NEWS to ME
Mechanical Engineering Department • Cal Poly College of Engineering • Summer 2018
Message from the Chair —————————————————
W
Jim Widmann
elcome to the summer issue of News to ME, the Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering Department newsletter. Reflecting at the end of my first full academic year as department chair, I marvel at how many Learn by Doing activities our students, faculty and staff participate in each year. From project-based pedagogies to extra-curricular club activities, our students learn how their ideas and theory translate to the real world of practical engineering. To support our handson approach, we continue to re-imagine and improve our laboratory facilities and machine shops to make our unique educational approach possible. Student club activities continue to increase, from the ever-popular Cal Poly Racing to growing areas in humanitarian engineering. Enrollment in Mechanical Engineering has also increased by 30 percent over the last six years, and we now have more than 1,200 undergraduate students — making us the largest department on campus. This spring we celebrated See CHAIR’S MESSAGE on Page 2
Clockwise from left: Mechanical Engineering students Jacob Rardin, Julia Trenkle, Ricky Tan and Patrick Granier work in the Mechatronics Lab.
Mechatronics Teaches Students to Use Multiple Facets of Engineering Growing field is more than robotics, professor says
S
urrounded by his peers, Nick Walker allows himself a quick, proud smile as his classmates reward him with a round of applause. After all, the machine he created with lab partner Carmelo Furlan has just used a Sharpie marker to draw a picture of a sailboat. And that picture, drawn on a piece of white paper, is a tangible product of mechatronics, a multidisciplinary field of science that combines mechanics, computer science, electrical engineering, and controls. “It’s cool to get to apply all the programming we do to a physical system,” said Walker, a computer engineering student from Seattle. The word “mechatronics” was coined by a Japanese engineer in 1969. But the field has
gained popularity more recently, leading to a concentration in the ME Department. In John Ridgely’s lab, students have been tasked with creating a mechatronics device that will actually achieve a goal – like drawing a sailboat. “The idea with mechanical engineering, and in mechatronics in particular, is that somebody understands the design of most of the system – not just one little piece,” Ridgely said. While mechatronics is currently a popular concentration, courses are likely to become required in the ME curriculum, Ridgely said. As Ridgely’s students tests their creations, Erin Clark, a mechanical engineering student from Glendora, works on a machine featuring an inverted pendulum. The pendulum is supposed to move back and forth on a track, but right now the pendulum starts to move, then beSee MECHATRONICS on Page 2