Summary:

I am a recent graduate, spring 2014, and have planned on moving to Colorado ever since a snowboarding trip I took there my first year of college in 2009. I have been there many times since and the worst part was that I always had to leave. I am currently living in Boulder Colorado and working a temporary job. With that said I am a self motivated person and always eager to learn new skills. I am very excited to be entering the professional engineering field and look forward to finding a career in Colorado.

Qualifications:

I am skilled with 3D design (most proficient with SolidWorks), and the design process in general. In addition the designs themselves I have experience with finite element analysis, so I can accurately and thoroughly analyze designs before prototyping or manufacturing. For my senior design project our team of five mechanical engineering students, including myself, were tasked with designing an expandable surgical drill bit for a surgeon at BayCare Clinic in Green Bay, WI. I was honored that my design concept was chosen for the final design. The main idea for the design was to incorporate as few moving parts as possible into the design because of the extremely small scale of the drill bit (~4 mm collapsed ~8mm expanded). More parts, more often than not for this design meant smaller components and higher likeliness of failure under stresses. The opportunity to be a part of the design was a great learning experience for me. Prior to the project I had never worked on a design on such a small scale requiring extreme precision and robust design. The project also allowed the team and I to work closely with some of the professors in the biology department at UW Platteville as well as the cadaver lab to perform some dissections to further our understanding of the human anatomy relating to the design.

In addition to the typical mechanical engineering courses I am educated in both thermal and mechanical design of internal combustion engines. Not only has this expanded my knowledge it has helped improve my understanding of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and dynamic mechanical systems

Outside of my formal education I very much enjoy designing, building "things", woodworking and more. One of my recently completed projects was a small thermal former (vacuum former) that I built. It has a work space of ~13" x 13". Every component for the entire design was purchased from the local hardware store expect for a $5 coiled heating element that was slightly modified to work in the design and some ceramic supports for the heating element which I made at the UW Platteville campus art building. The completed thermal former works quite well and was relatively cheap to produce (under $200) especially since it is designed to attach to many wet/dry vacuum designs.

Another project I had been working on for few weeks was recently completed as well. The project was to design and implement a temperature control device for a germination station (ultimately for the aquaponics system at my family’s home in WI). The device controls the temperature of the rock wool cubes in the germination station. A heating pad plugs into the device which is, itself, plugged into a standard 120V outlet, and is controlled by a small PLC board and mechanical relay. The device logic is similar to a standard thermostat and operates based on the feedback from an epoxy insulated thermistor placed strategically in the rock wool. In addition to fabricating the device which includes a 16x2 character LCD, three tactile switches, and an yellow indication LED to show when the mechanical relay is closed and delivering 120V AC to whatever is plugged into the device (in this case the heating pad), I wrote the code that controls the device. Other than an “include” file for the LCD, and EEPROM (to access EEPROM on the PLC) the code is unique to this device. The device allows the user to save a desired temperature to the EEPROM so that it will be stored when the device is powered off and on. The completed device is currently in use and has been running 24/7 since late June 2014 with no issue; it is also considerably smaller than comparable devices currently for sale. Future iterations of the device will include additional features such as a “sleep mode” that turns the LCD off after no buttons have been

pressed for a specific time, an easier access reset button onboard the device, an easy access serial port to allow for easier updating of the code, and a few other small changes to circuitry.

Below are some pictures of the temperature controller as it was being constructed and tested:

Below are pictures of the thermal/vacuum former I built: