Freligh, H. A., & Ambrico, C. A., & Mendez, A., & Stupak, P. R. (2022, April), Deadlift Energy Absorption and Dissipation Device for Athletic Weight Room  Paper presented at 2022 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference, Newark, New Jersey. 10.18260/1-2--40046

\bibitem{asee_peer_40046}
  Freligh, H. A., \& Ambrico, C. A., \& Mendez, A., \& Stupak, P. R. (2022, April), \emph{Deadlift Energy Absorption and Dissipation Device for Athletic Weight Room}
  Paper presented at 2022 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference, Newark, New Jersey.
  10.18260/1-2--40046

Henry Alan Freligh, Christian Anthony Ambrico, Ange Mendez, and Peter Raymond Stupak.  "Deadlift Energy Absorption and Dissipation Device for Athletic Weight Room".  2022 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference, Newark, New Jersey, 2022, April.  ASEE Conferences, 2022.  https://peer.asee.org/40046 Internet.  25 Apr, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_40046}
  Henry Alan Freligh, Christian Anthony Ambrico, Ange Mendez, and Peter Raymond Stupak.
  "Deadlift Energy Absorption and Dissipation Device for Athletic Weight Room".
  \emph{2022 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference, Newark, New Jersey, 2022, April}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2022.
  https://peer.asee.org/40046 Internet.  25 Apr, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_40046
author = "Henry Alan Freligh, Christian Anthony Ambrico, Ange Mendez, and Peter Raymond Stupak"
title = "Deadlift Energy Absorption and Dissipation Device for Athletic Weight Room"
booktitle = "2022 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference"
year = "2022"
month = "April"
address = "Newark, New Jersey"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/40046}
number = {10.18260/1-2--40046}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - The Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) project-based-learning “Authentic Engineering Experience” tasks groups of 2 to 4 students to solve a real problem for a real customer in one semester.  All project activity is hands-on and “live” – without classroom lectures or Labs.  Principles and skills are experienced first-hand.  The student Team members are treated as Professional Engineers– not as students.  The focus is for the student team to learn by doing.  The practical objectives are to expose students, early in their careers to methods and techniques used in industry and give students authentic hands-on product development and teamwork experience to relate to potential internship and professional employers.
Working as part of RVCC's Authentic Engineering Experience, a three-student team was tasked by the College's Facilities Department to solve the practical problem at hand: the unacceptable level of noise created by students "deadlifting" in the College's "Weight Room". The impact of the deadlift weights on the floor made it difficult for the Facility Department staff to conduct work in their offices, which are located directly below the weight room.  
The student team designed, fabricated, and demonstrated a fully functional prototype that “caught” the falling weight, absorbed the weight’s kinetic energy as elastic strain-energy stored in the twisting of a torsion bar that performed as a spring, and dissipated the stored energy using commercial shock-absorbers.
The students worked to overcome multiple technical challenges including designing a “cradle” to capture the 200-400lb barbell weight without fracturing, calculating the optimum torsion bar dimensions to absorb and store the kinetic energy of the falling weight as elastic strain-energy, maintaining rigidity of the system to prevent warping of the device during the impact of the weight, rapid dissipation of the elastic strain-energy to allow the user to maintain their normal weight-lifting rhythm, and limiting the design dimensions to fit into in a highly constrained device footprint required by the “Deadlift” station within the College’s “Weight Room”.
The resulting fully functional prototype effectively eliminated the unacceptable noise to the Facilities’ office, to the delight of the Facilities’ Staff, and to the Exercise Science Staff, who’s Weightlifting program had been shifted to after 5pm evenings.
Throughout the project, the overwhelming emphasis was for the student Team to reach their own designs, experience their own failures and successes in earning their own know-how, resolve their own communications and scheduling conflicts, and to respond to customer critical comments of prototype product performance.  


AU  - Henry Alan Freligh
AU  - Christian Anthony Ambrico
AU  - Ange Mendez
AU  - Peter Raymond Stupak
CY  - Newark, New Jersey
DA  - 2022/04/22
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Deadlift Energy Absorption and Dissipation Device for Athletic Weight Room
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/40046
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--40046
ER  -