A team from Lower Dauphin High School in Hummelstown, Pa., has won Phoenix Contact’s 2011 Nanoline Contest. In recognition of their home outlet monitoring device, the team has earned a trip to Germany this April.
Phoenix Contact challenged students to design and build a working control system using the company’s Nanoline controller and nanoNavigator flow chart software. The Lower Dauphin team’s project was called “M.UR.L.O.C.”, short for “Monitoring (yo)UR Local Outlet Consumption.”
The device measures and records power consumption, reads preconfigured schedules to turn power to an outlet on or off and remotely turns power to outlet on and off via a cell phone SMS message. M.UR.L.O.C. can save money and energy by cutting power to an outlet and disallowing any draw by standby power.
During their trip to Germany, team members and chaperones will present their innovative idea at Phoenix Contact’s TectoYou booth at the Hanover Fair (Hannover Messe). The Hanover Fair is the largest industrial trade fair in the world, and TectoYou is a special hall dedicated to promoting engineering careers to young people.
Highlights of the trip will include a visit to Autostadt, a Volkswagen theme park adjacent to the auto factory, and tours of Phoenix Contact’s headquarters and manufacturing facilities. A corresponding contest also ran in Germany, so the winning American team will meet the winning German team on the trip to Germany.
“This is a great way to start off our National Engineers Week activities,” said Jack Nehlig, president of Phoenix Contact USA and one of the judges in the contest. “Choosing the top project was very difficult. We could see that the students learned about control and automation, which was one of our goals. Then they added some mechanical parts to make the applications real.”
The second and third place teams, York County School of Technology and Central Dauphin High School, won $500 and $250 respectively. Other participants were Cumberland Perry Area Vocational School, Shrine Catholic Academy and Early College East High School.
Phoenix Contact
www.phoenixcontact.com
::Desing World::
Filed Under: Student programs • Technical education, ELECTRONICS • ELECTRICAL