Engineering schools across the country are developing ways of integrating design into their curriculum, and a question that often arises is how to best integrate design into the sophomore and junior level courses. Freshman design projects or mechanical dissection courses are designed to give the students hands-on experience in conceptual design and construction, with little if any of the mathematical modeling normally used in engineering design. The capstone senior design project is a true engineering design experience, where students draw from their background to conceptualize, analyze, model, refine, and optimize a product to meet design, manufacturing, and life cycle cost requirements. The sophomore and junior level courses should assist students in making the transition from the "seat-of-the-pants" freshman design approach to the engineering design approach required for the capstone experience and engineering practice. This paper summarizes a three year effort at integrating design into the Mechanics of Materials course, but the principal conclusions drawn would apply to most sophomore and junior engineering science courses.
A one hour presentation was developed to get elementary school students interested in engineering. The presentation begins with the students building a six feet long, structurally sound bridge which they can crawl across. A pictorial presentation helps them learn to identify some of the different types of bridges: truss, stone arch, steel arch, concrete girder, cable‐stayed, and suspension. They are introduced to the fundamental engineering concepts of tension and compression. These concepts are reinforced by demonstrating that if a tension member is replaced with a chain then the bridge is still strong, but if a compression member is replaced with a chain the bridge will collapse. The presentation was integrated into the engineering curriculum by having senior design groups develop new bridge concepts and introduce new ideas into the presentation. This project provides a good senior design problem and helps keep the program fresh and interesting for the grade school children.
Whiskers are a very attractive means of reinforcing a ceramic material. It has been shown that the whiskers dramatically improve the ultimate strength and modulus of the materials at room temperature. However, recent studies indicate that at high temperatures the improvement is less pronounced, or there is no improvement at all. In this paper a model is developed to explain why the properties are degraded at high temperature. The parameters which seem most important for high-temperature performance are the coefficients of thermal expansion and Poisson's ratios for the constituents, the heat treatment temperature, and the coefficient of friction between the whisker and the matrix. 'The model compares favorably with the experimental data available, so a parametric study was done to show the effect of different parameters on the strength and modulus of the composite. [
Multi‐disciplinary design can be taught in a very general way focusing on methods and procedures that work for any multi‐disciplinary design project or in a very specific way focusing on a specific multi‐disciplinary design project. The general approach teaches students the principles of how to approach any multi‐disciplinary design project but often lacks meaningful examples of how the principles are applied. Focusing on a specific multi‐disciplinary design project gives the students a meaningful example of how to apply design principles but they may have difficulty generalizing what they have learned and how it can be applied to other projects. To get a good background in engineering design, engineering students should have educational experiences that are both general and specific. This paper describes a course developed at the University of Missouri‐Rolla (UMR) to teach multi‐disciplinary design by focusing on the design of a solar racing car. The purpose of the course is to teach the aspects of a multi‐disciplinary design project utilizing a specific example for student comprehension.
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