An Update To A Multidisciplinary Hydroelectric Generation Design Project

A two-semester freshman course sequence at Norwich University brings Mechanical Engineering (ME), Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students together during the first semester for a general Introduction to Engineering course. They complete the second introductory course in the sequence in their respective disciplines. A final project in the second semester that could bring the students back together to make discipline-specific contributions to a multi-disciplinary project was implemented in the spring of 2012. The chosen project was a hydroelectric generation project in which the ME students designed a waterwheel to work in a laboratory flume, the ECE students designed a permanent-magnet generator with wireless monitoring, and the CEE students designed a structure to support the wheel and generator. Throughout the course of the project students designed their respective components and communicated with others among the various disciplines to define design interface requirements. The first year of the project was successful in that the student teams were able to design working components that functioned together in a system to generate electricity. That design experience and several lessons-learned were previously reported at the 2013 ASEE Annual Conference. Many of the lessons learned were adopted to enhance the experience for the next class of freshmen in the second annual iteration of the project. The scope of work for each of the respective disciplines was narrowed and the project test platform was modified-replacing the waterwheel with a turbine to afford the students the opportunity to test, measure, and analyze the performance of differing mechanical turbine designs. A number of new challenges were present in the second iteration of the project, including the absence of the CEE students from participating in the experience. This paper is an update to the previous report presented at this conference and will present the scope of the design problem, summarize the project modifications that stemmed from the lessons learned in the previous iteration, address the instructional coordination challenges and successes, and discuss the value of the multidisciplinary project to student achievement of course specific outcomes related to the freshman engineering sequence.