Development of Low-Cost Thermal-Fluid Undergraduate Laboratory Exercises Complying with the Washington Accord’s Graduate Attributes

Abstract

Signatories of the Washington Accord has to comply with the accord’s definition of a competent engineering graduate. In Malaysia, the Engineering Accreditation Council (EAC) is empowered to oversee all the engineering degree courses offered by all universities to make sure they conform with the Washington Accord. Our university has decided to revamp some of the laboratory exercises in order to comply with EAC’s requirements. This article reports the thought process of designing new thermal-fluid laboratory exercises that can provide advanced engineering knowledge using investigative scientific process and complex problem analysis. The cost of the laboratory setup was kept at minimum using open-source software that can visualize and measure the density gradient of the flow-field captured by a simple DSLR camera. The students were able to observe complex flow phenomena that stimulated their interest to read further on related engineering research articles. The students achieved well above average on the course and program outcomes that were set for this course.