What is the safest and most efficient way to flip a 2,000-pound metal plate? That's the question engineers at Gasbarre Products Inc. of DuBois recently posed to a class of freshmen engineering students at Penn State DuBois.
As part of a new curriculum offered at the DuBois campus, students in the "Engineering Design and Graphics" course were asked to create a working model of a machine that could flip a piece of metal weighing between 200 and 2,000 pounds. But there were some stipulations: the machine they designed had to be safe, low-cost to build and operate, efficient and fit into a 16-square-foot space.
Relying on the teamwork, computer-aided drafting and design skills learned this past semester, the students worked in teams to create three different models of machines.
The course was developed by Dhushy Sathianathan and Kabil Kallas, professors in the College of Engineering at University Park. The innovative curriculum was introduced to the DuBois students by Lorin Waitkas, instructor in engineering design and graphics at the campus.
Penn State researchers have joined in a collaborative effort to regenerate Pittsburgh's Nine Mile Run area, identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as one of the most degraded urban streams in the United States.
Ken Tamminga, assistant professor of landscape architecture at Penn State, is the landscape architect and ecological designer on the project involving Carnegie Mellon University's Studio for Creative Inquiry, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Penn State. The Nine Mile Run area includes 20 million tons of steel mill slag in piles 15-stories high; raw sewage mixed in with runoff in storm surges; illegal sanitary sewer overflows; and a severe decline of native plant species.
The usual approach to dealing with a situation like Nine Mile Run is to remove the slag, grade the area and plant grass. But in this case, removing the slag would be too costly and disruptive and it wouldn't be regenerative.
In the new, more sustainable model developed by the team, the plan is to try to convert the area to something more suitable for human compatibility by enhancing biodiversity, reintroducing native species and working with and revealing the natural processes under way in the area.
"We anticipate that it will take as long to restore the area as it did to degrade it," Tamminga said. "We'll need patience and tolerance and faith in natural processes to accomplish the task."