Eagles Make Clean Sweep at AFS Casting Competition
Georgia Southern student teams took 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places at the American Foundry Society Southeast Regional Conference student casting competition held in Chattanooga, TN on March 23. These students’ projects were under the mentorship of Dr. Mingzhi Xu, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Dr. Jingjing Qing, assistant professor of Manufacturing Engineering.
1st place: Noah Brack, junior, mechanical engineering, challenged himself with casting chains with ductile iron, steel, aluminum and brass. The chain links are not interconnected, and each chain has their own separate ingate. It takes four cores to form the package. The ductile iron chain is polished and heat tinted.
2nd place: Robert Myers, freshman, mechanical engineering, took on a restoration project for the B-17 bomber from WWII for the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force . He was tasked to cast an H-bracket for the machine gun turret. He was able to successfully convert a rough 3D scan of the broken component from the original airplane to a modern aluminum casting — and it only took him a millions of brain cells and three cores! Now a B-17 in the museum has a part on it that was made by Georgia Southern’s own Robert Myers.
3rd place: Evan Carter, graduate student, manufacturing engineering, turned a fun project into a competition piece… making a full size Blade of Chaos from #godofwar. The picture doesn’t do it justice — it is 40″ long and weighs around 10 pounds… and is less than 0.25 inch thick. It is also polished and heat tinted. Carter used over-inoculated ductile iron for fluidity and durability.
James Votava, sophomore, mechanical engineering, attempted to make a side cradle for the B-17 machine gun turret. He was able to complete the middle portion and will be working on casting the entire cradle in one piece in the coming weeks.
A total of eight Georgia Southern students attended the conference. The group also visited the Lodge Foundry in Tennessee.
Posted in CEC News
Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Computing • P.O. Box 7995 • Statesboro, Georgia 30460 • 912-478-7412 • engrcomp@georgiasouthern.edu
