Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Charles Pierce

student interest about learning concepts necessary to “build” thearena. This method has not yet been utilized in a course but is being developed for the nextoffering of Introductory Geotechnical Engineering. The paper provides a description of the newcourse platform and summarizes survey results of former students on the proposed method.I. IntroductionTeaching the fundamental concepts of geotechnical engineering using traditional methods oflecture-based instruction and hands-on laboratory testing can be effective, based on the author’sexperience. However, using a real, on-going field construction project as a platform for teachingthese concepts can enhance these traditional methods. It is important to recognize that thisteaching strategy does not

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Peter Schuyler; Howard A. Canistraro

Session 1526 A Single Computer Based Data Acquisition and Control System For a 4 Year MET Program Howard A. Canistraro And Peter Schuyler The S.I. Ward College of Technology University of HartfordAbstractUnder support from an Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement grant from the NationalScience Foundation (DUE # 9851104 ), the laboratory portion of the Mechanical EngineeringTechnology (MET) program at Ward College is being revised. Analog signal conditioning,measurement and data storage is now

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Jose Saldivar; Ighal Mehmedagic; Siva Thangam; Richard Cole

Session 1520 Computers in Education Division Design and Implementation of a Computer-Aided Instrumentation System for a CFR Engine Test Facility Siva Thangam, Jose Saldivar, Richard Cole, Igbal Mehmedagic Stevens Institute of TechnologyAbstractThe design and implementation of a computer-assisted instrumentation system for a Cooperative FuelResearch (CFR) engine test facility as part of modernization and development of the thermalengineering laboratory was carried out at Stevens Institute of Technology. The

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

William Szaroletta; Lloyd Ewing; Nancy L. Denton

Session 2168 Analog to Digital Mechanics Lab Conversion: Lessons Learned Nancy Denton, Bill Szaroletta, Lloyd Ewing Purdue UniversityAbstractTo upgrade the laboratory supporting an introductory sophomore-level strength of materials courseto reflect current industry practice and address student requests, the authors have begun convertingthe current experiments from analog instrumentation with hand-recorded data to NationalInstruments LabVIEW based testing. This paper reviews the challenges encountered during theconversion of one experiment; a three-point beam bending experiment

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Robert Rice; Christian Ochei; Alamgir Choudhury

the area. This simulation and programming task replaces previous laboratoryexperiment on wooden beam deflection. Therefore, curriculum objectives are achievedwithout utilizing additional laboratory time.1. IntroductionAt Cuyahoga Community College (CCC), Strength of Materials is a required course forthe mechanical engineering technology and architecture/construction technologyprograms. Beam deflection theory and the associated exercise problems are anindispensable part of a traditional strength of materials curriculum in similar programs.The subject is taught using both moment-area and superposition methods [1,2]. While themoment-area method uses properties of bending moment diagram area, the superpositiontechnique requires the combined use

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Casey Preston; R. Mark Worden; Daina Briedis

-the-art teaching laboratory, two higher levelbioprocessing courses, a seminar course, and a multidisciplinary graduate trainingprogram. An undergraduate-run student chapter of the International Society ofPharmaceutical Engineers (ISPE) was also initiated and has provided extracurricularbenefits for the students. The department has obtained both equipment donations andfederal grants for these efforts. One of the authors (CP) is currently a graduate studentwho was involved as an undergraduate in almost all phases of this program and willprovide his perspectives on the program effectiveness and its benefits to a student. Theother two authors are faculty members who have been involved in the development of thecourses and coordination of the

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Scott von Laven; X. Qian; A. Jalloh; Zheng-Tao Deng; Amir Mobasher; Ruben Rojas-Oviedo

individual computer purchases and configuredby our own departmental personnel. Parallel computing software to exploit the clusters isavailable for computer operating systems like Unix, Windows NT or Linux. Clusters also havethe advantage that they can be used as stand alone computers in a laboratory environment whenthey are not operating as a parallel computer. Page 6.540.1 Proceedings of the 2001American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society for Engineering Education

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Alok Verma

Agenciesb. State Government Agenciesc. Foundations andd. IndustryIn majority of the cases, the applied research projects are funded by industry. The motivation forcontracting out these services lies in the fact that a number of these companies do not have thesufficient manpower to support such an effort or they may not have the desired expertise. FederalAgencies like National Science Foundation (NSF) do support development of new laboratoriesunder programs like Course-Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) programs or MajorResearch Instrumentation Program (MRI). NSF also offers targeted funding for research in UGinstitutions. This paper discusses an industrial project which was funded by the Center forInnovative Technology of the State of

