The Development Stages of Rear Upright for Formula Car

Formula SAE (FSAE) is a design competition organized each year by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). The objective of the competition is to bring the best and brightest future engineers from each participating school to present a small scale race car. Although this sounds like a relatively simple concept, the actual execution is rather challenging and rewarding for the team. For almost three years Tennessee Tech University (TTU) has had a FSAE team. The first year was a planning year, so Tennessee Tech University has participated in the competition for the last two years. Both years have been extreme learning experiences since TTU was not prepared for the level of competition brought by participating schools. However TTU FSAE team is beginning to implement modern design tools such as FEA, Virtual Manufacturing, and Rapid Prototyping to help streamline the design efforts so that one day Golden Eagle FSAE will be one of the top competing teams. In this publication, authors will report on one Golden Eagle FSAE component (the rear upright) development stages and its accomplishments.

Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides: The Importance of Writing Sentence Headlines

Presentation slides are often used for teaching engineering classes, presenting engineering research, and explaining engineering designs. For those presentations in which the presenter desires to communicate and defend results, using a succinct sentence headline for all slides but the title slide has three advantages over relying on a phrase headline. The first is that a sentence headline not only can identify the topic, but also can state an assertion about the topic. Emphasizing the assertions in an engineering presentation is advantageous, because audiences are more inclined to believe an argument if they realize the assertions and sub-assertions. Also, for a presentation that serves as a classroom assignment, having the student write sentence headlines provides a written record for the faculty member of that student’s assertions in the presentation. A second advantage of using sentence headlines, rather than phrase headlines, is that a sentence headline can clarify much more effectively the role of the slide in the presentation. Such a clarification not only helps the audience during the presentation, but also serves the audience reviewing the slides days or weeks later. Yet a third advantage, and perhaps the most important, is that a sentence headline forces the presenter to come to grips with the main purpose of each slide. If the presenter cannot create a sentence headline that states the slide’s main purpose in the presentation, then the presenter should consider cutting that slide from the presentation. For engineering presenters who have used this design, the result has been that significantly fewer slides are presented, thus helping the presenters avoid a frenetic pace, which undermines so many engineering presentations. This paper uses several examples from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech to show these three advantages. The paper also analyzes why faculty and students are reluctant to use sentence headlines. Finally, the paper includes a preliminary assessment on the effectiveness of these sentence headlines in engineering presentations.

Analytical and Experimental Study of Potential Heat Recovery From Household Refrigerators

Opportunities for waste recovery exist in many types of industrial devices as summarized by Kreith and West [1]. However, no experimental data regarding the potential of heat recovery from household refrigerators have been published in open literature. The decision to implement a heat recovery option depends mostly on convenience and cost. In some cases, however, the decision is difficult because there is a lack of reliable information of the payback for a potential application. This article provides useful information for the design and payback of a waste heat recovery system on a household refrigerator. This paper presents experimental and analytical results of energy recovery potential from the heat rejected by the condenser coils of a household refrigerator. Using a small heat exchanger affixed to the condenser coils, the heat thus recovered can preheat domestic tap water. The analytical study considered three designs: A heat exchanger with the refrigerant condensing on the outside of water pipes, refrigerant on the inside of a counter-flow heat exchanger, and the refrigerant condensing inside a serpentine coil enclosed by a container filled with household tap water. Considering economic feasibility and manufacturing ease, the serpentine coil design was chosen. Experimental data confirmed the heat recovery possibility from the condenser coils. The serpentine coil design can achieve a payback time of 2 to 10 years dependent on whether the domestic hot water uses electric or gas heating.

Heat Pipe Optimization Team: The Heat Pipe Assisted Heat Sink Project

The Heat Pipe Assisted Heat Sink (HPAHS) team will be working on solving challenging thermal management problems for a device known as the base transceiver station (BTS); a device used to transfer cell phone calls. This problem was raised due to transfer cell phone calls. This problem was raised due to the high use of cell phone in recent years. According to 2002 Scarborough Research, the number of cell phones in US was 180 million (2/3 of population). Due to this high increase in demand for cell phone usage, Replacement Handset Shipments are projected to increase worldwide from Current 40% of total shipments to almost 85%. This will increase from 211 million in 2002 to 591 million by 2008 (Nokia). Cell phone calls are transferred via a device known as the base transceiver station (BTS). Cell phone companies are increasing the performance of the BTS by adding more electronics. Nokia is increasing the current BTS performance by adding another power amplifier. We will encounter the problem of designing the thermal solution to ensure optimal thermal performance, while meeting customer requirements of cost and manufacturing process.

