Grace Internships 2020

Posted by Nick Schiltz on August 26

Grace Internships 2020

This summer, we had the privilege of employing incredibly bright engineering students with internships at Grace Technologies. We had a total of five interns who participated in the research and development of our GraceSense Predictive Maintenance System, GracePort configurator, website development, and much more. Check out what each of them worked on this summer!

Logan Van Itallie began his first internship at Grace on our production team and later went on to participate in the manufacturing and assembly of our SafeSide Face Shields. This summer, he joined our engineering team to work on PCB design and testing our GraceSense Vibration & Temperature Node. He redesigned boards for our GracePort USB-C component as well as the Vibration & Temperature Node development board.

Apart from that, he was tasked with performing a shaker test for vibration analysis on the Vibration & Temperature Node where he created a program to create vibrations and test the orientation of the node. "From what I’ve seen with the intricate tester it can detect super small differences and that’s really promising for detecting failure," he said.

Logan initially planned to work with a youth group this summer, however, those plans got unfortunately scrapped when the pandemic emerged. Nevertheless, we were excited to have him back in action at Grace. He's currently pursuing a degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Dordt University and we wish him all the best!

Our dynamic duo of brothers, Luke and Bret Knous, are both Engineering students at Iowa State University and they couldn't have come at a better time. We've been working on our website for quite some time and Luke was able to automate a lot of time consuming processes for us. He created an app that automatically creates and synchronizes GracePorts on our eCommerce pages. Luke also made an app that allows our customers to easily find more information, such as PDFs, when looking at product pages on our website. As many of you may already know, new GracePorts are constantly being created due to their extremely customizable nature. Manually entering this data and synchronizing it is now a thing of the past.

Bret created a GracePort configurator to help automate the process of generating part numbers based on selected components, power options, and housing types. He also worked on simplifying our complex GracePort database. He created a system that allows us to catalog and modify our GracePort components that also allows synchronization within our eCommerce website. Along the lines of internal organization, he assisted us in the challenging transition of our enterprise resource planning software. 

Hao Lu is pursuing a PhD in Mechanical & Electrical Engineering at Iowa State University. He is early on in his internship at Grace Technologies and has expressed an interest in the areas of vibration signal analysis,
physics-based bearing fault diagnosis, and remaining useful life prediction for bearings. Meeting Hao was a great insight into the brilliant minds that are already embracing these forward-thinking paths of research. We're fortunate to have him onboard as our interests greatly align on these subjects and I can't wait to see what he does throughout his internship at Grace.

Hao already has great insights within the industry, stating, "IIoT is becoming popular and I think these products are amazing. Based on my experience, people want to monitor by hiring experts to bring in a sensor. And now we can get a wireless node and just install it, attach it to a machine, and it will be more convenient to check the health status."

Nazli Javadi is also pursuing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University and joined the internship program at Grace over the summer to work on the GraceSense Predictive Maintenance System. More specifically, she was tasked with temperature anomaly detection and created algorithms to detect them. Furthermore, her role expanded into other areas of the Predictive Maintenance System including data pre-processing, seasonal and trend decomposition, implementing regression-based prediction, and deploying data insights into the cloud.

By working closely on this project, Nazli has grasped a keen understanding on the potential IIoT and motor vibration analysis has, stating, "If we are able to detect anomalous behaviors so we can set alarms when a customer’s motor is not functioning well, then they would be able to keep track of the health condition of their equipment. IIoT is important and and can help decrease the risk of failures."

How IIoT Can Stop Being a Buzzword

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Nazli spent her entire summer's engineering internship learning exactly how our Predictive Maintenance System utilizes IIoT to help facilities predict failures before they occur. Our Engineering Department leader and CTO, Andy Zimmerman, has compressed his lifework and knowledge of IIoT and predictive maintenance capabilities into this easily consumable article. You may have heard the buzz, but now hear exactly how IIoT technology can work for you.

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Stay safe and have a GREAT week!

nick schiltz humpday

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Topics: HumpDay Blog Entry, IIoT, Predictive Maintenance System

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