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

P. Watta; N. Narasimhamurthi; Adnan Shaout

and bring a product tomarket. These software and hardware tools include hardware descriptive languages,such as HDL and VHDL, field programmable gate arrays, and digital simulationpackages, such as PowerView. The goal of this project is to integrate some of these design tools in a consistentand pedagogically sound manner throughout the ECE curriculum, thereby exposingstudents to current industry practice and state-of-the-art design technology. 1 Introduction The primary goal of this project is to expand the ECE laboratory facilities toprovide our undergraduate students with high quality experiments and design projectsin the area of Digital Design and Computer Architecture. In particular, our aim is toexpose

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Nicholas Massa; Gordon Snyder; Fenna Hanes; James Masi; Gary Mullett

week-long NCTT June workshop. c) New England and New York partners are utilizing the New York City Technical College Program to increase career, gender, and cultural awareness in the communities and in the secondary schools.5) Establish the laboratories within the facility; a) Two demonstration laboratories were built and upgraded in the NCTT facility, and multiple experiments and demonstrations in elementary and advanced telecommunications techniques, meant for a wide range of audiences, have been developed with support from Bell Atlantic, JDS Uniphase, Nortel Networks, Sandia National Laboratories, Cisco Networks, Springfield Technical Community College, and other NCTT partners. b) The laboratories

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Andrew Rose

develop improved student writing skills. The “Writing Assignments for TechnicalCourses” workshop sponsored by the Liberal Education Division at the 2000 ASEE Conferencediscussed how student peer review can be used with well-designed writing assignments intechnical courses. Based on this workshop, writing assignments in a junior level civil engineeringtechnology course have been used to help students improve their writing skills. Writingassignments varied from transmittal memos, technical memos, laboratory reports and a five toseven page research paper on topics that time constraints prevent from being covered in class. Tocompare the effectiveness of peer reviewed writing assignments with non-peer reviewedassignments; the peer review process was

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Shafaat Qazi; Sam Gile; Mustafa Guvench

Session 1359 Automated Measurement of Frequency Response of Electrical Networks, Filters and Amplifiers M.G. Guvench, S. Gile and S. Qazi University of Southern MaineAbstract:This paper describes the design, operation and use of a PC controlled automated frequency responsemeasurement system using the standard bench-top test equipment available in undergraduateelectronics laboratories. The system described employs the waveform data acquisition and processingcapabilities of digital oscilloscopes to extract amplitudes (rms or peak), periods, frequencies

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Naseem Ishaq; Salahuddin Qazi

Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2001, American Society for Engineering Education” Page 6.585.6including material on distance education. One of its publication “ Prism” includes useful Websites recommended by educators 21.VI. Virtual and Web-based LaboratoriesWith the popularity of web-based instruction for distance learning, the need for providing web-based teaching methods and virtual lab for experimental laboratory has also increased. Numberof universities and colleges are developing such facilities to supplement their distance educationprograms. A virtual lab is a simulation of a

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Stuart Steele

will be explored in order to emphasize the problemsolving and design experience. Both lecture and laboratory settings will be addressed. Theimpact of mobile computing with notebooks is reviewed from the viewpoint of team efforts andremote activity. Results from two courses in the Fall of 2000-2001 school year at PolytechnicUniversity will be shown, where notebook computers are now required and many classrooms,labs and campus areas utilize wireless operation. Covered are freshman and upper level courses.I. IntroductionRecently there has been a great interest and desire to make notebook (laptop) computersavailable for students at many universities. This is to provide a mobile type computing approachfor better communication between faculty and

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Rosalyn Hobson; Esther Hughes

students’learning, but also provides them with valuable training that they will use in their futureoccupations. The authors of this paper survey three engineering courses in which they haveintroduced various active cooperative learning activities. The three courses presented are:Introduction to Engineering, Microcomputer Systems, and Automatic Controls.Each course is described including course objectives, syllabus, and grading policies. For eachcourse examples are given of the assignments, in-class activities, laboratory assignments, andprojects in which teams are used. The attitudes of the students during the course and studentevaluations of the activities as well as the course are presented. The challenges and contrastsbetween using teams in a freshman

