First place in ASME’s 2012 Student Design Competition: Energy Relay went to engineering students Clement Jambou and Olivier Sintive from the Institut Superieur de L’Aeronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse, France. Mandar Zope, Mayank Porwal, and Kumar Keshav from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, took 2nd place. Third place was a three-way tie between Miss Hau Wing Yi Curie, Miss Chi Yuk Fung, and Mr. Ng Ka Kui of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Dereck Bastienne, Kaltham Saeed Khalfan Al Romaithi, Kaltham Yousef Khalfan Al-Ali, and Abdel Rahman Farraj of the Khalifa University of Science (UAE); and Danial Barkhurst, Kodi Dixon, Cody McKinney, and Tyler Stingley from the University of Wyoming.
Students had to apply the basic principles of alternative energy when designing four self-propelled devices that would collectively compete in a relay race. Each device had to contain an onboard energy source to trigger the subsequent device.
For the 2013 competition, the challenge is to design a Remote Inspection Device. Following the tragedy at the Fukushima nuclear facility after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, the nuclear industry issued a Request for Proposal to design and build a small, remotely controlled inspection vehicle that could determine the level of radioactivity at specified locations and inspect for damage, protecting humans from absorbing high doses of radioactive contamination. Participants must design a vehicle to negotiate around obstacles, both in getting to the inspection points and bringing the sensor to the designated return area.