Engineers require effective written communication skills, including the appropriate presentation of mechanical design information in visual format. A study of 48 Capstone Design Reports submitted over a period 5 semesters gives insight into the choices students make when selecting visual representations for describing designs. Student choices reflect assignment requirements, student preference, student skill level, and perceived appropriateness of representation type. This study presents observations on the use of visuals in a set of Capstone Design Reports with particular emphasis on sketches.
Mechanical engineers and those in related fields require effective written communication skills. These include the appropriate presentation of mechanical design information in visual format. A study of 48 Capstone Design Reports submitted over a period of five semesters gives insight into the visual representations used to describe designs. This study presents observations on the use of visuals in a set of Capstone Design Reports with particular emphasis on sketches. The findings are that students will include hand drawn sketches of design alternatives during the conceptual design process when specifically required to do so. The sketches tend not to be of high quality artistically but they do include details relevant to engineering analysis as determined by a coding scheme focused on the content level of sketches. The authors believe that the positive benefits of sketching should be encouraged by requiring students to produce hand drawn sketches and accepting sketches as visuals in concept generation design sections of design reports.
Many studies have shown the importance of sketching skill in engineering design, more specifically in the conceptual design phase. Yet, engineering students today clearly have a preference when it comes to design and sketching is not often included in their visual documentation tool kit. The reasons may be that first, today’s contemporary engineering course plan does not include a sketch training course leaving students feeling inadequate to the task. Secondly in such a demanding fast passed global economy, time is of the essence and tools such as CAD, Pro-E, and Inventor offer quick solutions to design problems. Overall students do not appear to appreciate the value of sketching in the design process. This must be changed. This paper presents the results of a study to intervene with the purpose of influencing student use of sketching during design in a senior capstone course at The University of Maryland. The students sketches are reviewed pre and post a specific lesson based on the importance of sketching in mechanical design. This sketching importance lesson changed the content of the sketches when compared to a control group.
Fatigue crack growth testing of 2024-T3 Aluminum plate was performed using compact tension (CT) specimens with chromate and non-chromate primer paint systems to evaluate the effects of the coatings on fatigue crack growth rates. The tests were conducted in lab air and sea water environments for each of the coating systems. Standard E399 CT specimens were tested to determine the influence level of environmentally assisted cracking (corrosion fatigue) on crack growth rates and cyclic count to prescribed precrack and final crack lengths. Increasing stress range (DK) tests were conducted at 10 Hz in the range of 6.5 to 26.5 MPa ffiffiffiffi m p . It was determined that the coated specimens exhibited a 12% shorter total life, on average, than the bare specimens for the lab air cases. In the case of salt water exposure, the coated specimens exhibited approximately 10% life increase over the bare specimens. The number of cycles to the 2.54 mm pre-crack length for the coated specimens was all less than the cycle count for the bare tests. In each case (coated or bare), there was an increased growth rate at the lower stress ranges in the salt water environment, with the chromate system case displaying the smallest change (increase). It can be concluded that the coated specimens initiate cracks and propagate faster than the bare specimens for short cracks at low stress range, but the environmental influence on the specimens is quickly overshadowed as the cracks elongate and the rate of growth increases. The coated specimens exhibited a higher total life cycle count to final crack length for this testing.
Some historically successful engineering inventions have been designed by trial and error as was the famous case of Thomas Edison’s light bulb. No contemporary design researcher would advocate a tedious, trial-and-error methodology as the basis for engineering practice. The 21st century engineer is expected to create innovative solutions to real world problems with limited resources and limited time. Successful engineering design methods are those that substitute trial-and-error with practice-based guidance (e.g., TRIZ), mathematical analysis (e.g., optimization), general problem-solving strategies (e.g., functional decomposition and synthesis), or good cognitive thinking strategies (e.g., Synectics). This research is placed in the last category, studying the cognitive processes that can be observed in recorded work of engineering designers. This study is the first step in research intended to go further into the designers mind and reveal new insights about the design process. This paper presents a cognitive coding scheme model to organize and categorize designer “thinking” as recorded in design documentation. The product of this research can be used to instruct curriculum on teaching the design process for students and professional engineers.
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