Engineering Quarterly VOL.III. . . No.2
University of Mary
FREE
WINTER 2021
W ELCOME ! Welcome to the Engineering Quarterly, a newsletter published four times per year by the University of Mary School of Engineering. In it we try to include articles from each of the five engineering majors that we currently offer on campus: Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computer Science, and Construction Management. The intended audience of the Engineering Quarterly is engineers, engineering students, engineering alumni, future engineering students, and people working in fields closely related to engineering such as science, computing, and mathematics. In this issue of EQ you will read about student design projects from the Fall semester, our new Computer Science degree program, our redesigned capstone course in Senior Design, as well as engineering problems to try and an article by Professor Carrico about Engineering as a Liberal Art which appeared on Prime Matters primematters.com. Enjoy! Dr. Terry Pilling Dean of Engineering
P ILLING A PPOINTED D EAN OF S CHOOL OF E NGINEERING
This past Fall, the University of Mary Board of Trustees confirmed the School of Engineering as the University’s fifth school. This action led to the appointment of Dr. Terry Pilling as inaugural Dean of the School of Engineering which was announced and celebrated during the School of Engineering’s first alumni event on November 20, 2020. Terry Pilling brings nearly twenty-five years of engineering, research, and higher education experience to the position, including the last five years at the University of Mary as associate professor (2015-2016) of Physics and Engineering, and more recently, as chair of the School of Engineering. It is fitting that Dr. Pilling be appointed the first dean of the School, as he has been the principal architect of the entire program. In 2015, the University of Mary announced that it intended to develop a School of Engineering, hiring him to lead the effort. In the Fall of 2016, the University began to dramatically increase technical course offerings under Dr. Pilling’s direction and guidance. Since then, he has spent many hours consulting with local and regional engineering firms, touring engineering facilities of other colleges and universities, drawing on his years of experience as a university professor, research scientist,
and engineering firm executive to assist him in developing curriculum, hiring the right faculty, and designing the School of Engineering’s new state-of-the-art facility in University Hall, all carried out in an effort to build an outstanding engineering program. Dr. Pilling has overseen remarkable growth of the School, which now includes five major programs and well over one hundred students. Dr. Pilling is an accomplished scientist, earning his Bachelor of Science degree, with honors, in Engineering Physics and Physics at the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada) in 1995, and his Master of Science degree in Nuclear Physics at the Saskatchewan Accelerator Laboratory in 1998 with research on the Threshold Photoproduction of π-mesons and Chiral Perturbation theory. Dr. Pilling completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in High Energy Particle Physics and Superstring Theory at North Dakota State University in 2002 followed by a post-doctoral appointment as a research scientist at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia and the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow, Russia. Since then, he has had widely-varying work experience across physics and engineering, including work in high energy physics research, both internationally and across the United States, as an industry executive in the wind power industry, and as an academic, publishing many peer-reviewed and highlycited scientific articles. Dr. Terry Pilling’s appointment as Dean of the School of Engineering is a strong endorsement of his leadership, and we, the faculty of the School of Engineering, congratulate him and look forward to working with him on the continued growth and development of our programs.
S TUDENT D ESIGN P ROJECTS
Digital Clock
Michael Storick, Rami Douri, and Chandler Olson designed a digital clock for their project in their EEL 321 Electronics I, course. The clock makes use of an infinity mirror, a large number of LED’s in the form of 60 different seven-LED strips, a wooden frame, an LED matrix display, and an Arduino Mega microcontroller.
The clock has the seconds shown by a sequence of LED’s lighting up around the edge as each second passes, along with an hour hand and a minute hand, also made out of LED’s. The matrix display in the middle shows the date. All of it is designed to high accuracy with a battery backup so that the time and date remain in sync over time and even when the clock loses power. This is a very aesthetically pleasing clock, and the control was done using programmed microcontrollers to control the hands, dates, and the outer LED’s.
Engineers are not only problem solvers and trouble shooters, they are also inventors. Our students have design projects in various courses throughout their degree which help them to see how the course material they are learning can be incorporated into products and devices. In their senior year they have a discipline-specific design course in which they must complete a design from conception to completion. This is followed by a cross disciplinary design course in the Spring of their senior year in which students must have team members from at least two different areas of engineering involved in their project. Here we will describe some of the exciting projects that were completed in the Fall, 2020 semester. One very clever clock-feature is the mechThe students can also choose to continue to anism that the team invented to set the time work on these projects throughout the Spring, and date. The design includes a single knob 2021 semester if they so choose. coming out of the frame which is both a push