Presented by: Mines students and moderated by Jason Combs, program director of the NSIN at Mines.
“Gate Defense” – This team of metallurgical and mechanical engineers helped Ellsworth improve 11 gates that are designed to control traffic flow and speeds. The current gates are extremely heavy, often stick and require multiple people to operate.
“ROADCON” – This team included mechanical and electrical engineers who worked on signs which notify base personnel what the road conditions are during winter storms. The team provided Ellsworth leadership with options to improve reliability, remote update capabilities and visibility of the signs during inclement weather.
“UNFUNDED” – This team of a chemical and a mechanical engineers tackled one of Ellsworth’s most difficult problems: developing a decision-making tool to aide senior base leadership in making end-of-year funding decisions (an advanced data analysis and data visualization problem). The team provided solutions that helped clarify what data was required for the decisions, standardized terms, cleaned and conditioned the data and then used Excel power tools (Power Pivot, etc.) to provide an interactive dashboard.
