Graduate Automotive Engineering Education Innovation – Deep Orange Program Collaborative Industry Partnerships Enable System Engineering Based Approach for Project-Focused Learning

Through traditional education associated with engineering disciplines, students are expected to become familiar with fundamental engineering design and principles through a series of engineering materials explanations, stages of assignments and class projects. The usual knowledge flow offered to engineering students is based on a step-by-step process taught by faculty using text books. Design solutions to real world problems often require approaches that cannot be obtained from traditional text books, such as the formulation of meaningful ideas, setting realistic design requirements, learning to execute trade-offs, balancing competing priorities, and communicating with colleagues that have different technical backgrounds. This paper presents the implementation of a system-based, sponsor-partner, collaboration focused, learning approach within the curriculum of the Department of Automotive Engineering at Clemson University which meets these realworld design engineering needs. The program implementing this real-world approach is called Deep Orange (DO). The Deep Orange initiative is an integral part of the automotive graduate program at the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research. The initiative was developed to provide first-year graduate engineering students with hands-on experience of the knowledge attained in the various automotive engineering and related disciplines (such as marketing and human factors psychology). The program focuses on developing and building new, innovative vehicle concepts and is driven entirely by graduate automotive engineering and transportation design students as part of their education in close collaboration with industry partners. This paper demonstrates and discusses the flow-down of requirement characteristics of the systems engineering process applied in DO. During this process, the students start with translating a grand challenge (defined by the sponsoring industry partners) into customer needs incorporating marketing analyses. The project proceeds with general investigation of various vehicle architectures and design alternatives, including the selection of one concept that is based on carefully balanced environmental, economic, performance, and social design imperatives. During the process, faculty serves as student mentors rather than direct knowledge providers. Students are empowered to make decisions and justify their concept selection to different program groups, i.e. sponsoring industry partners and faculty. The last eight months of each project is devoted to building a physical prototype and validation of the vehicle target requirements.