Sleep Sync — Cuddle Pillow
A consumer sleep-aid concept: a pillow with an embedded vibration motor guiding the 4-7-8 breathing technique, a heart-rate sensor, and a wireless-charging base that forces the user out of bed to disarm the alarm. Built and user-tested a working physical prototype, backed by a competitive market comparison, user personas, and a Business Model Canvas. The most consumer-product, human-centered-design piece in my portfolio — market research and usability testing alongside the hardware.
Heat Sink Orientation Study
Tested four cooling-fan orientations (0°, 45°, 90°, and overhead) against an aluminum fin-array heat sink, measuring transient cooling curves and computing fin efficiency and heat-transfer rate for each. Clean, conclusive result: a 45° orientation outperformed even direct overhead airflow — counter to the typical laptop-cooling assumption — backed by thermocouple data and a MATLAB numerical model.
Wind-Tunnel Drag Testing (Hot Wheels Dynamic Similarity)
Used 1:64-scale die-cast models in a wind tunnel to test whether drag coefficients measured on small-scale cars would predict full-size vehicle performance, via dimensional analysis and Buckingham Pi scaling. Built a custom 3D-printed test fixture and instrumented it with a dynamometer and LVDT. The honest result: measurement error from mounting and calibration was large enough that the scaling hypothesis wasn't conclusively validated — reported and root-caused rather than hidden, with every task split three ways and documented.
Controls II — Sheepdog Robot System ID & PID Tuning
Hands-on controls lab: identified a first-order plant model from physical hardware (myRIO + LabVIEW), then designed and tuned proportional and PI controllers with friction compensation, comparing settling time and steady-state error across each configuration on real hardware.
Decision-Based Engineering — Multi-Attribute Utility Analysis
A solo application of formal decision-analysis theory — utility independence, scaling constants, Monte Carlo probability modeling in MATLAB — applied to a real multi-attribute decision. The methodology is the transferable part: the same trade-study framework applies directly to engineering concept-selection decisions.
Early Coursework (2020–21)
First-year design sequence at Purdue: a catapult mechanism, a Mars-cargo rover concept, a disaster-relief robot, and a solar-hydro energy storage optimization paired with a Python script balancing pump/turbine efficiency against cost — an early instance of writing code to solve an engineering trade-off, well before MATLAB became the daily tool.