During this year’s North American Research Conference (NAMRC), on behalf of a MechSE team, Dr. Shao presented a project “Manufacturing of an Innovative Hybrid Heat Exchanger” in the Reusable Abstractions of Manufacturing Processes (RAMP) 2019 competition, and won the 2nd prize. The purpose of the RAMP competition is to create a venue to foster interest in characterizing manufacturing processes. This year’s Theme is Model Reusability. The participants need to develop a Unit Manufacturing Process (UMP) models of a manufacturing process for system-level sustainability assessment. In this competition, our team designed a low-grade waste heat recovery heat exchanger system incorporating innovations in designing, fabrication, surface processing and monitoring. UMP-based analysis was performed to analyze the system’s sustainability, cost, environmental impact, etc.
The team consists of members from research groups of five MechSE professors: Professor Sinha, Professor Miljkovic, Professor Ferreira, Professor Salapaka, and Professor Shao. Everyone on this team contributed a lot. As the competition winner, the team has also received a $600 cash prize. This project has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). An introduction to the DOE project is here.
View the full list of 2019 RAMP competition winners here and the departmental news here.