UNC Charlotte Team Wins ASPE Student Challenge
A team mechanical engineering graduate students from UNC Charlotte’s precision engineering program won the Student Challenge competition at the American Society of Precision Engineering’s 33rd annual conference, held Nov. 4-9 in Las Vegas. In second place was a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The UNC Charlotte team members were Alexander Blum, Jacob Cole, Kumar Arumugam and John Borek. Their advisor was Dr. Joshua Tarbutton.
The ASPE Student Challenge is a multi-disciplinary precision engineering project drawing students from mechatronics, optics, metrology, engineering and physics. The Student Challenge is held annually, and students participating get to attend the ASPE conference for free. The UNC Charlotte team also won $4,000 for coming in first place.
For 2018, teams had to take on an optical measurement challenge, designing and building a confocal-based measuring instrument to determine the thickness of glass plate specimens ranging from 0.1 to 0.5 mm thick (25 x 25 mm square). Each team and their instrument were judged in the areas of analysis, design, teamwork, presentation and measurement performance.
More information is available at the ASPE website.
