Modernizing the thermal fluid sciences curriculum: Implementation of a hands-on lab course in mechanical engineering

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Trends in Mechanical Engineering 2266 A Proposed Vehicle for Delivering a Mechanical Engineering Systems Laboratory Experience Jed Lyons, Jeffrey Morehouse, David Rocheleau, Edward Young, and Kenneth Miller Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of South Carolina ABSTRACT The practice of mechanical engineering requires the ability to investigate and analyze complex thermal and mechanical systems. An effective way for the students to develop their understanding of mechanical engineering systems is for them to get hands-on experience by working in small groups in a laboratory environment. This paper describes a plan to develop a unique capstone laboratory course that provides this experience. The course, Engineering Systems Laboratory will be based upon an integrated sequence of laboratory experiments on an automobile and its subsystems. The automobile is chosen as the system to study because it is compact, relatively inexpensive and in the direct realm of experience of most students. More importantly, its many complex subsystems provide opportunities for the students to apply the spectrum of their mechanical engineering knowledge, including the principles of mechanics, dynamics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, and controls. INTRODUCTION An integral part of the undergraduate mechanical engineering curricula at the University of South Carolina is sequence of four mechanical engineering laboratory courses: Measurements and Instrumentation, Engineering Materials, Fundamentals of Microprocessors, and Senior Laboratory. Senior Lab is a two-credit hour course consisting of one hour of lecture and three hours of lab each week. Laboratories are offered to sections of about eight students. Currently, it is a good class, but not a great class. The existing experiments were selected primarily to support upper-level mechanical engineering courses, and include Psychrometric Study Of Conditioned Air, Air Conditioner COP As Function Of Condenser Temperature, Transient Heat Conduction, Heat Transfer To Circular Cylinder In Cross Flow, Hydraulic And Energy Grade Line, Internal Combustion Engine Performance, Parallel And Counterflow Heat Exchanger Performance, Wind Tunnel Experimentation NACA 4418 Airfoil Section, Vibration Of A Cantilever Beam, Fracture Mechanics Experiment, and the Hydraulic Trainer. The major drawback of the existing laboratory experience is that the experiments themselves are not directly related to one another. Further, the existing lab equipment is suitable for students to gain insight into various engineering principles, but most items support one experiment only. The result is a large number of relatively expensive items which must be maintained, that occupy laboratory space, yet are used only once a semester. Because the students go from one unrelated experiment to another throughout the semester, they do not have the opportunity to develop the “system level” perspective necessary to analyze and understand complex thermal and mechanical systems. Further, with the current equipment, the experiments are “set-up” for the students and do not require any design of the experiment, or much in the way of instrumentation installation. 1

Authors

Professor Emeritus M. Necati Özisik 1923–2008

Mechanical engineers have an important role in contributing to a more sustainable future. However, the extent that sustainability is currently being integrated into mechanical engineering (ME) curricula is unclear. This research characterized sustainability integration in undergraduate ME courses at 100 universities. Criterion-based selection resulted in a range of institution types and geographic locations (including institutions outside the United States); 93 of the 100 programs were accredited by the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) of ABET. For 90 institutions, the data came from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability for Higher Education (AASHE) Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS). Course catalog information was used for ten additional schools, in addition to comparing catalog data to STARS for ten institutions. Overall, sustainability topics were found in at least one elective or required undergraduate ME course at 83 institutions; only 43 institutions included sustainability in at least one required ME course; 16 institutions offered ten or more ME courses that integrated sustainability topics. Courses with sustainability integration at the greatest number of institutions were thermodynamics, engineering design, introduction to engineering, and heat transfer. Few of these courses appeared to integrate all three sustainability pillars (environmental, social, and economic). Leading institutions for sustainability integrations across the curriculum were identified. This work offers a picture of sustainability incorporation in undergraduate mechanical engineering programs, with the hope of catalyzing greater and more visible sustainability integration in the future.

