Supporting the Development of Engineers’ Interdisciplinary Competence

BackgroundAlthough interdisciplinarity has been a subject of interest and debate for decades, few investigations of interdisciplinary education exist. Existing studies examine the effects of interdisciplinary experiences on students’ development of generic cognitive skills but not the development of interdisciplinary competencies.Purpose/HypothesisThis study sought to explore how engineering students’ characteristics, college experiences, and engineering faculty beliefs relate to students’ reports of interdisciplinary competence.Design/MethodThe study used a nationally representative survey sample of 5,018 undergraduate students and 1,119 faculty members in 120 U.S. engineering programs at 31 institutions. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we investigated the relationships among students’ curricular and co‐curricular experiences and faculty beliefs regarding interdisciplinarity in engineering education on students’ reports of interdisciplinary competence.ResultsThis study found that a curricular emphasis on interdisciplinary topics and skills, as well as co‐curricular activities, specifically, participating in nonengineering clubs and organizations, study abroad, and humanitarian engineering projects, significantly and positively relate to engineering students’ reports of interdisciplinary skills. Faculty members’ beliefs regarding interdisciplinarity in engineering education moderated the relationships between particular co‐curricular experiences and students’ interdisciplinary skills, as well as between curricular emphasis and students’ interdisciplinary skills.ConclusionsThis study identified a small set of experiences that are related to students’ reported development of interdisciplinary competence. The study points to the critical role of the curriculum in promoting interdisciplinary thinking and habits of mind, as well as the potential of co‐curricular opportunities that bring engineering students together with nonmajors to build interdisciplinary competence.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135983/1/jee20155_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135983/2/jee20155.pd

ASEE Support to Student Veterans: Results of a 2018 ASEE Leadership Roundtable

As industry demands for qualified science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers continue to increase, supporting diverse groups of students towards success in STEM may help mitigate future shortfalls in the STEM workforce. Education benefits like the post 9/11 GI Bill may provide a viable pathway for increasing the STEM-qualified, engineering technician, engineering technologist, and engineer (ETETE) workforce through the nation’s veteran population. Supporting student veterans along ETETE pathways may involve three key tasks: 1) building early awareness of ETETE pathways; 2) ensuring academic recognition for prior military work experience; and 3) providing seamless support from government agencies, academic institutions, and industry. Student veterans follow non-traditional education pathways and bring with them a wealth of diverse life experiences. Correspondingly, the growing number of veterans pursuing STEM degrees, and the diversity of this underserved group of students continues to gain the attention of faculty, administrators, and national organizations. To bolster ASEE’s support for many diverse groups to include student veterans in ETETE pathways, the ASEE president commissioned a series of leadership roundtables during the 2018 ASEE National Conference and Exposition. There, roundtables were tasked with making recommendations regarding how ASEE can support engineering education, relevant diversity research, and engagement of these diverse communities in society activities. The purpose of this paper is to report the results of the 2018 ASEE Student Veteran Leadership roundtable. This roundtable brought together a diverse group of veterans, engineering educators, and engineering student veteran researchers. Through a series of ideation exercises and discussions, the group examined the challenges student veterans traditionally face, on-going support initiatives at their home institutions, and recommended actions for ASEE to pursue in the years ahead. The topics discussed during the panel are related to previous research about the challenges faced by veteran students beyond ETETE career paths. A series of novel initiatives are presented that may assist ASEE and university administrators more broadly in adopting a fresh approach to veteran student support

