<p>Share any cool projects you had to do as an engineering major.</p>
<p>By the way I am not looking to steal ideas. I haven't even started at my uni, gonna be a freshman soon. I am just curious to know though. Got bored and was checking out some vids related to engr projects and I am curious to know what you guys have to share.</p>
<p>I had a pretty fun project where we were given a bunch of chunks of steel and some chunks of brass and told, “Make them harder.”</p>
<p>ASCE sponsors the concrete canoe competition and steel bridge competition. For the former, each university designs and builds a canoe made entirely out of concrete and races it against other schools. The latter is the same, but with steel, and you’re judged against other schools based on construction time (you have to put it together on the spot with certain restrictions), aesthetics and a load test.</p>
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<p>Whatcha do? Heat treat them?</p>
<p>I found the projects at the college level for chemEs much more boring then what my MechEs and EEs were doing. Once I got out of school though I have enjoyed my projects a lot… I think it was a budget thing. I need at least $3MM to make something cool. More the $10MM for a cool process design. I liken cool to magnitude.</p>
<p>First trying to figure out what alloy we had, different types of heat treating with solutionizing, annealing, quenching, tempering, cold working, etc. The hardest part was trying to figure out the brass one’s strengthening mechanism since the precipitates are nano-sized and don’t really show up well with an optical microscope. ;)</p>
<p>Also had a few labs where we got to make materials like high temperature superconducting pellets and then levitate magnets on them. They were kinda fun, but having to write the “how superconduction works” was pretty tough as a junior.</p>