The Capstone course sequence is unlike other courses in the BSME curriculum. The broad goal is to give students a substantial design project that develops their skills in six areas.
- Creativity in identifying design opportunities and in developing effective solutions.
- Application of engineering analysis to predict performance, compare options and verify performance of components (subsytems) and full systems that solve the design problem.
- Use of physical prototypes, analytical models and measurements to demonstrate effectiveness of design options and full systems.
- Performing in a team on a project of substantial scope that requires teamwork in order to succeed. These skills complement item 6 (below).
- Use of written and oral communication to document the design and explain its performance to sponsors.
- Using project management, budget tracking and other business practices to schedule and coordinate efforts. These skills are necessary in meeting deadlines within cost and personnel constraints. Note that these skills are applicable to individual as well as team projects.
Other classes in the BSME curriculum focus heavily on Engineering Analysis (item 2). Some classes involve team projects (item 4). In a variety of classes students create reports and make presentations (item 5). In Capstone, activities that students have experienced in other classes are not merely repeated. Rather, those activities are subsumed into the service of a much larger and more substantial design project.
Creativity, prototyping and project management (items 1, 3 and 6) are equal in importance to engineering analysis, teamwork and written communication (items 2, 4 and 5). The Capstone experience is about integrating all of these skills and balancing the mix of activities in all of these areas. For example, teams will need to judge how much effort to put into engineering analysis, which saves the cost of physical experimentation, against the effort put into building prototypes and making measurements, which include non-ideal affects and other complications that are usually difficult to include in engineering models.
The major design project that spans ME 492 and ME 493 provides the context for the practice of the six skill areas listed above.
Capstone as a Model of Engineering Practice
In discussions with students and with some potential project sponsors, the question arises, "Is Capstone a realistic model of engineering practice?" Sometimes this topic is framed as a hostile accusation, "This class is nothing like my "real" engineering job."
We do not claim that Capstone is the perfect model for all engineering practice. Capstone is designed to give students a team-based, engineering design experience that includes the range of activities from opportunity development to full scale prototype and testing.
Some engineering jobs mostly involve a subset of the activities required in a capstone project. Other engineering jobs, involve an even broader range of activities. The opinion of a majority of industry advisors, ABET, and engineering faculty across the United States, is that a project-based capstone experience that requires practice of all six skills, is a necessary preparation for engineering practice.
Suitable Capstone Projects
Recent capstone projects are described on this web page.
The characteristics of a project suitable for the BSME Capstone are:
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The project fully engages the effort of 4 to 6 seniors in the BSME program from January to the beginning of June in the academic year. In other words, Capstone projects should be a lot of work and of sufficient complexity that a team is needed to solve the problem in the given time frame (roughly 5 months).
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The project is a design problem that involves identification of client needs, conceiving possible solutions, development and testing of engineering subsystems, and assembly and testing of a final system prototype. In other words, Capstone projects are not research projects. Capstone projects are not a way to use students as skilled laborers to perform drafting, lab testing, or parametric optimization of existing equipment or designs.
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The project is open-ended, i.e. there is a problem or opportunity, but the solution is currently not known, or at least not obvious. This requirement reinforces the preceding bullet because open-ended problems require a broad range of engineering activities, not just the application of well-established procedures of engineering analysis applied to a constrained and well-specified problem.
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The project originates from a practical industrial, societal, or personal need, i.e., it is an authentic problem, not a made-up exercise.
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The project is not in the critical path of the company. In other words the outcome of the capstone project is not critical to a product with a ship date during or immediately following the January to June period that students are working on project.
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The project involves/requires fabrication and testing of a prototype, i.e. not a pure "paper" design. The exception to this requirement is a project that requires extensive modeling and cross-checking with models used by design professionals in an engineering sub-discipline. This type of design project occurs in the building sciences, e.g. HVAC, high-performance buildings. A major design project that does not result in physical prototypes requires that the final work product is reviewed by independent practicing professionals
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The project has an internal (to your company) sponsor who can answer questions from students as they work on the project. This contact includes one or more design reviews to provide feedback on whether the outcome of intermediate design phases meets your objectives.
Ideally, the sponsor gets extra engineering support on a current problem that would normally cost the sponsor substantial time and effort. The students get an authentic ("real-world") problem that helps them learn how to apply their knowledge and gives them experience with the design process.
Projects that do not require physical prototypes are, obviously, authentic engineering that involves engineering design. However, pure paper designs are usually not a good fit for Capstone because students (and their instructors) lack the ability to verify how such a design performs in the real world. A final physical prototype will perform according to the laws of physics, not the important, but nonetheless artificial, world of a CAD model or numerical simulation. If you or your company have an idea for a capstone project that involves only or mostly "paper" design, please talk to us. We may be able to find a way to use your project.
Role of Sponsors
Ideally, sponsors of Capstone projects are clients that have an opportunity or problem that will benefit from a comprehensive design activity by a team of students. The sponsor presents the problem or opportunity, responds to student requests for information, provides feedback on the design concepts they develop, and at the end of the project provides an evaluation of how well the final design meets the clients needs.
Sponsors also need to provide financial and possibly in-kind support to the Capstone team. We ask sponsors to make a flat $1000 donation to the PSU Foundation in addition to a budget sufficient to build and test intermediate prototypes, and a final prototype of the complete design. Typical prototyping budgets are $500 to $2000, although every year a handful of Capstone teams complete projects with final prototypes costing $15000 or more. This is serious engineering with important practical outcomes.
Initiating a Capstone Project
If you are interested in sponsoring a Capstone project, please contact the instructor, Gerald Recktenwald gerry@pdx.edu. If your idea is suitable for a Capstone project, he will ask you to submit a project description that provides seven items of information
- Project title
- Sponsor contact information
- Project motivation or context
- Objectives to meet customer needs
- Typical operation or user interaction
- Financial and in-kind support
- Special requirements, if any
The student design team will be responsible for creating their own detailed list of customer requirements, engineering specifications and project goals. Therefore, the information you provide on the project description need not, and in fact should not be exhaustive.
You can download a guide to submitting Capstone projects. The guide provides more information on the seven items listed above.