SWIEIT Speakers’ Visit – Loreto Normanhurst, 30 May

On 30 May SWIEIT Speakers Ashwini (BEngDipEngPrac) and Harshaa Raha (BEng BBus DipEngPrac) visited Loreto Normanhurst to speak with a cohort of year 10 students. Harshaa spoke about how her interest in engineering developed through her experiences travelling internationally, which lead her to pursue a career in the field. Ashwini outlined...

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Women in male-dominated industries: A toolkit of strategies

This year, the Australian Human Rights Commission in conjunction with the Office for Women in the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs released a 'toolkit' aimed at addressing some of the issues facing women in male-dominated industries. The 'toolkit' is designed as a resource for employers and employees,...

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Lucy Mentoring Launch 2013

On 15 May the Lucy Mentoring Program Launch for 2013 was hosted by Westpac at their offices in Sydney CBD.  The night was an opportunity for student mentees and mentors to meet for the first time and network.  The Program this year has seen a record 48 female Engineering and IT students paired with professional women from over 18...

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Upcoming Civil Engineering Industry talk - National Association of Women in Construction - 20 May

Calling all students and young professionals studying or working in civil engineering fields for a FREE evening of professional talks from the National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC) on 20 May.Read more below: http://www.nawic.com.au/index.cfm?MenuID=4&CFID=2525253&CFTOKEN=78945939&EventID=439...

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Manufacturing Processes

The Manufacturing Processes class toured two facilities in the cities on April 30th. The two facilities were Medtronics and MTS. While MTS designs and builds very innovative, often one of a kind, test equipment, I was definitely more impressed with Medtronics. Medtronics is a, if not the, world leader in the manufacturing of medical devices. However, this was not what sets this company apart. What sets this company apart...

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Journey to the 2013 Shell Eco-marathon

In the spring of 2012, a group of Itasca Community College Students (ICC) embarked on a project to build a battery-electric powered Urban Concept car for the 2013 Shell Eco-marathon. An Urban Concept car differs from a Prototype in that it more accurately represents a production model car; it has headlights, taillights, turn signals, a...

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SWIEIT Speakers' visit - Newcastle Region

The Sydney Women in Engineering & IT (SWIEIT) Speakers' Program visited Newcastle on Friday 10 May to speak to some lovely female students at St Philip's Christian College (Waratah campus) and Warner's Bay High School. UTS speakers' Amy and Laura spoke alongside civil and mechanical engineering students from the University of Newcastle at St Philip's Christian College. Amy, UTS mechanical engineering student and Railcorp Women...

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Force Testing at the Mesabi Eveleth Campus

The Detroit Diesel design group was at the Mesabi Eveleth Campus conducting experiment testing. The experiment testing involved measuring the forces required to pull the top component off a Detroit Diesel electronic controller (shown below). The top of this component was pulled up by the overhead gantry crane....

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What I learned about designDesign is critical to every stage of your product. As we build these projects it seems that one of the things that gets neglected is to make changes to the design to accommodate for changes in the materials and amounts of materials. Changing the bill of materials needed to build the product can change design specifications in very critical ways. For example take my team's project The Urban Concept Car...

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J1 Project

In the first semester of our junior year (J1) is the Iron Range Engineering (IRE) lingo for the first project which all students participate in.  There are many projects to choose from, and each student decides for themselves which one is most interesting.  Dan Schmitz and I chose an ergonomic based project from a company out of Hibbing, MN named Design Manufacture and Remanufacture (DMR) owned by Detroit Diesel. ...

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Machining with the new equipment

In the new manufacturing lab, the Flow waterjet machine has been used the most frequently by groups at IRE and also for outside projects.  The waterjet allows for precise cutting of various different materials with different thicknesses.  This precision is necessary when machining unique parts for different projects.  The first...

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More G5 Development

As I mentioned in previous posts, due to the larger and heavier parachute, the rocket also had to get bigger and more powerful. This necessitated an entire rocket development project as part of the overall CAPS design.Every part of the rocket, its attachment to the parachute, and installation into the airplane had to be looked at, redesigned,...

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Modeling at IRE

This device was cut from clear acrylic sheeting using IRE's CO2 laser cutter and bonded together using acetone. This was implemented in the Matrix Vasoconstrictor Team's project which is a continuation of the team's mentor, Les Flemming's doctoral dissertation. The small 1/8" silicone tubing was used as a micro-valve to direct hot and cold...

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Manufacturing Processes Tour

Yesterday, April 30th, the students participating in the Manufacturing Processes competency went on a tour to Medtronic and MTS in order to see what they do and how they do it. I thought that the visit to MTS was great because they not only design and manufacture testing systems, they design unique test systems based upon their customers’ requirements. There were tons of different machines and some big systems that they had built....

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Medtronic Tour

A number of students this semester are taking a competency called Manufacturing Processes with Bart Johnson.  As a part of this class, we study different methods of manufacturing different products.  We have studied plastics manufacturing, composite materials, one of a kind production, and clean room manufacturing.After doing research on clean room manufacturing, we toured Medtronic yesterday, April 30th.  Medtronic...

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