The Winter 03 Design Exposition will be held at the Media Union atrium from 1:00-5:00 p.m., Thursday, April 10.
As in previous years, the Department of Mechanical Engineering is pleased to showcase ME 250, ME 350 and ME 450, the three courses in the undergraduate Mechanical Engineering curriculum focusing on Design and Manufacturing. Each course features at least one design project that requires a creative application of fundamental engineering concepts toward the manufacture of proof-of-concept prototypes. It is these prototypes, and accompanying posters and presentations, that are presented during the Expo.
Over the course of the semester, the students in these courses engage in a process of determining customer specifications, generating creative concepts, and performing in-depth engineering analysis. This year, students in ME 250 have designed and prototyped various concepts for a College ID Key holder. In ME 350 ( http://me.engin.umich.edu/news/news/2003_04_08_ME350.shtml ), students were given the task of designing a mechanism to perform motion, path, or function generation, with topics only limited by their imagination. In ME 450, a total of 37 separate faculty and industry sponsored projects were undertaken and prototyped. It is these projects which will be most visible at the Expo, ranging in scope from automotive to biomedical and beyond.
The Design Expo brochure describing all projects is available for download ( http://me.engin.umich.edu/news/news/expo_brochure.pdf ), and a photo album of past projects is available on our news web site ( http://me.engin.umich.edu/news/news/DesignExpo/ ). All these projects are possible thanks to the active involvement of many industrial, faculty, and community sponsors. This interface to the “real world” provides a constant set of new challenges which feed the open-ended educational experience that prepares our students for careers in Mechanical Engineering.
The Expo is free and open to the public.