Fostering Innovation and Understanding in Fluid Mechanics through Real-World Projects

الملخص

Innovation is a critical skill that engineering students need to build during their university education. Despite its recognized importance, innovation has not been incorporated enough into engineering courses. One of the fundamental courses in the mechanical engineering curriculum is Fluid Mechanics, which can be taught in a way that includes innovation projects to enhance the students’ conceptual understanding and creativity. This paper presents a framework of a structured approach to achieve this goal. For each chapter, a real-world problem is solved during the tutorial sessions through active learning. Each team simulates their proposed solution using SolidWorks flow simulation software. An assessment rubric is used to evaluate the students’ solutions. Short courses on the innovation life cycle and SolidWorks Flow Simulation are included to enhance the effectiveness of the approach. In addition to boosting the students’ innovation skills, the approach is expected to enhance their ability to deal with real-world problems they will face in their working lives. A key challenge of this approach is the nature of the fluid mechanics course since it is a basic course that focuses on the principles more than design. Nevertheless, the approach is usable with the course to a certain limit.