Wesley Williams

In all the chaos and uncertainty that has characterized the summer, I am happy to report some good news.  The WaterBros team was successful in the second round of the Waves to Water competition and will be moving forward in the ADAPT round of the competition to refine our design for conditions at the Jennette’s Pier testing site, right here on the North Carolina Coast.  I’m looking forward to working with Landon again and appreciate the work that David and Rusabh putting into our winner submission.

I am proud of all of the hard work that Sina did to get this paper to publication.  It took diligence from the initial experiments and simulations all the way through the revisions and submission process.  Thanks as well to Peter and Tyler for finding the formatting, grammar, and spelling mistakes that eluded prior my review.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S245190492030072X

I’ve been impressed by the response of makers in the Charlotte community to the need for PPE in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It would be easy to just crank up the 3D printer and think that you are making a difference, but Charlotte MEDI has taken the right path by linking closely with the end users to make sure that what they are manufacturing matches the need.

On a personal front, it was a nice feeling to see the little Lulzbot Mini cranking out some faceshield parts for the effort, but hats off to Charlotte MEDI for making sure that effort wasn’t just a feel good, but an actual benefit.

https://www.charlottemedi.org/

The College of Engineering has had a strong showing, with Terrence Fagan in Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science coordinating the effort from the beginning and Joshua Tarbutton bring his machines at his company online to laser cut the faceshields.  I couldn’t be prouder to have them as colleagues.

http://bravoteam.tech/

A nice write up on the efforts can be found here.

Tyler and Peter were able to help out the NASA Lunabotics team this semester by doing the CAM work in Fusion 360 to replace a couple of custom gears that had worn out over the years.  The group has produced parts on the CNC numerous times before, but this time had the added wrinkle that we didn’t actually run the code (Mr. Pritchard in the machine shop ran it), which gave us all a bit of an education on what information needs to travel along with the file when someone else is going to be doing the final manufacturing.

Fusion 360 Simulation of the Gear being milled out

Final part as machined by Mr. Pritchard

Even with all of the COVID-19 chaos in the background, Landon and I got our submission into the Design Stage of the Waves to Water Prize.  We ended up bringing in some UNC Charlotte to help us get across the finish line in the form of David Barnett (UNC Charlotte December graduate for mechanical design and visualization help) and Rusabh Gandhi (current UNC Charlotte MS student in Applied Energy and Electromechanical System for modeling assistance).  It involved the four of us distributed among 3 different states at times, but hopefully they like our submission.

March 27-29th at UNC Asheville.  I’ll be the one in the black vest and yellow hat.

I’ve had the pleasure of working the past few months with Landon Mackey, PhD on a entry into the Waves to Water Prize (https://www.herox.com/wavestowater) sponsored by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.  The charge is to use wave energy to provide desalination for coastal communities as part of the recovery process following a natural disaster.  Landon and I met a number of years ago through meetings related to the NC Renewable Ocean Energy Program and share a similar outlook on engineering designs.  We’ve based our design on prior work done by the SAROS team (https://sarosdesalination.wordpress.com/), which was a spinoff of a UNC Charlotte senior design project, sponsored by Fred Wagner, a Charlotte area entrepreneur.  Our design, based on lessons learned during the SAROS project is the Wave Actuated Tethered Emergency Response Bouyant Reverse Osmosis System (WATERBROS).  We were pleased to be selected as one of the winning teams out of the CONCEPT phase of the competition (video here) and are hard at work on the DESIGN phase submission.