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Closed-loop mechanical engineering design teaching to electrical and computer engineering students using CAD, CAE, and 3D printing

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) Technical Session 14

Tagged Division

Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED)

Page Count

22

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43211

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43211

Download Count

134

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Paper Authors

biography

Abdullah Umair Bajwa Habib University

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Abdullah is a mechanical engineer from Lahore, Pakistan. After graduating, he worked as a turbomachinery engineer before embarking to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue graduate studies at Texas A&M University. There he studied gas exchange in stationary, natural gas two-stroke engines to reduce their emissions. Towards the end of his PhD, he started teaching remotely at Habib University – a newly formed private liberal arts university in Pakistan - and joined full-time as an assistant professor after his graduation and taught courses in engineering design, manufacturing, and thermodynamics; and oversaw the design and manufacturing workshop. After teaching for almost two years, Abdullah moved to the University of Oxford where, in addition to researching ways to adapt the internal combustion engine for a carbon-free mobility future, he tutors courses in fluid mechanics and thermodynamics in the Department of Engineering Science and is a Research Associate at Balliol College.

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Abstract

A computer aided design and engineering (CAD, CAE) course was designed to train senior electrical and computer engineering students in the mechanical engineering design process and introduce them to selected relevant topics from machine elements, material science, mechanics, and manufacturing to emphasize practical design considerations like manufacturability, mechanical integrity, and functionality. The course served as a ‘learning through doing and making’ based pedagogical experiment that leveraged the ease-of-use, manufacturing briskness, affordability, and portability of fusion deposition modeling-based 3D printing to teach these topics in an integrated manner within the time constraints of a three-credit-hour course. Couplings between CAD and CAE tools (motion simulation and analysis) and 3D printing were leveraged to reinforce student learnings on topics from machine elements and mechanics, and provide opportunities through project-based assessments to reflect on their design choices and use economically-available design performance results to introduce design refinements.

The course was very well-received by the students who reported that they found it motivating and stimulating, and that it enhanced their knowledge, skills and confidence. The paper presents an overview of the course and summarises experiences, challenges, lessons, recommendations and outcomes from two semesters of its teaching. Integrated and synergistic deployment of suitable pedagogical approaches is found to be very important for the execution of the course; and its resource-intense nature and high student workload requirements appear as potential challenges.

Bajwa, A. U. (2023, June), Closed-loop mechanical engineering design teaching to electrical and computer engineering students using CAD, CAE, and 3D printing Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43211

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