ISE Senior Design: Kroger

Paul Barina,
Senior, Industrial and Systems Engineering

Athens, OH 18 April 2013 – Our senior design project was in coordination with Kroger Corporation, which is one of the nation’s largest grocery chains, at their store right here in Athens. We are focused on the front-end operations, which deal with the checkout process. We as a team are in charge of making this process more efficient. Making things better is the heart and soul of Industrial & Systems Engineering.

We spent countless hours in the local Kroger grocery store collecting valuable data. This data provided the foundation for our project, where we applied Six Sigma methods. Six Sigma is a tool used by Industrial & System Engineers used to reduce variance and promote efficiency. It can be used in tandem with Lean Manufacturing which reduces waste within a given process. These efficiency tools helped us find areas of improvement within the front end of Kroger. When we find these areas of possible improvement, it is then onto improving the process. This is where the real fun begins. With our suggestions there are millions of dollars at stake to be saved.

These projects create a great opportunity for students like me to get out into the real world and work for real corporations. This is something I plan on putting on my resume and remaining proud of the work I have accomplished with the rest of my team. Senior design is a great way to end my journey here at Ohio University as an undergraduate student. I will use the lessons I’ve learned for the rest of my life.

ISE Senior Design: O’ Bleness Surgical Equipment

Steve Burns,
Senior, Industrial and Systems Engineering

Athens, OH 7 March 2013 – As a senior in the industrial and systems engineering program, I am currently involved in our program’s senior design class. The senior project involves the class splitting into groups of 3 or 4 people, and taking on a project for a real world company. My groups project is with the local hospital in Athens, O’Bleness Memorial Hospital. These real world projects are a great way to close out the years spent in school and prepare you for a career upon graduation.

The project my team has involves the movement of surgical equipment through the operating rooms at the hospital. We are investigating the reasons that items may be missing from an operating room when a surgery is set to begin. The overall goal of the project is to create a more efficient flow of items from inventory to individual operating rooms, ensuring that no surgical items are missing.

I am really enjoying this opportunity to work on this project. The senior capstone course really helps to bring together all the tools and concepts I have learned, and gives a better understanding on when to use these tools. Working on real world projects such as this gives a much bigger picture than regular textbook problems. There is not one single way to solve the problems you come across, and you need to reason to even determine what the best way to solve the problem is.

I am very grateful that ISE requires capstone courses such as these. It is another great learning tool at our exposure and is a wonderful way to bring a collegiate career to a close.

Mechanical Engineering Senior Design: BREW AN GO

Sanusi Shehu,
Senior, Mechanical Engineering

Athens, OH 6 December 2012 – In Ohio University, all Mechanical Engineering seniors are required to take a yearlong senior design class before graduation. We are required to work together in teams and select an engineering project that will have a positive impact in the lives of people, as the theme of the class is Designing to Make a Difference. The projects have ranged from designing a more robust wheel chair to assist people with disabilities, to developing a gravity fed water filtration system that can efficiently deliver clean water in Haiti.

BREW AN’ GO is the name of my senior design team. It stands for Batch Reclamation and Evacuation of Waste for Animal Nutrition and Green Operations.Our client, Jackie O’s, is in the process of expanding their brewery to a new location. During the new brewing process, they will have hundreds of pounds of wet grain that will be sent to farmers to feed livestock. Our goal is to create a system to unload the spent grain from a brewery tank into a transportation vehicle parked outside of the new brewery location.

For a while, we worked closely with our client to brainstorm feasible design concepts for our project. We came up with many feasible concepts such as using single/multiple conveyors, using a combination of an auger & a conveyor, using a customized wheelbarrow and an auger, and many more. In the end, we decided to use and bin on roller and a bin lifter as shown in the plan below. Our decision came down to the cheapest, simplest and safest system that will do the job.

In the future, we will be designing and constructing an effective working prototype using some cool machines here at Ohio University, and I cannot wait!

EE Senior Design: Robotic Bobcat

Jessica Borer,
Senior, Electrical Engineering

Athens, OH 31 October 2012 – Every senior engineering student must complete a capstone project and for electrical engineering we get to choose which project we want to work on. I chose the Robotic Bobcat and am working on a team of four undergrad students and two graduate students. One of the interesting things about my project is that it is a continuing project, so this is the third or fourth year for this specific project.

Robots are being greatly researched by the military so they can be sent into dangerous areas and spare human lives. The end goal for the robotic bobcat is to create an autonomous quadruped robot with ‘intelligence’. This ‘intelligence’ would come from integrated external sensors. For example, one of the graduate students’ assignments is to integrate video processing so the bobcat will be able to avoid upcoming obstacles when walking. This way it would not need to be controlled but would be completely autonomous.

Senior design is a great way to get engineering students to start thinking about planning a project from start to finish. It is also a way to get students used to planning software that they will surely use in jobs after college. We also have to research possible products we will need for project. I look forward to seeing how much we can accomplish by the end of the year!

ETM Senior Design Project

Ethan Wolfe,
Senior, Engineering Technology and Management

Athens, OH 30 September 2012 – This semester I am taking my capstone class ETM 4620. This is a class that combines everything we’ve learned into one semester. This class does a great job of preparing me for the future in the technology field from group work to being set on a strict timeline with no exceptions. The class is split into three teams, five members per team, and each team has to design a product to be made for the class. Part of the class is operations management so we have to manage our time using a set schedule so we have all the kinks worked out by the time we head to our production run near the end of the semester. Time management is very crucial for this project and it is helping me stay on task and not procrastinate my work.

My group has designed a drink coaster set with a case to hold them. The coaster will have an Ohio University logo engraved on them and the box will have a glass insert in the lid with an OU logo etched into it as well. We are in the middle of a prototype build, with all intentions of fixing any flaws before we start making specialized tooling for our production run.