Opportunities for Undergraduates
There are three main opportunities for undergraduates new to research:
- Experimental Studies. The most common project to be initiated into research in the Tribomechadynamics Lab focuses on developing a set of experimental skills for application to research that compliments other efforts within the Tribomechadynamics Lab group (such as collecting failure data to validate a model against, or scoping research to act as preliminary results for a proposal).
- Design and Analysis. Throughout the course of research in the Tribomechadynamics Lab, there are many small projects that come up that require the design of a new fixture, test stand, or other experimental apparatus. Thus, the second opportunity focuses on design and analysis of fixtures for experiments.
- Finite Element Analysis. As an introduction to numerical analysis within the Tribomechadynamics Lab, the first step is to become familiar with FEA software for analysis. In particular, Abaqus and ANSYS are heavily used within the lab. We have created a new self-paced course on FEA that interested students can enroll in at any time.
For more advanced students, there are many projects related to each of the topics listed in the research section of this site. In particular, we have a diverse set of research projects, spanning mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, applied mathematics, and even group psychology.