UMaine Students to Test Wheelchair Devices at Senior Design Competition
Contact: Herb Crosby (207) 581-2134; Tom Weber (207) 581-3777
ORONO — Trying to navigate wheelchairs over rough, hilly terrain can be a risky business, as their more outdoorsy users can tell you. A chair can roll backwards should your hands come off the wheels even for an instant, and tipping over on an incline is always a concern.
So when the students in the University of Maine’s Mechanical Engineering Technology Program learned of the problems from people with disabilities in Bangor, they set out to design and manufacture anti-rollback and anti-tipping wheelchair devices as their senior capstone projects.
Though varied, the designs all serve the same purposes, incorporating everything from parts of a boat winch and an ATV to a bicycle freewheel and ratchet components.
The public is invited to witness the results of their public-service efforts — and the countless hours of engineering resourcefulness that went into them — during the Maine Day Senior Design Competition to be held on campus Wednesday, April 30.
At the Machine Tool Lab, situated between Boardman and Barrows halls, the four teams will present their separate designs at 9 a.m., followed at 9:30 a.m. by an evaluation of the devices by a team of professional engineers and a ramp competition at 10 a.m.
The endurance part of the competition, scheduled for 10:30 a.m., will put the wheelchair devices to the test on a hilly outdoor course near Patch Hall and the Doris Twitchell Allen Village. There, the teams will have to negotiate a bump, a rut, a curb and a pothole, in some cases with both the anti-rollback and “wheelie bar” anti-tip systems engaged.
For the finale, the teams will test their systems after dousing them with a slurry of mud and sand to simulate harsh Maine outdoors conditions.
Herb Crosby, the Mechanical Engineering Technology professor who teaches the course, says this year’s group of students is one of the best that’s ever tackled a public-service design project, a senior-year tradition of sorts.
“All of the designs work and all have practical value,” he says . “They look like simple concepts but the students put in 100s of hours on them. They’ve really worked hard.”