My team of 4 was given a four-story tower on a shaking platform and challenged to find the combination of tuned mass damping and weight distribution that minimized the acceleration of the fourth floor as much as possible in an "earthquake." First we found the tower's resonant frequencies at 13 different weight distributions and chose the one closest to the 1.5 Hz target (1.512 Hz). Then we tested all 10 pendulum damper configurations (with 2 possible arm lengths and 5 bob masses). The short arm with the heaviest bob worked best, cutting fourth-floor acceleration by about 32% from the 1.563 m/s² baseline. In competition with the entire class, my team came in second for smallest acceleration.

I modeled ASTM D638 and ISO 527 standard tensile test specimens in Autodesk Fusion 360 and used stress simulation to predict the Young's modulus, tensile strength, safety factor, and elongation for polylactic acid (PLA). Then, my group 3D printed them in PLA and pulled them apart on a Mark-10 tensile tester to compare with the Fusion 360 results. The ASTM tensile strength came within 1% of the simulation, and the Young's modulus landed within the manufacturer's datasheet tolerance.