MENOMONIE — Paul Craig, instrumentation innovator-instruction and program director at UW-Stout, said a big objective for students when designing their prototype is “process improvement.”
At UW-Stout, many engineering students were tasked with designing industry solutions for their Senior Design Experience capstone course.
“This will be manufacturing engineering, mechanical engineering, computer and electrical engineers as well. And then, we have projects that are in the packaging group and plastic as well,” said Craig. “All of the disciplines have some form of a capstone, and this can be a problem which is brought in from one of our industry sponsors or sometimes I talk to my former students and ask if they have got anything that we can work on.”
Craig continued, and said what they essentially do is take a look at a process or some form of small automation and develop a solution to a problem.
In focusing on that aspect of small automation, he said the work of the students is not detrimental to the industry as they have an entire two semester timeframe to develop their prototype.
Over the course of the two-year projects, Craig said they run almost 12 to 15 projects a semester which students pick out of a range of possibilities. For that reason and in order to safely monitor the projects, they typically rely on three professors.
“All the projects come in and as an instructor, we take a look at them first and make sure they are appropriate — number one — and that we can accomplish them,” said Craig.
This year, one group that stood out was a hinge assembly project that was closely monitored by its industry sponsor: a $3 billion a year global company called nVent based out of St. Louis Park, Minn. Their goal was to find a method of installing hinges in nVent products that was automated as opposed to their current method of installation by hand. Their solution utilized robots as an alternative.
“It’s cool to see it finally come to life and have the motion we were hoping for,” Evan Zaves, a senior in manufacturing engineering, said in a press release from the University.
But plenty of other corporations involve themselves with the students to sponsor their work, including companies like Viracon, Fastenal, DiaSorin, Industrial Heat Transfer, Loos Machine and Automation, St. Croix Tactical Manufacturing and Graco, with several of those companies sponsoring multiple projects.
With a chance to create something useful for an industry, Craig said there are positives to this collaboration on both sides.
Craig said, “I think it is a really good partnership between our industry partnerships and our programs, because it benefits all parties. The industry sponsor is getting some sort of a solution that they can use… they are also getting access to meet the students and talk to the students.”
It's something that Stout has been doing for awhile, said Craig, as the opportunity challenges students and incentivizes them to think outside of the box with their solutions. With some of the students finishing up their projects this past spring and others continuing and aiming for completion at the end of the next semester, more engineering students will begin work on their industry prototypes in the fall as well.
“Quite often, the students will take road blocks… so they have to take a look and evaluate it as far as, ‘That’s not gonna work, what else can we do?’... They learn to be very flexible and they have to kind of learn to roll with the punches and adapt,” said Craig. “It’s a fascinating process to watch the growth of the students; the engineering skill sets they are learning are amazing.”
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