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Economic Evaluation of Structures of Different Shapes and Materials with Processing Considerations

Robert C. Creese, Ph.D., PE, CCE Deepak Gupta, BS Industrial and Management Systems Engineering Department College of Engineering and Mineral Resources West Virginia University Morgantown, West Virginia

Introduction

A computer program was developed to help students perform economic evaluations of structures with different shapes, materials, and processing factors in a more efficient manner. To develop the various programs necessary to evaluate different shapes was very time consuming, and the program is used to evaluate approximately 80 percent of the shapes assigned. The students must develop programs for two or three additional shapes. This permitted the project teams to be reduced in size which increased the ability of the teams to meet and increased the amount of shapes that could be investigated. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the logic of the program with its benefits over the current approach (developing separate spreadsheets), to present an example of the program input and results, and to describe the typical students using the program.

The student teams previously have used spreadsheets to solve the problem, but when they investigated complex shapes, such as the hollow box, the expressions for the moment of inertia lead to complex expressions requiring search algorithms. The teams often made serious derivation errors and programming errors and obtain poor results with the different shapes. Previously the teams would assign one person for a particular shape, as they were requested to evaluate at least five different shapes and would have five different programs.

The use of a computer model reduced the programming errors made and all teams can easily obtain the correct results for most of the shapes. The student teams develop programs for only the additional two or three shapes. This permits smaller teams and help the students participate at a higher level. The students evaluate their team members for their participation level and the evaluation is used to adjust the project grade for an individual student. The use of the computer has permitted the team size to be reduced to 2-3 students in the large classes instead of the 4-7 students that occurred in the past.

The basic manufacturing processes course, which is required by the Industrial Engineering program, the Mechanical Engineering program, and the Aerospace Engineering and Mechanical Engineering dual major program, is a 2 credit course and is typically taken in the

“Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Gupta, D., & Creese, R. (2005, June), Economic Evaluation Of Structures Of Different Shapes And Materials With Processing Considerations Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14281