Course Projects - Part 1

On 29th of December 2010, all my students for the course Structural Analysis I (Aero103) assembled to give presentations of their work on the course project. It was a real celebration for me.

When I decided to offer a course project for the students, I though I got myself in a real mess ... these are first year Aerospace Engineering students, who have no experience in, practically, anything ... and I am required to give them ideas about what they should do for their course project that will be weighed for half their semester work grade ... what a mess am I in!!!!!!

Someday, I got the idea of offering them different types of projects so that they may chose what best suits their own taste! The idea was to offer them three different "families" of project:

1. Hardware project. In this family, the students may prepare some devise or apparatus that presents an experiment that presents an a structural problem. (Tension, torsion, bending, ...)
2. Software project. In this family, the students are required to use some software tool to prepare a "problem solver" for their different topics so that it may be used to solve the homework problems by their coleagues.
3. Nowhere project (Net-ware project). In this family, the students are required to prepare the course notes they take during the lectures for presentation on the internet using one of the available free tools (Websites, WIKIs, Blogs, Online course authoring tools).

 Hardware Projects
Five different projects were proposed by the students in this family:

1. Hook's apparatus. This project presented the simple Hook's apparatus where you hang a spring then hang some weights and measure the elongation of the spring. For measuring the deflection, the students used a simple laser pointer that moved on a ruler! The pointer's beam could not be pointed steadily on the ruler, so the students used a magnet to stick a long needle horizontally, so that when the beam moves, the needle can still indicate its level.
2. Twisting apparatus. In this project, the students designed and implemented a device to perform twisting experiments on shafts of different materials.
3. 3-Point Bending Apparatus. (Slide-show) This device was designed to perform bending experiments on different specimens of different dimensions and materials. The deflections were measured using a dial micrometer.
4. Sound Detection apparatus. This device was designed to detect noise by fixing a magnet to a flexible membrane that will vibrate when sound falls on it. A coil is fixed to the outer frame of the membrane such that the magnet moves relative to it creating induced current in it.
5. MR Brakes apparatus. In this project, the students created a device that utilized the properties of MR fluids to break a rotating disk.

Part II - Part III

1.