The TIMEs
Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering • Cal Poly College of Engineering • Spring 2018
Message from the Chair —————————————————
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Dan Waldorf
he IME Department has been doing Big Things lately — starting with Big Data. One of our biggest new initiatives includes an emphasis on Big Data and using modern analytics techniques to solve industrial engineering problems. We added two new classes to the required curriculum, hired two new faculty members, and are growing funds and connections to establish a center for analytics and Big Data in our department labs. On the alumni front His Excellency Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair (Industrial Engineering, ’77) returned to campus to receive one of the university’s most prestigious awards. He was, in fact, the first recipient of the Cal Poly Alumni Excellence Award – “an award created to recognize individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary leadership locally, nationally and internationally,” said President Jeffrey D. Armstrong when he presented the award. One of our biggest cohorts of students started in the fall, and many of them will be taking advantage of new opportunities for summer undergraduate research, study abroad and work on campus Please see MESSAGE on Page 2
Monitoring Ocean Traffic
Cal Poly Engineering students wheel a radar and camera ocean monitor they helped design and build into place near the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse.
Undergraduates’ project will watch over marine protected area
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ndustrial and Manufacturing Engineering Professor Kurt Colvin wasn’t sure what to expect when his sales pitch to undergraduate engineering students last fall went something like “no credit and no pay for 60 to 80 hours of work over two quarters — just great experience.” But 18 students from several engineering disciplines answered the call to work on a solarpowered radar and camera monitor for the Piedras Blancas Marine Protected Area (MPA) off the northwest coast of San Luis Obispo County, a project Colvin developed with Gordon Hensley of the non-profit Environment in the Public Interest/San Luis Obispo COASTKEEPERS and the
Anthropocene Institute. “I think our students were really attracted to the environmental aspects of this project,” said Colvin. “The state knows surprisingly little about boat traffic in the MPAs and this monitor aims to provide real-time data to help manage the preserve.” Hensley, a Cal Poly biology alum, said the MPA is difficult to monitor because unlike a land-based park, there’s no visible borders. “We really have no idea how many people are traveling through the MPA,” he said. “This monitor will pick up a vessel once it enters the MPA, Please see MONITOR on Page 2
“This project has all the elements that Cal Poly has always wanted — an outside organization working with the university, there’s an actual practical application, and it’s the complete Learn by Doing package.”
The TIMEs MONITOR From Page 1
track it and the camera will give us some information about the vessel. At the very least, we will know if it’s a Zodiac, a small fishing boat or an oil tanker. The data set we’re hoping for is the type of vessel, the length of time the vessel is in the MPA and the geolocation of where the vessel went.” There was a wide spectrum of challenges in assembling the monitor, which was built on campus and installed near the wind-swept Piedras Blancas Lighthouse in February for a six-month test. “Anthropocene sent us the radar, camera and computer, and our task was to design and build an off-the-grid system that can collect the data and send it back,” Colvin said. “It was completely up to us to build the trailer, build the moisture-tight box for the computer, design and test the solar system, integrate the electrical system, mount the equipment and deploy it to the site.” Powered by three donated Sunpower
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For more info: http://epicenteronline.org http://californiampas.org
solar panels, the monitor is able to detect vessels out to three miles and photograph them out to a mile into the sprawling MPA. Hensley, who said the Cal Poly platform could be a model for future monitors, said early data collection was robust. “This project has all the elements that Cal Poly has always wanted — an outside
organization working with the university, there’s an actual practical application, and it’s the complete Learn by Doing package,” he said. “It’s very impressive that we had 18 students who wanted to spend their time on a project like this. It says a lot about the drive and passion of Cal Poly Engineering students.”
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as student technicians. The big, blank walls in some of our manufacturing labs look different this Spring as a number of vintage photos have brought an artistic and historic flavor to the lab environment. Historic photos from the 1960s and 70s machine shop now line the walls behind the machines in the material removal lab and larger-than-life photographic impressions of some of our classic hands-on machinery hang in the lab briefing area. The artwork is meant to give students a strong appreciation for the unique nature of a Cal Poly education as well as the historic roots and evolution of manufacturing in our labs. Finally, a big thanks goes to Dave Hampton who retired from Frito Lay this year and has served as the chair for our industry advisory board for the past 10 years. He has been a huge help for our programs and has recently led a big effort to raise funds for a new scholarship endowment for IME students.
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Cal Poly students Hannah Carlile (industrial engineering) and Robert Arzate (aerospace engineering) seal up the back of the monitor on site at the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse. The monitor employs both a radar system and a camera to survey boat traffic in the Piedras Blancas Marine Protected Area.
