The Teaching Value of Defining Iterative Design Projects in Serving Capstone Engineering Undergraduate Education

Abstract

In the past several years, the traditional fourth year “hands-on” requirement for engineering programs in the U.S. is being satisfied by what is now called the capstone senior design project (herein referred to as CSDP). The engineering CSDP program director sends a call to the local industries within the state for solicitation of project proposals that will be worked on by the interdisciplinary engineering student team. Each industrial participant will have to contribute a preset budget defined by the program to the engineering school for each submitted proposal that has been selected by the student team. Honeywell has been an avid participant in the University of Arizona CSDP program for the past several years. Rather than define a simple CSDP that can be fully completed in the first attempt, the author has sought the value of teaching iterative design to the student team by defining a multiyear CSDP scope, in that after the first year, each successive team learns from the past design and implements its own improvement to the design it inherits. This paper gives an overview of Honeywell's CSDP titled “Measuring Heat Transfer in Annular Flow Between Co-Rotating or Counter-Rotating Cylinders.” Now in its fourth iteration, each wave of student team has been able to understand the complexity of the design, the challenge of testing for structural integrity, the controllability of implementing a balanced system of heat gain and loss to reach steady state operation, the evolution of starting with slip ring temperature measurements and ending at wireless telemetry, DOE testing to rank influencing variables, and heat transfer correlation of the data relating Nusselt versus Reynolds number. Beginning with the first year CSDP team, this paper covers the design approach selected by that team, its results, and the lessons learned as a result of failure in meeting the full requirements, which is then taken on by the next group of students the following year.