On Monday February 1st, a small group of students from Iron Range Engineering traveled to the Eveleth Vocational campus to look into a problem with one of the projects that their students are working on. The project is a Sand Hopper that is being designed to fill multiple sandbags in wet flood stricken areas. Because of these conditions, the sand that is being used in most cases is saturated with water. They were having some issues with the design in that the wet sand has a tendency to clog up in the hopper and behave like concrete. Meeting with these students was interesting because we learned that like here at IRE, they have a very limited amount of time to go through the design process and come up with a working deliverable on their projects so any input is usually welcome.
With that, we all discussed possible solutions to the given problem and brainstormed a few ideas on the whiteboard. It turned out that many of the ideas that we came up with coincided with theirs. This I believe was a great start to a good working relationship with the people at the Eveleth campus. They are very interested in learning what we do here at IRE due to the fact that many of us will possibly be working together in the future with local industries. It so turned out that the very next day, they visited our campus and met with Andrew McNally who introduced them to other students and staff. They received many more ideas from Andrew and Les Flemming to further help in their design and will be here again in the future.
The Eveleth campus has much to offer IRE as we do for them. I encourage all students here at IRE to check out the programs that they are involved in on their website and become familiar with the students. They share many of the same ideas in learning and have a great desire to build relationships with IRE and share in future projects.
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