What is Senior Design?

Senior Design, formally known as Engineering Design Systems I & II (EML 4551/2), is a pair of classes taught by Dr. Cesar Luongo and taken by senior mechanical engineering majors at the Florida A&M University - Florida State University College of Engineering (FAMU-FSU CoE) in Tallahassee, FL. The courses' underlying assumption is that students have a sufficient understanding of core mechanical engineering principles related to Solid Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Propulsions, Static and Dynamic Systems, Mechanism Design, Computer Aided Design/Engineering, and Finite Element Analysis/Method. The emphasis of these courses is to integrate knowledge of the aforementioned topics with the experience of working in teams on a professional-level project. Projects are formulated primarily by representatives from industry and professors at the FAMU-FSU CoE.

Additionally, this class informs students of basic business principles that constrain the funding and scope of a project. Such non-technical information is integrated to help students maintain and advance during their careers. Students learn how a product develops according to a given market's demand (consumer, industrial, OEM, etc.) and how the product's profit is affected by how it is manufactured. Careers in mechanical engineering generally involve project assignments where oral and written communication skills, teamwork, and time management are required to achieve goals and complete projects within time constraints. After completing this course, students will have a more realistic perspective regarding project assignments mechanical engineers take part in when working in industry.

Project Teams:

Project teams are assigned as follows:

1. Each of the proposed projects is explained to the class.
2. The students in the class are separated as evenly as possible into 4 groups as follows:
   • If the class had 100 students ranked from #1 to #100 based on GPA...
     • Red Group: students #1 to #25
     • Blue Group: student #26 to student #50
     • Green Group: student #51 to student #75
     • Yellow Group: student #76 to student #100
3. The names from each group are written on pieces of paper and placed in separate containers. The first name is picked from the Red Group and he/she is allowed to pick which project he/she would like to work on. The second name picked is from the Blue Group and he/she is allowed to pick a project. The third name is picked from the Green Group, the fourth name from the Yellow Group and then the cylce begins again and continues until all of the names have been picked.
4. Once the initial project teams are set, students are allowed to switch projects with members of their respective GPA group (i.e. a Blue Group Member may only switch projects with another Blue Group Member if both students are willing to do so).
5. After the switching period is finished, the project teams are set permanently.

Customers:

The industrial representatives and professors mentioned above act as customers for their respective projects. Customers delineate learning objectives and generate requirements (i.e. techinical specifications, deadlines, etc.) to be met by their project team throughout the year. Additionally, customers stipulate the deliverables such as reports, presentations, models, computer programs and simulations, procedures, etc. to be submitted by their team. The customers also submit an evalutation of their team's performance at the end of each semester. This evalutation is factored into the final grade earned by their team. Thus it is very important for teams to maintain frequent communication with their customers.

Deliverables:

Deliverables are anything that a team must submit and are assigned by the instructor or by the customer. Deliverables may include but are not limited to the following:

• Written Reports
• Oral Presentations
• Schedules
• Meeting Minutes (written records of what occured during a meeting)
• Mock-ups (physical models of the product that do not function)
• Prototypes (physical models of the product that do function)
• 2D and 3D Computer Models
• Computer Simulations/Programs/Software
• Assembly Procedures
• Process/Experiment Procedures
• Operations Manuals
• Webpages

Class Time:

• Two 75-minute lectures and one 165-minute lab each week
• First Semester: General aspects of the design process such as problem formulation, project planning/scheduling, conceptualization, detailed design, design for manufacturing, technical reporting, and implementation are touched upon during lectures. The lab time is used to conduct mandatory (i.e. graded) progress report presentations for each team.
• Second Semester: Aspects of engineering economics, decision theory, project management, and optimization are covered during lectures.