Practical Engineering Design

Maja Bystrom, Bruce Eisenstein

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351992077
• Subtopic: Computer Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Every engineer must eventually face their first daunting design project. Scheduling, organization, budgeting, prototyping: all can be overwhelming in the short time given to complete the project. While there are resources available on project management and the design process, many are focused too narrowly on specific topics or areas of engineering. Practical Engineering Design presents a complete overview of the design project and beyond for any engineering discipline, including sections on how to protect intellectual property rights and suggestions for turning the project into a business. An outgrowth of the editors' broad experience teaching the capstone Engineering Design course, Practical Engineering Design reflects the most pressing and often-repeated questions with a set of guidelines for the entire process. The editors present two sample project reports and presentations in the appendix and refer to them throughout the book, using examples and critiques to demonstrate specific suggestions for improving the quality of writing and presentation. Real-world examples demonstrate how to formulate schedules and budgets, and generous references in each chapter offer direction to more in-depth information. Whether for a co-op assignment or your first project on the job, this is the most comprehensive guide available for deciding where to begin, organizing the team, budgeting time and resources, and, most importantly, completing the project successfully.

Chapter 1

The Design Process

Bruce Eisenstein, Stewart D. Personick, James E. Mitchell, and Maja Bystrom

Key Points Chapter 1

• Design is what engineering is all about. The courses, the laboratories, the analysis tools, and in fact your entire undergraduate engineering education, are preparation for you to learn how to undertake a design project. For most engineering students, the first exposure to design is the capstone sequence senior design or the first internship or co-op position with a company.
• A senior design course sequence gives you the opportunity to experience a real-world design process in a laboratory setting. As a consequence, you can take on an ambitious project with little actual risk. Similarly, your first design project for industry will likely be as a member of an experienced team and will be well supervised by your manager or team leader. Often, there are formal, written design procedures and practices that will provide the framework for your project. There are eight primary steps in a design process: -Forming your team and recruiting an advisor
  – Identifying an opportunity or a problem that needs an engineering solution
  – Selecting and evaluating a design project within the scope of the opportunity or problem
  – Generating and evaluating design alternatives (including economic consequences)
  – Modeling and simulating one or more designs or components
  – Selecting and implementing one design
  – Testing and verifying your design
  – Documenting and presenting your project
• By taking care to complete each step you will minimize problems along the way and have a successful project.

1.1 What is a Design Project?

Engineering design projects are as varied as the opportunities and problems within our society. The choice of projects will be influenced greatly by the interests of the person or team working on the project, the requirements of the company, and even by the engineering disciplines represented on the team. Interdisciplinary projects add another dimension and can be the most interesting and rewarding of projects, since they give all team members an opportunity to learn about different fields. In the Appendix we have included examples of two vastly different electrical engineering senior projects. Each had a different set of requirements, deliverables, and, as a consequence, necessitated different team skills. The following are the titles of some recent projects at various universities:

• Multimedia Filtering
• Desktop Integrated Microcontroller Environment (DIME)
• Bird Sound Recognition Algorithm
• The Robotic Snake Comes of Age
• DSP Laboratory
• Solar Converter
• Battery Sensing and Monitoring

From this list you can see that even in one engineering discipline there is no typical project, and you can see that each of these projects would involve different techniques and result in different deliverables.

In general, a design project can result in a new service, product, process, or design. The common thread that is shared among all disciplines is that the project has to be unique and it has to involve elements of design. That is, you must design or create something new. This does not necessarily mean that you need to design a method, process, or consumer product that has never been designed before. You may choose to redesign a current process or product, but, when you are finished, there must be something valuable added by your work that was not there before.

All projects, whether performed as course work or for industry, will be graded in some sense. For instance, the course project will result in a letter grade for the class and, perhaps, later recommendations from faculty advisors, while the industrial project outcome might have a significant impact on an annual review and merit raise. Your project will be graded or rated on the basis of how well you and your group adhere to the schedule and deliverables that are in your proposal. Since you will be working under a time limit, it is important that your proposal clearly delineates what you expect to accomplish and by when. A design project can be compromised by being too ambitious, causing time or budget overruns, or at worst an incomplete delivery. It is much better to scale down the proposal so that the deliverables are attainable, and at the time of the final presentation a finished and tested product is there for the evaluator to see. A very well-done, finished, and tested project is better than a more ambitious project that is incomplete.

A good rule to follow is that the best projects are those that meet the customer’s needs and expectations. The customer may be a manager, an advisor, the department faculty or staff members, a senior design committee, or a company client. These customers may be providing funds for the work or may be relying on your project in order for another project to continue. Therefore, they will be mainly interested in having their specifications met within the given timeframe. However, in addition to the deliverables, the customer will be interested in ongoing maintenance costs, ease of manufacturing, and prospects of satisfying environmental considerations.

