When Sweet Briar’s engineering students returned to campus last week, they found a lot had changed in the engineering laboratory.

What was once one big room on the left side of Guion Science Center is now four separate spaces, including a classroom, a pair of testing labs and a machine shop. There are new workstations, complete with sinks and air hookups, and several new computers.

Engineering faculty T.C. Scott (left) and Hank Yochum check out the new wind tunnel.More specifically, the machine shop was walled in and two labs — one for material testing and one for research — were created. At the back of the classroom area, there is space for heat transfer and thermodynamics work.

The program also acquired a wind tunnel, an air compressor, and other new or gently used equipment, some of which was acquired through relationships with local industry or other colleges.

The new air compressor was the fruit of one such collaboration.

T.C. Scott, associate professor of engineering at Sweet Briar, owns T.C. Scott, Inc., a local engineering firm. Recently, patent attorneys hired his firm to do some testing, and he used Sweet Briar’s lab to do the work.

To complete the job, however, he needed an air compressor. The engineering firm purchased the compressor, finished the job, and then gave it to the College.

Although this example has close ties to Sweet Briar, Scott said it is common for engineering firms to use college facilities, and even faculty and students, to accomplish testing.

“Many manufacturing and engineering companies do not have facilities to do special tests,” he said. “So they send stuff out to for-profit testing labs that charge lots of money. If we have the test equipment, we can do the test cheaper.

“This is good PR and often the company will respond with plant tours for our students, co-op and summer jobs, or maybe give us some free equipment or material.”

In the future, Scott plans to develop many more of these partnerships. “We’re talking to a dozen companies in the area,” he said, “and they’re eager to get started with us on these kinds of things.”

When companies partner with college professors and students to solve a problem, it’s a win-win situation, Scott said. The company gets “cheap labor,” the program gets money and the students get training that could put them on the short list for jobs in the industry after graduation.

“In addition to the money this brings in, our students will be eagerly hired after graduation because companies love students who have had some integration with industry as a part of their education,” Scott said. “Plus it gives SBC a lot of good visibility in the community.”

Students are excited about the makeover, too. Although she’ll miss the 2 a.m. rolling chair races that the once cavernous room allowed, junior Lauren Guyer knows the changes will only improve the program.

“We now have ‘test cells’ for the labs and research [and] the machine equipment is separated,” Guyer wrote in an e-mail. “Overall, we will be able to accommodate a growing program, which means more students and hopefully another prof[fessor] in the future.”

Even if there’s no room for chair racing, Guyer said she and the other engineering students will still find ways to blow off steam. “We’ll have to go down to the basement and ride the hovercraft that the physics department has instead.”

The renovations and equipment purchases were made possible through a gift from Margaret Jones Wyllie ’45 and a grant from the National Science Foundation.

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer