by Eric Lanke
NFPA President/CEO
With the launch of the new academic year, I’m thrilled to announce the a total of nine university teams have registered to participate in NFPA’s first-ever Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge in April 2017. Final dates and venue are still to be determined.
The Vehicle Challenge is a workforce development program designed to support teams of undergraduate students (through a senior capstone design project or extracurricularly) as they develop a fluid powered vehicle without the use of chains or belts. It’s based on the Chainless Challenge, formerly run by Parker Hannifin, but under NFPA’s coordination it has the opportunity to attract many more universities and many more industry participants.
This year’s participating schools are:
- California Polytechnic State University – San Luis Obispo
- Cleveland State University
- Illinois Institute of Technology
- Murray State University
- Purdue University
- University of Akron
- University of Cincinnati
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Western Michigan University
We’re still looking for industry mentors to work directly with the student teams at these schools and to attend the final competition event in April 2017. Both are great opportunities to connect with the future engineering workforce. Because their support is helping to fund this program, we’re reserving the industry mentor role for the companies that are supporting the NFPA Foundation’s Pascal Society at the Gold or Silver level. If your company qualifies, or would like to learn more about how to qualify, please contact me at elanke@nfpa.com.
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