Two senior UVM Mechanical Engineering students, Jimmy Paré and Camden Piper, are co-winners of The Prime Engineering Prize Competition, sponsored by Burlington-based Prime Engineering, a leading provider of engineering design services for the nuclear industry.

Prime’s competition gives undergraduate and master’s-level mechanical engineering students the opportunity to showcase their skills by solving real-world engineering problems related to next-generation clean nuclear energy. The competition was designed to recognize—and raise awareness of—the critical role engineering analysis plays in ensuring safe operations within the nuclear industry.

Using computer-aided design (CAD) and engineering analysis software, students were tasked with designing and analyzing an overhead nuclear crane support structure and submitting their solutions using Finite Element Analysis (FEA)—a computerized numerical method used to predict how a product or structure responds to real-world forces such as stress, vibration, and heat by simulating physical phenomena.

For this challenge, students were provided with the crane’s weight, along with the size and material specifications for the required support structure. The problem brief also specified the operating temperature of the environment, as well as allowable material stress and deflection limits. Students were required to determine the maximum load the crane could safely lift based on these constraints and deliver a final report that included mechanical drawings, FEA model information, and other relevant technical data and assumptions.

While the biannual competition typically awards a single grand prize of $1,000 and a trophy, Paré’s and Piper’s submissions demonstrated nearly identical accuracy and results. As a result, both students were named co-winners, with each receiving the full award.

Both students credit Mechanical Engineering Professor Alireza Fath for going “above and beyond” in their Computational Solids course this past semester, writing, “This class is already having an impact on our futures, and we look forward to the coming semester.”

Image: Prime Engineering's Hayden Bischoff (left), Maury Smith (center), and Ben Hardy (right) present Camden Piper (front left), and Jimmy Paré (front right) with their award checks and trophies as winners of the Prime Engineering Prize Competition. Photo courtesy of Prime Engineering.