Sharing Laboratory Resources Across Departments For A Control Systems Curriculum

As is the case in most curricula, Control Systems is a required course for both Mechanical and Electrical Engineering students at Ohio Northern University (ONU). Students in both majors are given extensive laboratory experience and have access to electives in this area. Students in Electrical Engineering take a two-quarter sequence while Mechanical Engineering students take one course. Both of these sequences introduce students to Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) in addition to the traditional course content. This makes students from both departments eligible for two elective courses in the area of control systems offered by the Mechanical Engineering department. Over the past four years, the instructors for these four courses have collaborated closely to share laboratory and classroom content. The required Control Systems courses in both departments currently share a textbook. In addition, over half of the laboratory exercises in the Mechanical Engineering course are also used in the Electrical Engineering courses, with minor modifications. While this has caused some scheduling and administrative difficulties, it has reduced cost to the College of Engineering and simultaneously increased the quality of the laboratory. Another area of common hardware is that the same PLC devices are used to introduce students to this technology in the required Control Systems courses in both departments. These same PLCs are again used for Applications in Control Systems. This has the economic benefit of sharing equipment costs between the two departments, while at the same time insuring that students taking Applications in Control Systems are already familiar with the hardware they will be using for this elective course. The paper will detail the collaboration between departments during this four-year period. Details of purchasing as well as administrative and scheduling challenges will be addressed. Faculty and student assessment of the laboratory experience will also be provided. It is hoped that other institutions may benefit from similar collaboration to keep costs down while still providing a significant control systems laboratory experience, something many Mechanical Engineering programs lack.