Calvin will have a Cornerstone Ceremony for the Calvin College Engineering Building on Monday, November 16 at 4 p.m. on site. That ceremony will include the placement of a time capsule with fun engineering artifacts, including items from the Prince and Vermeer families (two major donors to the project).

The new Calvin College Engineering Building will actually be two Centers -- the Prince Engineering Design Center and the Vermeer Engineering Projects Center. A walk-through display lobby will connect the two Centers (each of which will be 8,000 square feet).

"This new building certainly will enhance our efforts at Calvin College," said Engineering department chair Rich De Jong. "It will be a center for the projects of our students and faculty and it will result, I am sure, in cooperative ventures with the West Michigan community beyond what we're presently doing. It will allow our Engineering department to compete on a national level. The impact of this facility will be significant."

Occupancy for the building is scheduled for the fall of 1999 and, through the generosity of Pella, Iowa's Vermeer family and Holland, Michigan's Prince family, funding for the $3.1 million project is 80 percent complete.

As one might expect from an Engineering faculty, a lot of thought has gone into the design of the new building. De Jong notes, for example, that the Centers themselves will function as a teaching tool. The major building systems -- such things as structural, heating and cooling and electrical -- will be used to teach. Strain gauges on the roof trusses will allow load-deflection and stress-strain analyses; instrumentation on the air handling unit and thermocouples applied to the wall surfaces will allow thermodynamic analyses of the building; electrical power monitoring devices connected to a computer-based data acquisition system will allow remote analysis of the energy usage.

Two areas in the new facilities will enable civil engineers to work with systems considerably larger than currently possible in the basement of the Science Building. A Wet Lab is part of the Vermeer Engineering Projects Center and can house large-scale hydraulic systems. A Design Yard will be located outside the southwest corner of the building as a place for testing bridge components and solar powered systems.

The Prince Engineering Design Center will include a special test facility for acoustics and vibration testing. Calvin professors have done such work previously with funding from such places Ford Motor Company, Westinghouse Electric Company, Northrop Grumman and the Office of Naval Research. Calvin students also have participated in such research.

With the new test chambers even full size automobiles can be tested in a controlled laboratory environment. The acoustics and vibration test facility will consist of two adjacent rooms – one with hard, reflecting walls and one with soft, absorbing walls. These rooms will be qualified for ANSI and ISO standards for acoustical measurements.

Calvin's existing metal and wood shops will be moved to the Projects Center, thus allowing easy access to the tools and machinery needed to assemble senior design prototypes. The shops, which will continue to service the needs of the science division and maintenance personnel, are designed with a 10-foot clearance below the mezzanine joists to accommodate large machines such as numerically controlled milling machines. The interior shop walls are designed with glass panels to provide high visibility and isolation of the noise and particles.

A student club office will be built as part of the complex, while a 1,900-square-foot mezzanine, located above the machine shop, will be devoted entirely to a student work area with tables, chairs, computer workstations, vending machines and reference materials.

"The goal of the building," says De Jong, "is to provide a social as well as a working environment to draw engineering students together."

Part of the overall project is to upgrade the existing mechanical building with a new boiler, a new cooling tower and a student viewing area. The upgrade will provide heating and cooling for the Engineering Building and the new Life Sciences Center, which is currently under construction. The building itself will be upgraded to display a functioning power plant for students and visitors to see. As with the Engineering Building, the mechanical equipment will be instrumental as a teaching tool.

These two new Centers will enable the Calvin College Engineering Department to maintain, and expand, its reputation as one of the finest programs in the country. This fall Calvin added a new concentration in Chemical Engineering to its existing trio of concentrations in Mechanical, Civil, and Electrical & Computer. All four concentrations result in Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) degrees and are accredited by ABET -- the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology.

Outside advisors assist many of the department majors. For the new concentration in Chemical Engineering, for example, the college has created a new Chemical Engineering Advisory Council.

Calvin College was founded in 1876 and began a three-year pre-engineering program in 1937. This was expanded to a four-year BSE program in 1985, accredited by ABET. This year 115 first-year students came to Calvin to study Engineering.