1.2 The Steps to a Successful Project

There are eight (not necessarily sequential) steps required for completion of a design project:

• Choosing your team and advisor
• Identifying an opportunity or a problem that needs an engineering solution
• Selecting and evaluating a project within the scope of the opportunity or problem
• Generating and evaluating alternative design solutions and deciding on a “figure of merit” against which to compare the different approaches
• Modeling and simulating component interactions or system perfor-mance
• Selecting and implementing one design approach
• Testing and verifying your design
• Documenting and presenting your project

These steps are not sequential and can be implemented as in Figure 1.1. There are several observations that you should make from this figure. First, design is iterative. You must evaluate and test design alternatives, and often you must go back and redesign a system. Second, at each stage of the design, you must document your work. Finally, some of the steps (those indicated by dashed lines) may be optional. You may have your team, project, and detailed specifications assigned. If so, you are ready to start the project and can immediately jump ahead to the section on generating design alternatives.

Figure 1.1

The design process.

If you are responsible for all or part of team, if you are the team advisor, or if you are still engaged in the process of project selection, read on. In this chapter we discuss each of these steps, and in subsequent chapters we provide more information on the design process.

1.2.1 Choosing Your Team and Advisor

In industry, almost all design projects are performed in teams, usually assigned and not selected by the participants. An important part of the education you will get in a formal design course is the ability to work as a team. While a team may draw on many individuals throughout the course of a design project, the key people are the teammates and their advisor. Since this handbook is aimed at novice engineers, it is likely that you will need or want an advisor for your first design project. If the project is for a required course, your advisor might automatically be assigned or you might have a list of faculty members to choose from. If this project is one of your first industrial design projects, your manager can serve as an advisor, and you might seek additional advisors and mentors, if they are not assigned by your manager. Wisely selecting and carefully considering the needs of the project and the skills of each of these individuals can make an enormous difference in both the ease and the pleasure with which you move through the entire process. The following suggestions should assist in making those selections effectively.

The Team

The first inclination is to pick friends from your class or your department as your team members. Often this can work well, especially if they are study partners or teammates whom you have worked with before. Selecting them solely because they are friends will help the project as much as selecting them for their partying ability or because they work in the neighboring office.

Picking the best team depends in large part on weighing three important criteria. First should be the nature of the design you’re undertaking. You want individuals with the skills and previous experience necessary to complete the work or those who are interested in and have the ability to obtain the necessary skills. Second are the personalities of each of the members. You probably want both a somewhat impulsive “get-it-done” person and a more restrained “let’s-think-about-it” person to balance each other. If this were a space flight you would have undergone extensive psychological testing in order to determine compatibility. As it is, you need to at least think carefully about how you will get along together for many long months. Team roles will be discussed in Chapter 4; you should consider ahead of time whether the teammates you are choosing are able to span roles from team leader to organizer to recorder, since you do not want a team in which all members wish to be leaders. Third are the schedules and other commitments of all the team members. To be successful you will need to see each other regularly as a complete group. Be sure you are able to do so.

The Advisor

Picking the right advisor is as important as picking the right team, and worth considering equally carefully. For course-work projects, you probably know the potential advisors because you have had them in class or you know them by reputation. Personal knowledge is a good indicator of how they will work with you as a team advisor, but bear in mind that working on a project is very different from taking a class. Therefore it is incumbent on the group to discuss with potential advisors what the advisor expects of a team in terms of level of input and communication frequency before officially signing on the person. Some pitfalls that would work against a particular advisor are: schedules that are incompatible with your group’s, expectations of a level of work that is either greater or less than you envision, requirements for progress reports, and evaluation methods or other specifics that are out of line with your team’s wishes. It is important to understand these issues as well as possible in advance and discuss them among the team members in order to make an informed decision.

One particularly useful question to ask is how potential advisors envision their role working with you. Some advisors may see themselves as project leaders, with you taking the roles of helpers carrying out their vision. Others may wish to act solely as consultants, waiting for you to ask questions. Many advisors can tell you in advance what they prefer, thus reducing the uncertainty of what the working relationship will be like. Yet another question worth discussing in advance is how often they will be able to meet with you. The average for a design course is once a week, but some advisors are so busy that this frequency is not possible. In industry, some potential advisors may be more flexible or busy than others. Some may have open door policies — if the door is open, then walk in and ask — whereas some may require that you make an appointment for consultation. Again, knowing in advance what to expect will help you during the project.

Industrial advisors come in many forms. The first kind is the team mem-bers’ manager, or for cross-departmental teams, the managers of the associated groups. The second potential kind of advisor is a senior staff member who has worked on similar projects in the past. Both types of advisors would know the company’s expectations for timelines, budgets, and report generation frequency and format. Also, both types of advisors, but particularly the latter, can be especially useful in networking, t...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contributors
• Contents
• 1 The Design Process
• 2 Ethics and the Social Impacts of Design Projects
• 3 Project Management
• 4 Teamwork
• 5 Are We in Business Yet?
• 6 Documenting Your Design Project
• 7 Presenting Your Design Project
• 8 Intellectual Property
• 9 Planning Your Business
• APPENDIX
• Index I-1