During the senior year of the engineering program students take a 2-semester major design course (EGR 491/492), working on a significant engineering project. These projects are often sponsored by local industry partners. An overview of two of this year’s projects is provided below:
Project 1: Cabling Innovations
By Alex Wainscott, William Murray, and Grace Morriss
Sponsoring Organization: General Cable
Our team was tasked by General Cable in Jackson to implement a design to bunch wire on an existing Cecco jacket line. The end goal is to provide a lay length (3-5 inches) that will allow for the proper quality assurance standards, specifically crosstalk, to be passed for category 5 wire. The economic motivation behind this project involves an ability to manufacture more category 5 wire as well as a potential for $90,000 dollars in cost savings through labor reduction. The focus of our design will be a proof of concept demonstrating how a bunching stage could be built for full scale production in the future. Final Presentation (.pdf)
Project 2: Scrap Wire Reclamation
By Dylan Baker, Cody Giles, Todd Jones, and Kian Jost
Sponsoring Organization: General Cable
The General Cable plant in Jackson, Tennessee, produces Ethernet cable, composed of four pairs of insulated copper wire twisted together. During the process, scrap wire is inevitably produced. This scrap wire has reclaim value; however, separating the wire into insulation and clean copper yields a significantly higher reclaim value. Currently, General Cable only has a method for separating single strands of wire, but a considerable amount of their scrap is in the form of two strands twisted together which must be sold at the lower reclaim price. The goal for our capstone project is to develop a method for separating and sorting these twisted strands of wire into insulation and clean copper using the knowledge we have gained from the engineering curriculum. Final Presentation (.pdf)