MADMEC III:
Making and Designing Materials Engineering Contest
"Materials Solutions for Alternative Energy"

Team Name: rEvolvEng

Team Members:

Billy Woodford, DMSE
Timothy Zens, DMSE G
Kevin Gotrik, DMSE G
Fabrice Kunzi, Aero/Astro G
Jonathan Singer, DMSE G

Abstract:
Our group hopes to not only improve the efficiency of revolving doors, but also to address one of the largest challenges facing current revolving doors, namely under-usage. Our door will approach enhanced efficiency with a hybrid strategy of improving the structural design of the door, usage of the door’s spin, and application of modern materials. The main idea of these innovations is to allow for air exchange through the center column of the door in the middle of its stroke and further, enhancing this exchange with fans powered by the door’s motion and lighter and better insulating door materials. By making these new features visible to users, it will hopefully encourage use of the door. In addition, we hope to also implement mechano or chemo chromic materials to allow users to interact with the door to make use of the revolving door more attractive. All innovations will be designed to be modular such that they can be implemented on their own or with existing or other new technologies should aspects turn out to be infeasible or impractical. In the design process, we hope to maximize our effectiveness by extensively using computational modeling to determine the best specifications before constructing and testing a scale model. We also plan on utilizing surveys to get peoples impressions of our designs.

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