Managing Interdisciplinary Senior Design with Nuclear Applications

This paper presents results from an investigation into how interdisciplinary senior design projects emphasizing nuclear engineering applications can best be managed, along with suggested technical content areas within nuclear engineering carrying strong interdisciplinary potential. This work is important because an aging nuclear industry workforce will need to be replaced soon, and due to recent national emphasis on detection of nuclear materials to fight terrorism, radiation detection and monitoring for nuclear medicine applications, and design of small modular nuclear reactors. In the paper, the most likely technical content overlap between nuclear and other fields of engineering is discussed. Also, results of a literature search demonstrate that nuclear engineering projects are exceedingly rare within interdisciplinary senior design. Therefore, a project management framework using results from an exploration of the literature on interdisciplinary senior design to identify salient issues pertaining to nuclear engineering is presented. Issues include raising awareness among faculty mentors from different subject areas about potential project areas; addressing nuclear specific codes and standards; and challenges when working across disciplines in project funding, the student team formation process, student credit hours granted, and workload allocation for faculty advisors to the projects. Finally, two interdisciplinary case studies involving nuclear engineering topics are discussed – one from mechanical engineering and one from electrical engineering. These case studies include descriptions of the projects along with reflections and assessments by students and faculty mentors on their impact.