Showcase, final presentation, and wrapping up

The team traveled to Houston on Monday to participate in the semester’s TSGC Design Challenge Showcase at South Shore Harbor in League City, TX. The event was amazing! We were all very impressed with the amount of thought and work that Debbie and the TSGC crew put in to make the day awesome. From binders with all the teams’ info to our team patches made into buttons, to gift bags with some TSGC swag, they thought of absolutely everything.

The day started with a poster session, where all the teams had poster and prototype displays that the judges could stroll around and look at. We all stood by our poster to discuss our project with the Showcase attendees and answer any questions about our design.

Next up was the presentation portion of the day. We presented an abbreviated (15 minute) version of our final presentation, followed by a five minute Q&A session. The judges had some very insightful questions, and overall our presentation was very effective and glitch-free!

After lunch and a few more presentations came the awards ceremony, and we were thrilled with our success! In addition 1st Place Design Team (1st semester), 1st Place Paper Submission, and 1st Place Showcase Presentation, the team came away with ten other awards recognizing our hard work over the course of the semester. Not only were the accolades appreciated, but each came with a small scholarship which really added up!

The next day way presented to our professor and classmates here at UT, and the presentation went equally as smoothly. It was great to have the Showcase presentation the day before, since it was a good dry run for our presentation on Tuesday that actually counts for our grade!

Now all that’s left before graduation is the Final Report, which the team has already begun compiling. It’s been an exciting and edifying semester, and we’d like to thank everyone involved in our project who made it great: Dr. Crawford, Travis McEvoy, Dr. Seepersad, Debbie Mullins, and last but not least our sponsor, Robert Trevino. We hope that other design teams and NASA can use our work in the future to advance manned spaceflight, and we are happy to have contributed to the future of space exploration. Thank you also to those of you who kept up with this blog with our (approximately) weekly updates! And with that, it’s goodbye from the Litter Mermaids.

Houston, we’re signing off. Over and out.

Currently listening to: “The Final Countdown” by Europe.

Prototyping and Finalizing Presentation

Hey, fans and followers of the Litter Mermaids!

We just received our 1/6 scaled prototype from the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) lab here on the first floor of the ME building at UT. We’re really excited that it turned out so well and we can’t wait to show it off at the Design Showcase on Monday!

Sam and Adam acting like proud parents with the SLS prototyped litter

The SLS machine was not able to produce the relatively thin and fragile textile back support, so the team will fabricate one by hand during the next few days.

The SLS prototype of the litter in the deployed configuration.

The team has also been hard at work finalizing their PowerPoint slides for next week’s presentations at the Design Challenge and for the UT ME Senior Design Projects Program. We’re a little nervous but overall very excited to be so close to the culmination of our semesters’ (and entire college careers’, yikes…) work. We’ve got a fair amount of work to get done in the next few days, so stay tuned to see how it all turns out!

Current Song: “Howlin’ at the Moon” by Hank Williams

Design Finalization

The team is currently engaged in the process of solid modeling, calculating, and researching in order to finalize the geometry, materials, and dimensions of the final rescue litter. Calculations were conducted to determine the necessary size of our litter’s hinge, and finite element analysis to find the minimum base thickness is pending. Here are some screenshots of the solid model parts and assemblies being developed:

Tether Attach Point

Outer Hinge Part

Litter Assembly

We’ll be finishing our Showcase poster and our PowerPoint presentation by the end of this week, so we can spend next week practicing presenting. Also in progress is the Selective Laser Sintering scale prototype of our model. After the Showcase and our UT class presentation, all that stands between us and graduation is the Final Report!

Currently listening to: “Moonage Daydream” by David Bowie

Presentation at Tau Beta Pi Meeting

After volunteering at Space Day, that evening the team gave a presentation on their senior design work for the Texas Alpha chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society. The 15-minute presentation gave the audience of 75 UT engineering students information on what it really meant to be in senior design, details on our specific project with NASA, as well as advice on getting through your last semester in one piece.

 

Jason gives background information into the team's project with NASA

Adam and Jason listen as Sam answers an audience member's question about being in senior design.

The presentation was lighthearted and gave the mainly sophomore and junior student audience a great snapshot into what to expect from a typical senior design project. Sam’s advice: “If you want to get outvoted on everything, try picking twins as your senior design teammates.”

Current song: “I Wish I was the Moon” by Neko Case

NASA Space Day on the Texas Capitol Lawn

This past Thursday, the Litter Mermaids spent the afternoon volunteering with TSGC for NASA’s Space Day on the Capitol Lawn in Austin. The weather was awesome, the location perfect, and there was a large number of elementary school students excited to do some fun projects, not to mention free Amy’s ice cream!

Adam and Sam helping students during Space Day

We helped Margaret from TSGC at their booth by helping the kids make straw rockets. We got to interact with a large number of kids and it was truly a pleasure to see them get excited about NASA at such an early age.

Adam helping some students make straw rockets

We’ve all had some pretty extensive volunteering experience through organizations like UT SEEK (Student Engineers Educating Kids), Tau Beta Pi, and Kappa Kappa Psi, and it’s always really rewarding to introduce kids to engineering and science, in hopes that they someday will become the next generation of inventors and thinkers.

