Áine wins engineering award for her dental implant design
ATU Engineering student Áine Kane’s project on ‘Endosteal Dental Implants and their Osseointegration Enhancing Design’ has won her the overall Engineers Ireland West award in ATU Galway’s annual Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Exhibition and Competition 2022.
Áine, who is from Castlepollard and a former student of the community college there, was of one of 80 students who exhibited final year posters which were critiqued and judged by 22 industry representatives at a formal event on campus on 27 April.
Describing her project, Áine says: “An endosteal implant is a type of dental implant that’s put in to your jawbone as an artificial root to hold a replacement tooth, and the basic idea behind my project is to determine a suitable type of implant that would be considered more porous, like that of the bone matrix.
“To achieve this, I assumed that the only variable which is different in the centre of the implant is its cellular solid shape. The porosity of the four cellular solids was roughly 70%, compared to trabecular bones’ porosity of 80%, with the permissible gap width for osteointegration to occur. The implants had a young’s Modulus of 20GPa, the same as trabecular bone to prevent stress shielding.”
Students won awards in several engineering categories – Agricultural, Biomedical, Energy Manufacturing Engineering Design and Mechanical Engineering specialisations.
Professor Graham Heaslip, head of the Engineering School, said: “Engineering requires an ability to think outside the box and visualize several alternative solutions and scenarios. The exhibition demonstrates that innovation and enterprise engagement is core to ATU Engineering. The diversity of projects demonstrates creativity, knowledge, and ingenuity by each student. The success of the exhibition relies on our industry partners, who act as our judging panel and assess the talent being developed in ATU. Thank you to the academic staff who acted as mentors and provided encouragement to all the entries.”
Organised by the ATU Dept of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering in collaboration with the Innovation Hub (iHub), the competition was adjudicated by 22 industry representatives.