Instructional Methodology for Capstone Senior Mechanical Design

The capstone design project is a big event in every mechanical program. The capstone design project serves as a bridge to help students migrate from an academic environment to an industrial environment. Any school normally don‟t have the full capability to construct and physically test each capstone design project due to limited equipment, limited funds and limited time, which is the primary difference between the industrial environment and the academic environment. Due to this defect in the academic environment, there are two common major problems in lots of capstone designs. Some capstone projects couldn‟t provide the supporting documented analysis to answer whether components or final product were safe or not, which is not acceptable because safety is the most important design criteria. Some students didn‟t know how to manufacture components/assemblies of their design. In our capstone design project course, we propose, and implement the concepts of a virtual factory. In our capstone design, every student and design team own their virtual factory. Every student and design team can design and construct virtual products of their designs, and furthermore can numerically test virtual components /assemblies to make sure that safety criteria are satisfied before they start to construct their prototypes. The discussion of the virtual factory-based approach in the capstone design project will be presented in this paper. Some observations and opinions about how to instruct senior mechanical design projects based on our Capstone design course MECH690Mechanical Design will also be presented and shared throughout this paper. We recommend that mechanical engineering program provide every student the virtual factory when they graduate.