Graphical Interpretation of Exergy

Exergy is a system thermodynamic property defined only with respect to the system’s surroundings. For a specified system state, exergy is the maximum potential useful work available from the system as it achieves equilibrium with the surroundings. For students exergy can be a very abstract concept. This paper presents a graphical means to clarify the concept of exergy for a closed system, demonstrating exergy at any state i corresponds to the sum of the net work of a power cycle that incorporates a process from system state i to the dead state and the net work of a refrigeration/heat pump cycle required to move the system from the dead state to state i.

A Product Realization Approach to Creativity in Engineering Education

Product realization, which is the goal of any product development process from concept to production, usually means bringing a product to physical reality. Problem solving and design are two of the engineering activities for achieving the product development process goal. For this reason engineering education efforts are usually focused on problem solving as a building block for any educational course or program activities. In addition, some courses and curriculum threads are usually dedicated to design education and practices. The common restriction of realization to mean physical reality, however, limits the full understanding and potential of better problem solving and design education in engineering. In this paper, the realization process is expanded to include the virtual and perceptual realities as valid domains of the product realization process. These domains of realization and their interactions with the physical reality are studied. Also, the relationships between research, problem solving, and design are examined in the context of engineering product realization. Focus, in this study, is directed to the understanding of research, engineering problem solving, and design activities as a result of the expanded realization concept. This understanding aims at improving engineering education by focusing on the key issue of creativity in program and course design, delivery, and assessment. To illustrate the concepts, presented in the paper, several examples are included.

Design Experience in a Sophomore Mechanics and Machines Course

Design experience was introduced in a Mechanics and Machines sophomore course. The objective was to support the content of the course and provide the students with some of the design skills. The students were asked to design an over head crane. Several “real-world” practical components were used in the project such as a customer, a request of a profession quote, update presentations, decision making tools, cost analysis, benchmarking, user manual development and a final professional report. The details of the project are presented and samples from the students’ work are discussed. The project was used in several offerings of the course and showed success.

Preparation for the Fundamentals of Engineering Examination at Virginia Tech

The first step most engineers take toward professional engineering licensure is taking the Fundamentals of Engineering examination administered by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying. The examination is typically taken by students near completion of an undergraduate engineering degree. By following up with engineering experience and the Professional Engineering examination, engineers can be licensed in any of the 50 states of the U.S. Professional licensure is both an aid and an incentive to professionalism in engineers. Licensure provides a publicly recognized credential for engineering competence and professional ethics. The licensing process, together with state requirements for maintaining licensure, ensures that professional engineers have the depth and breadth of knowledge required for engineering practice. Knowledge of licensing requirements helps young engineers set their own standards for engineering competence. Virginia Tech has, for many years, assisted its senior engineering students in preparing for the Fundamentals of Engineering examination. The program began in the 1970’s as an unofficial series of review lectures offered by engineering faculty. Later, it became a two credit hour course administered by the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics with modules taught by faculty from many engineering disciplines as well as mathematics and chemistry. The course was taught every spring, using a set of notes and problems prepared by the instructors and available to students at reproduction cost. Lectures were scheduled in the evening to reduce interference with other courses. In spring 2011, the course was taught for the first time as an asynchronous online course developed by the instructors working in conjunction with Virginia Tech’s Institute for Distance and Distributed Learning. Updated lecture notes and problems were available for download, and lectures, recorded for the online course, were available for viewing as audio/video slide presentations using streaming video format. Since different faculty had different prior experience with computer-aided and online teaching, the different course modules used various online teaching techniques. The course website has been organized so that student response to the online materials may be monitored. Historically, Virginia Tech has had both high levels of undergraduate participation in the Fundamentals of Engineering examination and a high pass rate. Statistics on course registration, exam participation, and pass rate over the past decade are presented and compared with statistics for the new online course. In spite of a few technical and other issues, the online course appears to be a success. It is anticipated that feedback from this initial online offering will result in even better student acceptance and utilization of the online content, as well as examination performance, in the future.

A Framework for Integrating Design Education, Research and Outreach: The Center for Innovation and Engineering at West Point

The Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at West Point has recently established a multi-disciplinary research and educational outreach center that has a two-fold mission: enhance the undergraduate educational experience of students and assist in solving real-world technical problems, supporting global Army operations. This is accomplished by tying projects directly to the undergraduate education mission and gaining efficiency by consolidating administrative and outreach functions for multiple existing research programs. The paper describes the Center for Innovation and Engineering (CIE), its lines of effort, and several past and current initiatives. Assessment data from students participating in the senior capstone design course, which is closely tied to the CIE, reinforces the importance of multi-disciplinary, client-based projects in the engineering education experience.

