MIE Fall 2025 Senior Design Showcase
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Students in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department at the Riccio College of Engineering demonstrated the depth and breadth of their design expertise during the Fall 2025 Senior Design Showcase on December 3 in the Campus Center Auditorium, where teams presented semester-long and yearlong projects developed in alignment with real-world engineering challenges.
Among the yearlong projects, Team 1402 – Flexible Manufacturing System 1, comprised of Aman Patel, Liam Wasser, Ethan Wlodyka, Tiernan O’Kane, and Andri Mahegan, earned top honors for their work on advancing the department’s Manufacturing Automation Teaching Lab. Their project focused on the design, fabrication, and evaluation of the final two stations in a five-station flexible assembly line used for hands-on instruction.
The team’s primary objective was to ensure the mechanical reliability and repeatability of the stations, allowing future student users to focus on learning outcomes rather than troubleshooting equipment. To that end, the team developed and validated proof-of-concept designs for several critical subsystems, including a gravity-fed magazine for plate-shaped components, a spring-fed magazine for specialty components, a compliant self-seating stage fixture to ensure precise component alignment prior to placement, a captive-nut mounting block, and a universal baseplate compatible with both products manufactured on the assembly line. Together, these elements contribute to a more robust, adaptable, and instruction-ready manufacturing platform.
First place among the semester-long projects was awarded to Team 1506—Lithira Piyatunga, Stefan Nguyen, Matthew Morgan, Daniel Mocarski, and Nickolas Lima—for their Motorized Tire Performance Rig, a system designed to evaluate rolling resistance and braking performance on the front axle of the Mass Mileage vehicle.
The team designed and built a fully integrated test stand capable of producing repeatable, real-time performance data. In addition to the mechanical system, they incorporated controls using an existing programmable logic controller (PLC) originally developed for the Spring 2025 Dynamometer capstone project. The team also created a custom Human-Machine Interface (HMI) that displayed test results live while reliably logging data for later analysis. During testing, the rig successfully measured rolling resistance and captured performance variations resulting from changes in load and tire pressure.
A culmination of the four-year B.S. degrees in mechanical engineering and industrial engineering, the MIE’s capstone design course develops and refines students’ abilities to plan, organize, and execute an engineering design project, evaluate design alternatives with supporting engineering analysis, apply appropriate engineering standards, assess and optimize designs from the customer perspective, and present final designs.