Brushwood Acre Farms awards prizes to winners of design challenge at AC

Engineers enjoy conundrums, and that may go double for Daulton Norman, a mechanical engineering major at Amarillo College, who submitted not one, but two possible solutions in the Brushwood Acre Farms Design Challenge.

One of Noman’s concepts won first place in the competition, and Brushwood Acre Farms presented him with a modest cash prize that was matched by the College at an awards ceremony today on AC’s Washington Street Campus.

“I feel honored, for sure,” said Norman, who sought a “simplistic” project solution. “I wanted to come up with something with no mechanical parts that is easy to make and easy to utilize. I’ve made a lot of things that have never been used for anything,” he said. “It’s nice to make something that someone will actually use.”

Brushwood Acre Farms of Amarillo is a hydroponic greenhouse operation that uses cutting-edge vertical towers and other soilless growing systems. Last summer, the burgeoning operation asked AC’s Engineering Department to encourage students to come up with a system of support – essentially a type of stand or base – to accommodate the stackable apparatuses used in its hydroponic operations.

“Our engineering faculty got together and to us it seemed like a no-brainer,” said Zach Vick, instructor of engineering. “It was an achievable project and we loved giving students the opportunity to collaborate with a community partner, so we proposed turning it into a contest, a Design Challenge. That way, more students could choose to enter the competition than just a few we might have hand-picked, which in turn allowed us to offer more and better outcomes.

“We think it was pretty much a win-win for our students and for the client.”

Brushwood Acre Farms provided precise specifications at the start of the semester for the system of support it required – among other stipulations, the successful components would need to support at least 200 pounds. Student teams (or individuals) that took up the challenge were tasked with developing design concepts which were vetted in late September by AC faculty, who selected the five finalists.

On Oct. 10, those finalists formally presented their designs graphically and/or in printed 3-D form to Brushwood Acre Farms, which today announced its favorites.

In all, 14 AC students comprising five teams of 1 to 5 budding engineers entered the Design Challenge, and all of them were recognized at the awards ceremony, including the runner-up team of Oscar Hernandez, Kevin Parra and Ryan Torres.

“We came up with our concept through trial and error,” Parra said. “We studied the design constraints provided and came up with a prototype that would support the weight and satisfy the requirements. I feel like with just a little more time we might have been able to knock off the rough edges, but we had a great time.”

Vanessa Miles, instructor of engineering, said the Design Challenge not only spurred students’ interest, but helped them fulfill the requirements of a class design project each had due at semester’s end.

“They all had a design project due anyway, so this gave them an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone,” Miles said. “But they went way beyond just fulfilling a requirement; for what they came up with truly wowed me.

“And along the way a lot of our students also developed interpersonal skills and teaming skills that are vital for engineers who seldom work alone in the workplace, so it was a unique and worthwhile project all around,” she said.

Among other participating students in the Design Challenge were Alexander Hernandez, who undertook the project on his own, and a four-member team of Isaac Gonzalez, Kade Ledger, Ryan Mayberry and Gilberto Pena.

Engineering major Kaden Martinez handled the 3-D modeling duties for a five-member team that also included Mark Dangkingson, Luis Ordaz, Riley Patterson and Colin Taylor.

“For a lot of us it was our first experience working in a group setting,” Martinez said, “so we all took on different roles – organizer, draftsman, constraints checker – and we tried to give everyone an equal share of the workload. Our concept might not have been the winner, but I feel like we all learned a lot and especially benefited from our efforts to work as a team and meet a deadline.

“If the opportunity ever comes up to participate in a future team project like this one, I’m definitely in,” he said.

NOTE: In the photograph are AC engineering team members Kevin Parra, Oscar Hernandez and Ryan Torres.