Water Heater Cart

William Schrab

22 Sep 2026 — 1 min read

Project Goal

The goal of this project was to create a cart that could be used to test an electric heat pump on a water heater.

Research Goals

The research being conducted is to improve the cold weather efficiency of heat pumps, in particular those in water heaters. As temperatures near the evaporator side of a heat exchanger get below 0 the water that condenses on them can freeze. This freezing can cause frost build up and greatly decrease the performance of a heat pump. Here a coating is in development to greatly delay the time until frost growth and spreading.

Technical Specs

The cart is designed out of aluminum extrusion, both 1.5x1.5" and 1.5x3" varieties. It needs to be able to hold 600+ pounds and have space for mounting the heater along with all of the control and sensors to be built out in the future.

Media

Robot Project

Skills Used * Creo * KiCad * Vectors * Arduino IDE The Challenge Design a robot using an Arduino to complete a simple task Media Bill of Materials

Transfer Mechanism

Project Goal Create a mechanism that is able to move a ball through 3 randomly given precision points that can be mounted onto a pegboard. The mechansim must receive a ball from the previous group and transfer it to the next group. Hardware Skills Used * 3D Printing * Laser cutting * Analytical

Prosthetic Knee Linkage

Skills Used * MATLAB * Object Oriented Programming * Mechanism Design * Simulation * Visualization Goal Create a GUI that allows users to visualize the mechanism of a knee that uses a simple 4 bar mechanism design. The programs allows for changing of the 2 input and output links, visualizing of sitting, midswing, and standing

Prosthetic Knee Failure Analysis

Skills used * MATLAB * SolidWorks * ANSYS * FMEA Goal This project was designed to create a situation where a company reaches out to an engineering consulting team requesting validation of their design. They propose an upper block for a prosthetic knee and the team is tasked with determining its safety factor and

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Robot Project

Transfer Mechanism

Prosthetic Knee Linkage

Prosthetic Knee Failure Analysis