Robert Balmer

Engineering, Liberal Arts, and Technological Literacy in Higher Education

A small private liberal arts college with engineering, is experimenting with a new undergraduate paradigm for integrating the arts, humanities, and sciences with modern technology and engineering in a way that will enhance students technological literacy for the 21st century. Union College brings together faculty from engineering and the liberal arts so that students graduate with an understanding beyond that provided by a traditional disciplinary major.

Converging technologies in higher education : Paradigm for the new liberal arts?

Abstract:  This article discusses the historic relationship between the practical arts (technology) and the mental (liberal) arts, suggesting that Converging Technologies is a new higher education paradigm that integrates the arts, humanities, and sciences with modern technology. It explains that the paradigm really includes all fields in higher education from philosophy to art to music to modern languages and beyond. To implement a transformation of this magnitude, it is necessary to understand the psychology of change in academia. Union College in Schenectady, New York, implemented a Converging Technologies Educational Paradigm in five steps: (1) create a compelling vision, (2) communicate the vision, (3) empower the faculty, (4) create short‐term successes, and (5) institutionalize the results. This case study of Union College demonstrates it is possible to build a pillar of educational excellence based on Converging Technologies.

Closing Remarks on the Important Role of Design Projects

Why do a design project? Typical faculty answers are these: they are motivational tools, they apply the analytical methods taught in courses, they help to develop written and oral communication skills, and they teach teaming. In addition, they teach how to see the “big picture” and see that engineering design is, at its core, an unbiased and structured methodology for dissecting and solving complex problems.

Design Step 4. Detailed Design

Try to analyze your design and use simple experiments to model what you cannot totally analyze. Eliminate risk and uncertainties. Make decent diagrams including dimensions for your device.

Design Step 6. Manufacturing and Testing

Think through your manufacturing and testing strategies. Talk to a machinist for an expert opinion of your design. Start immediately, and assign subtasks to all the team members. Enforce deadlines for all the team! Keep the device drawings up to date. Use the provided materials to make the device. Use appropriate material joining methods, be they glue, nails, screws, and so forth. (For the beginners, look at the pictures of all the available tools needed for construction.)

Chapter 10 – Manufacturing Engineering

Solve: Since this story is likely of medieval origin when wild animals and other predictors stalked villages, both straw and sticks were inexpensive and easily obtained. Straw and stick mud houses were common, but sun-dried mud brick houses were more labor intensive and expensive. Straw is weaker than sticks, and both are weaker than bricks. A strong wind (or wolf) could easily damage straw and stick houses, but was less likely to damage brick dwellings. Since all three building materials were available from the local environment, the use of straw and sticks would eventually deplete their supply, but the use of sun-dried mud bricks would have little impact on the pig’s environment.

Green Energy Engineering

Solar, wind, and hydropower sources are ultimately all solar. Direct solar includes photovoltaics (PV), solar thermal electric power plants, and solar thermal heat. Hydropower and wind energy are harnessed by hydroelectric dams and windmills, both of which can directly produce electricity. PV uses solar photons provided they are above the bandgap of the photovoltaic collector. The bandgap also limits the efficiency of solar PV. Solar thermal power converts virtually all of the solar infrared energy to heat and uses it to run a conventional heat-to-electricity power plant. A less sophisticated application is for home heating, which requires lower temperatures and leads to proportionally less heat losses. Windmill farms directly convert incoming kinetic wind energy into mechanical energy, restricted only by the Betz limit. Hydropower is the most developed of the indirect solar power producers. It converts almost 100% of the potential energy of water upstream of a dam directly into electric power.

Design Step 5. Design Defense

Prepare to orally defend your design before a “jury.” The jury wants to know: Did the team adhere to a systematic design approach? How does the final concept work? What level of risk is associated with this design? Do the students appear to be teaming effectively with each other? Prepare the right number of salient slides.

Force and Motion

Newtons Laws of Motion are described and developed for use both in SI units and in Engineering English units. Starting with the Second Law, the constant g c is shown to be a consequence of what units are chosen. Mass and weight are clearly distinguished. Free-body diagrams are introduced by force component additions. Both static and dynamic equilibria are considered. One-dimensional kinematics is explained with discussion of the variables of distance, speed, and acceleration. We eschew the formal equations normally used in kinematics in favor of a speed versus time diagram method to promote the understanding of kinematics. As an application of the latter, highway on-ramp problems are used to illustrate the power of speed versus time diagrams.

Design Step 3. Evaluation of Alternatives and Selection of a Concept

Minimize the information content of the design and use the principal of “Keep It Simple, Stupid” (KISS). Minimize the number of parts. Minimize the number of different kinds of parts. Buying parts is preferable to manufacturing them yourself. Maintain the independence of functional requirements to avoid the complications of couplings. Design for ease of manufacture, robustness, and adjustability. Use a decision matrix: make a table (i.e., a matrix), weighting desired criteria in column 1 and their proposed solutions in the other columns. Draw the best path through for two or more solution combinations.