An unfortunate aspect of engineering education in general, and turbomachinery education in specific, has been the difficulty of incorporating the design aspect of instruction with the time-consuming components that make up theoretical instruction. The primary reason for this difficulty is the extremely limited time (typically three months) allocated to teach turbomachinery as a senior-level quarter or semester technical elective. It is desirable to develop an educational design tool that can be simultaneously exercised by a student to perform various design tasks and function as a means of theoretical instruction. Such a tool can permit the students both greater depth and breadth of exposure and may be subsequently used by the students in their future capacity as professional engineers. In this paper, this tool is illustrated by several applications of a commercial “graphical spreadsheet” software package (MathCAD, though others such as Mathmatica and Macsyma are appropriate as well). Some graphical spreadsheet design tools are presented, and these tools are applied to the analysis and design of a radial pump, centrifugal compressor, and radial-inflow turbine.
Switchable window modeling. Task 12: Building energy analysis and design tools for solar applications, Subtask A.1: High-performance glazing
