Engineering Portfolio

Throughout my time in school, I've realized I learn best by doing, by seeing and by experimenting. I'm a visual and hands-on learner. I've been fortunate enough to work more than 24 months in various engineering internship roles that have allowed me to work on some really interesting projects and learn a lot about the industries that I was working in. I've summarized a few of the projects I've worked on below. Some details are left out of these summaries to protect the intellectual property of the companies I have worked at.

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efficient flood response device

Capstone Project for GlobalMedic (Flood Response Charity)

My team of 4 developed a device to improve the efficiency of flood response operations in Canada and the US. The current method, filling sandbags with a shovel, is hard labor and only fills 12 bags/hour.

We learned that more than 20% of homes in Canada and northern US own a snowblower. We thought: what if we could use those snowblowers to fill sandbags? People already have them readily available, making deployment that much easier. We designed a snowblower conversion kit and in turn, improved the efficiency of sandbag filling by more than 450%. GlobalMedic plans to use this technology to fight the next floods that they address.

sled concept

Won Online International Design Competition from SolidProfessor

Contest: https://go.solidprofessor.com/winter-sled-design-challenge

​I entered a design competition that required entrants to design the coolest looking sled concept using Solidworks 3D CAD software. With my design, the user steers the sled using pedals and can brake using the metal handle. I used this competition to showcase my abilities in product design using aesthetically-pleasing surface modelling, as well as photorealistic renders.

walking mechanism

Class Project - Kinematics & Dynamics of Machines (3rd Year)

​As a group of 5, we were tasked with designing and analyzing an improved walking mechanism. Our design team decided to modify a traditional Theo-Jansen walking mechanism by optimizing the lengths of each link in the system. The goal was to minimize vertical displacement of a robot outfitted with these legs, while ensuring the robot is moving forwards with a constant horizontal velocity and making sure that the robot is difficult to tip over. By optimizing the lengths of each link, we were able to "tune" the walking profile until it generated the optimal output that we were looking for.

My role with this project was to:

1. Take our conceptual design and model it using 3D CAD in Solidworks
2. Create kinematic analyses in Solidworks to validate in 3D the analysis work that the team did in 2D using MATLAB​
3. Create the visuals & diagrams needed for our final report

geometry optimization

Project at Internship - Technical Details Redacted to Protect Company's IP

One project I received at work was to study the stress behavior and load path of a component (see images A and B) that was being changed from a light titanium to a heavy stainless steel. This change was going to bring a 2X weight increase to the part if no changes to the geometry were made, so I was tasked with trying to reduce the weight impact by modifying geometry strategically.

Why this was not a trivial task: we were already close to our target safety margins and we did not have access to proper optimization software - I needed to figure out how the load was flowing through the part and modify the design (without protruding from the outer boundary limits I was given).

After studying how the part interacted with the assembly, I assumed the load path was cutting through the outer curvature (see image C). I ran a number of different axisymmetric finite element models (image D and E) to confirm this and hypothesized that if I add just a bit of material to that outer curvature, I could remove a lot more material from the interior of the part (meaning that the outer curvature was the most efficient area to cut mass). 

The axisymmetric models ran quickly, and that is why I started with those - I could iterate the design many times over before finding an optimal design to analyze in 3D. Once I reached that point, I modeled the new design in 3D, and analyzed that using 3D finite element analysis tools. The peak stresses dropped significantly in the area of interest (image F) - allowing me to cut even more mass out from the interior of the part.

You can see how much material was removed from the original design to create the optimized one in Image G. Image H shows a close-up view of how little material was needed to be added to the exterior to get the improved stress behavior. The net result of my analysis efforts produced a new design that the company selected to be used. I was able to cut out enough mass, without sacrificing safety margins or external boundary limits, to get the new stainless steel part to be almost weight-neutral with the old titanium part - something none of us expected at the project's start!

electromechanical device

Project at Internship - Technical Details Redacted & Images Kept Simple / Non-Specific to Protect Company's IP

I was given my own project to lead where I was to design a new product to supplement the company's current product line.

What I did:

• STAGE 1: Created a few different prospective designs using 3D CAD software and analyzed each using finite element analysis tools
• STAGE 2: Built a few different iterations of prototypes. This involved:
  • design for machining & assembly, tolerance stack-up analysis, geometric dimensioning & tolerancing
  • strain gauge installation, microelectronics using an Arduino for prototyping & writing my own matrix algebra to interpret results
  • defining and running test set-ups to validate the merits of the prototype
• STAGE 3: Once done, I designed and built a new version that was more product-ready:
  • designed some components to be machined out of metal, while some were made of sheet metal or composites
  • helped with the mechanical layout of a flexible printed circuit board to clean up wiring
  • included tactile switches and knobs for more intuitive user control

Out of respect for the company's IP policy and my agreement with them, I cannot show pictures of the full device or go into more details about what it does.