ECE 491 - Senior Design ISE 491 - Senior Design ME 492 - Senior Mechanical Engineering Design Project Fall 2008

September 4, 2008

Fall 2008 Design Project Description:

In order to illustrate the entrepreneurial aspects of engineering, student groups will design a new product that will compete in the global marketplace and satisfy the following criteria:

Design, build and demonstrate a device that generates and stores electrical energy with the purpose of charging the battery in a common cell phone in a maximum of 8 hours. The device cannot be powered by fuel, that is, must be powered with free, commonly available sources of energy.

Senior Design Project Criteria

1. The project shows significant innovation, creativity and inventiveness.
2. The project must be multidisciplinary, that is, contain significant electrical, mechanical, and computer components.
3. The theory and design practices learned in previous courses are used appropriately.
4. The product meets a significant social need.
5. The product has commercial potential in a competitive market.
6. The product includes one or more modern sensors. The device should also have an interface to the Internet, if appropriate.

Competition:

On Friday December 5, 2008 a demonstration/exposition will be held for all of the design groups. Experts in the fields of entrepreneurial enterprise, marketing, product development, engineering design and other related fields will be invited to Oakland University to attend presentations and demonstration of the products. The products will be judged on the how well they achieve the criteria above and how successful the products could be in a global marketplace.

Discussion for the final written reports:

For your final written reports, in addition to your technical discussions, you are to discuss applications of the technologies that you are exploring and developing in this project. For your final report, discuss various applications of the technologies, with specific emphasis on:

• Engineering Standards - describe the process in which you searched for applicable professional engineering standards and applied them in your design.
• Safety - what sort of constraints must be accounted for if such technologies you employed were used on a large scale?
• Economic factors - How much would it cost to implement such technology and what sort of jobs would it impact (consider improvements to safety as well as displacing jobs)? What sort of impact would this have on the acceptance of such technologies?
• Reliability - if this technology was to be used in mass applications, what sort of reliability and failure rates would be acceptable?
• Aesthetics - what sort of additional devices or accessories could be used to make this technology as aesthetically attractive as possible while retaining its essential functionality?
• Potential customers - who would be the consumer for such technology? Consider the consumer of this technology; who would be the consumer? A government agency? Manufacturers? Insurance companies? The public at large?
• Societal impact - what would be the potential benefits to society for the applications that you discuss? What would be the potential drawbacks?