MAE Department Moves into Its New Facility on the West Campus Research Annex
October 10, 2005
By Dr. N Ma, NCSU

The continued increase in enrollment at NC State and building renovation plans have caused a number of relocations in the College of Engineering . As part of this plan, the MAE department vacated the ground floor in the Diesel Wing of Broughton Hall. An 11,000 square foot facility with 5,200 square feet of flexible laboratory space, faculty and student office space, and a conference room was completed on the West Campus Research Annex in March of 2005. We have coined this facility “MAE west.” A brief description of the four activities located in this facility is given below.

Wolfpack Motorsports

Wolfpack Motorsports is an extracurricular student organization in the MAE department under the direction of Dr. Eric Klang, that designs, builds and races vehicles in international student competitions. The competitions are hosted by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).

The object of each competition is to provide SAE student members with a challenging project that involves the planning and manufacturing tasks found when introducing a new product to the consumer industrial market. Teams compete against one another to have their design accepted for manufacture by a fictitious firm. Students must function as a team not only to design, build, test, promote, and race a vehicle within the limits of the rules, but also to generate financial support for their project and manage their educational priorities.

Students in the Wolfpack Motorsports program build two distinct vehicles: an off-road Mini-Baja car and a road racing Formula style car. The vehicles are judged in three different categories: static inspection & engineering design, solo performance trials and high-performance track endurance. Since the founding of Wolfpack Motorsports in 1998 the team has done remarkably well.

• 7 th Place , 2005 Formula SAE
• 8 th Place , 2003 Formula SAE
• 2 nd Place , 2001 Midwest Mini-Baja
• Rookie of the Year, 2000 Formula SAE

Recently Wolfpack Motorsports was given a new 1600 sq. ft. facility on NCSU's West Campus. This new facility, fully outfitted with machine and fabrication tools has much more space than previous facilities and has the student members of Wolfpack Motorsports excited about the future of their program.

2004 Wolfpack Motorsports Team: Mini-Baja / White, Formula SAE / Black

Manufacturing Processes Laboratory

The research in Dr. Gracious Ngaile's lab focuses on modeling and optimization of metal forming processes, tribology for metal forming and tool design. Currently, there are two major projects that are being carried out, namely, (1) study of the mechanics and control pertaining to meso and macro hydroforming of complex parts, and (2) development of environmentally benign lubricants for cold forging processes. This laboratory houses a hydraulic press with a 150 ton vertical cylinder and two 50 ton axial cylinders, a 10,000 PSI pump, load cells and data acquisition system. The axial cylinders are used for hydroforming processes whereas the vertical cylinder can be fitted with four different tribotest rigs. These tribology experiments included the spike test, double cup extrusion test, ring test, and ball penetration test. The figure below shows a hydroforming set-up in the 150 ton hydraulic press.

Mechatronics and Bio-manufacturing Laboratory

Dr. Melur Ramasubramanian's research laboratory is also located in the MAE West Building. His research interests are in the area of Mechatronics. His current work is focused on biosensors and bio-manufacturing. In one of the projects, supported by the National Science Foundation, he is studying the mechanics of a mosquito bite for the drawing of blood to help guide in the development of painless needles. He is collaborating on this project with Dr. Juei Tu, also located in MAE West, to explore laser micro-drilling for needle manufacturing applications. In another project, a sensor for bedside cross-matching for error-free blood transfusion is being developed. In this project, scattering of light by agglutinated particles is measured using photodiodes and an algorithm for the identification of agglutination due to mismatch of blood types has been implemented. A Department of Energy supported project to develop sensors for non-contact stiffness measurement of moving flexible discrete objects like paper, and non-contact chemical composition detection using fluorescence measurements in paper are also in progress. Other areas include paper manufacturing, cup forming, and intelligent machine design.

Laser Material Processing Laboratory

With the startup support of the MAE department and over $120,000 in research funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Juei Tu has constructed advanced facilities for laser material processing, based on a 300 W state-of-the-art fiber optic coupled laser. Specific projects underway in this lab include (1) characterizing keyhole plasma and absorption mechanisms for improving high speed, very deep penetration laser beam welding, (2) fatigue crack detection and repair via laser welding and composite patch for aircraft structural components, (3) development of a localized heat treatment tool for shape memory alloy (SMA) wires using a ytterbium fiber optic laser, (4) laser ablation using long-pulsed, 300 w, cw, single mode fiber optic laser, and (5) laser welding aluminum alloy 7075-t6 through the use of a 300 w, single-mode, ytterbium fiber optic laser.

Pictures: top/left: Laser setup; top/right: SMA heat treatment; bottom/left: laser welding of aluminum; bottom/right: laser ablation for micro-hole drilling