A creative course providing first-hand experience with a variety of small-scale manufacturing technologies

The first half of this course covered the principles and ideas behind many of the contemporary methods of manufacturing or prototyping common components and products. The second half was focused on a project where groups decide on a product and use the available resources to fabricate it. Our team chose to produce a crossbow.

Our crossbow made use of a variety of methods. The main body and trigger components were made from sand cast aluminium pieces using 3D printed patterns. The limbs were carbon fibre composite beams, and the grip was also 3D printed. The bow was strung using a length of fishing line and was sized to shoot small pieces of wooden dowel. During this project, I was responsible primarily for designing the trigger mechanism, but also coordinated the overall design for proper assembly and performed the machining to clean up our cast items.

This project acted as both a creative outlet and an opportunity to gain some hands-on experience with a variety of prototyping methods. Seeing the wide selection of products created by other groups during the term also promoted an appreciation of the wide range of perspectives and ideas present in the class.

A client-focused project exploring some of the considerations of designing medical equipment for spaceflight

This course is run as an optional alternative to department-specific capstone-level courses, providing an opportunity to work with students from other departments within the Engineering Faculty. I was on a team with one other student from Materials, and two from Mechanical. Our project was provided to us by the Association of Spaceflight Professionals (ASP).

The goal of the project was to create a miniature autotransfusion device, a system that cleans blood lost by or taken from a patient and reintroduces it into them, bypassing potential logistical or medical challenges associated with donated blood. The motivation comes from the eventual goals of long-term human spaceflight, where, among other things, medical equipment and emergency stores of blood may be limited. Alternative markets include remote or otherwise isolated communities that face the same issues.

Our team chose to narrow the scope to only the separation process. A variety of separation methods were proposed, however, a centrifuge-type design was ultimately chosen, similar to the majority of existing autotransfusion systems used in hospitals. The design was influenced by early plans to eventually test the system in parabolic flight to simulate a microgravity environment; these plans had to be abandoned along with much of the prototyping and testing phase activities in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We later presented our work at the 2021 NASA HRP Investigator's Workshop virtual conference.

Exploratory work providing some appreciation for the unique and complex structures developed by nature to solve various problems

In the summer of my first year, I worked on a project studying the hydrophobic properties of needles taken from a range of species of coniferous trees identified across the university campus. The motivation for the project comes from an interest in studying the anti-icing properties of evergreen plants for potential biomimicry applications.

Much of the project consisted of developing a consistent method to measure water contact angles on the thin needles, performing the measurements on the assorted needle samples to collect data, and identifying and quantifying microscopic features present over the needle surfaces, namely stomata distribution and surface characteristics. An attempt was made to relate the wetting behaviour to surface features, although ultimately no strong correlation was found based on the data collected.

Preliminary experiments to improve the recovery of profitable minerals, but limited by time and thermodynamics

After my second year, I worked on a project where I tried to develop a bench-scale froth flotation procedure for the upgrading of mining tailings taken from Vale's Voisey's Bay Mine in Labrador. The main interest is for the improved extraction of pentlandite, an iron-nickel sulphide mineral. The proper management of mining tailings as a waste product helps both improve the yield for desired metals such as nickel as well as reduce the risk of environmental damage.

There were a number of challenges encountered during this project. One of the main hindrances was needing an external lab for ICP-OES chemical analysis, where the turnaround time was 2-3 weeks; not particularly ideal for a 15-week summer project. Another issue was the oxidation of my sample material over time, suspected due to the decrease in experimental result quality with later samples independent of the test parameters. As this research group was new at the time, I was also responsible for sourcing some of the equipment we would be needing in the lab. Similar to my first project, unfortunately, no strong conclusions could be made.