All too often, college graduates find themselves on graduation day with a shiny new degree, ready to join the workforce with one common problem. They have no hands-on job experience. Fortunately, that won’t be the story of these four students from Marquette University who teamed up with Modine to test an idea they had to save energy. Modine is always looking for the next innovations that will help the planet and improve the performance of their products, so when Timothy Fair, Sam Goulet, Shaun Plunkett and Luke Klusmeyer approached Modine with their idea to improve the efficiency of their Atherion unit with an adiabatic system, Modine didn’t hesitate to put these young minds to work.

Dr. Bedard, a principal engineer at Modine in the building HVAC group who specifically works on ventilation products served as the supervisor of the project. He said “It’s been a really great experience from my point of view and I think the students have had a good time too.  We’ve met every couple of weeks face to face. Through the first semester they developed a really great model for predicting the energy savings they could make with this system and then through the second semester we’ve been planning this testing”. At the end of the project, Modine is going to have a verified model for this energy saving technique that could save their product users millions of dollars over time in energy costs. But Modine isn’t the only benefiting party, the students will walk away with some invaluable experience.

Timothy Fair, a Modine employee and Marquette student on the design team reported, “We didn’t realize how much was going to go into this in the beginning but it’s been a really fun and good experience for the whole journey.” The other students agreed, stating that the experience has helped them to see where they might fit into the workforce once they’ve acquired their degrees. Whether it was a learning experience that showed them they have a passion for finding energy saving techniques or an opportunity to get their feet wet in a manufacturing testing facility, these students are walking away from the project with a better understanding of real life applications of the theoretical work they learned at Marquette and a clearer understanding of what they can accomplish with their knowledge in the future.