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

William Charlton; Marsha Creatchman; Carl Beard; Sheldon Landsberger

students are at Department of Energy national laboratories, various industries, orother federal or state government facilities. Obtaining an advanced degree or degrees in new Page 6.527.1applied nuclear engineering areas would be of great benefit to them.In 1997 the Nuclear Engineering program at the University of Texas at Austin, which is inthe Department of Mechanical Engineering changed its name to the Nuclear and RadiationEngineering Program to better reflect the new areas of nuclear science and engineering. Sincethen our program has added two new faculty members and begun to restructure both itsundergraduate and graduate programs. We began to offer

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Robert Hendricks

Session 1332 An Undergraduate Microchip Fabrication Facility† Robert W. Hendricks Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniversityAbstractA microchip fabrication facility for teaching the elements of semiconductor processing to amultidisciplinary cohort of about 500 students per year from all areas of engineering, science,and even the humanities is described. The laboratory comprises an approximately 1,800 ft 2,Class 10,000 cleanroom with house vacuum, distributed process gases (Ar, O2 and N2), and an18.3 MΩ de-ionized water system. It has been equipped with

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Kevin Renken; George Abraham

Session 1359 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP OF A LOW DIFFERENTIAL PRESSURE PERMEABILITY APPARATUS FOR CONCRETE SAMPLES Kevin J. Renken, George T. Abraham University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeAbstractThis paper presents the results of a mechanical engineering senior design project that was carried-outin the Radon Reduction Technology Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).The objective of the student's project was to design, setup and test an experimental apparatus tomeasure the air permeability coefficient of concrete samples under low pressure differences (∆p ~5 - 10 Pa) that

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Richard Alexander; Jay Porter; James Ochoa; Rainer Fink

Session 3375Synergy of Applied Research and Education in Engineering Technology Rainer J. Fink, Jay Porter, James A. Ochoa, Richard M. Alexander Texas A&M UniversityAbstractEngineering technology programs at Texas A&M University are housed within a College ofEngineering that enjoys ever-increasing success in research productivity. Faculty across thecountry who serve in engineering technology programs are often attracted to those programsprimarily because of their desire to devote most of their time working with students in theclassroom and laboratory, while minimizing the time devoted to research

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Karen Horton

books and materials used in the course are listed in References 1-10.This paper highlights the non-lecture activities used to support the topics above. The activitiesincluded vibration measurements in the laboratory and at our campus steam plant, solvingdifferential equations graphically using MathCAD in a computer laboratory, and noisemeasurements simulating machinery noise in a laboratory.Lecture TopicsTypical topics in vibration courses were introduced. In the applied context, students calculatedspring constants for helical coil springs, beams with applied masses, and torsional springs. Theycalculated natural frequencies for mass-spring systems such as equipment foundations includingparallel and series systems. The Fundamentals of

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Paul Flikkema

, synthesis and evaluation.These concerns have driven the development of a new laboratory and a senior-level electricalengineering course: EE 440 Embedded Control. Three major goals of the course are to ✁ spark students’ interest by connecting exciting real-world problems to abstract concepts, ✁ show students how seemingly disparate and abstract systems disciplines such as signal pro- cessing, communications and embedded systems design can be joined to attack important problems, and ✁ help students develop the cognitive skills that allow them to use systems principles in the development of new technologies and applications of them.More generally, we hope that this course illuminates other deep connections

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

John Kemeny; Bryan Zeitler

. Interactivity is anotherimportant element of the engineering classroom experience. One of the challenges in developingthe online course was to develop an approach that can effectively capture these classroomelements. In addition, the rock lab provides a hands-on, kinesthetic experience for the students,as well as a writing experience in the form of laboratory reports. The second challenge was todevelop an innovative approach to capture these important laboratory experiences.Several innovative multimedia components have been adapted to meet the challenges describedabove. For the lecture portion of the course, an approach that utilizes streaming audio and vectorgraphics was adapted. The streaming audio comes from actual lectures, and animated

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

John Olson; Georgia Ehlers; David Lovelock; Ali Mehrabian

newspapers as well as alocal TV station.4. Lab Assessment and Design by Architecture StudentsAssessing UA labs is a joint project between Program ACCESS and the University of ArizonaCollege of Architecture. Each year 40 sophomore architecture students visit and surveylaboratories that lack adequate accessibility options and make recommendation on retrofittingand transforming them into “barrier free” laboratories. These visits are part of a project for astudio class required to be taken by all architecture students. The objectives of these experiencesare to train and expose the future architects to the accessibility issues and to increase theirawareness of the issues involving designing laboratories for students with disabilities. Theseprojects are

