At Virginia Tech’s Joseph F. Ware Jr. Advanced Engineering Laboratory, students don’t just sit and listen to lectures about the work of engineering. They do engineering. They build engines and electronic components for hybrid, low-fuel cars and motorcycles. Wings and propellers of miniature airplanes are created. Race cars, submersibles, fuel cells, and intricate miniature bridges all are at the center of brainstorming and hands-on work, even on weekends and in the middle of the night.
The students at the Ware Lab – located inside a nondescript building that once house a laundry facility for the Corps of Cadets on the Virginia Tech campus – voluntarily work long hours, often at night after classrooms go dark, and get their hands dirty. They say they love the work, the grime, and the challenges. Attendees of Virginia Tech’s Nov. 12 behind-the-scenes Open House tour will have the chance to see the students at work. The lab, located on Stanger Street, will be open for tours from noon to 3 p.m.
“The Ware Lab is a place where I can be creative,” said Kimberly Wenger in spring 2010 when she was a senior majoring in mechanical engineering. At the time, she served as student leader of Virginia Tech’s Blind Driver Challenge team. “It is a chance for all students to get their heads out of their books and apply all the ideas that professors teach us in a real-world application. It is a place where you can learn skills necessary for your future. You can make mistakes and learn from them.”
The facility is billed as the cornerstone of the College of Engineering’s efforts to provide undergraduate students with a hands-on experience that will better prepare them to enter the workforce. And it is exactly that, Wenger is now working at National Instruments in Austin, Texas. National Instruments has long been a supporter of the Ware Lab, and provided assistance for the ongoing Blind Driver project.
Few other recent engineering team projects exemplify the success of the Ware Lab in training students for the professional workforce than the HybridElectric Vehicle Team. This past summer, it won the EcoCAR Challenge, a three-year competition design to spur U.S. and Canadian science and engineering students to build more energy-efficient cars. In all, the team won 14 awards. Prestige, cash prizes, and trophies were not the only benefits of the win. Ninety percent of the graduating students on the 2010-11 team found jobs right out of school because of their exposure to industry-leading software and hardware tools. The team did nearly all of its design and work in the Ware Lab. This fall a new group formed to enter EcoCAR 2.
Team efforts drive the Ware Lab’s success, said facility manager Dewey Spangler, himself a part-time doctoral student. Students have praised the computer lab, machine shop and welding shop as better than any of those at engineering schools they compete with. “The Ware Lab emulates the real world of working engineers more so than probably any other activity or endeavor within their academic training,” Spangler said.
This fall, a number of student projects are filling every bay, and then some, of the Ware Lab. A student team named BOLT is building an electric motorcycle that will have less negative environmental impact than their all-fuel counterparts. Other teams include a lunar robotics team creating a movable ’bot fit for, you guessed, work on the moon; the Steel Bridge team, which has students competing to quickly erect and then stress test a miniature bridge; several race teams competing in on-track and off-track venues; and a human powers submarine team. Also in a bay: A human-powered airplane team, creating a craft with a 70-foot wing span. Some of the projects are so large, students need to work outside for lack of space.
Companies – looking for students to recruit and to form long-standing relations with the Virginia Tech College of Engineering, continually ranked among the Top 25 schools by “U.S. News and World Report” – have long taken note of the Ware Lab. “We try and get as many corporate people in here that are hiring our students,” Spangler said. “They see the students working in the bays and … it really makes a big impression.”
MathWorks, National Instruments, Volvo, Siemens, Boeing and Lockheed Martin all have donated money and equipment, or mentored students on numerous projects. More recently high-tech software companies such as Vishay Precision Group, FARO Inc.; and Amtek Co. have visited, interested in supporting the 3-D imaging work now done by students as they prep various projects that will take them to race tracks, dirt tracks, as well as underwater, in the air, and one day, if the lunar robotics team has its way, the moon.
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