Students showcase research, presentation skills during ASME competition
By Ksenia Maryasova
Lively voices broke the summer silence on the empty campus on a Saturday morning in June as students presented their technical research projects at the Oral Presentation Competition organized by the Arizona Section of American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Students from any university of the state majoring in engineering and willing to showcase their presentation skills took part in the competition held in Arizona for the first time.
As the judges were still arriving, the contestants were double-checking equipment and anxiously rehearsing presentations of their technical projects, designed from scratch. Each presentation had to meet the limit of 15 minutes and followed by a barrage of tough questions. Alongside the quality of content and presenters’ eloquence, the discussion was one of the scoring criteria and examined students’ ability to answer the questions clearly and confidently.
Chemical engineering sophomore Berenice Castro, the only woman and one of the prize winners, was the one to get the ball rolling. Visibly eager, she turned on the PowerPoint and started presenting her project.
“The project I had to present dealt with the design and analysis of cabinet structures that protect electronics from resonance frequencies. I was able to present my results by utilizing ASONIKA-V subsystem’s specialized graphical user interface to carry out parametric optimization of vibration isolators.”
Alongside getting more comfortable with the pressure of presenting, for Castro it was an opportunity to dive in a new aspect of engineering. “It’s an interesting topic. It has given me an opportunity to apply what I have learned in my differential equations class to the real world of engineering.”
Castro is an active member of ASU MAES club, a Latinos in Science and Engineering organization devoted to promote, cultivate, and honor excellence in education and leadership among Latino engineers and scientists.
Stella Dearing, chair of the ASME Arizona Section, said the organization seeks to encourage engineering with young people as much as possible. Through the competition, students were able to sharpen their presentation skills while sharing findings on a topic of interest.
“We wanted to encourage more people to practice and to get those presentation skills down as well as giving them a chance to highlight their technical expertise,” she said.
The competition format was based on ASME’s Old Guard Presentation Competition. According to ASME website, the purpose of the event is to highlight the importance of delivering succinct and effective oral messages in the engineering related fields.
Oral Guard Presentation Competition happens as a part of Student Professional Development Conference, an international complex event consisting of various competitions, skill development sessions and networking for engineering students, and takes place all year round.
As its prototype, the local competition remunerated students’ efforts with awards of $500, $300 and $200 for the first, second and third places respectively. However, the competition designed to be integrative in contestants’ future careers, would benefit them in many other ways, Dearing said.
“Some of the students were pretty motivated and this just gave them another chance to shine,” Dearing said. “But it’s also a good place to practice for bigger competitions or bigger scholarships. It’s kind of a form for them to get better at their presentation skills and share with a group of people that are technically-minded their ideas in terms of what work they do and where they want to go with that.”
Current ASU PhD student Nicholas Fette and ASU alumnus Valeriy Khaldarov volunteered to put the event together, recruit students and judges. Chairing, attentively observing and supporting students, Khaldarov said it was a challenge to recruit people, but at the end the competition turned to be a success. The event achieved the goal of establishing connections between students and ASME, he said.
“So this will be an opportunity for students to practice technical presentation and to network with local ASME section,” Fette said. “Likewise, this will give local ASME section members an opportunity to interact with young engineers.”
ASME annually holds multiple competitions for engineering students, including the Student Design Competition, which encourages participants to offer fresh design solution to a wide variety of problems from quotidian tasks to innovative scientific exploration.
Other competitions organized by ASME include Next-Generation Innovators Define Robotics Competition, which calls to more than 100 students’ creativity by challenging them to design and build a 130-pound robot in six weeks. IAM3D Challenge provides students with an opportunity to re-engineer or re-design existing products to improve energy efficiency.
The panel of three judges including an ASU professor and engineers working for Boeing and Intel assessed students’ performance. After the presentations had been completed, the judges took 15 minutes to deliberate and anticipation filled the air. The judges returned in agreement and announced that mastery of the technical component and confident presentation skills were equally important to get to the top.
ASU graduate mechanical engineering student Deepakshyam Krishnaraju’s performance was called very consistent, and granted him the first place. Visibly excited, Krishnaraju said that his years of hard work in graduate school had culminated in this achievement and that his parents back in India are very proud of his effort.
“My presentation contained an analysis of a certain electronic sensor used in the aerospace industry. My job was to determine whether this sensor could withstand thermal load under extreme conditions. And if it did not, I needed to come up with the design changes needed to be implemented for the device to avoid failure. I was able to generate these results by modeling thermal networks analogous to an electrical circuit by using ASONIKA-T subsystem.”
Krishnaraju has recently received his Master’s degree and is looking for employment as an FEA analyst for an engineering company. “I am looking forward to entering the real world,” he said. “The future looks bright!”
Felipe Hernandez a Structural Analysis Engineer at Boeing, noted the novelty approach to Krishnaraju’s work, and said that the “top-to-bottom” method presented can substantially reduce computational time for analysts working with finite element models.
Richard Jenkins, an electrical engineer from General Electric with over 30 years of experience in the aerospace industry, really liked the technical quality of Castro’s presentation which brought her to the second place.
“In today’s competitive environment, companies in the aerospace industry are looking to save costs on physical testing, yet guarantee high reliability of performance. This translates to more reliance on simulation analysis like the one presented today,” said Jenkins.
NAU electrical engineering junior Jess Robinson won third place in the competition. His presentation was about overclocking, a process of making computer components operate faster than the clock frequency specified by the manufacturer.
“The downside to this process is that the processor will get overheated and fail as a result,” Robinson said. “In overclocking competitions, liquid nitrogen is applied on computer motherboards but currently this technique is considered as art rather than science. My aim is to develop a systematic approach to this process, and to do that I used ASONIKA-TM to get some analysis.”
Sergei Voronov, an Engineering Manager in Substrate Packaging Technology Development at Intel said the initial results presented by Robinson were encouraging but that more work needs to be done.
“This is a very broad subject, and there are literally million things that can go wrong and ruin the chip,” Voronov said. “So my advice to this student is to concentrate on something specific in this subject and be able to present a particular solution.”
“Applying liquid nitrogen to dissipate heat can be very costly,” Robinson said. “So my next step is to work on the design which would minimize its loss and keep the processor working at the same time. My plan is to present this work next year and win this thing.”
One of the judges and ASU associate professor Anatoli Korkin said the competition was an example of what students would face in working and educational environment in the future.
“You have to market yourself anywhere to find a job, to present your project to your colleagues, to your manager,” he said. “(The competition) gives them an addition to creativity in a sense of taking up the project by themselves, thinking what I would do if I had a project, how I formulate it, how I present it.”
Dearing said that although the turnout wasn’t very high, the competition was a success, and organizers have an optimistic outlook on the future.
“We started out small, but I was happy how it went this year,” she said. “We hope next year to have a lot bigger turnout. But the thing that was nice about this year that it was very small, so we could iron out any kinks.”