2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Using SolidWorks to improve student's understanding of typical crystal structures
MECH3600 Materials Science is a required course in the Mechanical Engineering program at XXX . Understanding typical crystal structures are important for a better understanding of the Materials Science subject. The typical crystal structures are body-centered cubic (BCC) crystal structures, face-centered cubic (FCC) crystal structures, and hexagonal closed-packed (HCP) crystal structures. Without a good understanding of these typical crystal structures, students will have difficulty understanding the concept of unit cell parameters such as length, atomic packing factor, crystallographic direction, crystallographic plane, tetrahedral site, and octahedral site. The textbook has clear descriptions with diagrams of these crystal structures. However, some students have a hard time developing the spatial thinking skills required to understand typical crystal structures. We have a physical lab related to this topic. In this lab, ping-pong balls or marbles are used to represent atoms, and adhesive is used to connect them together. This lab significantly helps students to develop spatial thinking skills and concepts of typical crystal structures. There were three issues for this physical lab. One was that some measurements of the unit cell parameters such as unit cell constant and atomic packing factors had very big relative errors when compared with theoretical values. The second issue was that they only build crystal structure representations with a minimum number of marbles or ping-pong balls, could not get a unit cell, or could not repeat the unit cell. The third issue is that they could not access the built-physical models of typical crystal structures after the experiment. For our Mechanical Engineering program, the MECH3600-materials science is offered in the junior year and all students have access to SolidWorks and know how to use SolidWorks to create models. Therefore, we created a new additional lab related to typical crystal structures. In this lab, one-inch radius virtual spheres are used to represent an atom and the unit lattices are defined first per the definitions of typical crystal structures. Through SolidWorks, students can build models representing these typical crystal structures. They can cut the models to get the unit cells, repeat the unit cells or orientate them in different ways. The measurement of unit parameters based on the SolidWorks models is the same as theoretical values. Feedback from students has shown that virtual models of typical crystal structures created by SolidWorks significantly helped them to have a better understanding of typical crystal structures. This paper will present the inclusion of SolidWorks and the results of this virtual lab. This paper will also present and analyze survey results related to this virtual lab.