UT Engineers + TSGC = ❤

Current song: “Man on the Moon” by R.E.M.

Back to work!

Hey, everyone!

We all had a great time on our respective Spring Breaks (Sam won’t stop wearing his multiple new Hawaii shirts…), but it’s time to get back to the grind. We’ve spent the first part of this week finishing up our next report for our UT senior design program, as well as doing some preliminary design embodiment work.

Much of the work that is still to be done is dependent on having a detailed 3D solid model of our litter design, so we’ve begun the (somewhat painstaking) task of modeling it in SolidWorks. None of us have really touched this software since our freshman year graphics course, so it’s definitely going to take some time.

Sam CADing our beast of a litter. No, it's not a bobsled.

We’ve also been working on finalizing our material selection, and from here we can start to validate our design through a variety of techniques.

We just booked our hotel for the Design Showcase in Houston, so we’re looking forward to heading to Space City soon!

Current song: “Rocket Experience” by Buzz Aldrin (AKA Doc Rendezvous), produced by Snoop Dogg

The Litter Mermaids are on Vacation!

Greetings!

As mentioned in our previous entry, we are currently on Spring Break getting some much-needed R&R before the final push of our college careers.

Boston skyline after takeoff from Logan Airport

No worries though, as the team has made significant headway in terms of project scheduling, and is almost a week early on its Gantt chart.

We are looking forward to the coming month, with the hopes that our final multipurpose rescue litter design will take home accolades at the Design Challenge Showcase in Houston. We know that our final design is well thought out; we just need to convince NASA of it!

Current song: “Space Jam Theme Song” composed by James Newton Howard

Team Patch

In keeping with the TSGC requirement for each team to design a patch, we have created the following insignia to represent our team and project. We’re planning on getting a few printed on stickers!

The Litter Mermaids Team Patch

Here’s the writeup on the patch that we included in our Design Review:

The team has designed a patch to reflect the spirit of the design project and the solidarity of the team members. The border features the last names of the three team members, as well as the project title, “Multipurpose Lunar Rescue Litter”. The center portion of the patch uses a moon graphic, representing the final destination of our litter design and the huge influence the lunar environment has had in our design process. The title “MLRL” stands for the project title, and below it can be seen the team name, “The Litter Mermaids”. The mission number, STS-266K pays homage to the traditional shuttle mission prefix, “STS”, as well as the UT Austin mechanical engineering design project class identifier, ME266K. In the center of the patch lies an orange longhorn, showing the team’s school spirit. The red, white, and blue color scheme symbolizes the iconic NASA logo colors, found on United States space hardware for decades.­

Current song: “Ziggy Stardust” by David Bowie

Design Review and Mid-term Report

On Monday, we had our Design Review presentation for our senior design class. The presentation went over very well and we were happy to get some constructive feedback from our peers. Since then, we’ve been focusing our efforts on writing and compiling the Design Review/Mid-term report for both TSGC and the UT ME department. It’s definitely not the most exhilarating thing to do when the weather outside is 74°F with clear skies, but somebody’s gotta do it!

Who says editting a paper can't be exciting?!

The midway point of the semester has come and past and it’s starting to sink in that we will be finishing up our undergraduate careers before we know it. The deadline for the project is coming up quickly, but we’re all confident we can deliver an excellent solution to NASA’s needs in the time allotted.

After we get done writing this report, it’ll be time for a well-deserved Spring Break vacation. Sam will be going on a family trip to Hawaii and putting his newly-certified SCUBA skills to work (let’s hope he knows what he’s doing). On the complete opposite end of the vacation spectrum, Adam and I will be visiting our hard-working-graduate-engineering-student-of-a-sister in Boston for a few days (brrrr…) before meeting up with our parents in Tennessee for the remainder of the week.

Hope everyone has a great Spring Break!

Jason and the rest of the Litter Mermaids

Current song: “Bowie’s in Space” by the Flight of the Conchords

Concept Selection

After last week’s final 6-3-5 concept generation session, the team was ready to move into concept selection. We chose design contenders based on feasibility, our sponsor’s constraints, and our self-generated requirements and constraints from our specification sheet.

After discussing and gradually eliminating designs, we ended up with five unique concepts that drew from our entire pool of ideas that were generated in the previous weeks. Next, we began vetting the five contenders against each other to determine where each design’s advantages lay.

First, we implemented a Pugh Chart, which compares designs’ abilities in many areas compared to a ‘datum’, or baseline design. From this exercise, we identified the best and worst aspects of each of the five designs. This knowledge was then used to construct an Advantage Matrix, a concept selection technique we developed to weight the importance of different litter features.

Our next step is to create our Design Review presentation report for submission to TSGC and our senior design program instructors. We will be summarizing the background of our project, as well as our methodology and progress, and concluding with our plans for future work. The semester’s halfway point is today, and we’ve made a ton of progress! Stay tuned for info about our Design Review.

Hard at work in the K Lab selecting concepts!

Current song: “Space Olympics” by The Lonely Island