In engineering classes, many Tufts students have the chance to get up close and personal with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) technology: Tufts' Civil and Environmental Engineering department has its own CAD lab in Anderson Hall, as well as an Engineering Project Development Center (EPDC) that utilizes CAD technology and a machine shop where students can use AutoCAD to custom-design metal parts.
According to senior and mechanical engineering major Michael Brown, Tufts' CAD lab - which includes 30 high-performance computers - is "sweet."
"Anything you would want to draw [using CAD], you can do it there," Brown said.
Civil and Environmental Engineering Senior Lecturer Lee Minardi, who teaches three CAD-centric courses at Tufts, shares Brown's enthusiasm for the lab and the "state-of-the-art" programs it utilizes. "Tufts' CAD lab compares very favorably to CAD labs at other universities," Minardi said.
And many Tufts students take advantage of the lab. "I used it in a project this summer working with the BEND [Bringing Engineers into New Disciplines] program," said junior Clara Robinson, a mechanical engineer. "We were working with machines controlled by computers. Basically, we had a large plate that we needed to cut into specific dimensions with a laser-cutter. We used COREL [a CAD program] to control the laser."
"It's a useful tool to know," Robinson said.
CAD is first introduced to most engineers in EN-2, Engineering Graphics. The class is required by all engineers and taught by Minardi. He asked the course's 220 students last year to use AutoCAD to design iPod.
"It was pretty amazing," Minardi said. "I gave them a CAD model of an iPod and a few speakers for them to place, and I gave them some dimensional restraints." The students took it from there.
In Minardi's more advanced CAD classes, the projects get more complex. "In my ES-88 class, they just started their major project: a ten second animation," he said.
For that project, the engineers have the chance to embrace their creative sides. "I've had people do everything from a fly-by of the Golden Gate Bridge to a fly-by of Florence, Italy, and one student did an animation of the Mars Rover landing," Minardi said.
"The idea is to give students experience in creating precise geometric models to pose designs," he said, "whether they be mechanical assemblies or buildings or structures."
For his senior design project, Brown is working with Axyz, Inc., a small engineering consulting company that recreates accident scenes from tractor-trailer crashes.
"The trick was to figure out a way to use the information from a model truck in a program that would contain information about the surrounding environment during the accident," Brown said.
To accomplish this "trick," Brown turned to AutoCAD, writing a program that converted raw location coordinates from a moving truck into a trajectory map. Then, he took that information and applied it to an AutoCAD drawing of the intersection where the accident had occurred - coming up with an accurate recreation of the truck's behavior during the incident.
"It's pretty cool," Brown said.
Brown is not the only student using the CAD lab for his or her senior design project: Many engineers use the lab to design custom parts for their projects. The parts are then produced in the Bray Machine Shop, near the Sci-Tech Center.
"You can go into [the machine shop] and cut exactly what you want," senior and mechanical engineer Andrew Margules said. "If you're designing a metal plate and need holes in five specific places, you can create a design in AutoCAD, send it over there, and the machines will cut it for you using the dimensions that you've specified."
Programs such as AutoCAD have uses outside the classroom, Brown said. He spent a month of his summer in the Virgin Islands thanks in part to his knowledge of the program.
"I got a random job at an architecture firm because I knew AutoCAD," Brown said. "I worked on entering a couple's house plans into the program. They wanted to do renovations on their home, and it's really easy to play around with it once you've got it into AutoCAD."
Tufts' CAD lab is only open to those students who use CAD technology for their classes - but those students often get hooked and end up craving CAD throughout their college careers: According to Minardi, once you go CAD, you never go back.
"All freshmen engineers learn how to use AutoCAD or the EPDC," he said. "But a lot of those freshmen students still want to use the lab after the [required CAD class] is over. They keep coming back."