The Water Turbine Competition: A Hands-On Approach to Teaching Conservation Principles

For the past five semesters, the Water Turbine Competition has added significant excitement and motivation to the historically dreaded Fluid Mechanics course offered in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the United States Military Academy. The Water Turbine Competition is an adaptation of the national Hydropower Contest. Teams of two or three students build a water turbine that will lift a weight using only the potential energy stored in a tank of water that is suspended above ground level. The water turbine project has proven to be an exciting and beneficial educational tool.

A Study of the Running Accuracy of Re-Circulating, Linear Bearings

The demand for faster operation, higher quality output and increased efficiency in automation and machine control systems has led to increased demands on guidance systems. Innovation of re-circulating, linear bearing guide technology has launched that option as the preferred choice for most precision linear motion stages. As the use of re-circulating linear guides increases, many vendors have entered the market, producing nearly identical products. All vendors promote similar load capabilities, running speeds and accuracies. A machine designer has difficulty in selecting a specific brand. An extensive study was conducted to evaluate the running accuracy of several commercially available, re-circulating bearings and configurations. This paper will describe the results of the study and explain the reasons for various inaccuracies. These results will help understand the subtle details of the different styles.

Automated Outcomes-Based Assessment Process for Traditional and Project-Based Engineering Instruction

An outcomes-based assessment process called QQI, an acronym for Quantity-Quality-Improvement, has been developed and pilot-tested in several courses, both traditional and project-based, in mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. An online version of the QQI survey instrument has been created which automates collection of data and rapid generation of reports to faculty. The QQI process, including the instrument and report generator, research and design basis, and results of pilot testing, are described and department-wide implementation plans are discussed.

Creation of Nano-Scaled Surface Structure for the Enhancement of Boiling Heat Transfer

The present research is an experimental investigation of nucleate pool boiling heat transfer enhancement on a surface with micro/nano-scaled surface structures. Glancing Angle Deposition (GLAD) was employed to fabricate porous surfaces in this study. The thin film microstructure consists of closely packed columns oriented in the plane of incidence formed due to a self-shadowing mechanism. Boiling heat transfer from the nano-structured surface was compared to that of a smooth reference surface and the commercial High Flux surface. The results of this study have shown that nano-structured films created by the GLAD process increase the nucleation site density as compared to the smooth surface. This research has opened up new areas in the field of heat transfer, which motivate new surface coating concepts to enhance the understanding of boiling heat transfer on nano-structured films.

Developing a Virtual Model of a Second Order System to Simulation Real Laboratory Measurement Problems

Most of the student’s educational exposure is to well behaved, deterministic problems with known results. Most courses expose students to material in compartmentized modules (chapters of a book) with exercises/problems (at the end of the chapter) where the majority of the material is readily found in the compartmentized module. Unfortunately, real world problems never fit this simple mold. Laboratory is the perfect place for students to become exposed to real world problems and solutions to those problems. Laboratory is the perfect place to put all the student’s knowledge of basic STEM material to the test. However, many times the real world measurement is much more complicated than the textbook problems and students often struggle with methods and procedures to solve a given problem (with no answer at the back of the book). This is true for a mechanical measurement of a simple second order mass, spring, dashpot system which is measured with displacement and acceleration instruments in an existing mechanical engineering laboratory exercise. The measurement is plagued with measurement errors, drift, bias, digital data acquisition amplitude/quantization errors, etc. In order to understand the basic underlying measurement and associated “problems” with the measurement, a simple simulation model was developed. The simulation model allows the students to define a basic second order system and then add different types of “problems” (drift, bias, quantization, noise, etc) to the measurement to see their effects. The simulation module further allows the student to “cleanse” the distorted data using common measurement tools such as coupling, filtering, smoothing, etc. to understand the effects of processing the data. The simulation model is built using Simulink/MATLAB and allows a simple GUI to modify the model, the “problems” added to the data and the “cleansing” of the data, to obtain a better understanding of the problem and tools to process the data. The simulation model is presented and discussed in the paper. Several data sets are presented to illustrate the simulation module.

Developing a Multisemester Interwoven Dynamic Systems Project to Foster Learning and Retention of STEM Material

Students generally do not understand how basic STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) material fits into all of their engineering courses. Basic material is presented in introductory courses but the relationship of the material to subsequent courses is unclear to the student since the practical relevance of the material is not necessarily presented. Students generally hit the “reset button” after each course not realizing the importance of basic STEM material. The capstone experience is supposed to “tie all the pieces together” but this occurs too late in the student’s educational career. A new multisemester interwoven dynamic systems project has been initiated to better integrate the material from differential equations, mathematical methods, laboratory measurements and dynamic systems across several semesters/courses so that the students can better understand the relationship of basic STEM material to an ongoing problem. This paper highlights the overall concept to be addressed by the new approach. The description of the project and modules under development are discussed.