Students design hurricane gauge

• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 4, 2009

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Allison Belanger, Valerie Vogler and Eric Fredericks spent the year designing and building a portable, collapsible tower that can be used to take weather measurements during a hurricane.

Standing 60 feet outside the Patrick F. Taylor Building at LSU last week, the tower was hard to miss. The challenge, team members said, was building a tower more than twice the size of the one built last year and one that could remain stable during a hurricane.

Vogler said using 175 mph winds as a base — although they’re recommending it not be deployed with wind gusts above 150 mph — the team figured that 82 feet was adequate. The tower can be extended to that height, he said.

“It took 5,500 man hours to build it. That’s on top of class work,” Fredericks said. If the tower had been stationary, team members said, construction would have been easier.

Vogler, 23; Fredericks, 22; and Belanger, 23; were part of one of the 14 teams of graduating mechanical engineering seniors at LSU who brought out their final projects for discussion and demonstrations Friday at the university.

Dimitris Nikitopoulos, interim chairman of LSU’s mechanical engineering department, explained that seniors go through a series of courses in their final year where the first semester is used to design a project that fits a set of criteria.

In the second semester, he said, the teams build what they’ve designed. “They have to deliver a finished prototype,” Nikitopoulos said.

The effort is intended to give young engineering students a taste for an entire project, including how to handle a budget, work with sponsors and do hands-on construction, he said.

“Typically, engineers design things and someone else builds them,” Nikitopoulos said. But for new engineers, it’s important for them to get some hands-on, “holistic” experience, he said.

Eugene Lopez-Ona, 25, and Jason Cary, 22, designed a hang-glider on a cart which gets pushed down a ramp that is 30 feet off the ground.

Once the vehicle leaves the ramp, they said, the glider pops free and the goal is to see how much distance the pilot can cover before hitting the water.

The U.S. record is 155 feet, Lopez-Ona said.

Because of safety concerns, they haven’t been able to do a manned flight, but they did a smaller unmanned test and got decent results, they said.