Student News
Students keep cargo from getting scrambled

Contestants Isaac Clements and Elizabeth Ballard with their entry

They came hurtling out of the sky in a variety of shapes. There were triangles. There were cones. There were square boxes. There were inflated bags and parachutes. There were two-bladed helicopters and even a Leonardo da Vinci-like flying screw. All were brightly colored in red, white and blue and were entries in the annual engineering egg drop competition sponsored by FedEx and held Dec. 7.

While a cheering crowd of several hundred participants and observers watched from the ground below, some 60 containers, each cradling one raw egg, were dropped from the veranda of the Overcup Oak Lounge in Sarratt Center onto the brick pavement three stories below. Their flight times were clocked and two faculty members, Ken Frampton and Art Overholser, judged whether the eggs they carried survived the experience without even a scratch.

Teams of one to three engineering students were given an hour to surround their egg with a container capable of protecting it from the drop, made out of a FedEx box and a variety of other materials filling a plastic bag. A total of 136 students participated in the exercise and produced 60 entries, making it what organizers said was the University’s largest egg drop competition to date.

This year, the rules were changed substantially from the previous year, when students could pick up the FedEx boxes ahead of time and use a wider variety of materials. The eggs broke in fewer than 10 percent of the entries, which took away a lot of the suspense. So, instead of seeking out a higher drop point, the Engineering Council decided to limit the materials that competitors can use and have them construct their entries in just an hour. The group also changed the criteria slightly. A cracked or broken egg still resulted in instant disqualification. But, of those that survived, entries using the least material were ranked ahead of those using added material. Contestants were required to use all of the FedEx box. Finally, of those using the least amount of material, the entries were ranked by their drop times — the shorter the better. “We thought that this would make the competition more difficult and do a better job of differentiating between the skill that went into the designs,” says David Brogan, president of the Engineering Council, who directed the competition with Madani Adjali, head of the council’s special events committee.

This year’s winner was Timothy Brian Jones, a sophomore. His entry was a slender cone. “I picked the shape because I thought that it would direct the force around the egg rather than through it,” he said. “I entered the contest last year and used a wide cone. This year, when they added the rule about the time, I made the cone narrower so it would be more aerodynamic and fall faster.”

Second place went to graduate student Jim Placke and third place to sophomores Cole Moody and Matt Eames. Faculty judges awarded the creativity award to junior Ian Burgess for his minimalist approach of simply sticking the egg in a FedEx box, sealing it up and letting it drop.

In addition to the boxes, FedEx provided $500 in prize money: $200 for first place; 150 for second place; $100 for third place and $50 for most creative.

ME Students Solve Vanderbilt
Water Problem

A group of Vanderbilt mechanical engineering students used some “tunnel vision” to solve a University water problem that should save Vanderbilt about $35,000 per year in utility expenditures.

The University hit water while boring a huge tunnel between the new Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital and the power plant, according to Robert L. Camperlino, Director of building and utilities for Plant Operations. The tunnel will house gas, electric and water utilities as well as communications lines for the new hospital.

“There is a substantial amount of in-leakage to the tunnel from two sources,” Camperlino says. “One is from some underground springs that were previously trapped under the limestone rock. The other water is related to wet weather and rainfall. There is almost a mile of tunnel, and we’ve got water leaking in a number of places.” The water is currently pumped into storm sewers.

When students Leighann Hamilton and Bobby Bailie contacted Camperlino to get ideas for their group’s senior design project, he suggested they study the water problem in the tunnel and propose a solution. Other members of the team were Aaron Berutti, Chad Clark and Jesse Holmes.

The group, wearing galoshes and hardhats, inspected the site by descending a 120-foot deep shaft to reach the tunnel. The tunnel is eight feet, six inches in diameter. Bobcat earth-moving equipment fits inside with room to spare.

Members of the group revisited the tunnel a number of times to perform various tests. “We took flow rate measurements on a couple of springs that had been sealed, with a pipe and cutoff valve installed,” Bailie says. “We were able to get some decent flow measurements on the first valve we opened. The second one was a whole other story. The three–and–a–half–inch pipe shot water out 17 feet when we opened the valve. It knocked us down. We tried a big drainage separator, but the water pressure blew it right out of our hands.

“We tried to catch it in a 30-gallon trashcan, but the water spread out so much after traveling 17 feet that we couldn’t begin to catch it all,” Hamilton adds. “We ended up doing trajectory measurements to get some idea of the water flow, which we estimated at 450 gallons per minute.”

The team met regularly with Camperlino and Galen Romine, the project engineer who works for I.C. Thomasson Associates on the University’s co-generation plant. The students came up with a plan to capture the tunnel water and use a large portion of it in the irrigation systems that provide water for the athletic and intramural fields near the Student Recreation Center and McGugin Center. They proposed that much of the remaining water be used to cool the bearings in a number of Plant Operation devices. Other water will be used to replace that lost to evaporation in the University’s cooling tower. Currently, city water supplies all three above uses.

The group had to crunch numbers for piping schematics, equipment prices, water pressure flows, water temperature and the water’s chemical composition. Camperlino, currently running a check to verify the numbers, plans to proceed with the project. He predicts the project will pay for itself in reduced city water bills within two to two-and-a-half years.

“I really liked working with this group,” Camperlino says. “They were bright, enthusiastic and well organized. They were open to new ideas. We threw a few curve balls at them — things you don’t get out of textbooks. They had to come up with some unique formulas and do research that engineers in the real world have to do when there’s not a pat answer.”

Vanderbilt’s Women’s Mini Baja Team In a League of Their Own

Karen Talla takes her team’s off-road vehicle for a spin, showing that men are not the only ones who can succeed in the world of Mini Baja racing.

Picture an off-road vehicle at the starting line of a dirt track designed to punish its participants. A mass of 134 other roaring engines surrounds the vehicle; they roar so loudly the driver cannot hear the cries of the crowd standing just a few feet away. Now, picture the driver. Did you picture a male? Most people do, but not the members of Vanderbilt’s all-women Mini Baja racing team.
Karen Talla, Diane Muratore, Allyson McAdoo and Robyn Kratenstein broke the mold at the Society of Automotive Engineers’ Mini Baha competition that took place June 1-3, in Troy, Ohio. These four women composed not only the first all-women team at Vanderbilt, but also the only all-women team to enter the competition.
The team members started working on their project in January 2001. They were responsible for designing, building, testing, promoting and racing the vehicle, as well as generating the finances they needed to support their project.
Karen Talla, the team leader, believes that not having males on the team allowed them to speak more freely about the things they did not understand. “The atmosphere was very relaxed, and we just had a lot of fun while learning so much,” she says.
The pressure of being the only all-female team did not seem to get in the way of their success. In fact, it might have helped the group. Talla recalls, “The other teams doubted that we could even make the competition, because we were an all-girls team. I guess that made us — well, at least me — work even harder.”
The hard work paid off for the team. Phil Davis, Research and Development Engineer at Vanderbilt, gloats, “The competition is very brutal and is designed to test the cars to their limits. Less than 50 of the 135 car entries finished the race and the girls were in that 50. I would say the girls measured up very well against the other teams.”