LEWISBURG — Teams consisting of Bucknell College of Engineering senior students on Friday showcased the projects they’ve been working on during the academic year for representatives from their senior design corporate partners.
Shane Cohen, director of Engineering Corporate Relations, explained that “this is the end-of-the-year celebration for our senior students who have spent time working with external partners, ranging from nonprofits, entrepreneurs, small businesses, as well as large, Fortune 500 companies such as Auto Nation, Corning and Pepsico.”
One project was for the U.S. Army, a drone project so sensitive that the sponsor on hand would not reveal any specifics about it to The Daily Item.
“Sponsors in general say the students are very creative and the final outcome can be valuable. But the process itself can also be very valuable to them,” Cohen said. “It’s really great to see that down the road, some of these projects are implemented by the sponsor companies.”
There were about 35 sponsored projects this year.
In the group called Adaptide, with a goal of creating a system capable of measuring power off turbines, Michael Prestopino said the sponsor wanted them to find a way to verify results they had achieved. “We created a system just to get a turbine operating to verify his theoretical data points. It was all designed with our clients. We talked to them every week.”
Brett Smith and teammate Dan Young designed an automatic box-folding machine for custom takeout boxes.
All the projects were under non-disclosure agreements, but sponsors Kim and Joe Scopelliti, owners of Denovo Innovations, of Elysburg, a start-up business, were willing to talk about their interaction with students. The project put before students was a beverage-mixing project. “I was very impressed by their ingenuity and creativity,” said Joe. “To see the product go from concept to final fruition was exciting.”
Joe said he hoped to commercialize what the students had done, but it’s such a long project it still has to go through some phases at Bucknell, and add components to it.
Kim Scopelliti said she is more a business person, “but it was interesting to watch the mechanics of how they worked on the project.”