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Ali R. Moazed is a Professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Technology department at Wentworth Institute of Technology. In addition to twenty five years of industrial and consulting experience, he has taught mechanical engineering courses full or part-time prior to joining Wentworth in 2001. At Wentworth, he teaches design related courses in the solid mechanics area. He believes in teaching from the perspective of a practicing academician by bringing into the classroom topics related to the practice of engineering, along with the latest pedagogical tools.His expertise is in the area of Applied Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and as an engineering consultant, he provides FEA services to the Utility, Industrial, and Commercial clients nationwide. These services include design analysis, design verification, design modification, design optimization, and failure analysis. He is a registered professional engineer in states of Massachusetts and California. The Design Projects for the Simulation Based Design Course AbstractThe course MECH625-simulation-based design in our program was mainly to conduct FEA (Finite Element Analysis) on components and assemblies to provide stress/strain information. Through our program assessment, it was found that students who performed excellently in the previous MECH625 course had some difficulties incorporating FEA simulation correctly and efficiently on their senior design projects. In fall 2014, we decided to modify the course and created two projects to improve student skills in running FEA simulations on projects. The first project was an individual project in which students were mainly asked to use different simulation skills to run FEA simulations and then compare the FEA results with the theoretical handcalculation results. The second project was a team design project which was to baseline the structural strength of a real device and then redesign it according to the design specifications. During the successful implementation of the two projects in spring semester 2015, the majority of students had strong positive feedbacks about the projects based on the data collected both directly and indirectly. This paper will provide details of the two projects, their implementation and the analyzed results of a student survey.

Statics and Strength of Materials are two core technical courses for any mechanical program. In Statics, vector operations: the parallelogram law, the triangle rule and the polygon rule are introduced and explained in the first two weeks. Many students, especially in the mechanical engineering technology program have difficulty using vector operations to obtain a resultant magnitude or its direction by the trigonometry approach because some students have forgotten the laws of sine and cosine. In the case of Strength of Materials, many students have a hard time understanding the stress concentration phenomena and some assumptions for stress formulas under different loadings. Some students are puzzled about the purpose and the approach of the Mohr's circle so they only sketch the Mohr's circle for visualization purposes but still use stress transformations to calculate the stresses at different orientations. Since 2010 we have introduced the idea of using the sketch tools in SolidWorks to run vector operations for statics and to draw Mohr's circle for determining the stresses at a given orientation. We also have used SolidWorks Simulation as a virtual lab and an alternative approach to visualize the stress distributions to facilitate student's understanding of stress concentration phenomena, and the assumptions of stress formulas under shear, bending and torsion loadings. The application of SolidWorks in Statics and Strength of Materials courses since 2010 will be summarized, presented and discussed in this paper. Results of student surveys conducted in the fall of 2011using the application of SolidWorks in these two courses will also be presented in this paper. According to the survey, students favored the application of SolidWorks in these two courses and would like to see more integration of SolidWorks in Statics and Strength of Materials courses.

has been a faculty member in the Mechanical Engineering and Technology Department at Wentworth Institute of Technology since 2001 with 14 years of prior industrial experience. He has worked with various technologies from advanced underwater propulsion systems to ultra high altitude propulsion for research aircraft. He has also worked with printing systems and automated wafer measurement systems. He currently holds 6 patents in propulsion and fuel related technologies.