Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 1 No. 4 | Page 12

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12

Additive
Manufacturing
projects bring
ideas to life
Senior undergraduate students and first year graduate students recently finished a course where members of the groups team up to design and produce
items using additive manufacturing techniques.
"The course is about more than making cool stuff,"
says Associate Professor Chris Williams, who instructs the course. "The idea is to go beyond lecturing and have students be able to do the cost modeling, materials selection, research, and ultimately,
to fabricate using an emerging technology. Industry
has a need for engineers who know how to use this
technology and take advantage of the strengths of
additive manufacturing."
In addition to providing valuable technical skills, the
class provides graduate students mentoring opportunities and undergraduates the opportunity to engage
in graduate-level work.
Among the teams finishing their projects in December is Vy Nguyen, a first-year MSME student
who studies gas turbines, and her teammates Olivia
Heisner and Cecilia Stout, both senior undergraduates in ME. Together they designed a powerless
cellphone amplifier.

"The idea started
during a trip to
Uganda with Engineers Without Borders," Nguyen said.
"We were watching
a movie on an iPad
and we placed in
it a box and made
holes to redirect the
sound."
The simple contraption not only
directed the sound
but also amplified it,
so the team began
to look at designs to
passively amplify sound from a cell phone.
The team's final product features eight holes for
sound in any direction, weighs about 360 grams, and
is about one-quarter of an inch thick. Nguyen says
they think a redesign can reduce the weight and
thickness by nearly half.
Above Vy Nguyen
shows the second design for a cell phone
powerless amplifier.
At left the designs
the group tried. The
final design at far
right sends sound
out in all directions
and Nguyen says with
minor redesign, could
be made nearly half
as thick and at nearly
half its current 360
gram weight.