The Mechanical Engineering course is largely based on practical skills and requires the acquisition of basic skills and domain knowledge before applying them on real problems. In order to design and develop a technology assisted problem solving (TAPS) package particularly to guide students in learning and solving engineering problems, it is necessary to be acquainted with its development and its process of realization in practical terms in computer software. User interface design has been applied in learning environments as discussed in previous Chapter 3. Therefore it is informative to discover the extent to which they help engineering students in their learning and thereby be incorporated in TAPS packages. This examination includes an overview of good practice in the positioning and operation of navigational features, visual screen presentation, the nature of presentation, help and feedback and views on the role of the learner in using the TAPS packages. This Chapter discusses the need to learn practical Mechanical Engineering skills and reviews the tutorial and situational learning approaches. Additionally the Chapter provides an overview of TAPS packages and the approach adopted for problem solving and student learning.

Mechanical Engineering (ME) faculty members are often called upon to teach service courses to non-ME majors. In courses such as statics and strength of materials, existing ME courses work well to satisfy student needs from other departments. However, the traditional ME thermal-fluid science courses are often not a good match for the non-major. Special courses are then used to present the material to these students. This paper documents the creation of such a hybrid Thermal-Fluid Sciences course at Western Kentucky University (WKU) that has been developed to satisfy the needs of civil (CE) and electrical (EE) engineering students. The four-hour course offered each fall presents a blend of thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid mechanics. The course has been offered three semesters, and is still evolving. The paper also presents some of the struggles to balance a solid engineering science experience with a perceived need for coverage for the FE exam materials only. In addition, lessons learned with respect to various student-learning styles in the course are shared. The results of faculty self-assessment, student course assessment and FE exam results are presented and compared

DIARY OF EVENTS

The conservation of energy, the conservation of mass, and the conservation of momentum are three fundamental concepts (or laws) of physics that are regularly reviewed in several undergraduate engineering courses. Mechanical energies in the form of kinetic and potential forms are the most easily understood forms of energy in engineering dynamics courses. Fluid flow energies related to pressure, velocity, elevation, fluid friction, pump, and turbine are covered in a fluid mechanics course. In a thermodynamics course, the first law deals with heat transfer and work done that causes a change of internal energy in a system. Aerospace engineers normally simplify a thermodynamic analysis by using intensive variables also called specific variables. In all these courses, the conservation of energy states that the amount of energy remains constant, that means that energy is neither created nor destroyed but transferable from one form to another, keeping the total energy same within a fixed domain.
 In several instances, students are either misunderstood or unclear about energy and its conservation concepts, however those very concepts are reviewed over and over in multiple courses. Through an integrative teaching approach that maps the smooth flow of energy and its conservation concepts in several undergraduate mechanical engineering courses, we are relating our shared teaching resources of the energy conservation principle. In this session, we present our pilot study on the synchronization of resources teaching the energy conservation principle in a sequence of undergraduate courses and our mitigation plan to clear up students’ misunderstanding on the energy conservation.

Authors

This paper presents pedagogy and experiences in teaching system modeling and analysis as well as feedback control systems in the engineering curriculum. The course is a required multidisciplinary course to be offered at the junior level for both electrical and mechanical engineering students. In addition, electrical engineering (EE) students and mechanical engineering (ME) students who pursue an electrical engineering (EE) minor are required to concurrently complete a laboratory course. But regular ME students who do not pursue an EE minor are not required to take the laboratory course. The motivation for offering this multidisciplinary course is to increase learning efficiency for ME students pursuing the EE minor, since there is no need for them to take a dynamic system modeling course and a feedback control system course separately, and to efficiently use faculty resources. Furthermore, the course will enhance a collaboration between EE and ME students. This multidisciplinary course consists of two parts. The first part covers modeling and analysis of dynamic systems, including mechanical, electrical, thermal and electromechanical systems with an emphasis on mechanical system modeling, to meet the ME program requirement; and the second part deals with control system theory and applications consisting of both open loop and closed loop system analysis, and feedback control system design to meet the EE program requirement.

