Hall of Justice

Every super hero team needs a "base" to work out of. Today's final for the Principles of Engineering course had our engineers using circuit design and centroid analysis to develop the layout of their team's Superhero Headquarters.

Each team had to choose the six rooms that were most important to their team (living quarters, command center, research lab, etc.). Each of these rooms had a unique geometric shape and associated resistor value to simulate it on their "power grid". A successful "base" would be able to create a circuit with both parallel and series components (rooms laid out side by side or in a row) to create a total circuit resistance of 500 to 1000 ohms. The test would be to hook up a 9V battery and LED so that the LED was powered (not too much resistance in circuit) but would not blow out (not too little resistance in circuit). Finally, each team had to determine the centroid, or point at which their layout balanced using centroid analysis: