OMAX Matriculates at MIT—Waterjets Pass Rigorous Mechanical Engineering Challenges with Flying Colors

The equipment required to be successful at school used to be pretty basic:  a few HB pencils, a spiral bound notebook, Pee Chee folders and a book bag.  Now, mechanical engineering students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have expanded the list of necessities to include an OMAX waterjet. 

Alex Slocum Jr., Brad Schiller and Keith Durand participated on the MIT team that competed in Formula SAE, the Society of Automotive Engineer’s annual student competition to design and build a formula-style racing car.  This year, the MIT team machined almost all of their formula-style racing vehicle parts using OMAX waterjets.

“We used the waterjet for machining most of our parts because it was faster,” says Slocum (class of 2009), a first-year participant on MIT’s 22-member team.  “We don’t have a lot of time. By utilizing waterjet, we found we could make parts quickly, and that extra speed reduced our costs.”

Cost is an important consideration in the competition, according to Team Manager, Brad Schiller (class of 2007). According to the rules, every Formula SAE vehicle must be designed and produced for under $25,000. “The cheaper the car, the more points the team gets,” says Schiller. “Time adds to the overall cost of the car. By using waterjet, we can go quicker than we can on a laser or CNC.”  Keith Durand, a mechanical engineering graduate student who led the team’s manufacturing, reports, “Using a CNC mill is orders of magnitude more expensive than punching parts out on waterjet.   It just takes a lot more time that we don’t have.”

In all, MIT’s vehicle contains more than 20 parts machined on the waterjet.  “The uprights, the rockers, wheel centers, all the suspension brackets, the brake rotors, brake rotor carriers, and any mounting tabs for the gas tank and water tank – basically, anything that mounts to the frame of car - was machined by waterjet because it was quick,” says Durand.

The students also liked the ease of operation “Pretty much the whole team does waterjetting.  We logged 22 hours just running the waterjet, not including set up time,” says Durand. “A new person can achieve competency in a few hours. A CNC, on the other hand, takes a couple days of practice.”

Typically, students devote twenty to thirty hours to the Formula SAE project on top of their regular course load, but that number of hours expands as the deadline for the race gets closer.  “We were putting in sixty-eighty hour weeks,” says Schiller.  Slocum adds, “Let’s just say there wasn’t a lot of sleep going on the week before the race. We were all working in the lab.” To add to the stress, MIT finals were held the week following the competition in May.

 “It’s a great way to get real world experience before actually going out in the real world. No professor gives us deadlines or tells us what to do.  We set the goals. It’s a team effort,” says Slocum.

And how did the MIT vehicle do?  “We learned good things and bad things about redesigning from the ground up (which our advisors warned us against),” says Schiller. Even though MIT’s vehicle had a “major engine failure” which prohibited them from finishing the endurance test, the team placed a respectable 81 out of a field of 120.
 
 “In the week before the competition, no one remembers what was going on in the outside world. It goes from a hobby to an addiction to a disease,” says Slocum.

MIT currently has six waterjet systems, in operation at various labs within the university.