Engineering students participate in welding training at Praxair
Praxair trainer Ken Jozwiak supervises a student from UB's Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) club performing a welding technique.
Submitted by Kristin Bruton, Praxair
Published February 29, 2016 This content is archived.
In December 2015, seven students from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences' Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) student club visited the PTC’s metal fabrication laboratory for a one-day training session on gas metal arc welding (GMAW, or MIG) and gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW, or TIG).
The club participates in the International SAE Collegiate Design Series competitions where they design and construct off-road vehicles and snowmobiles to meet a series of challenges. Mike Sinicropi, director of global market development for metal fabrication, and a member of UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Dean’s Advisory Council, decided to offer the training after seeing some of the group’s vehicles and discussing their activities during a UB event.
“We talked about the durability requirements they face and the challenges they encountered in constructing the vehicles,” he said. “I thought we could help them learn to improve on their weld quality and produce a better overall product by offering them this training.”
Sinicropi coordinated the training session with Jeremy Neff, senior R&D manager for metal fabrication, and Spencer Heyden, president of the UB Motorsports Club. Technologists Tom Matecki and Ken Jozwiak from the PTC’s MetFab lab conducted the training, which covered both theory and practice for MIG and TIG welding.
“The training gave us great insight into the industrial side of welding as opposed to our ‘self-taught’ hobby welding which we have relied on in the past,” Heyden said. “The techniques we learned will help us produce reliable and clean welds, which are key elements for both our snowmobile and Baja vehicles.”
In 2015, the UB SAE participated in several regional competitions simulating real-world engineering design projects and their related challenges. For example, the UB Baja sub-team had to design and build an off-road vehicle that would survive rough terrain and water. Their design placed 23rd out of 102 entries at a competition in Baltimore, and 74th out of 103 entries at a competition in Auburn, Ala.
The Clean Snowmobile sub-team was challenged to re-engineer an existing snowmobile to improve performance. The team brought the world’s only turbo-diesel-powered snowmobile to a competition in Houghton, Mich., where it was tested on such performance measures as emissions, noise, fuel economy, endurance, acceleration, handling and cold starting. The UB team finished second in the diesel snowmobile class.
“We hope that the skills they learned in this training will help them do even better in their 2016 competitions,” Sinicropi said.
UB students participating in the training include (front row, left to right) Casey Amidon, Spencer Heyden, (middle row, left to right) George Melero, Livio Forte, Stefan Cwalina and Nick Marchesiello. Also pictured are Mike Sinicropi (middle row, far left) and trainers Tom Matecki and Ken Jozwiak (back row, left to right).