As a professional engineer at lab equipment manufacturer Bio-Rad, Matthew Latham finds that actual engineering is just a small part of his job.

"The engineering is the easy part," he said. Most of his time is spent on project management, working with other professionals and managers in the company, giving presentations and other tasks.

Now Latham, himself a UC Davis graduate, is helping current mechanical engineering students gain valuable experiences through the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering's Design Clinic.

From labs to markets

The Design Clinic, part of the final year of the undergraduate major in mechanical engineering, aims to provide students with the experience and feel of the engineering profession. Working in small groups, students take on a real design project from initial brainstorming to detailed designs, making real tradeoffs between quality and cost, time and practicality. The projects worked on by the students can come from private companies, campus research labs or centers, or other campus units.

Each group is advised by a project sponsor, usually an engineer from the sponsoring company or campus unit, and a professor from the department's faculty with the greatest knowledge in that area.

Depending on the complexity of the problem and the time available, the students may build a prototype. The class runs for two quarters, about six months.

"It's the capstone design experience in which the students get to tackle real-life problems with all the tools they have learned in their education," said Steve Velinsky, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Davis and course leader for the current session.

For industry sponsors, it's an opportunity to have a team of students bring fresh ideas to a problem, as well as building relationships with UC Davis and helping to train the next generation of engineers and technology experts, Velinsky said. They also effectively get the services of a high-level engineering consultant, the professor assigned as mentor to the group.

"It's a good bridge between industry and college," said Bobby Daddel, a mechanical engineering senior taking the class. "You have a project, a deadline, and you have to work with others to make it happen."

"If you don't know how to manage a project, you can't build anything," said David Yung Lei, another student working in Latham's group. Lei is already working as an engineering intern with the city of Sacramento, but said that the Design Clinic gives an added experience.

"Working for the city is different from working for Bio-Rad — you get a different experience, different perspectives," he said.

The students have to learn how to get mechanical, electronic and other systems to work together, and the principles of how to go about solving an engineering problem — all with an outcome and a client in view.

"It really allows them to take what they have learned academically and apply it to a real-life problem," Latham said.

Latham brought his group a problem from Bio-Rad's manufacturing floor. The company makes pre-cast electrophoresis gels for biology labs using a semi-automated process. With demand increasing, the company needs to ramp up production and move to a fully automated process, maintaining product quality while staying within space and cost constraints.

'Keep out of their way'

The group began with a tour of Bio-Rad's facility near Richmond in the Bay Area, and a briefing on the task. Since then, they've been meeting weekly to come up with ideas and develop designs. Latham meets regularly with the group, but says he tries to keep out of their way.

By the end of last quarter, the group had come up with four possible designs and is now fine-tuning their ideas, Daddel said. If the company likes the design the students come up with, they may develop it further. Even if they ultimately go in a different direction, the project will still have helped the company's engineers exclude design solutions, Latham said.

"It's a terrific project. The students are learning a lot and I think the company will get a lot out of it," Velinsky said.

Industry sponsors contribute $3,000 to cover basic expenses of running the clinic, such as building prototypes, said director James Schaaf.

Other groups in the class are working on campus projects such as an automated roadside debris collection device for the Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology Center, energy use at the California National Primate Research Center, and fixing the air conditioning in a Mrak Hall conference room.

Bio-Rad is the only industry sponsor in the current class. Previous industry sponsors have included companies such as Aerojet, Rockwell and Lockheed.

Velinsky said the number of industry sponsors has dropped in recent years, at least partly due to the weak economy. There is also a trend for engineering design work to move offshore, he said. The department is hoping to attract more companies back to the program.

"It's a great opportunity to network with our best students, the students can come up with very impressive ideas, and it's an opportunity to contribute to engineering education overall," Velinsky said.

UC Davis currently has about 3,300 undergraduate students in engineering, in 16 programs including double majors. The campus graduates about 130 mechanical engineering majors per year.