As Calvin’s graduating student engineers geared up for their annual Senior Projects Night, they put in a lot of hours in the college’s Engineering Building.
The 24th annual showcase of design projects by Calvin College graduating student engineers featured an open house for family, friends, faculty, and other well-wishers.
The showcase highlights projects that take senior engineering teams an entire academic year to produce. The teams, comprising student engineers from the electrical, civil and environmental, electrical and computer, mechanical, and chemical concentrations, form early in the fall semester. They dream up a project to address a specific engineering challenge, and by spring they have a working prototype.
This year’s 16 projects included everything from a hovercraft to an electronic stethoscope to treatment facilities for drinking and wastewater in an Ecuadoran village.
The team producing the stethoscope consisted of electrical and computer engineers Nate Brinks, Andy Gabler, Ben Moes, and David van Geest. Their prototype is a significant improvement on existing electronic models. Another team transformed an unlikely resource salvaged from the Calvin campus into a fuel source. Mechanical engineers Adebo Alao, Joshua Harbert, and Fred Thielke and chemical engineers Mitch Kenyon and Christian Ocier converted waste vegetable oil from the college’s dining halls into biodiesel fuel.
Read about all of the senior engineering design projects at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/engineering/senior-design.
About the Author
Myrna Anderson is a senior writer in Calvin College’s communications and marketing department.