Biomedical Engineering Design Education at King Saud University: A First of Its Kind Approach

Biomedical Engineering in the Millennium is building the future of biology and medicine. New products, from biotechnology and novel devices for diagnosis and treatment, are marketed through interactions between universities, medical centers, small start-up companies, and large, more established firms. The role of biomedical engineering in the 21st century has already been highlighted by Ranu as far as research, education and space age technologies are concerned. Therefore, educating the modern biomedical engineering students in design processes is extremely important. This paper highlights how biomedical engineering design is taught for the first time to King Saud University students in Saudi Arabia. The conclusion drawn from this is that for the first time an innovative design course has been developed to teach the biomedical engineering students at King Saud University to meet the needs of tomorrow’s biomedical engineers.

Incorporation of Manufacturing Process Design Into the Senior Capstone Design Course

At the University Colorado Denver, a manufacturing process design course was specifically created to raise the level of the as constructed senior design projects in the department. The manufacturing process design course creates a feed forward loop into the senior design course, while the senior design course generates a feedback loop into the process design course. Every student and student project has the opportunity to utilize CNC mills and lathes where appropriate. Specific emphasis is placed upon the interfaces from solid models to CAM models and subsequently the interface from CAM models to the machine tool. Often the construction of many senior design projects approaches the level of blacksmithing due to time constraints and lack of fabrication background. Obviously, most engineering students have neither the time nor the ability to become expert fabricators. However, the wide incorporation of CNC machining in the program allows, an opportunity to not only raise the quality of their prototypes, but also to immerse in the hands on experience of living with the ramifications of their own design decisions in manufacturing. Additionally, some of the art of fabrication is turned into the science of fabrication. The focus of this paper will be primarily on examining the effect of formal incorporation of the manufacturing process in the capstone design course.

Oil Spill Clean Up Project

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oilrig sank in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in an oil spill of 4.9 million barrels, one of the largest environmental disasters in United States history. In response to this disaster, the X Prize Foundation sponsored the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, with a one million dollar top prize for engineers to develop better ways to clean up oil after an offshore oil spill. Inspired by the oil spill cleanup challenge, a class project was developed for students in a junior-level fluid mechanics course to develop and implement an oil-spill cleanup solution. Students had one semester to design and build an oil spill cleanup device. At the end of the semester final testing took place in a 20-foot long water table, which was filled with water 6 inches deep. Then for each team of 3–4 students 100 mL of cooking oil was dispersed into the water table, and they had 20 minutes to recover as much of the oil as they could. The grading for the project was based in part on the percentage of the oil the students could recover in the allotted time. The students employed a wide range of techniques, including skimmers, scoopers, and absorbers. The students also had to write a report explaining how their model solution in the water table could be scaled up to full-scale use in an actual offshore oil spill.

A Case Study of Using Capstone Design as Basis for Curriculum-Wide Project-Based Learning

This paper describes an NSF funded project in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department at the University of Missouri. A primary goal of this project is to systematically increase project-based learning (PBL) experiences throughout the MAE curriculum. To accomplish this goal, recent capstone design projects that need further refinements serve as the basis for PBL activities throughout the MAE curriculum. A major tool for facilitating these refinement efforts is a new senior/graduate Design Management course in which each student in this course learns how to plan and manage design projects. These students then implement their learning by serving as project team managers in the courses in which the refinement activities are being conducted. This paper provides a detailed case study of five refinements to one capstone design that took place in four different MAE courses during the Spring 2011 semester. The paper describes a Fall 2009 capstone project that consisted of designing a portable wood chipper. The student design was very promising, leading to a chipper with significantly greater chipping capacity than commercially available chippers of the same size and weight. However, several faculty members reviewed the results and identified additional opportunities for refining the design. This paper describes activities during Spring 2011 when students in four different MAE courses developed refinements to the original design. The roles of the Design Management students in these activities are discussed. The paper also includes a discussion of the methods and findings of the formative assessment process, including interviews with, and surveys of, faculty and students.

Characterization of Air-Entrainment in a Plunging Water Jet System Using Image Processing: An Educational Approach

This paper outlines a proposed experimental setup and image processing techniques using MATLAB for the characterization of the average dynamic behavior of the air/water mixture under the free surface of water penetrated by a plunging jet. The proposed setup focuses on the dynamics of air entrainment below the free surface and the identification of the major regimes related to the entrainment process of bubbles in water, namely: (a) no-entrainment, (b) incipient entrainment, (c) intermittent entrainment, and (d) continuous entrainment. The experimental setup allows students to observe the flow behavior below the free liquid surface and determine the penetration depth of the bubble plumes using image processing techniques in MATLAB. The focal point of the experiment is image analysis for qualitative and quantitative characterization of the bubble plume.