Dan Waldorf Chair, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
IME’s Rich Legacy of Machines
Photos by Dena Dechance-Udlock
Flexible Electronics Stretch Students’ Creativity
Industrial and manufacturing students Wesley Powell, Quinn Mikelson and Kyle Batman prepare a circuit board to print on fabric.
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soldier on a future battlefield, a soccer player competing in the next World Cup or a heart patient recuperating from surgery could all benefit from a research project into flexible hybrid electronics — printing electronic circuits on fabric — by a multidisciplinary team of Cal Poly Engineering students. Sponsored by Jabil Circuit, DuPont and NovaCentrix, and supported by the Summer Undergraduate Research Program, the project involves the students developing and testing wearable electronic fabric that holds the promise of many realworld implications. “Monitoring of blood pressure, heart rate and temperature are probably the first applications,” said IME professor and project leader
Printed with a flexible silver paste, electronic fabric is designed to incorporate monitoring chips in clothing.
John Pan. “In the future, a patient in a hospital won’t have to wear a bunch of wires connected to different parts of the body, but simply wear a smock that monitors everything. “Another application is for athletes. Say in a future World
Cup soccer match, the coach will know which players are dehydrated or exhausted with real-time data.” IME student Wesley Powell agreed: “It would be perfect for a sport like soccer where you can’t wear hard monitoring
equipment like a watch.” Powell, along with Kyle Batman, Jonathan Bedinger and Joshua Ledgerwood (IME), Quinn Mikelson (electrical engineering), David Otsu (materials engineering), and Julia Roche, Maya Manzano and Paul Swartz (mechanical engineering), said the team was not focusing on specific applications, but rather “the manufacturing process that make the applications feasible.” The students printed fabric with a silver conductor paste only 50 microns thick — paper is typically around 75 microns — and then stressed it for hours with a stretching machine. “The challenge is to make sure it is reliable,” Powell said. “It’s got to be able to stretch, bend, be folded and be washed, and still work after all the kinds of abuse that people put their clothes through.” Engineering student Quinn Mikelson works on printing electrical circuits on fabric.
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“I give credit for what I have achieved to the foundation that Cal Poly gave me.” — His Excellency Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair
1977 Cal Poly IME Alum Returns to Campus and Receives Inaugural Alumni Excellence Award His Excellency Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair is chair of the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation for Education, one of the largest privately funded philanthropic eduction initiatives in the Arab world. Established in 2015 with one-third of the assets of the Al Ghurair group of companies, the foundation works to prepare young Emiratis and Arabs to fulfill their potential through access to higher education.
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is Excellency Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair (Industrial Engineering, ’77) was on campus last fall to receive the inaugural Cal Poly Alumni Excellence Award. In presenting the award, Cal Poly President Jeffrey D. Armstrong noted that it was created to recognize individuals like His Excellency “who have made a huge difference in their part of the world.” Naming His Excellency as the first recipient of the award was fitting. Among his prominent roles in business and philanthropy, he is CEO of Mashreq Bank, the largest private-sector bank in the United Arab Emirates; the chair of the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation for Education, the chair of the United Arab Emirate Banking Federation; and the vice chair of the Higher Board of Dubai International Financial Center and the Board of Emirates Foundation. For more, click HERE.
His Excellency is congratulated by IME Chair Dan Waldorf, left, and Cal Poly President Jeffrey D. Armstrong.
A Tour of the Department
IME student Wesley Powell detailed his flexible electronic fabric project.
During a tour of the IME department, His Excellency Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair met with IME students Taryn Kelly and Mitchell Wilhelmsen. At right, His Excellency is given a tour of the Ergonomics and Human Factors lab by lecturer Ginny Callow.
IME lecturer Trian Georgeou led a tour of the Gene Haas Advanced Manufacturing lab.
The tour included a round of tests administered by Industrial Engineering students in the Ergonomics and Human Factors lab.
Professor Emeritus Jo Anne Freeman, at left, and His Excellency were given a tour of the Gene Haas Laboratory for Robotics and Automation by IME professor Jose Macedo. At right, His Excellency and Freeman check out a portrait of Industrial Engineering Department founder George E. Hoffman.
College of Engineering Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering Dept. 1 Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA • 93407
Big Data Prompts Big Effort at Cal Poly Big Data — used with analytics to solve problems — is one of the hottest fields in the U.S., and Cal Poly is one of the first schools to integrate Big Data and analytics into its required industrial engineering curriculum. The department’s new courses include an introduction to enterprise analytics and applications of analytics in industrial engineering. More courses, applications and lab space will be developed by the department’s newest faculty member and “data champion” Roy Jafari. IME graduate student Harry Chaw (middle), discusses Big Data in the IME office with professors Reza Pouraghabagher and Liz Schlemer.
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