Engineering Mechanics is one of the fundamental branches of science which is important in the education of professional engineers of any major. Most of the basic engineering courses, such as mechanics of materials, fluid and gas mechanics, machine design, mechatronics, acoustics, vibrations, etc. are based on Engineering Mechanics course. In order to absorb the materials of Engineering Mechanics, it is not enough to consume just theoretical laws and theorems—student also must develop an ability to solve practical problems. Therefore, it is necessary to solve many problems independently. This book is a part of a four-book series designed to supplement the Engineering Mechanics courses in the principles required to solve practical engineering problems in the following branches of mechanics: Statics, Kinematics, Dynamics, and Advanced Kinetics. Each book contains 6-8 topics on its specific branch and each topic features 30 problems to be assigned as homework, tests, and/or midterm/final exams with the consent of the instructor. A solution of one similar sample problem from each topic is provided. This second book in the series contains six topics of Kinematics, the branch of mechanics that is concerned with the analysis of motion of both particle and rigid bodies without reference to the cause of the motion. This book targets undergraduate students at the sophomore/junior level majoring in science and engineering.

This mixed methods study investigated a college engineering professor’s first-time implementation of project/problem-based instruction (PBI) within an engineering mechanics (EM) course and compared this implementation with a business-as-usual (BAU) EM course. Research questions concerned the degree to which the PBI course changed from a BAU model and the effectiveness of the PBI implementation on students’ EM learning as measured by a Statics Concept Inventory as compared to BAU students. Findings showed the professor’s original intentions and realizations of project-based instruction had to be adjusted to a problem-based instructional format to keep it in line with the EM course objectives (simply better suited as problem-based).

This paper reports the development of a mechatronics studio course in the Mechanical Engineering (ME) undergraduate program at Georgia Southern University. The course covers three broad areas: mechatronic instrumentation, computer based data acquisition and analysis, and microcontroller programming and interfacing. This is a required 2-credit course in the ME program. The course is delivered in studio format for four contact hours per week with one hour of lecture and three hours of interactive sessions of problem solving and laboratory experiments. For each topic covered, students get the theoretical background and the hands-on experience in the laboratory setting. Both formative and summative assessment of the students’ performance in the course are done as a part of the overall assessment and evaluation plan of the department for ABET accreditation of the ME program. Both direct and indirect forms of assessment are considered. The paper reports the details of the course materials and the results of assessment. The positive response of the students and their performance in the course are encouraging. Future steps of the continuous improvement process for the course are also discussed.

This study addresses a gap in existing literature by exploring the impact of an aerodynamics laboratory course on students' readiness for senior design projects in Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University. The redesigned curriculum focuses on propellers, aligning with the increasing popularity of senior design projects involving fixed‐wing aircraft and multi‐rotor systems in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. The updated course incorporates Additive Manufacturing (AM) and an anechoic chamber for the first time, outlining its structure, objectives, and pivotal concepts. The use of data acquisition codes streamlines experimentation while integrating AM accelerates practical applications of blade element theory (BET). Through an assessment of lab report grades, this initiative significantly enhances students' grasp of propeller concepts, marking a pivotal step in their preparation for senior design projects.

There has been a sudden surge in 3D printing technologies within the past few years. Consequently, many educational institutions are trying to implement 3D printing in their curriculum to make it more challenging and appealing. However, the process is quite challenging as it needs experience and professionalism to select and employ the best courses and practices for this matter. This work is directed into sharing the best procedures and practices for implementing 3D printing in mechanical engineering education at UAE University. The courses described in this paper include geometric modelling (MECH315), Fluid Mechanics Laboratory (MECH348) and Mechanics of Materials (MECH305). Using 3D printing in these courses motivated students to be more involved in their learning process and enhancing their hands-on experience in additive manufacturing technologies.