Cutbirth Lab Opening

This fall the Oklahoma Christian University Engineering program is getting ready to celebrate their 40th anniversary. As part of the celebrations, the department will reopen a remodeled lab on Nov. 8, during homecoming weekend. The ribbon-cutting ceremony will officially open the lab in honor of Jim Cutbirth.

“So all of [the excitement] is kind of wrapped up in an idea. This is our 40th year of having engineering at [Oklahoma Christian] and so that’s part of why we’re doing it now rather than a couple years ago… We’ve had a lot of faculty changes. We’ve also had a lot of student number increases, so we needed to do updates, and this was a convenient time to celebrate all of that all at once,” said Dr. Plumlee, the Chair of Mechanical Engineering.

These renovations are in honor of a faculty member named Jim Cutbirth, who passed away a couple years ago.

“We have an existing lab that we are renovating and updating, and it is in honor of a longtime faculty member who passed away who helped establish [Oklahoma Christian] engineering as a program… and he helped to bring in that particular set of lab equipment [which] centers on wind tunnels and air flow and aerodynamics,” Plumlee said. “That was his specialty, and we’re updating a lot of that equipment and processes to better suit current students’ needs and also to honor him and that process.”

Plumlee also added, “He was a faculty member at [Oklahoma Christian] for a long time, including [being] my faculty member back when I was a student. So I know him as a professor, not as a colleague.”

Students are also anticipating the new space. Piper Dallmann, a senior in mechanical engineering, expressed her excitement about the lab.

“It’s really cool to see the renovations happening to our building. I think we’re all very proud of our department and our program. We owe a lot to it, and so it’s really cool to see that it will help people,” Dallman said.

Specific renovations include materials, furnishings, and some equipment updates.

“It’s a more flexible space… It has new dry erase boards, updates to our wind tunnel, way better storage and organization for all of the equipment, and way more table space for actually having students in the room,” Plumlee said.

In addition to the new furnishings, the lab was also reworked for more flexibility.

“Previously, we could only fit 10 to 12 students in there at a time, and we routinely have class sizes over 30. So now we can hold 32 students there for a standard class. And then in the labs, we can still break [tables] apart and do lab spaces when we need it. So it’s way more flexible but still allows us to do all the labs that we used to, just with better access,” Plumlee said.

“This particular lab is for our fluid and air flow labs, and so the main piece of equipment in there is our wind tunnel, which we have a large and capable wind tunnel for a school our size. But we’ve also been increasing our robotics and our kind of fluid flow experiments, hydraulics, and so we’re updating all of our lab equipment that goes with anything that blows… Electrons flow, water flows, air flows, [and] heat flows, and this is our fluid and flow lab. We call it our heat transfer lab or our hot wet lab,” Plumlee said.

Dallman noted that the expansions could benefit a range of students within the engineering program.

“I’m hoping that our lower-level engineering classes will get to use it more. I know our systems teams use it a lot for drone and aero teams, but there are a lot of really cool experiments and things you can run with the wind tunnel. I think it’ll make it more accessible,” Dallman said.