Development of a high efficiency dilute gasoline engine

textDevelopment of a High Efficiency Dilute Gasoline Engine (HEDGE) and control system for use in the Challenge X design competition encompasses the body of this work. The HEDGE concept embodies running an engine on gasoline at Diesel-like compression ratios. This is accomplished through extreme amounts of Exhaust Gas Recirculation to prevent knock. In addition, a high energy ignition system is necessary to ensure cylinder combustion due to the high dilution. This high energy ignition system took the form of a Diesel pilot injection. A 2005 1.9L Euro IV Diesel engine, was modified for use in HEDGE operation by re-routing the Exhaust Gas Recirculation pre-compressor instead of post-compressor for increased flow and adding gasoline port fuel injectors. Simultaneously, a fully programmable Motohawk engine control system was developed and implemented to allow full control of all engine functions including multiple injections from both gasoline and Diesel fuel injectors. During the course of engine development, cylinder 4 of the initial engine failed due to a loss of compression. Failure analysis of cylinder 4 determined that the damage was caused by excessive cylinder temperature and pressure caused by a failed Diesel injector. Several engine protection systems were implemented to protect the second engine. Engine dynamometer testing was conducted on the second engine in single Diesel injection pulse operating mode and resulting emissions and fuel consumption data were compared to stock engine performance information. Testing of HEDGE operation was not conducted due to time constraints related to the project. Baseline Diesel operation data will be used for comparison of HEDGE operation in the future.Mechanical Engineerin

Determination of Efficiency Losses in Entry Ignition Engines

In 2020, Cheeseman (SAE Paper 2020-01-1314) introduced Entry Ignition (EI) as a potential engine combustion process to rival traditional Spark Ignition (SI) and Compression Ignition (CI). The EI process premixes fuel with compressed air, which then enters a hot cylinder at top dead center, autoigniting upon entry. The original proposed concept for an engine separates the compression and expansion processes allowing for it to be modeled as a 2-stroke Brayton cycle. Theoretically, an EI engine allows for higher compression ratios than SI engines with less emissions than CI engines. However, the original EI engine analysis made several assumptions that merit further investigation. First, the original analysis did not look at the temperatures and pressures in the air/fuel mixing chamber to ensure that it does not autoignite prior to entering the cylinder. Second, the analysis did not account for the large amount of heat transfer associated with keeping half the end-gas in the cylinder. Third, the analysis neglected the losses caused by intake passageways and additional components. Our analysis corrects Cheeseman’s thermodynamic model to account for these changes to better identify a brake thermal efficiency for the EI cycle. Our analyses further identify other issues with the EI process to include frictional losses, operating at partial load, and emissions. With these corrections, the EI engine was found to perform with a similar or less efficiency than SI engines. Additionally, while it has the potential to reduce NOx emissions, the large quantity of residuals can result in an increase in CO emissions

Shared Leadership in Capstone Design Teams: Social Network Analysis

Multiple national-level reports encourage engineering faculty to help undergraduate engineers develop a basic level of leadership knowledge to enable leadership growth upon graduation. Recent engineering leadership literature suggests that traditional, vertical leadership models are incompatible with engineers’ core identities and may be less appropriate than shared leadership models for knowledge work like that found in student design teams. This study examines the extent to which leadership is shared within undergraduate, senior-level mechanical engineering capstone design teams and classifies teams based on their level of leadership sharing. Results indicate that leadership is more shared than vertical within capstone design teams, and a quadrant classification of shared leadership may be appropriate for describing leadership processes therein. The results develop a student design team leadership taxonomy and suggest that shared leadership models may be more consistent student design experiences than historical, vertical leadership models

The Role of Andragogy in Mechanical Engineering Education

As highlighted by ABET mechanical engineering program accreditation criteria, a goal of an undergraduate mechanical engineering program is to prepare undergraduate students to work professionally in thermal or mechanical systems. Correspondingly, a student’s undergraduate experience marks a transition from their formative years as teacher-dependent, full-time students toward an adulthood marked by self-directed learning and full-time employment. To date, undergraduate engineering education literature has oriented on students as young, dependent learners through the use of the term pedagogy to describe techniques and methods of teaching rather than andragogy, which refers to educating adult, self-directed learners. A search for the two topics in the Journal for Engineering Education returns 277 articles associated with the term pedagogy compared to 2 for andragogy, for a ratio of over 138:1. For the International Journal of Engineering Education the ratio is 119:1. A similar search of all ASEE conference articles since 1996 returns over 104:1. The initial conclusion of these findings is that the topic of andragogy is less prevalent than pedagogy in engineering education publications. This is problematic considering these two learner orientations bring with them a set of conflicting underlying assumptions regarding the learner themselves, with the pedagogical assumptions less consistent with ABET student outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to provide undergraduate mechanical engineering educators with a better understanding of how andragogy may play an integral role in the education of undergraduate engineering students. The assumptions associated with andragogy may be better suited to preparing students for the rigors of professional mechanical engineering practice. Using a single case study methodology, this paper examines the guiding documents of one undergraduate mechanical engineering program including 1) ABET accreditation criteria, 2) institution-level guiding documents, and 3) department-level mission and vision statements. Results from this case study analysis contrast the applicability of pedagogical and andragogical assumptions in the education of undergraduate mechanical engineers and highlight how the historically pervasive pedagogical assumptions may hinder the development of students into independent, adult learners. The paper concludes by proposing the use of a continuum to view how pedagogy and andragogy apply across the entire undergraduate mechanical engineering experience as we encourage students to develop into adult, self-directed learners prepared for a life of professional engineering practice

