Florida Institute of Technology

For the third year, Florida tech engineering students have competed against Northrop Grumman Corp, Bayside High and Harris Corp. as part of National Engineering Week. In the first competition they took home the trophy for a amazing “Rube Goldberg” type of machine. This year’s competition was a Brain Bowl, which pitted contestants against each other to win back the trophy.

Florida Tech students Jeff Gibson, Valarie Bastien, Ken Mandeville and Christian Torres (picture, left to right) formed the team Panthers. They represented aerospace, mechanical and electrical majors in the College of Engineering. The Brain Bowl was a series of three competitions: A “Pictionary” competiton, a knowledge quiz and a design competition. Although the Panthers placed first in pictionary, they were third overall.

This competition is a great experience and a chance for the students to interact with local industry. It is a fun way to celebrate engineering and for the students to show off their innovative skills. Many thanks to Northrop Grumman for hosting this event.

Student design projects can mentally take you to a higher plane. For Michael Vergalla the Tank Fluid Dynamics project took him on board a different kind of plane. It lead to research as a Graduate student at Florida Tech. He continued working on modeling slosh dynamics in fuel tanks under microgravity. The experiment was flown on the NASA Zero-Gravity flight in an effort to simulate and analyze the behavior of liquids in motion under simulated microgravity. 

As a result of his work Mike was one of the two Florida Tech Students who participated in the new NASA Student Ambassador Virtual Community program.  Ryan Clegg, a senior with a double major in Florida Tech's physics and space science jioned Mike in working with students across the globe on NASA projects.

Junior Christina Lucas was awarded the prestigious HORIZONS Foundation scholarship by Women in Defense, a National Security Organization and an affiliate of the National Defense Industrial Association. Ms. Lucas was one of three students nationally to received a scholarship. The two other students were from Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University.

Ms. Lucas is a junior in Mechanical Engineering. She is focused on mobile robots and unmanned autonomous vehicles. Her work as an Intern in the Robotics and Spatial Systems Lab (RASSL) at Florida Tech has resulted in the development of a six-legged robot prototype. “A basic idea of how it would be useful is that it will be able to go up and around obstacles where other robots are not able to go, therefore making it less dangerous for troops,” Lucas said. She has begun a peer-reviewed paper awaiting publication and preparation of a patent for this robot. The application is aiding troops in dangerous environments. She intends to pursue a career in the development of these types of advanced military systems.

Florida Tech has a long history of building and testing rockets. This October the students built a hybrid rocket motor from scratch. After a rigorous safety review the rocket was cleared to be test fired on the Florida Tech Trust stand. This test stand was build by Florida Tech students to test the thrust properties of rocket engines. For the Panther II and USLI students this was their first atempt to build a motor.  Both it and the thrust stand performed well.

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