Mechanical Project Ideas

I was receiving a lot of emails and requests from mechanical engineering students to list a few ideas for mechanical projects (mostly mini projects for mechanical engineers). So I decided to regularly post some projects on this website. This is my first list of projects. Here I would like to tell you that there is nothing like a mini project or a big project. You can always add up or cut down to the scope of a mechanical project according to your desire. Have a look at these ideas, discuss it with your friends and faculty members and implement any of these mechanical project ideas if you like:

1. Energy production from sewage waste using solar biogas digester with reverse absorber heater:

If you are interested in doing some mechanical engineering project on renewable energy sources then this can be an ideal project for you. In this project, you can decompose biomass by an aerobic digestion which results in formation of biogas, a methane rich gas. Though this project has been done a several times but new thing in this project is use of sewage sludge (toilet waste) for production of biogas and use of solar energy for heating that slurry instead of providing heat from some external source, as biogas production rate depends on temperatures.
Use solar energy as heat source and then design, manufacture and test biogas digester. If you want to do more work on it, then you can also design a complete system for production of electric power from produced biogas.

2. Modeling and experimental flow analysis of airfoil:

This mechanical project idea involves formation of relationship between aerodynamic parameters with angle of attack of airfoil using Computational fluid dynamics techniques. You can evaluate numerical solution for airfoils NACA-0012 and NACA-4412 using CFX(Ansys). Use wind tunnels in your university to verify accuracy of your model.

3. Develop automatic gear shifting mechanism for bicycles:

In this project, you can develop a mechanism for automatically shifting the gears of a bicycle according to the force applied onto the paddles by the cyclist.

4. Geometric modeling and simulation of parallel plate heat exchangers:

There are many types of plate heat exchanges. Some are round plate heat exchangers and some are rectangular plate heat exchangers. Then it can be a counter flow or cross flow heat exchanger. These heat exchangers also differ based on the configuration of the plates. Some of these heat exchangers have flat plates while others have corrugated plates. You can design any type of these parallel plate heat exchangers. What you need to do is that you will design the plates and assemble them in Pro Engineer or any other software of your choice. Then you will import this heat exchanger in CFX (Ansys) where you will run real time simulations on this heat exchanger. Take any two similar or different fluids to flow inside the plates and take readings of temperature and pressure etc. Change different flow parameters and check the change in your results. You can compare different type of flows and plate configurations in order to check that which of type of plates gives more accurate results and higher efficiency. In order to verify the results of this mechanical engineering project, you can always compare your data with experimental readings which can be found in many research papers of heat exchanges.

5. Design a tennis ball thrower mechanism and manufacture it:

This mechanical project idea is related to design and manufacturing. You will need to design and fabricate tennis ball thrower which can throw ball to a distance as far as it can. The design requirements for the tennis ball thrower are: The tennis ball thrower must be 3 feet in height and must have the capability to automatically load the next ball for throwing. The ball thrower must be manually operated. Such that no need to install motors etc. First a complete analysis and simulation of the design is required on Pro Engineer and ANSYS for functioning and stresses calculations involved. The design of the ball thrower must be the one that it can throw the ball as far as it can.

Main tasks are to design of model ball thrower on Pro Engineer. Analysis of the critical component of the ball thrower on ANSYS. Fabrication of ball thrower on the basis of model designed. The maximum power required to load the ball thrower for throwing the ball. Material selection with their justification of chosen material. Justification of the design and material selected to be cost effective.

Note: If you want to share more mechanical engineering project ideas, kindly email me the ideas at info@mechanicalengineerings.com or you can also write your project ideas on our mechanical engineering blogs. Share the projects offered in your university with your mechanical engineer friends from all over the world.