Three MIE Students Win Awards at Prestigious ASME Conference
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Undergraduates Bella Lambros, Ilya McCune-Pedit, and Ryan Packer of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department won poster awards at the 2022 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition National Science Foundation Student Research Poster Competition Research Experience for Undergraduates. The event was sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and held in Columbus, Ohio, from October 30 till November 3. MIE Assistant Professor Xian Du was also a faculty advisor on all three winning posters.
Other advisors on the winning posters were MIE Ph.D. students Jingyang Yan, Meysam Safarzadeh, and Jixin Yin.
At the ASME conference, Packer won the Best Presenter Award for a project titled “Close-Loop Control of a Roll-to-Roll Gravure Printing Process.” As Packer explains, Gravure Printing is a roll-to-roll printing process that consists of multiple steps used to print ink onto a surface. This type of printing process is used for many applications such as wearable sweat sensors for detecting molecular composition and graphene high-resolution patterned circuits, as it produces high-resolution patterns at high precision.
The problem, as Packer says, is that Gravure Printing does not reliably produce usable products because unsynchronized speeds between the different rollers used in the process create defects in the designed patterns and the printing quality.
According to Packer, “To resolve this issue, an encoder will be installed onto one of the rollers to measure and control the roller’s speed in a closed-loop manner. To install the encoder, it is mounted to the roller via 3D printed parts that secure the encoder into place and allow the encoder to measure the position of the roller.”
Another award, for the Most Informative Poster, was presented to Lambros and McCune-Pedit for their poster on “Defect Detection and Printed Pattern Measurement for Roll-to-Roll Microcontact Printing.”
As Lambros and McCune-Pedit explain, “This project focuses on the development of image processing techniques for defect detection and printed pattern measurement in roll-to-roll (R2R) microcontact printing (µCP) and the characterization of µCP stamp compression-deformation. The outcome of this project will offer researchers in the R2R printing domain some insights into the sources and factors of defect formation.”
Lambros and McCune-Pedit add that their project “will also demonstrate the effects on deformations that using a rolling stamp have as well as the differences in elasticity that exist in the stamp, depending on its thickness. This work will improve the overall effectiveness and reliability of R2R µCP.”
In addition to that award, Lambros and McCune-Pedit also received the Most Enthusiastic Presenter award for a second poster, titled “Investigation of In-Situ Compression Mechanisms for μCp Quality Control.” (January 2023)