The Adiabatic Flame and The Wet Bandits, two teams of students from B´ÎÔª’s chapter of the American Society for Mechanical Engineering, won first and third place, respectively, in ASME’s annual Student Design Competition.  

"The ASME Student Design Competition has been a great venue for our students to show case their ingenuity and design talent at the international level for many years," said Dr. Mohammad Mahinfalah, team advisor. "Other schools are always eager to see what design solution we are presenting in these competitions."

Students were challenged to design a scaled, proof-of-concept prototype for water energy conversion. Their prototypes had to propel their vehicles by converting the potential energy of water that was manually loaded into their device.  

“Every year ASME tasks undergraduate students with a new engineering challenge, and this year’s is called H2Go Revisited,” said Collin Ostrowski, a senior mechanical engineering student on the first-place Adiabatic Flame team. “The challenge is to build a robot that delivers as much water as possible from one corner to the other of the field in 15 minutes. However, the vehicle can only source energy for propulsion from water that is poured into it in the starting zone.”