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

William Szaroletta

-private course web page and a course email listserve including all registered students. This technology implementation has been tested for asophomore-level strength of materials class for the purpose of improving the communicationsloop times between the students and professor and improving student satisfaction.The public portion of the web page includes a course outline, lecture and laboratory syllabi, dailyhomework assignments, examination schedules, and email access to the professor. The privateportion of the web page (available to only registered students with valid computer accounts)includes homework problem solutions, examination solutions, common laboratory data, andother potentially copyrightable course material. Hyperlinks are liberally

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

John Anderson

Session 3563 Real World Learning in Distance Education John C. Anderson, PE Mechanical Engineering Technology Dept., Purdue University, 1417 Knoy Hall, W. Lafayette, IN 47909-6219 Ph. (765) 494-7526 email: jcanderson@tech.purdue.eduAbstractObtaining and maintaining laboratory equipment in technology courses is a constantproblem. This paper proposes an alternative to the use of simulation or to buying laboratoryequipment for a school laboratory, and uses a course in Programmable Logic Controllers(PLC) to illustrate the concept.With the reduction in pricing of

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Josette Rice; Thad Welch

electrocardiography (ECG) and electromyography (EMG)signals. With the advent of real-time data acquisition and signal processing technology, it is nowmuch easier to develop instrumentation lab experiments for student use. The current hardware andsoftware enables our students to achieve highly accurate measurements, perform time domain andfrequency domain analysis, and store the data for subsequent use, analysis, and design. This paperdiscusses some of the methods developed for implementing these labs. We believe our techniqueshave greatly enhanced the ease of teaching and learning these important topics in instrumentation.1. IntroductionThis paper describes how student laboratories using data acquisition, measurement, and analysis ofphysiological signals has

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Raul Ordonez; Hong Zhang; Ravi Ramachandran; Stephanie Farrell

Session 1526 MULTIDISCPLINARY CONTROL EXPERIMENTS BASED ON THE PROPORTIONAL-INTEGRAL-DERIVATIVE (PID) CONCEPT Ravi P. Ramachandran, Raul Ordonez, Stephanie Farrell, Zenaida Otero Gephardt and Hong Zhang Faculty of Engineering, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey 08028Abstract - The hallmark of the newly configured Rowan College of Engineering undergraduateprogram is multidisciplinary education with a laboratory emphasis. The development of a newmultidisciplinary control laboratory upholds our hallmark very well. We attempt to address thedemand of industry for acquiring control engineers (1) with a

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Paul Hoke; Craig Somerton

Session 1566 Student Evaluation of the Thermal/Fluids Design Experience Paul B. Hoke, Craig W. Somerton Department of Mechanical Engineering, Michigan State UniversityAbstractThe paper details on-going course development and improvement in a senior level heat transferlaboratory incorporating a design experience. The heat transfer laboratory includes eight (8)laboratory exercises and concludes with a seven week thermal design project. The project ischosen to include multiple aspects of thermal design and to incorporate the tools utilized in theearlier laboratory exercises. The goal of the project

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Eric Warmbier; James S. Fairweather; P. David Fisher

circuitapplications. Students are also introduced to digital logic fundamentals and gain experience indesigning, building and testing simple logic circuits. A three-hour/week laboratory providesactive learning experiences for the students.Initial Process for Assessing the Course Learning ObjectivesECE 345 did not have a good reputation. Students who took the course and the faculty memberswho taught it shared this opinion. Students had difficulty learning the material and seeing how itcould be applied within their major fields of study. Faculty members teaching the course felt thattoo many topics were covered at a superficial level. Feedback from one student captures thegeneral sense of both the students and faculty: “This class was really presented at

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

David Schmidt; Gregory Plett

labs. Interdisciplinary instruction also addsto the richness of both the ECE and MAE curricula.Another main focus of the lab is that it include visually stimulating physical devices to control. Avery comprehensive undergraduate controls lab has been developed around controllingEducational Control Products Magnetic Levitation systems. Using a single general-purposedevice for all laboratory experiments rather than a plurality of devices (which each have a specialpurpose) results in economies of space, money, and student time (as only one device needs to bethoroughly understood; hence, more time may be devoted to studying how control-systems theoryapplies to it).The laboratory we have built comprises four work centers. Each work center has a