Mechanical Engineering Intern at Oceaneering
May 2025 — May 2026
Summary
Modeled wire harnesses for a large-scale ROV's telemetry and propulsion systems, designed and validated sensor brackets, and wrote a VBA tool that cut part-search time by 96%.
Cabling Project
My first project was learning how to use the SolidWorks routing tool to model wire harnesses for all of the telemetry and propulsion systems on a large-scale ROV. This task included documenting the process of using the tool and creating a design history notebook to follow my harnesses as they evolved. I routed over 40 different cables to show our clients how we planned to connect all of our lighting, sensors, manipulators, thrusters, and telemetry together, and I also presented how to model cables more efficiently to our engineering team. The main challenges with this project were ensuring that all my cables maintained the minimum bend radius and minimized any potential for EMI or crosstalk from intersecting cables or a high-power cable next to a signal cable.
Bracket Design and Analysis
I also modeled sensor brackets in SolidWorks and performed hand calcs to validate that my mounting passed the various load cases such as waveslap, transport, and operation. I worked with our analysis team to use their FEA to optimize my design, decreasing the mass of the initial brackets by 37%.
SolidWorks PDM / Excel Tool
One of the main problems that the team was facing was managing all of our part files and assemblies and making sure they followed the naming schematic set in our product breakdown sheet. Since there are infinite ways of naming the files, it was very easy for the thousands of files to get lost, and for no one to be sure what they were actually supposed to be called. I programmed a VBA script to scrape through all of the files related to our master assembly and perform a cross-check with the product breakdown sheet to show what files were named incorrectly and give the correct naming, part description, and part number. This allowed our engineers to make sure all of their projects followed the PBS and my tool became a required step before critical design reviews. Compared to the previous way of searching for parts in the native file explorer or using our part finder, my tool was able to decrease search time by 96% due to automation and more efficient code.