Relating Shared Leadership to Capstone Team Effectiveness

Waning student engagement over the course of year-long capstone design projects may decrease team effectiveness and create challenges for capstone faculty advisors and student team leaders. Because leadership is an influence process, reframing how leadership is conceptualized for students may provide a tool that can bolster student effort and overall team effectiveness. Recent literature suggests that sharing leadership may be more effective than vertical leadership for complex design work, but little is known regarding shared leadership within the undergraduate engineering context. This study examined the relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness for undergraduate mechanical engineering capstone design teams using an adaptation of the Full Range of Leadership model. Results indicated that the overall strength and a limited sharing of select team leadership behaviors relate to a team’s effectiveness through group process and individual satisfaction, but not task performance. This study provides capstone faculty with insights into effective leadership behaviors that may be encouraged within the capstone design experience

Mechanical Engineering Design for Complex Environments: Incorporating Industrial Design Perspectives into a Multidisciplinary Capstone Design Project

The rapid pace of global communications development coupled with an unprecedented increase in technological advancement has increased the need for multi-disciplinary teams to solve the complex engineering problems of the future. The well-structured, multi-part ‘complicated’ problems of the past have transformed into the interdependent, multi-part ‘complex’ problems of today and the future. These problems prevent one person or disciplinaryspecific group from having the requisite knowledge and skills to solve the problem independently. ABET acknowledges this reality by requiring undergraduate engineering programs demonstrate the ability of their students to work within a multi-disciplinary team upon graduation. Faculty may be challenged to meet this requirement because of a lack of sufficiently complex problems that may require a multi-disciplinary approach. One such problem was a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored project that asked West Point cadets to design a system that would sustain SquadX in a dense urban combat environment for up to 72 hours. A multi-disciplinary team of Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Engineering Management, and Defense Strategic Studies students embarked on this design challenge during the 2017-2018 academic year. The team quickly realized the need to better understand the dense urban operating environment. To remedy this gap, the faculty at West Point collaborated with the Industrial Design department at the Rhode Island School of design (RISD) to create an intensive, two-day experience that allowed both West Point cadets and RISD students the opportunity to better understand the challenges associated with a dense urban operating environment and military operations more generally. The purpose of this paper is to describe an intensive, two-day design experience conducted by faculty and students from West Point and RISD. This session brought together cadets assigned to a DARPA-sponsored SquadX urban sustainment project and students from the Design, Culture and Global Security course at RISD in Providence, Rhode Island. The students from both institutions were divided into five separate teams aligned with the preliminary functional decomposition of systems to be designed. After a preliminary orientation and team formation meeting the night prior, the teams spent a total of five hours collecting data around the city of Providence, synthesizing the results of the data collection, and presenting their work to the larger group. An analysis of student feedback from the experience shows that despite initial ambivalence or assumptions of unhelpfulness regarding the potential benefits of the multidisciplinary collaboration, students gained some unique insights. Students were exposed to various design perspectives, a fresh perspective of their design challenge, and described the experience as ‘eye-opening’. The overall success of this experience provided the faculty a desire to further refine the relationship between RISD and West Point, to allow continued collaboration on future complex design problems