Course-Related Undergraduate Projects for Dynamics

The Engineering Technology (ET) program at Middle T ennessee State University (MTSU) has approximately 450 students. Our Mechanical Enginee r g Technology (MET) concentration was started in 2004 fall and currently it has 220 major s. The author teaches Dynamics every spring and all MET students are required to take this cour se. Dynamics is a lecture course and we cover kinematics and kinetics of particles and rigid bodi es in this calculus-based course. We felt it is necessary to have some hands-on projects that will help students better understand the principles and applications. The author developed the egg dr op p oject in which the students work in teams and following the guidelines build two struct ures using balsa wood sticks, place an egg inside and drop the unit from a certain height so a s to land on the target placed on the ground. They build two such units with and without a parach ute. They are required to write a report that included the construction method, calculations and graphical presentation of the unit’s height as a function of time. They also compare the calculat ed time of fall with the measured value and explain any discrepancy. The author derived the equ ation of motion and the height-time relationship for the case with a parachute as these are not readily available in our Dynamics textbook. The egg drop project of each team is jud ged based on the compliance to the guidelines, structure’s weight condition of the egg /structure after landing, distance from the target to the egg/structure, and aesthetics of the structure. This project was a great success and students had fun working together and competing wit h other teams. The author briefly discussed in the class a hands-on project that would help stu dents better understand the motion of a projectile in a two-dimensional space. Three studen ts showed a great interest in the project and that very weekend they purchased a paintball gun an d co ducted some experiments at a barn. Their paintball has the capability of giving the ve locity of the paintball at the barrel exit which is the initial velocity of the projectile. They built some fixture to allow the tilting of the gun so th at they can measure the angle made by the initial velo city f the projectile. They were able compare the calculated range and height of the targ t with the corresponding measured values and compute the accuracy of their device. They wer e also able to make a video of their experiments. The trio made a presentation of their experiments in the class and in collaboration with the author they also participated at the MTSU’ s annual undergraduate symposium. Three of our Dynamics students were inspired by the Paintbal l Gun project and decided to build a golf ball shooter for their capstone project. These stu dents applied their knowledge of CADD, Fluid Power, Machine Tool Technology and Dynamics, and su ccessfully completed the project. There are numerous application-oriented publications in t he area of Engineering Mechanics and we have cited two of them in this paper. 1, 2 We hope our course related hands-on project will i nspire the ET faculty community further and many more inte resting projects will be presented at the future ASEE conferences.