The Design Projects for the Simulation-Based Design Course

Abstract

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.

Teaching Finite Element Analysis for Mechanical Undergraduate Students

“…Because FEA is a daily tool for design engineers in many industries [1.2] , mechanical engineering students must know how to use this tool during their education. Many engineering colleges have offered FEA-related courses to their engineering students [3,4,5,6,7] FEA commercial software is a version of solid mechanics and is expressed in the form of computer codes. It is commonly accepted that teaching pure theory and programming of the Finite Element Method (FEM) is for Master-Degree or Ph.D. candidate students and has not been taught for undergraduate engineering students.…”

Facilitate students to integrate FEA simulation skills through a practical simulation project

“…We found that students were able to successfully follow the lectures and complete homework exercises relative to each of the main FEA skills such as restraints (loading and boundary conditions), meshing, meshing control and convergence. Unfortunately, we also found that most of the students had difficulty starting and carrying out the project to conduct a design evaluation of a real product [10] . Students did not have difficulty completing their homework assignment because each homework assignment was tailored to a specific FEA simulation skill.…”

An Integrated Active Learning Approach for Understanding Fatigue Theory

“…The addition of physical test demonstrations significantly improved students' understanding of fatigue theory [7,8,9] . Numerical simulation tools such as FEA (Finite Element Analysis) programs have become a wonderful and necessary tool for mechanical engineers and students [4,10,11,12] . FEA software was also frequently implemented in classrooms to conduct fatigue analysis [12~15] to help students visualizing fatigue analysis.…”