Castlepollard student scoops top award
A Castlepollard student won the top award in ATU Galway's annual Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Exhibition for her impressive work on dental implants.
Engineering student Áine Kane’s project on “Endosteal Dental Implants and their Osseointegration Enhancing Design” won her the overall Engineers Ireland West award 2022.
Áine was of one of 80 students who exhibited final year posters which were critiqued and judged by 22 industry representatives at a formal event. Her work essentially tries to more accurately replicate a feature of natural bone in a steal implant.
Describing her project, Áine says: “An endosteal implant is a type of dental implant that’s put into your jawbone as an artificial root to hold a replacement tooth, and the basic idea behind my project is to determine a suitable type of implant that would be considered more porous, like that of the bone matrix. To achieve this, I assumed that the only variable which is different in the centre of the implant is its cellular solid shape. The porosity of the four cellular solids was roughly 70%, compared to trabecular bones' porosity of 80%, with the permissible gap width for osteointegration to occur. The implants had a young’s Modulus of 20GPa, the same as trabecular bone to prevent stress shielding.”
Students won awards in several engineering categories – Agricultural, Biomedical, Energy Manufacturing Engineering Design and Mechanical Engineering specialisations.
Student Adam Quigley from Newbliss, won the Agricultural Engineering award for “The Design of a Push Feeder Attached to a Kennan Mechfiber 350 Diet Feeder”.
“Over the past two decades animals have gone from being fed silage and meal separately to getting a Total Mixed Ration (TMR) which they tend to push away from the feeding barrier. For my project I designed and manufactured a hydraulic implement which could be attached to the feeder, which could push or pull the TMR towards the barrier.” he explains.
Ryan McGovern from Glangevlin, Dylan Murphy from Killygarry, and Conor McKeogh from Raharney, Co Westmeath, won the Manufacturing specialisation award for “The Design, Manufacture and Programming of an Automated Microplastic Injection Moulding Machine”.
Conor says “We all worked collaboratively to deliver the project, but each had our own milestones and deliverables. I researched, developed and implemented the wiring diagram and the ladder logic that was used by the PLC to control and automate the system.”