Project proposal due 9 April 2004
Draft report due 23 April 2004
Final report due 30 April 2004
Overview
For the final lab your group is going to select a physical
system--electrical, mechanical, biological, thermal, acoustical, or
visual--and analyze it using the techniques you have learned this
semester in ENGR 12. The systems you pick can be variations of ones
you studied earlier, or completely new systems--so long as you can
model the system and take measurements that reflect the state of the
system. They do not have to be complex systems, and should be simple
enough that you can analyze them in a reasonable manner.
Proposal
Your group should have a project proposal written by the proposal due
date (listed above). The proposal needs to contain the following
elements:
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A description of the system you want to examine.
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A description of the materials and resources you will need, where
you will get them, and how much they will cost (each group can have
a budget of $30 if necessary).
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A description of the measurements you plan to take and how they
relate them to the system's state.
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A project timeline broken down into setup, measurements, analysis,
and writeup. Your total time commitment should be around 6-8 hours
per person, and you should also specify who will be a part of what
tasks. Note that you will have about 2 weeks to take the
measurements and do the analysis, with a week to write up the
project.
Suggested Systems
The following are some suggested project ideas.
-
Explore the behavior of the triple pendulum system.
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Look at sound generating systems describable by differential
equations
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Analysis of a pendulum system without the assumption of small
deflections (i.e., sin A = A) or with a heavy string so that the
assumption of a point mass is no longer valid.
-
Modeling & measuring the vibrational modes of a string, beam, or
air column.
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Modeling one-dimensional heat flow or diffusion measurement.
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Model of heat input and heat loss in a house in response to external
temperature fluctuations.
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Modeling catastrophes: Build a pile of Kix on an electronic scale
and drop one Kix onto it at a time. Over time there will be small
and large avalanches and some of the cereal will fall off. It turns
out this behavior can be modeled as a differential equation and is
related to a lot of physical phenomena.
-
Determine the friction coefficient of pendula from the double
pendulum lab by developing a complete model
-
Build an analog computer using op-amps, capacitors, and resistors.
Basically this would involve building the electrical analog to the
double-pendulum lab and demonstrating that the same equations
hold.
Lab Report
The writeup for this lab will be either a web page or a paper
document. In either case, it needs to follow the rules for a formal
writeup. Clearly, there is a bit more flexibility in the case of a
web document as you can hyperlink relevant materials together.
Try to make your writeup somewhat of a tutorial on the subject. In
other words, aim your writeup at first year engineering students who
might be interested in seeing what they may get to do next year.
If you decide to undertake a web page, it is suggested that you
organize it as follows:
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A central page which has an overview of your project, including a
picture of the apparatus, system, or model you are
analyzing.
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The central page should have a link to data and code (m-files, C,
Simulink layouts) you wrote.
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The central page should also have a link to a page (or pages) which
contain(s) your introduction, theory, experiments, results, and
discussion. The results page should have supporting graphs, model
diagrams, Fourier spectra, and whatever techniques you used to do
the analysis.
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In your analysis you need to include any models you developed, a
description of how well the system fit the model, a summary of the
model parameters you obtained, a description of your analysis
techniques, and a clear description of your methods.