Engineering showcase to highlight graduating students’ final projects

Kailan Martin
Tue, 23 Apr 2019 00:25:57 +0000
Campus, News, Abbott Nutrition, Bob Rhoads, college of engineering, Edu Technologic, engineering capstone design, honda, jeni's splendid ice creams, Madison Holdsworth, Nationwide Insurance, NetJets, ohio state, ohio state engineering capstone design, ohio union, Procter & Gamble, Smart Columbus, Trevor Lynd

Madison Holdsworth, a fourth-year in mathematics, shows off her senior project for the Engineering Capstone Design Showcase. Photo Credit: Kailan Martin | Senior Lantern Reporter

For the 12th year in a row, the College of Engineering will host the Engineering Capstone Design Showcase, which will consist of more than 250 senior undergraduate engineering capstone design projects.

Individual students and teams will present their projects and findings that they have been working on for either one or two semesters to the Ohio State community and industry officials.

Bob Rhoads, director of the multidisciplinary capstone program, said the projects will be presented in a poster-style presentation, but some will present prototypes of their final projects.

“If they built any kind of prototypes or models or simulations, whether they be on a computer, whether they be on a physical prototype that you can actually interact with, there’s a lot of variety you’ll see [Tuesday],” Rhoads said. “This is their last kickoff event before they go into a profession or they go into another step into their future career.”

More than 70 companies sponsor the engineering capstone projects, including Abbott Nutrition, Edu Technologic, Honda, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, Nationwide Insurance, NetJets, Procter & Gamble and Smart Columbus.

There are also multiple nonengineering students who participate in the showcase, like Madison Holdsworth.

Holdsworth, a fourth-year in mathematics, and Trevor Lynd, a fourth-year in chemical engineering, said they started the recycle contaminating sticker project — sponsored by Waste Management — in August.

Lynd said Waste Management wanted to start applying stickers that informed neighborhoods on how they’re poorly recycling after they’ve contaminated a batch.

“The only problem was that this took them too long to manually apply stickers,” Lynd said. “So, their proposal was if we could create a mechanism that could attach to one of their recycling trucks, that with a press of a button could just apply a sticker to a recycling bin.”

Holdsworth said this is a way for customers to physically go out and take the sticker off the bin and to realize they contaminated something.

“The problem is that, for example, I don’t know that I’m recycling stuff that’s not supposed to be and so the sticker is going to be there to tell me, you’re doing this wrong,” she said.

Lynd said the showcase will allow him to see what his peers have been working on all semester because they spend so much time on their own.

“I’m hoping to see what a lot of other people have been working on,” Lynd said. “I think there is a lot of interesting things going on at Ohio State.”

Holdsworth added that she is looking forward to people being interested in their project and improving recycling.

The engineering showcase will be from 3 to 6:30 p.m.Tuesday in the Ohio Union Archie Griffin Grand Ballroom and the Performance Hall.