutes before the meeting begins. If you have any other questions, you can email the president, Cara Connors, at cara.connors@uconn.edu.

Professor Matheou’s Exhibit @ the Benton Blends Art and Science With Teaching

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George Matheou and his exhibit at the William Benton Museum of Art. (UConn Photo/Eli Freund)

By: Alexandra Meropoulos, Student Written Communications Specialist, UConn School of Engineering

Art and science are two fields that appear to be worlds apart at first glance, but according to George Matheou, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, the intersection between the two are actually extremely important. This notion became the inspiration behind his art exhibit called Fluid Dynamics in Art and Nature at the William Benton Museum of Art. 

Read more by following this link.

Norato Receives ASME Young Investigator Award

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by Kassidy Manness
ME Communications
kassidy.manness@uconn.edu

During the 45th Annual Design Automation Conference, held by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) this past summer, Mechanical Engineering Professor Julián Norato has been awarded the prestigious Design Automation Young Investigator Award.

Prof. Norato receiving the award from Prof. Chris Mattson on behalf of the Design Automation Committee

This award is given once each year “to recognize an outstanding young investigator who is making noteworthy contributions in the area of design automation, including research in design representation, design optimization, design evaluation, and/or design integration.” The award was presented at the ASME’s Design Automation Conference, which was held on August 18-21, 2019 in Anaheim, California. This conference brings together every year international experts in the field of design automation.

Norato was given this award based on the work and research he has done in topology optimization. Topology optimization is a computational methodology to automatically design parts to maximize structural strength with minimal amounts of material in the most efficient and effective way. A major focus of Norato’s research group is to do the topology optimization employing exclusively certain shapes, like bars or plates, that make manufacturing with conventional processes easier. 

 

An example of the work Norato does with topology optimization

Prof. Christopher Mattson presented the award to Prof. Norato “in recognition of his expertise in topology optimization, specifically his advances in stress-based topology optimization and development of the geometry projection method” and to “recognize his continuous and dedicated service to the Design Automation Conference and his outreach to the community.” 

Fueling the Fire: Studying Flame Behavior to Improve Combustion Systems

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The power you feel underneath you when you’re on a plane as it takes off is tremendous. The physics that enable the remarkable feat of lifting a 175,000-pound midsize commercial aircraft into the sky and keeping it there are just as incredible – and complicated.

There are four components to a commercial aircraft gas turbine engine: the fan that produces most of the thrust, the compressor, which compresses the incoming air, the combustor which burns the fuel to create high-energy gas, and the turbine that produces work from that gas to power the fan and exhaust to produce additional thrust.

The challenge in this system is keeping the flame in the combustor burning. Flame blowoff can occur when the air flow speed is very high, or the fuel-air mixture is weak so that the flame cannot be stabilized, so it moves downstream and eventually extinguishes itself.

University of Connecticut professor of mechanical engineering, Baki Cetegen has received $320,000 from the National Science Foundation to study this problem by investigating how different fuels and high levels of flow turbulence affect the occurrence of flame blowoff.

Read more on UConn Today

Chih-Jen (Jackie) Sung Named Combustion Institute Fellow

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By: Eli Freund, Editorial Communications Manager, UConn School of Engineering 

The UConn School of Engineering is proud to announce that Mechanical Engineering Professor Chih-Jen Sung has been recognized as one of the 2019 Class of Fellows for The Combustion Institute.

Sung joins a class of 38 accomplished international scholars from industry, academia, and the public sector, and was recognized for “novel contributions to flame dynamics and structure, and development of rapid compression machines to enhance understanding of low-temperature chemistry.”

Read the School of Engineering announcement.

ME Students Revamp Hartford’s Historic Keney Clock Tower

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After a four-year vacation, the Historic Keney Clock is telling time again thanks to senior design project completed by Mechanical Engineering students seniors Henry Courchaine ’19, Garrett Murphy ’19, and Spencer Padget ’19 advised by Thomas Mealy. The project was a collaboration between UConn, the City of Hartford and Friends of Keney Park.

Through our Senior Design Program, directed by Prof. Vito Moreno, industrial sponsors put the bright UConn ME undergraduate students to work on a real-world problem that they are interested in researching, while reaping the benefits of our faculty’s experience and expertise. The renovation of the Historic Keney Clock Tower is one of the more than 65 senior design projects that Mechanical Engineering students worked on during the 2018-2019 academic year.

For additional information, please see the article in UConn Today or the press coverage, including:

 

Our Senior Design Program Leads to Mutually Beneficial Partnerships with Industry

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Through our Senior Design Program, industrial sponsors put the bright UConn ME undergraduate students to work on a real-world problem that they are interested in researching, while reaping the benefits of our faculty’s experience and expertise. For students, this program is an opportunity to synthesize and apply the classroom engineering knowledge they have acquired. They delve further into various aspects of product development process, and are experiencing first hand how ethics affect engineering decisions, how professionals communicate ideas and the day-to-day implications of design decisions and of intellectual property.

Here is a podcast, part of Simsbury Bank’s “Manufacturing Matters” initiative, in which CEO Martin Geitz discusses a UConn Engineering Senior Design partnership with EDAC Technologies that has provided a mechanism to hire some of our talented engineering graduates while providing solutions to one of the company’s major challenges.

 

From left to right in the video: Kenneth Osborn (Engineering Manager, EDAC), Emily Sweeney (UConn senior), Martin Geitz (CEO, Simsbury Bank) and Prof. Vito Moreno (UConn).