Fine particles are typically difficult to fluidize with gas, due to interparticle forces that cause the bed material to be cohesi®e.

In our age of technological growth and change, the role of the engineer has evolved from lone specialist to team player, from internally focused to globally aware, from reactionary to entrepreneur. The entrepreneur has created much of our social wealth. The characteristics of the entrepreneur transcend academic disciplines, and social as well as economic status. To foster these characteristics among its students, Lehigh University is developing a multidisciplinary educational environment where entrepreneurial spirit can flourish. Lehigh's academic programs in Integrated Product, Process and Project (iP 3 ), Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE), and Integrated Design Arts (IDA) integrate across Engineering, Business and Design Arts through sponsored projects and entrepreneurial teams or e-teams consisting of students, faculty advisors, staff support and company mentors. Project sponsors include the full range from student entrepreneurs and other start-up companies, to established small, medium and large corporations. The multi-level approach to curricular integration includes pre-college outreach, freshman projects, curricula support, capstone projects and graduate projects. The educational environment includes a Campus Center for Entrepreneurial projects; an entire building designed to support students project teams. This paper will discuss the design and implementation of these programs, our assessment and evaluation methods, lessons learned and future plans for improving this environment.

The transmissibility across thin, simply supported, rectangular and square aluminum plates has been determined experimentally and found to agree closely with theoretical prediction through the frequency range of measurement, which extended from 25 to 3025 Hz. Both the rectangular and the square plates considered were uniquely supported by spring-steel flanges, which were designed to provide, for the first time, true simple supports that simulated almost identically the idealized supports assumed as boundary conditions in theoretical analyses for more than a century. For example, the first 20 resonant frequencies of the rectangular plate with these novel supports differed, with only one exception, by less than 0.55% from their predicted values. One important result obtained for the damped plates considered--which comprised aluminum plates plus applied tiles of high-damping compound to yield composite plates having damping factors of essentially 0.3--was that the measured transmissibility across the plates could be duplicated closely by an expression for transmissibility developed for an internally damped homogeneous plate having damping factors equal to those of the composite plates.Subject Classification: 40.24, 40.60, 40.20.

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