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Engineering Foundations: Eight College Builds (2016–2020)
From a first-year pulley system to explosion simulations for a government organisation: the mechanical engineering projects that shaped how I build, test and iterate.
Each project is written up in full on my college blog, Life of a Mechanical Engineer.
Before program management, I was a mechanical engineer who learnt mostly by building. Four years of projects gave me a habit I still rely on: find a way to make it work with what’s available, test it, and iterate. Along the way, coding turned out to be one of the most useful tools in a mechanical engineer’s kit.
Featured
Formula Student: 97 iterations to a race-car chassis. Head designer for a 20-person team on my college’s first Formula Student car.
The projects
Hybrid vertical-axis wind turbine
A wind turbine designed to generate electricity safely in cities. I optimised blade geometry, aspect ratio and blade count through CFD simulation in Ansys Fluent and SolidWorks, and the design reached 100 RPM at 4 m/s wind speed. Lesson: your first simulations will always be wrong. Read the project →
Explicit simulations (internship)
A six-month internship with a government organisation, simulating an explosion with explicit finite-element methods in Abaqus and Ansys Workbench, and validating the results across both. It meant deriving material equations of state by hand and defining failure criteria for extreme stresses. Read the project →
CNC plotter
A 2D pen-plotting CNC machine, built as a stepping stone towards a 3D printer, for about ₹15,000, with open-source electronics and laser-cut MDF. Layered sheets solved the vibration problem, and modular parts made each iteration cheap to test. Read the project →
The Useless Box
An Arduino-powered box whose arm flicks its own switch back off, with an ultrasonic sensor so it can dodge your hand. It taught me how hard it is to build a compact 3D mechanism from flat laser-cut sheets, and how much testing goes into a “simple” idea. Read the project →
Cycle Bus
An eight-seat human-powered vehicle that combines power from eight sets of pedals into a single drive shaft. I designed and simulated the chassis in SolidWorks, my first simulation work. It never got manufacturing funding, but it taught me more than any textbook. Read the project →
Mechanical press
A press that converts rotary motion into a linear stroke strong enough to cut small plastics. Our professor rejected the first design 24 hours before the final presentation, so we redesigned it and built it in under six hours with hand tools only. Lesson: understand the manufacturing process before you open the CAD. Read the project →
Speed-reduction pulley system
My first-year project: a rope-and-cylinder pulley system that cut a motor’s speed to about a third to drive a conveyor. Basic, and built for grades, but it taught me the difference between building to pass and building to learn. Read the project →