Types: Projects typically involve the creation of new products, the re-engineering of existing products, or the design of enhanced manufacturing facilities. Health, safety, and environmental concerns are frequently addressed.
Innovation: Projects should demand that students be creative. Moreover, students should have the freedom to explore numerous ideas without having solutions imposed on them by the industrial partner. However, students should have access to company data on benchmarking, patent literature and previous generations of products.
Prototype Fabrication: The design-build-and-test philosophy is very important. Indeed, the opportunity to develop "hands-on" engineering experience is welcomed by students, and it provides a highly motivational component of this educational activity. However, paper studies are sometimes accepted too.
Proprietary Information: Students deliver a public presentation at the end-of-semester Student Design Conference. If the project involves proprietary information, or issues of intellectual property rights, then agreements can be developed between the students and the industrial partner.
Conventional Methods: Projects should require the application of fundamental engineering skills rather than highly specialized technologies and exotic software packages.
Partners receive focused attention on industrial design problems through student and faculty involvement.
This focused attention is facilitated by access to the significant eclectic resources of a major research university.
Projects often yield cost-effective solutions through the infusion of fresh new ideas.
Each project is subjected to more than 600 hours of innovation by teams of enthusiastic and well-trained students. Novel, nontraditional approaches are forthcoming to provide new perspectives and viable creative solutions.
Design teams prepare a comprehensive written final report. A prototype is usually built to validate ideas and augment the report.
Industrial partners gain a basis for interacting with bright students and advertising their company to the Department of Mechanical Engineering's senior class.
