Meet the Maker: Allison Nowak

Our #makeroftheweek is Allison Nowak! Allison is a senior in Agricultural and Biological Engineering. She is specializing in Food and Bioprocess Engineering with a minor in Food Science. She found the MakerLab through our guru, Jim!

She came to the MakerLab to print components of hardware demonstrators. Specifically she is  focusing on something called a PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) Control. In simple terms, PID Control is a way to bring a given input to a desired output based upon parameters and weights given to each of the three types of control it exhibits. Yep! You guessed it, those controls are the P, I and D!

Allison is currently working on an Independent Study project with Dr. Grift in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department to develop these hardware demonstrators. Dr. Grift hopes to integrate these demonstrators into one of his courses (ABE 425: Engineering Measurement Systems). Currently, PID Control is taught by the complicated mathematics behind it. This complicated math can be very hard to conceptualize or see how it would look like in 3D! So these demonstrators that Allison is working on can physically show how the PID Control works. In this way people can see the results without having to visualize based on complicated math. Allison's PID Control will show how fast, how accurate, and how stable the outcomes are.

Allison has made a prototype of this PID Control and is right now working on printing eight complete demonstrators.