UA Engineering Students Win Metal-Casting Contest

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — A team of University of Alabama engineering students won the 2014 Student Casting Competition for the Southeast organized by the American Foundry Society.

The competition was held in April in Birmingham. This is the third time in four years UA students have won the AFS competition. The UA chapter received a $1,000 award.

For the competition, the students, all studying metallurgical and materials engineering, were tasked with creating innovative casting molds of a school mascot, a community project or an industry product fix. The UA students decided to create molds for bells. One bell was made with a brass alloy, and the other was made with a more traditional tin bronze alloy. The students used 3-D silica sand mold printing from ExOne Digital Part Materialization to create the molding for the bells.

At the competition, the students were judged on concept, difficulty, use of casting principles, use of engineering tools, creativity and the presentation of their physical castings. The students turned in an electronic version of the presentation two weeks before the competition.

“The advantage of using 3-D-mold printing, rapid prototyping, is that the students were able to produce their intricate molds for casting the bells quickly,” said Dr. Laurentiu Nastac, associate professor of metallurgical and materials engineering.  “The cast bells were of high quality, too.”

Members of the UA team included:

• Kyle Burns, a junior from Charlotte, North Carolina
• Robert Douglas, a senior from Madison, Tennessee
• Caleb Felker, a junior from Knoxville, Tennessee
• Kurt Kamena, a senior from Prattville
• Jeremy Peters, a senior from Evergreen
• Bryan Reczek, a junior from Peach Tree City, Georgia
• Bianca Gomes, a senior from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

In 1837, The University of Alabama became one of the first five universities in the nation to offer engineering classes. Today, UA’s fully accredited College of Engineering has more than 4,500 students and more than 120 faculty. In the last eight years, students in the College have been named USA Today All-USA College Academic Team members, Goldwater, Hollings, Portz, Mitchell and Truman scholars.