fyi Feature Story

They will build it
...if you come

by Cynthia Canteen and Deb Wiley

One of the best kept secrets at The University of Iowa is about to change. The Engineering Machine Shop (EMS), located in the basement of the College of Engineering, is about to become the Engineering Design and Prototyping Center (EDPC).

The change may not seem drastic, just a few words added and a few words deleted, but it reflects the expanded role and capabilities of the EMS. And it's a change that College of Engineering administrators hope will bring the secret, at least figuratively, out of the basement and into the consciousness of physicians, artists, astronomers, and other researchers at the UI.

For many departments, the Engineering Design and Prototyping Center has been anything but a secret: it's the birthplace of many high-tech research project designs and prototypes for departments all over campus. EMS staff helped the division of orthopedic mechanics design and build a tissue chamber to test the effects of repeated movement on the human knee. They designed a template for the Institute of Hydraulics to use in critiquing a scale model of a U.S. Navy destroyer. They've constructed components for the Iowa Driving Simulator, and the treatment of gynecological tumors.

"The EDPC takes virtual reality and turns it into solid reality -- a tangible, three-dimensional piece," says A. Jacob Odgaard, associate dean for research and graduate studies at the College of Engineering.

But according to Dean Macken, manager of the EDPC, the shop has changed significantly enough that the name no longer accurately reflects its activities. In addition to machining parts, the four full-time and four part-time highly skilled technicians also do design consultation, specimen preparation, and, with the purchase of a $156,000 piece of equipment from Stratasys, they've introduced to the UI campus the hottest new trend in fabrication: rapid prototyping.

"To give you an idea of what this machine will do," Macken says, "we can take the electronic information created by radiology scans (CT and MRI) and, with the aid of our rapid prototyping machine convert that information into precise 3-D plastic models of a tooth, a vertebra, a kidney, whatever was scanned." These models can be used in research and teaching.

Macken makes it clear that the newly named EDPC capabilities can benefit the entire University.

"The goal of the EDPC is to serve Ul colleges and departments needing a highly developed resource with the necessary technology and experience to develop, design, and/or manufacture prototype models and research equipment," Macken says. "We provide a level of unmatched technical support not only to the College of Engineering, but to the entire University of Iowa."

Students and faculty of the College of Engineering were its primary customers when the original Engineering Machine Shop started in 1970, and they still are.

Students can take a design to the shop, where, with the help of computer-aided design, computer-aided machining, and sometimes a little practical input from the EDPC staff, it comes to life.

"Many times people come to us with an objective but don't know how to create the mechanical components that will make their projects successful," Macken said. "We offer our mechanical/technical expertise to help fill the gap between problem and solution."

For example, an engineering student came to them to create a device for the headset of a stunt bicycle that would allow the handlebars to be rotated 360 degrees without tangling the brake cables.

"We began making the parts based on the student's specifications and found that there were critical errors in the design. We met with the student and made several design suggestions. The student went 'back to the drawing board' and, in a couple-of-days, returned with a quality design," Macken says.

The EDPC can create specific pieces of machinery. For example, the staff made a patented machine that can simultaneously pull and twist metal. The machine provides stress test information about metals that could be useful in designing motor vehicles, bridges, or other metal structures.

Word of the shop's capabilities has been spreading the past few years among research units of the University, especially medical and biomedical areas.

"Researchers have become aware that we can do things that no one else on campus can do," Macken says. "What has actually happened here is a classic entrepreneurial study."

The EDPC helped a graduate student in the department of orthopedics to develop and create an instrument for researchers to measure directional and rotational forces applied to an artificial hip joint.

The School of Dentistry asked the EDPC to design and build a three-axis specimen slicer that would allow dental researchers to cut human tooth samples into a variety of shapes and sizes. The resulting machine is being considered for a patent.

But it is the rapid prototyping that Macken expects to generate the most new business. The rapid Prototyping machine takes plastic filament like large diameter fishing line and feeds it into the machine. The plastic melts, and the molten material is fed into nozzles that are programmed to form the plastic into a specific shape. The object is made in thousands of tiny layers of plastic to very precise specifications.

Objects as large as a 10-inch cube can be made by the machine.

"The rapid prototyping models will be useful for art, dentistry, and other courses," Macken says.  Many of the products produced by the EDPC stem from research sponsored outside the UI, including NASA, Johnson and Johnson, various governmental agencies (including the U.S. Department of Defense), John Deere, Caterpillar, and others, Macken says. Several components for outer space experiments have been built by the EDPC for physics and astronomy professors.

The EDPC also works with the Iowa Computer Aided Engineering Network -- which provides computer system administration and network support for the students, faculty, and staff at the College of engineering, and with the Engineering Electronics Shop -- other UI service centers, and various vendors to produce custom devices with programmable automation and data collection capabilities.

Because it generates its own funds to continue purchasing newer equipment, the EDPC wants to build a broader range of clientele on campus to support the shop.

"There is a void this organization can fill on campus," Odgaard says. "Here's a resource that can effectively support many grant proposals."