MIME Home | degree | undergraduate | projects

Senior Design Project: Industry Partnerships

The MIME Senior Design Project is the capstone educational experience for OSU Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering undergraduates. This two-term project challenges our seniors to synthesize the knowledge they have gained during their undergraduate program and apply that knowledge in solving real-world engineering problems.

OSU MIME seeks partnerships with a diverse set of business and service organizations in and beyond the Pacific Northwest to provide our student teams with two key elements of the MIME Senior Design experience:

  • The real-world problems our students work to solve, and

  • the mentorship that helps our students devise solutions that meet the sponsoring organization's needs.

To learn more about industry sponsorship of MIME Senior Projects, scroll down through the rest of this page—or to go to a specific topic, click on one of the topics below.

Our downloadable Senior Project brochures for ME and IME (PDF format) also provide sponsorship information.

Or, if you're ready to fill out a project proposal form, click here.

Why Sponsor an MIME Senior Project?

  • Do you have an idea for a new mechanical or electromechanical device, product, or system but no time or resources to work on it?
  • Is your company looking for an innovative solution to a long-standing mechanical, electromechanical, or manufacturing problem?
  • Would you like to improve the efficiency or ergonomics of some of the machinery on your manufacturing floor?
  • Do you have other equipment or fixtures that need to be redesigned or improved?
  • Is your engineering staff or your development budget stretched too thin to complete some of the projects on your company's to-do list?
  • Are you looking for mechanical, industrial, or manufacturing engineering assistance on a community service project?
  • Would you like to help train and mentor the next generation of mechanical, industrial, and manufacturing engineers?

If your answer to any of these questions is "Yes," we invite you to consider MIME Senior Design Project sponsorship!
Please contact the OSU MIME Senior Project Coordinator to discuss your ideas:

John Parmigiani
School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering, Oregon State University
204 Rogers Hall
Corvallis, OR 97331
parmigjo@engr.oregonstate.edu
phone: 541.737.7023
fax: 541.737.2600

Sample Listing of Recent Senior Projects

  • Automated temperature and flow control faucet system
  • Automated rolling table for screen door and window manufacture
  • Composite body for solar vehicle
  • Hydrofoil surfboard
  • Biodiesel demo and test station
  • Smart lawn sprinkler
  • Ocean wave energy buoy
  • Zoom and focus mechanism for a digital projector
  • Technique for reducing soft tissue damage during manual riveting operations
  • Remote visual inspection unit for wing assemblies
  • Human-powered vehicle
  • Computational toolbox for feedback controllers (implemented in MATLAB)
  • Testing apparatus for rock climbing ropes and knots
  • Compressed-air–powered vehicle
  • SEM loading stage
  • Scrap material chopper
  • Weed seed killer
  • Baseball conditioning machine

Benefits of Senior Project Sponsorship

MIME Senior Project sponsorship is a two-way relationship that promises significant returns for industry participants:

  • With a relatively small investment of company time and money, project sponsorship lets you pursue "outside-of-the-box" solutions to your organization's business needs and ideas.
  • Project sponsorship gives you a "no-obligation" opportunity to work with and train potential company hires.
  • Project sponsorship raises your organization's visibility at OSU (and beyond) and leads to stronger working relationships with OSU MIME faculty.
  • And most important, project sponsorship is an avenue through which you can help shape and influence our next generation of mechanical, industrial, and manufacturing engineers—here in Oregon, throughout the Pacific Northwest, and around the world.

Project partnerships with industry also enhance the "work-readiness” of our graduating seniors by allowing them to:

  • develop marketable engineering skills
  • get acquainted with corporate environments
  • meet the performance standards of these environments
  • build professional relationships
  • solve real-world problems with the guidance of experts

Sponsor Responsibilities

We ask corporate MIME Senior Project sponsors to contribute a $3500 sustaining fee, payable by donation to the OSU Foundation. Sponsors should also provide necessary resources for prototype construction and project completion that may not be available at OSU. In addition, sponsors typically make several trips to OSU to meet with their project team and host the project team for several onsite visits. Sponsors also assign a project mentor who acts as the project team’s technical consultant, serves as the point person for onsite visits, reviews project documentation, and participates in project evaluation.

Preparing and Submitting a Project Proposal

Proposal Considerations

In putting together your Senior Design Project Proposal, be sure that your engineering problem has all of the following characteristics:

  • The problem must be sufficiently rigorous to serve as a capstone project for senior undergraduates in mechanical, industrial, and/or manufacturing engineering.
  • In its scope, the problem should be appropriate for a group of 3-4 students to tackle as a two-term project.
  • The problem must be open-ended—in other words, it must have more than one possible solution.
  • It should be able to be solved using existing engineering methods (this is not a research project in new engineering methodologies).
  • Students must be able to construct a prototype or computer model that represents their solution to the problem.

Other considerations:

  • You can come up with the project idea yourself, or you can work with the senior design coordinator and/or a student design team to define a project.
  • Non-critical-path projects work best.
  • Projects can be either mechanical-, industrial-, or manufacturing-engineering-specific or interdisciplinary, with teams including electrical engineering and/or computer science students as well as MIME students.
  • As well as industry-based projects, we also welcome proposals for community-service-based projects (both local and international). For community service projects, the sustaining fee may be waived.

Proposal Submission

To ensure that your Senior Design Project proposal receives full consideration, please submit it to the MIME Senior Project Coordinator by September 1 of the project year. You can submit the proposal form electronically or print it out and send or fax it to the Senior Design Project Coordinator (contact information is on the form). In either case, please submit a separate form for each project you intend to sponsor.

Confidentiality and Intellectual Property Considerations

Confidentiality: OSU personnel can keep information which project sponsors provide confidential, but any work OSU personnel (including students) accomplish is public.

Intellectual Property: In cases where a sponsoring company requests ownership of intellectual property resulting from the senior project as a condition of students' participation, the sponsoring company should be aware of the following OSU policy regarding student IP:  Students are never obligated to participate in projects or activities that require the assignment of the student's intellectual property to an outside entity. In these situations students will always be presented with a choice of two options: (1) To participate in projects or activities which do not require the student to assign their intellectual property, or (2) To participate in projects or activities that requires the student to assign their intellectual property.