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Revamping Mechanical Engineering Measurements Lab Class

Abstract

Measurements Lab is a core junior course for mechanical engineering majors in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Lamar University. The main objective of the course is to train students to be able to use various instruments and equipments needed in a mechanical engineer’s career. This paper discusses the revamping of the course describing each experiment and the related materials, the relevance of each new experiment to ABET outcomes related to experimentation, and the evaluation of student projects and their assessments. Responses and feedback from students are presented to evaluate the effectiveness of new experiments and group projects.

Introduction

Laboratories are essential for education and training of engineers as they provide hands-on experiences and demonstrate applications of theoretical principles to the real-world engineering problems. There are two required laboratory classes in the curricula of mechanical engineering at Lamar University: MEEN 3311 Measurements Lab and MEEN 4313 Materials Lab. These lab courses were the principal courses designed to meet the ABET EC 2000 outcome (b) related to experimentation: an ability to design and conduct experiments as well as to analyze and interpret data. This paper will discuss the Measurements Lab, a core junior level course for mechanical engineering majors in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Lamar University. The course is a two-credit hour class with one 1-hour lecture and one 3-hour lab session per week. The main goals of the course are

(a) to develop and promote students’ ability to identify, select, and use various instruments and equipment (b) to develop and promote students’ ability to conduct experiments, to analyze experimental data, and to interpret the experimental results.

The course covers technical writing and presentation, design of experiments and error analysis, and data acquisition concepts using DataStudio1 and LabVIEW2 software packages. Laboratory session covers several experiments including measurement of fundamental properties such as pressure, temperature, flow, humidity, and mechanical strain. Moreover, experimental analyses of engineering systems such as vapor compression refrigeration cycle and heat exchanger testing are also included in the lab sessions. The present experiments in the lab are several years old so the department has recently decided to revamp and introduce new experiments to replace some old ones. As discussed previously, this course is one of the two courses to evaluate the ABET outcome related to experimentation. As a result, the revamping of the course is an ideal opportunity to incorporate new materials with which the students will be able to demonstrate higher learning skills such as application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. To deal with new experiments and materials to be introduced to the course, the lab manual is also

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Aung, K. (2006, June), Revamping Mechanical Engineering Measurements Lab Class Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--28